In search of transparency. Anna, in The avenue of glass, first novel by Clara Breteau, teacher. Its pedagogy is dialectical, based on questions to students; his research involves surveys. However, at 35, she realizes that she never wanted to know more about this land from which her Algerian father came, this town of Aurès, Batna, where he grew up, in the eastern part of this massif. mountainous, in Chaoui country. Come to think of it, perhaps it was not so much a lack of curiosity as a way of being endemic among those born to an unknown father, under X. Anna bears her mother’s surname, “with very French sounds, from the peasant backgrounds of Sarthe”. Although Anna and her brother knew him, the elusive sire had a second family, or rather it was them, these children born to a French woman, who were the family that is hidden – under cover, “undercover” as we say in English. Also, when, as a little girl, she passed him in the street, he would wave discreetly, she remembers. And this “flashing presence” to rush off immediately on his scooter to go wash the tiles. Nevertheless, Anna keeps in mind these images and sensations where she and her brother, the hidden offspring, slipped into the big bed where their father slept when he came, and had fun making dunes like those of the desert that he had left.
“The suitcase or the coffin”, thus summed up the fate of the pieds-noirs at the independence of Algeria. For Algerians like his father, it was even without a suitcase. The illiterate window cleaner, fan of Johnny Hallyday to the point of being given the stage name of his favorite rocker, will meet Yvette. With her, “the Arab”, as Yvette’s father refers to him, will start a home. And then it will be with another French woman, Anna’s mother, a solitary student, that he will have a parallel love story. As if this duplicity only duplicated the torn life of this man, between France and Algeria, far from his family and the landscapes of his childhood.
Back in Touraine after ten years of wandering, Anna projects herself into paternal nostalgia: “In summer, the dry bed of the Loire and its large white-hot sandbanks meandered through Anna’s eye like the footprints of a dried-up wadi. The name of the river itself, through its adjective “Ligerian” had become for her by dint of quivering in her ear like a national, a sonorous tributary of the body of Algeria. » Even if she finally goes to investigate with Algerian relatives, there will always remain an illegible part for the daughter of this foreign father, like the traces left by the window cleaner’s squeegee – sibylline letters covered with a palimpsest, in the Berber alphabet.
Clara Breteau
The avenue of glass
Threshold
Edition: 03700 copies.
Price: €20.50; 224 pp.
ISBN: 9782021575958
