The Praetorians
Page 8
“Yes, because that’s where the war will be won or lost.”
Pinières, feeling utterly bewildered, was rummaging in a ration box. Raspéguy asked him:
“Will you give me your pâté?”
He was about the only one who was able to stomach this mixture of wood shavings and horseflesh, for he never paid any attention to what he ate or drank.
A few minutes later, while he was sitting on a rock scraping up the contents of the tin with the point of his knife, he raised his head and saw the second lieutenant standing in front of him.
“Could I come with you, sir? I’m not particularly good at fighting, but I speak Arabic like a native and I even know a few Berber dialects. I was born in Beirut, where my father was consul, and I’m a graduate of the School of Oriental Languages.”
Naugier cleared his throat.
“My cold’s much better, sir. I believe it’s completely cured in fact. This job of yours sounds rather interesting!”
“What about us?” asked the two other captains.
Raspéguy tossed his tin over his shoulder:
“I’ll take Naugier and the second lieutenant with me. It’s the hell of a set-up. The lad’s a reservist and Naugier doesn’t give a damn. He’s found a job in civilian life and is only waiting to have fifteen years’ service behind him, with proportional retirement pay, to leave us in the lurch. I’ll start with them; if things work out I’ll let you know.”
Orsini cleared his throat:
“If only he was leaving us Esclavier!”
Pinières:
“Or even Glatigny.”
The little Corsican had drawn himself up to his full height and was scarlet in the face:
“That fellow? Not on your life!”
There was a call for Raspéguy on the W.T. Lieutenant-Colonel Millois was claiming all the automatic weapons they had captured for himself, on the pretext that it was to one of his legionaries that the fellagha had given away the hiding-place.
Raspéguy shrugged his shoulders. He was bored by all this bargaining, this rivalry between different “outfits,” and he did not want to waste any more time over it.
He visualized his return to Les Aduldes, and the long irrintzina he would give at the bottom of the path to notify those on the Raspéguy estates that it was he, Pierre-Noël, coming home with his general’s badges of rank. For this time they could not refuse him promotion.
4
THE PARADE AT THE RÉPUBLIQUE
“No,” Esclavier said to Irène, with a hint of irritation in his voice, “you don’t understand. On the 13th of May we could have overthrown the course of history if we had been organized and prepared, if we had for a moment suspected that it would be so easy. We weren’t ready. In spite of our experience with the Viets we were still good little bourgeois Frenchmen. The skin may perhaps have changed colour but not the inside of the fruit. We abided by the rules of the game, we fell into every trap, and that wasn’t all. They charged us with causing disunity in the army and so we stopped. What nonsense! The army has been disunited since 1940, ever since one part chose discipline and pledged themselves to Pétain and the rest of us decided to carry on the war.
“And yet there came a morning when anything was possible in Algiers if we had not lacked drive. We were like a prisoner who has been locked up for years in his cell. On his release, and at the prison gates, he meets a girl, the girl he has dreamt about all his life; she is at his disposal, but he doesn’t think of approaching her, he no longer knows what to say to her, and he lets the girl pass by—an opportunity he will never have again. We, the captains who win battles and lose wars, suddenly discovered our power, but too quickly and too soon.”
“France wasn’t behind you, Philippe; she has never been behind you; she was just drifting along.”
Irène Donadieu and Philippe Esclavier were lying under the olive-trees of a ruined house overlooking the gorge. Some swallows skimmed low over them and they could hear the muffled whistling sound produced by their wings.
Esclavier propped himself up on his elbow:
“Right and Left alike, the whole of France rejoiced at the fall of the régime. But not those, of course, who relied for their bread-and-butter on the big racketeers in Paris!”
“It seems to me a little too simple to account for the 13th of May by disgust for what you call ‘the big racketeers.’ What about the parade at the Place de la République?”
“Carnival always ends up with a masquerade.”
Philippe was thinking of a photograph of his brother-in-law Michel, draped in a cape that was too long for him, parading with a placard saying “Down with Fascism.” That photograph had been given a big splash in Influences.
Throughout those days when they were scanning the skies of Paris for the arrival of the paratroops, Michel Weihl-Esclavier had played the rôle of Brutus, while taking certain precautions, of course. . . .
Irène plucked a blade of grass:
“A people without weapons could not stand up against a professional army, all the same.”
“When a people wants to fight it will always find weapons. This time it merely sat back and jeered at the discomfiture of a gang of dirty crooks!”
“You talk like a Fascist.”
“No, I’m not a Fascist. The only temptation I might have had is towards Communism. But I should have to be even more disgusted with the world. People of my sort turn to Communism for the same reason they commit suicide.”
Irène was lying on her stomach, nibbling the blade of grass, and this gesture reminded her of her childhood and her first love affair. At that time she too had proved intolerant.
It was a commonplace, ludicrous story, the sort that makes adults laugh (and the laughter wounds the adolescents deeply).
