Men find here throughout all their youth a way of living commensurate with their beauty. After that, decay and oblivion. They’ve staked all on the body and they know they must lose. In Algiers, for those who are young and alive, everything is their haven and an occasion for excelling - the bay, the sun, the red and white checkerboard of terraces going down to the sea, the flowers and stadiums, the fresh brown bodies … But for those whose youth is past no place exists, no sanctuary to absorb their melancholy.
The notion of hell, for instance, is here no more than a silly joke. Such imagining are only for the very virtuous. And I am convinced that the word virtue is entirely meaningless throughout Algeria. Not that its men are without principles. They have their moral code. We don’t ‘chuck’ our mothers, we make out wife respected in the street, we are considerate to the pregnant, we don’t attack an enemy two against one, because ‘it’s cheap’.
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