Free The Last Life by Claire Messud Page A

garçon
at sixteen, with the pick of the young Algeroises fluttering their lashes at him and cramming furiously for his exams besides, refused the interruption—no, the cessation—of his life. He kissed his mother and his younger sister (whom he called, with the cruelty of adolescence, "La Bête") and sternly shook his father's hand; then turned on his heel and went home to his maternal grandmother (her dainty Frenchness now long wizened, she had become, like a Catholic convert, more African than her offspring, and would prove more difficult to uproot than the statue of the black virgin at Notre Dame d'Afrique), in whose benevolent care he remained till the end, and her end, which came more or less at the same time.
    On new soil, a new man, Jacques LaBasse, my grandfather, wanted to accomplish in five years what others took ten to achieve. With unforeseen adversity on his side, he determined that the second half of his life would redeem the humble first. His wish, his vocation, was to build the three-star Hotel Bellevue not into a mans work, but into that of a dynasty; to have people—all people: the locals, the tourists, even those who never ventured to the Mediterranean shore—believe that it had always been and always would be there, a haven of order and quiet for France's
bonne bourgeoisie.
And up to a point, he succeeded.
    By that summer of my fourteenth year, the hotel had followed the round of seasons more than twenty-five times, its fifty-three rooms filling and emptying with the regularity of the tides, each change in nature's dress bringing a different clientele: the British and the elderly in the off-season, when the mimosa bloomed or the autumn winds blustered; elegant Parisians and their boisterous children in the heat of summer; a few eccentrics, often alone, and the widows, in the winter months. Each July brought familiar families back for a week or a fortnight or a month at a time, depending on the depth of their pockets. Many of the children I played with in the summertime it seemed that I had always known, although, amoeba-like, the group stretched and shrank and altered. One or two had been coming to the Bellevue for so long that they had learned to swim in that very pool, had first been stung by sea urchins off the rocky beach below, and knew the secret hiding places in the grounds as well as I did. They had been there when the extra parking lot behind the tennis courts—paved over five years at least—was a grassy playground adorned with swing set and slides, and when the potato-faced
patronne
of the paper store down the road still dispensed sweets with one hand while clutching her three-legged, crazy-eyed chihuahua, Milou, in the other. It had been more than three years since a yellow
deux chevaux
had done away with the dog, which seemed, at the time, like forever.
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    My grandfather's motives, in most things, were unclear to the family. He had always been deemed, by those who loved him, a difficult man and brilliant therefore, a man with a temper, a man gnawed upon by undisclosed demons. (Not that the ways of the family allowed for disclosure: his mystery was his power, and they were all too keen to grant it him.) Family stories spun him into life, stories that my grandmother told with reverent indulgence, or that my mother repeated with a sneer. (My father never spoke about his parent, except in the present. As in: "Papa needs me to work late," or "Papa hasn't been sleeping well." I sometimes wondered if he even knew the stories, or whether he had made it his business not to.) From these anecdotes I, the grandchild, was to cull the essence of the man, who was so resolutely divorced from them in his own person. What was strange to me then was that two women could tell the same tale and draw such vastly differing conclusions.
    That same summer, only a month or so before the shooting, my grandmother had imparted one such story—a new one, that, at fourteen, I was only just