“Still refusing to touch a penny of what you look upon as my ill-gotten gains?”
“No, it’s simpler than that: I’m ill at ease with money, I feel it keeps me apart from something that is basically essential to me. Anyway, I’m very happy to see you again.”
“So am I; come in.”
Julien at once noticed the heady, penetrating smell of opium, mingled with a faint effluvium of pharmacy. They went through a big hall with Chinese hangings and lacquer furniture, then entered a dark little room. Two thin rush mats were spread out on the floor. Between them stood all the smoker’s paraphernalia: the little oil lamp with its golden flame, the bamboo pipes. The smell of the drug, like leaf-mould after rain, was unmistakable, drowning all the others.
Above the lamp the roll of painted silk which had been looted from the Summer Palace hung like a Japanese kakemono.
“I often thought of that painting,” said Julien, “especially when I was marching in chains along the tracks of the Moyenne Région. I imagined it much bigger and it’s nothing but an old bit of faded silk.”
He settled down on the mat facing his father and watched him hold the little pellet of opium over the flame between two long silver pincers.
The old man peered at him with his rheumy eyes:
“Well, what’s your opinion of this war we’ve . . . yes, this war we’ve just lost.”
“It was inevitable we should lose it.”
“Not enough arms, enough money . . . ?”
“We had too many arms, too much money. With the money we bought up a lot of puppets, while we let the Vietminh take the arms. We had no valid reason for fighting, apart from preventing the Communists from fanning out into South-East Asia. To succeed in this aim, we needed the support of the Vietnamese people. But how could they give us their support since, at the very outset, we denied them their independence?
“But it was only much later, in the prison camps, that we realized this conflict had overreached itself.”
“But you, what part did you have to play in this business?”
“A quick-change music-hall performer, by turns a partisan leader, a political adviser to racial minorities, an intelligence agent; but more often than not I acted as an observer, a witness.”
“Care for a pipe of opium?”
“No, thanks.”
“Yet opium is the vice of witnesses.”
Armand Boisfeuras drew on his pipe. The little pellet bubbled, expanded, and the taipan exhaled the smoke.
“Do you want to go and lie down? Your room has been ready for you for over a week.”
“No, thanks.”
“Go on, then.”
“Asia is lost. The Communists have introduced extremely effective and worth-while methods out there. They have transformed China and Northern Viet-Nam into a vast, perfectly organized, perfectly inhuman ant-heap. It will hold out for quite a time . . .”
Old Boisfeuras clapped his hands and Lung came in with some tea.
“It will hold out as long as their police system holds out.”
“Supposing a sort of popular tidal wave suddenly wiped out the whole Chinese Communist organization. What would be the result, Father?”
“Anarchy, monstrous, cosmic anarchy on a world-wide scale, a human ocean lashed to fury by the winds and smashing down every breakwater . . .”
Julien again remembered the hordes of cats in Marseilles and their stupid king. Kuomintang China was rather like that, with its war-lords and brigand generals.
“A nasty thought, isn’t it, Father? On this over-populated earth of ours, where distance has been abolished, we can hardly afford an anarchy six hundred million strong.”
Armand Boisfeuras emptied the bowl of his pipe, shook out the dross which he put aside in a little box, stretched out and laid his head on a small cushion:
“The Communists have either absorbed or liquidated every branch of society that might at a pinch have controlled that anarchy. The world is becoming an extremely disagreeable place, my dear Julien, with more and more insoluble problems presenting themselves every day. I shall soon be of an age to take leave of it, so for me those problems don’t exist. Meanwhile I’ve got this refuge: the smoker’s den where the sound and fury of the present age only reach me in the form of a muffled echo, deprived of all hysteria and pathos. You’ll be leaving the army, I suppose. I was planning to give you the directorship of our group of insurance companies. You’ll have absolutely no work to do; it’s the sort of sinecure that only a capitalist world can offer. It will enable you to live on a grand scale, to travel anywhere that takes your fancy, to have, shall we say, a social purpose . . . Stay here for a bit, have a good rest, go to bed with some girls . . . and in the evening, as you used to in Shanghai, come and lie down here with me on the mat. I’m rather bored, but I refuse to live in Paris. I have a horror of big towns in the West. I need warmth, silence and the beauty of flowers. A shark but at the same time an artist, my boy, and also resigned—resigned and weary to the point of not wanting to corrupt anyone any more, not even you. Yes, I’m decidedly bored with this world. Take advantage of its decline and its perversions, Julien, whether as an artist or a moralist, it’s much the same thing. You can have as much money as you like. I don’t enjoy things any more. What one can do with a woman or even a very young girl is pretty limited in the long run . . . You don’t bother about it, Julien? That sort of thing leaves you cold? You’re merely obsessed by your lust for power, the longing you have to fasten your name to some historical incident. Beware of the temptation of Communism; you’ve already experienced it, it might easily come back. In another age you would have been a financial tycoon, but money has lost its power and perhaps that’s why you despise it. The masses now represent the only power, and in order to win them over men indulge in the same savage, cynical tussle as the sharks of Wall Street or the City did in the old days.
