Chapter 1
Childhood in the Dark

Like I said in the introduction, I’m not getting into the details of my life here because the idea is not to make my story more sorrowful; it is just meant to put things into context, and show you how I was actually being prepared for what was to come. As you’ll read it, I had quite of a doleful childhood, which made me very unhappy and very lonely. But that miserable period would also turn into an incredible force for the future.

My parents were born in Kabylia, in a small village in the north of Algeria. The place has its nature filled with wonders, and its inhabitants are for the most part faithful believers. Religious beliefs revolve around Muslim practices moulded into ancestral cultural roots. It would be very enriching if, regrettably, some of them didn’t fall into the trap of spiritism and black magic.

Some people in the family did spiral into that dirty business and by an unfortunate twist of fate, my parents were tragically targeted and hit. It would take years before we found out but, at the time they got married, a woman in the family had my father swallow poison, following satanic rituals that I won’t develop on paper. Why is that? Well, for the same reasons as many other people: jealousy and money. She was gnawed by jealousy that my father had chosen my mother for marriage and not one of her daughters; gnawed by jealousy that they had intended to build a nice house, and that they were going to be happy. So she poisoned him, mixing her filthy potion in his plate during breakfast, which she took great care in handing to my mother first. All of this on the very next day of the ceremony. If her daughters couldn’t have him, no one would.

As my mother told me afterwards, my father fell sick for days, until little by little, he totally changed. From a gentle and joyous man he became sour, angry, and violent.

This woman’s enterprise would have succeeded if my parents had separated as they were supposed to – by God’s grace, they did not. Her evil plot only triggered wars and disputes between them from the day of the feast on.

A short time after their union, my father was hired by a mining company in the south of France. Once the arrangements were made and the papers were signed, he and his new bride moved to the Mediterranean region of the country. There they started a new life, very far from their family. In their new home, they built their future and had five children; of which I am the youngest.

One could think that things got better thanks to the geographical distance. They didn’t; it even got worse. One day, he was offered a drink at some friends’ house for lunch, and it was that drink which became the first brick to our house of nightmare. Needless to tell you about the daily life of children in a family where the father is an alcoholic and clutches his fists to his wife to make his point.

I thus lived my childhood in the middle of screaming, crying, fighting, and fear. Because of black magic. The fear in the evening when my father was coming home, with the sound of the car parking in the garage below and the thumping sound of his footsteps climbing up the staircase – I remember! One of my sisters and I were sleeping in the same room with my mother; we would block the door with the sewing table and I’d get myself to bed right away. Though she was trying to hide it from us, I could hear my mother wail to God at night, begging for help. I was really young, but I could hear it.

Years went by and around the time I began high school, my father reached the age of retirement. Except for one of my older brothers and me, my three other siblings had left our home. Since my father was now free from work, the results on us were predictable – and I do not wish to give any detail here. I was young anyway; what is it that I understood? I was terrorised, like everyone in the family.

When I was around 16, my brothers and sisters tried to find a way out. Talking to my father or sending him to a doctor was impossible, but we knew that something serious was looming if we didn’t find a solution quickly. That’s why, after assembling enough money, my mother and my siblings went (without letting my father know, of course) to see one the most reputed healer in the country.

He’s the one who declared that black magic was behind this. I never had the opportunity of seeing him except on pictures and on TV, and at first, I wasn’t sure whether I should believe him or not. What was he talking about? I had no idea. In my ignorance (as well as, I think, my position as the youngest in the family), I assumed I was better off staying in my place, detached and neutral. I kept my role of my mother’s confidant, like most youngest children are, and listened quietly to her recounting – although I’m pretty sure that as far as she was concerned, she had known everything for years.

It took me a very short time however, before I acknowledged that there was some truth in what she said. Indeed, during the hours he was praying on my father, I could see with my own eyes that something out of the ordinary was taking place. Our beloved God knows; it was like someone had kicked a nest of snakes! Never had I seen my father fly into such a violent temper! Our home was a battlefield of hell! He would break out into uncontrollable rages, and at times, I really thought that one of us would die. Verily, my childhood was not enviable at all.

Regardless, despite all the skills that this healer had, it didn’t work. He permitted us to see clearer in what was going wrong with my father, otherwise, not much.

Desperate, my siblings looked for another religious person, another healer. They found one, though the results were the same. This person agreed on one thing, that is, the truth about what had been done to him. Apart from that, it was all the same. The major reason was that my father had been a hard drinker for years, and it had a terrible effect on him. Plus, there had been too much pain, too much suffering in our home.

There was another point on which they all agreed: it was that my father should die suddenly, “in the near future,” from a car accident or something brutal. An uncalculated event, at night, after having drunk too much. Well, no need to be a fortune-teller to know in advance what was very likely to become of someone who had a life rhythm made of gallons of alcohol every day, peaks of anger and violence, while spending 35 years of their life working several feet below the surface of the Earth. He should have died many times already, without warning.

It’s not that I was surprised to hear that, it’s just that I refused to believe it. Our life was filled with horrors, yes, but I didn’t want to see my father leave us in such a way. After all, like they said, he was only the victim of the hidden plotting of another human being. To me, he was my father, and I loved him; so there had to be another solution.

My own solution was to turn my trust to God. Thinking about the worst was inconceivable to me, and I knew in my heart that God alone had power over life and death, so I asked Him that He might grant us His mercy and save us.

By His grace years went by, and I witnessed what I interpreted at once as a direct intervention from Him. Nothing of what had been foretold occurred. Instead, my father was offered the miraculous grace of having the time to purify himself before he died. When he died, it was in his sleep, in peace, at home.

The process to that end, sorely, was a very slow and a very, very cruel one. It started a few years after his retirement. Gradually, he fell very ill. Like is common among alcoholics, blood had stopped flowing in the lower parts of his body. Pain, first in the feet, then in the legs. It was so horrendous that for days and nights he stayed lying on the bed, weeping and moaning like an injured animal.

Before we came to that extent, there was some sort of a tacit consensus that my family was following: never leave my parents without surveillance. Leaving my mother and father together alone was unthinkable for us, as it would have assuredly led to irreversible drama. By the time I finished high school and my father was retired, I too had to leave our home and study at the university. Happily, my brother had found a job in a factory in a neighbouring town, so he stayed with them. He watched over them while I was in class, and I came back during the weekend and the holidays. My university was not far from home, roughly an hour and half drive away. The others would do their part by calling and visiting whenever they could.

The year after I took my bachelor’s, I took the chance of travelling in Europe, coming back this time for the holidays and returning for good after two years. It was at the end of those two years that my mother told me my father was ill. I’ll never forget that day, about a month after my return. It was a hot summer afternoon and my father was taking his nap in the bedroom next to mine. I was resting on my side of the wall when, I overheard his sobbing; I heard everything.

The moment came however, when the pain became unspeakable and gangrene began to spread to his feet. There was no alternative this time, he had to see a doctor. The diagnosis was without appeal; he had to be amputated. Trying to save as much as they could, surgeons started first with a toe, then two, then the foot, the calf, then half of the leg. In parallel, he was being operated on to have what looked like springs inserted inside his arteries so the blood could flow to his heart. The left leg, then the right toes, the right foot, the right leg. Once he was legless and in a wheelchair, the pain ceased.

No time to rejoice; a cancer of the stomach went...