Raisinets. The nectarine didn’t have a single living relative in the kingdom of fruit. It was all graft.
“Grafted like us, you mean?” I said to him one day at Café Algiers after I’d heard him go on and on about President Carter’s nectarined face, to say nothing of his smile. The face, I agreed, was pure nectarine. But were we any better? We were no more authentic than anyone else, and we, having lived on three continents, were pure graft.
“Yes, I suppose like you and me,” he conceded. But a moment later: “No, not like you and me. The nectarine thinks it is a fruit. It doesn’t know it’s not natural and won’t believe it however hard you argue. And to prove it, it can even have children, the way robots too will have children of their own one day.”
He suddenly looked pensive, almost sad.
“You don’t know you’re human until you have children.”
Where did he come up with such notions?
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“I don’t have children.”
“Then?” I was teasing him
“I have my skin. That’s all.” And again, as he had done the first day I met him, he pinched the skin on his forearm. “This. This is my proof. The color of the ground in my country, the color of wheat. But,” he added as though on second thought—because there was always a second thought to everything he said—“I would have liked a child.”
All this was spoken out loud in French the better to intrigue a woman sitting next to our table who was probably wondering whether she was a nectarine herself, hoping that she wasn’t, all the while trying to guess what kind of a lover this strange rogue-preacher was in bed.
Which was exactly the purpose of the whole diatribe.
And yet, what finally cemented our friendship from the very start was our love of France and of the French language, or, better yet, of the idea of France—because real France we no longer had much use for, nor it for us. We nursed this love like a guilty secret, because we couldn’t undo it, didn’t trust it, didn’t even want to dignify it with the name of love. But it hovered over our lives like a fraught and tired heirloom that dated back to our respective childhoods in colonial North Africa. Perhaps it wasn’t even France, or the romance of France we loved; perhaps France was the nickname we gave our desperate reach for something firm in our lives—and for both of us the past was the firmest thing we had to hold on to, and the past in both cases was written in French.
Every night, in the bars and coffeehouses of Cambridge, we’d seek each other out, sit together, and for an hour or so speak in French of the France we’d both loved and lost. He was in Cambridge because he was running away from debt, from alimony, from who knows what ill-fated scrapes and illicit ventures he’d gotten himself mixed up in in France. I was in Cambridge because I still hadn’t found the courage to pack up and try to make France my home. We were, when we eventually ran into each other every night, the closest the other would ever get to France. Even the skittish intensity of his tidbit notions plucked from working-class cafés on rue Mouffetard and transposed to the dim-lit bar Casablanca kept the illusion afloat. Until last call. Last call made things more urgent, more desperate, for when they turned on the lights and we finally walked out of the bar to face a deserted Brattle Street, we already presaged the sobering realization yet again that night, as always at night, that this was not France, was never going to be, that this was all wrong, would always be, that France itself was just as wrong, because we were wrong everywhere, here, as in France, as in our respective birthplace that no longer was our homeland. We blamed Cambridge for not being Paris, the way over the years I’ve blamed many places for not being Cambridge, which is like blaming someone for not being someone else or for not living up to who they never claimed they were.
All
“Grafted like us, you mean?” I said to him one day at Café Algiers after I’d heard him go on and on about President Carter’s nectarined face, to say nothing of his smile. The face, I agreed, was pure nectarine. But were we any better? We were no more authentic than anyone else, and we, having lived on three continents, were pure graft.
“Yes, I suppose like you and me,” he conceded. But a moment later: “No, not like you and me. The nectarine thinks it is a fruit. It doesn’t know it’s not natural and won’t believe it however hard you argue. And to prove it, it can even have children, the way robots too will have children of their own one day.”
He suddenly looked pensive, almost sad.
“You don’t know you’re human until you have children.”
Where did he come up with such notions?
“Do you have children?” I asked.
“I don’t have children.”
“Then?” I was teasing him
“I have my skin. That’s all.” And again, as he had done the first day I met him, he pinched the skin on his forearm. “This. This is my proof. The color of the ground in my country, the color of wheat. But,” he added as though on second thought—because there was always a second thought to everything he said—“I would have liked a child.”
All this was spoken out loud in French the better to intrigue a woman sitting next to our table who was probably wondering whether she was a nectarine herself, hoping that she wasn’t, all the while trying to guess what kind of a lover this strange rogue-preacher was in bed.
Which was exactly the purpose of the whole diatribe.
And yet, what finally cemented our friendship from the very start was our love of France and of the French language, or, better yet, of the idea of France—because real France we no longer had much use for, nor it for us. We nursed this love like a guilty secret, because we couldn’t undo it, didn’t trust it, didn’t even want to dignify it with the name of love. But it hovered over our lives like a fraught and tired heirloom that dated back to our respective childhoods in colonial North Africa. Perhaps it wasn’t even France, or the romance of France we loved; perhaps France was the nickname we gave our desperate reach for something firm in our lives—and for both of us the past was the firmest thing we had to hold on to, and the past in both cases was written in French.
Every night, in the bars and coffeehouses of Cambridge, we’d seek each other out, sit together, and for an hour or so speak in French of the France we’d both loved and lost. He was in Cambridge because he was running away from debt, from alimony, from who knows what ill-fated scrapes and illicit ventures he’d gotten himself mixed up in in France. I was in Cambridge because I still hadn’t found the courage to pack up and try to make France my home. We were, when we eventually ran into each other every night, the closest the other would ever get to France. Even the skittish intensity of his tidbit notions plucked from working-class cafés on rue Mouffetard and transposed to the dim-lit bar Casablanca kept the illusion afloat. Until last call. Last call made things more urgent, more desperate, for when they turned on the lights and we finally walked out of the bar to face a deserted Brattle Street, we already presaged the sobering realization yet again that night, as always at night, that this was not France, was never going to be, that this was all wrong, would always be, that France itself was just as wrong, because we were wrong everywhere, here, as in France, as in our respective birthplace that no longer was our homeland. We blamed Cambridge for not being Paris, the way over the years I’ve blamed many places for not being Cambridge, which is like blaming someone for not being someone else or for not living up to who they never claimed they were.
All
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