She was sixteen and was on holiday at Saint-Gilles. Since she had passed the first part of her baccalaureate, she considered herself quite a figure. He was seventeen, the son of an Italian mason, as handsome as the young gods she had seen at the Louvre and Palazzo Vecchio. Like them, he had a jutting forehead reminiscent of a young he-goat, and a smooth, flat, rather effeminate body. He always left his shirt unbuttoned to show off his naked chest.
They were lying in a field behind the graveyard. She was talking to him about life, death, destiny, love, and for her these words were mere celluloid balls, weightless, with which she juggled.
He was nibbling a blade of grass, gazing at her, and every now and then he rubbed his cheek against her leg.
“You’re not listening to me, Giulio,” she said.
“Why should I? I love you.”
“We’ll get married and I’ll be poor, like you.”
“I shall work and your father will give us a little money. But we’ll have to wait before getting married. In the first place, your father must like me. This evening I’ll go fishing in a pool I know, near Goat Bridge, and bring him back a dish of trout. When they’re in season I’ll bring him some thrushes. He enjoys his food, doesn’t he?”
The image of the youth dissolved; he had been only a holiday love affair. Giulio had never kissed her, although she had asked him to.
“I’ll kiss you,” he told her, “the day we become engaged. We mustn’t spoil it.”
Since then Irène had always “spoilt” everything. She now longed to rub her cheek against Esclavier’s leg. It would be a friendly gesture, which meant nothing, like the caress of a pet animal.
The day before, they had gone down to the coast to bathe. Irène had been disturbed by the sight of Esclavier’s tall body stretched out on the sand, that scar on his chest which was going purple, and, on his thighs, arms and back, and even his neck, those marks of other, older, wars.
“I hate war,” she had mused, “but, like all females, I have a weakness for men who fight and who bear the marks of fighting.”
* * * *
“What you say is fascinating, but you must leave aside general considerations and describe in detail what it was like that morning in Algiers when anything was possible.”
She stretched and heaved a sigh of well-being.
“It’s so wonderful, Philippe. We hardly know each other, and yet we’re already close friends. I could strip naked in front of you to go bathing, I shouldn’t feel the slightest shame or embarrassment. Let’s go for a swim in the river. The water is icy at this time of year; it still is even in summer. We shall go blue with cold, then red. We’ll be ravenous and simply gulp down my father’s carefully prepared dishes.”
Irène could not resist any longer and rubbed her cheek against the major’s leg.
* * * *
Paris was behind her: the convulsions, desires and agitations of the capital suddenly seemed derisory. That morning she had found it was more important to be woken by bird-song than by the telephone ringing, even if it disclosed a bedroom or household secret.
In three days she had not written a word or opened the black leather book in which she jotted down her notes. She had not even abided by the convention which demanded, when an Influences journalist was away from Paris, that he should ring up the editorial department two or three times daily, to show that no matter where he was, no matter what the circumstances, all his thoughts were centred on the paper and its interests.
In a pair of faded jeans she went ambling along the river bank, through the pine-woods or under the olive-trees, following the stony paths where the sunshine was scented with thyme, lavender and fennel, accompanying a sort of disenchanted officer on half-pay, whom she regarded more or less as a brother or cousin.
She helped him to put the house straight, imposing her taste as though she were going to live in it. To see to his laundry and cooking she had found him a housekeeper, but she herself was the one who had unpacked for him, counted his underclothes, his socks and shirts.
Irène knew that Philippe was keeping back one of those secrets that do not always overthrow a régime but at least make a journalist’s career. She could see those secrets buzzing round him like flies which, in the summer, heavy and clumsy, knock against lamps and window-panes. It would be easy to catch them.
Yet sometimes, to her embarrassment, she found herself interrupting the paratrooper’s disclosures.
The major held out his hand to help her up. Did she want to put him on his guard? She could not prevent herself from saying:
“I also took part in what you call the masquerade at the République, and I haven’t changed my views.”
But at that moment she would have liked to seize him by the shoulders, shake him and shout in his face:
“You silly fool, I work for the weekly paper Influences. I’ve been given the job of worming everything out of you. The day I leave, when I ask you for that photograph showing you wounded, naked to the waist, half sitting up on your stretcher, it will not be to keep it and hang it up in my room, but to publish it!”
They were scrambling down towards the torrent, dislodging the pebbles under their feet. A blackbird, a thrush, then a squirrel fled out of the thickets.
“I could start a new life,” Philippe was saying to himself, “if I had a girl like Irène with me. She has the sort of adolescent beauty, the immature body, that has always attracted me. But she’s healthy, her teeth are dazzling. I feel she is open-minded, but without a single idea in her head; violent, but without passion. Politics, the army, Algeria, de Gaulle, Communism: a game everyone in her set plays and of which she knows the essential rules. But none of it really interests her. I’m thirty-seven and I’ve lost my friends. . . .”
He dismissed this temptation, which had been as faint as a whiff of citronella. By the time they had reached the torrent it had vanished.
