Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949 25
adolescence. He had the impression that her life was easy, while his
father was a martyr to work, exploited by his family as much as by
his employer.
My compassion for my father was infi nite. Hardly had he
begun school when, at the age of twelve, he had to begin
working for the Tachet business where his own father had been
a modest employee. After being a sort of apprentice until the
age of adulthood, my father became a commercial representa-
tive: he was always behind the wheel of his car.^19Jackie found this profession both exhausting and humiliating. In
his ‘poor father’ he saw ‘a sacrifi cial victim of the modern age’,
and in his ceaseless trips driving down bumpy roads ‘an intolerable
strain’. Four days a week, Aimé Derrida would leave the house
early, at 5 a.m., in his blue Citroën equipped with a primitive gas
producer since the beginning of the war. He would return in the
evening, ‘shattered’. From his rounds in the hinterland he brought
back supplies of groceries that at least enabled his family to suff er
less from their poverty than did many other people. At daybreak,
before heading off , he needed to tot up the receipts from the day
before on the kitchen table. And when the fi gures did not balance,
it was a real disaster. He kept heaving a sigh, complained about
his exhausting schedule, but remained grateful to his bosses for
not sacking him when anti-Semitic measures were brought in, as
they might have done. These demonstrations of gratitude wounded
Jackie particularly.
There was the boss and the employee, the rich and the poor, and
even within the family I saw my father as the victim of a sombre
ritual. Obscure, cruel, and fatal. The word ‘sacrifi ce’ came up
constantly: ‘He is sacrifi cing himself for us.’ Sometimes he said
it himself. During my entire adolescence, I suff ered with him, I
accused the rest of the family of not recognizing how much he
was doing for us. That was the experience of the ‘humiliated
father’: a man of duty above all, bending beneath his obliga-
tions. Stooped. And he was stooped; his bearing, his silhouette,
the line and movement of his body, it was as though they all
bore this signature. The word ‘stooped’ [voûté] imposes itself
on me all the more in that I have never been able to dissociate
it from his destiny: my father worked in an area whose name
was nothing other than ‘the vaults [les voûtes],’ at the port of
Algiers.^20As soon as he had learned to drive, Jackie regularly went with
Aimé on his rounds. This was an opportunity to have a private