Free The Last Life by Claire Messud

his square-jawed papa having fallen into his flour, struck down by a heart attack, when little Jacques was only nine. My grandmother came into the world not far from there but a society apart, the daughter of a moderately comfortable civil servant and his delicate French wife living in the city of Algiers. And my father: by the time he drew breath, as the Second World War labored to its close (even, indeed, as mainland France regained its freedom), he had Africa in his blood, from both sides. The earth on which he planted his feet for the first time was France and yet not France; and he grew up believing it would always be home.
    My grandfather lost that faith, not so early, but earlier than many. He never spoke of why, of how doubt crept into his frame and spread until it became certainty of a different fate; but history speaks for him. In the spring of 1958, he crossed to Marseilles to scout for a patch of land, taking leave from his position as the deputy manager of the St. Joseph Hotel, on another clifftop overlooking the Bay of Algiers; and he did so in the immediate wake of that tribulation that has since been tided the Battle of that city. He didn't tell his family of his plan, but assumed that in time they would understand, if only because they had seen the violence, because the daughter of one of their friends—the friend a stout matron with a spun-sugar coiffure, with whom my grandmother regularly played bridge—had lost her slender legs when the Casino bomb went off (the very bomb that disembowelled the unfortunate and misnamed bandleader Lucky Starway), and was still, months later, propped in a hospital ward, trying to reimagine her future in the metal embrace of a wheelchair.
    The transaction, a matter entirely of borrowed funds, with a wealthy university comrade of my grandfather's as a silent partner, took some time; and the construction of the edifice—stylish, by the day's standards, an early forebear of those modern, terraced structures which have usurped the waterfront from Monte Carlo to Marseilles—took a good while longer, three years during which my grandfather shuttled back and forth between the colony and the
métropole.
By 1961, he had bowed out of his job at the languishing bastion of Algerian
hôtellerie.
(The St. Joseph's employees were all, ostensibly, Swiss-trained; but this was and had always been a lie, and by that late date in the French colony's brief history, no promise of Swiss service was sufficient to lure tourists to those unsettled shores. The world's journalists swarmed the panicked city, but they searched out more modest accommodations, indifferent to the quantity of starch in their linens. Only a clutch of mysterious Americans, Mormon-like in attire and sobriety, clacked along the hotel's hushed corridors, and conducted their business in hushed tones.) He, my grandmother and my Tante Marie installed themselves in the staff block in the specially designed penthouse—the very same—from which they oversaw the finishing touches on my grandfather's great plan.
    My father, Alexandre, did not at once join his parents. For the very reason that his father decreed it, he refused, even then, to accept that he might have to. This was not the beginning of his rebellion: that had begun much earlier, and even through my child's eyes I could detect its vestiges in the continuing subterranean struggles between father and son. My grandfather, from the beginning, did not want my father, his firstborn, impediment to freedom and the shimmering success that Jacques, still so young, the war just ending, dreamed of. And if later he changed his mind and claimed his heir and tried to clasp him to his breast (a matter purely of speculation on my part—in our family, who would ever discuss such things?), by then it was too late. With regard to his parent, my father's heart, like that of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen, had turned to ice.
    My father, famously
beau