Philippe believed himself to be devoted to Passionarias, like Isabelle Pélissier, who try to drag a man into their conflicts and require him to espouse their cause whole-heartedly, or to shameless hussies like Mina who have to be tamed like wild mares.
He did not realize that in order to please him his mistresses often deliberately assumed the very character he fancied he saw in them.
Thus it was that Mina had become shameless while dreaming of a very conventional relationship, of marriage even. Souen, of course, was outside these categories. But Dia, with good reason, had told him:
“You’re not the one Souen loved, you had nothing to do with it; it was an idea of love that she had fashioned for herself. It was like Lescure’s flute: a solitary, pure little melody, outside time, country, religion, politics and sex. Love isn’t like that. Love has a smell, the smell of a couple’s sweat and of their pleasure. It is made up of the tussle between man and woman—an endless, cruel tussle, because each wants to impose his dream on the other and to destroy the dream that is not his own.”
Irène could be a friend, a companion, even an accomplice. But then what good would it do him to make her his wife or his mistress? Mina would be down on the coast in three days’ time, and with her he would once more find that violent pleasure, that irritation, that sense of remorse that comes from making love without loving.
Irène appeared on a rock, stark naked, her breasts and stomach as bronzed as the rest of her body. “So she never wears a bathing-dress?” But she had already dived into the water with its green reflections.
She came out at once and sat down beside him, draped in a towel.
“Philippe, you mustn’t bathe with that wound of yours, the water’s much too cold. It took my breath away.”
She leant her damp face and short curly hair towards him. In her pale, almost yellow eyes there were flashes of gold. She had a long neck, slender arms, but a firm well-developed bosom.
He stroked her hair; she laid her head on his shoulder and asked him for a cigarette.
* * * *
Since he came out of hospital Philippe had not been near a woman. His blood was on fire and he interpreted Irène’s friendly gesture as a sign of consent. He stroked her back and was surprised at the silky softness of her skin. Pressed close to him, she amused herself by purring like a kitten. All of a sudden he tore off her towel and pinned her against the rock. Irène tried to fight back, but when she felt the major’s strong body against hers, his mouth biting into hers, she abandoned the struggle and surrendered.
The water roared beside her, the water roared all round her. Above her were patches of sky and foliage, and this contorted male face, these hard thighs pressed against hers, this smell of sweat and aromatic plants, of love, stone and damp moss.
Her body was invaded by pleasure; she writhed and the stone bruised her back, while the sky grew dark and the roar of the Siagne swelled to become as loud as the roar of a train racing over a bridge. She gave a sharp cry.
But already he had escaped her and had collapsed by her side. After a moment she pushed him gently with the toe of her foot towards the water. He let himself slide into the foaming current and came back to join her, then they dried themselves in the sun, rubbing each other down with the towel.
“I suppose,” said Irène, “that, like me, you don’t attach much importance to what has just happened: ‘the exchange of two desires, the contact of two skins,’ with, in addition, a little friendship on your part, a little affection on mine. Nothing has changed, Philippe, we’re still two friends, two cousins. . . .”
“Let’s forget all about it.”
“But why? I plan to spend the remaining eight days of my holiday with you, and some of the time in your bed. Then, when I’m back in Paris, I’ll find other . . . let’s say, friendships. Now give me the cigarette I asked you for just now.”
From the moment Philippe had taken her, Irène had felt released from her scruples, as though, by giving herself to him, she had acquired the right to lie.
She hated the ide
a of deceiving Philippe, her friend, but she felt she had the right to take revenge on this same Philippe who had become her lover.
Therein lay the fruit of the teaching of her philosophy teacher. Irène had been as shocked as if she had been betrayed when she realized that this stern-faced woman with the fringe preached rebellion against man with such conviction only because she herself had a taste for playing the man’s rôle with women. Then, so as not to appear silly, she had laughed about it.
Later on she had put it to the test for herself with a singer with a lovely deep contralto voice who had made advances to her. The experience had seemed interesting, without danger, and she had had occasion to repeat it.
Her relationship with Philippe was now more simple and straightforward. She had given herself to him; in exchange, she was entitled to his secrets.
But she had not accounted for the strong healthy pleasure she had derived from him and which she had not known for quite some time. Like the majority of independent women of her age, she not only wanted to be on an equal footing with men but demanded, in addition, various privileges without opposition.
Irène thought for a moment of her companions and bed-companions, of their unhealthy scanty pleasure which they considered sophisticated.
“With two, it’s boring,” Jeanne de Villaret used to say, “with four, it’s a public meeting, three’s the perfect number. . . .”
She had just experienced in the open countryside the over-powering desire and gratification that Lady Chatterley sought with her gamekeeper. That was how she would describe her adventure, if she ever had to talk about it.
Jeanne, with her throaty voice, would reply with one of her usual stock phrases:
“Are you abandoning the Directoire for the rustic?”
* * * *
With their arms round each other’s waists they made their way back to Saint-Gilles. Irène slipped her hand under Philippe’s shirt to stroke his skin and rubbed her head against his shoulder, without realizing that these were the age-old gestures of a woman in love.