“Only this new form of capital can’t be locked away in the vaults of a bank. This capital lives, eats, suffers, dies and rebels.
“In spite of my ghastly reputation, I believe I’m more human than the whole lot of you. I’ve only tried to corrupt my fellow man, not to use him as a limited capital. You think I’m off my head, that I’ve smoked too much opium. No, I’ve merely realized the absurdity of our condition and the immensity of our vanity . . . Don’t bother about the human race, Julien, just eat, drink, make love or listen to music, take drugs, you’ll be all the better for it. Why not marry? You’ll have children, you’ll build yourself a home, you’ll bring off a big deal, and one day you’ll be old and there’ll be nothing left for you but to wait sanctimoniously for the sky to drop on top of you . . . Come on, have a little pipe . . .”
Julien Boisfeuras got up and went to bed. He knew how deeply his father was suffering through having nothing more to do, through rotting away all alone in the sunshine of Provence without being able to contaminate any more continents with his personal gangrene.
• • •
Next day Julien Boisfeuras went for a walk through the narrow lanes of Grasse. Washing hung out from every window; round an old fountain some peasant women were selling the flowers and wild herbs from the mountains; hordes of children scampered up and down the steps and threw stones at one another; a beautiful, dark-haired girl with dull skin and a profile of classical purity was enthroned behind a stall of figs and lettuces.
Julien sat down on the damp rim of the fountain and appraised the girl dispassionately as a beautiful object.
“Hallo, Captain.”
A heavy hand came to rest on his shoulder. He looked up and recognized the journalist who had attended the prisoners’ release at Vietri and who knew Marindelle.
“Hallo.”
“Pretty girl, isn’t she? She might have been born in a Florentine palace in the Quattrocento. You can see her fingering her jewels. Her page comes in and kneels at her feet, br
inging back the dagger with which he has killed her unfaithful lover. She kisses him, keeps him all night in her bed and gives orders for him to be hanged in the morning. She has taken so much out of him that the page doesn’t even have the final orgasm which all men who are hanged are said to have . . . I’ve just been reading the Chronicle of the Cenci, I’m so bored here!”
“Why don’t you go away then?”
“You may well ask, Captain. I’ve got a month’s holiday, not a penny to spend, and an old aunt who’s putting me up at Grasse. She is extremely well-born and extremely deaf . . . Do you live in these parts?”
“My father does.”
“Don’t you miss Indo-China?”
“I was born in China, so it’s China I should miss if anywhere.”
“I believe you know my cousin, Yves Marindelle?”
“Extremely well, we were prisoners together in Camp One.”
“For four years all he had to eat was rice. Now that he’s back in France, he only takes his wife out to Vietnamese restaurants. He wants to teach her Annamite. Are you free for lunch, Captain?”
Julien had no wish to go back to his father wandering about in his old dressing-gown among the flower-beds, leaving a smell of corpses and pharmacy behind him.
“Why not?”
“We could go up to Cabris. You’re sure to have a car. An Aronde or a Vedette, or maybe a Frégate? All the officers back from Indo-China have cars.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s odd. Let’s take mine, then, if she can manage the climb, she’s an old rattletrap. Are you building yourself a house? The few officers who haven’t bought cars are building themselves houses.”
“I’m not.”
During the meal the journalist never stopped drinking and kept ordering bottle after bottle. At one point he even clutched his glass so tightly that it broke in his hand.
“Are you feeling restless?” Boisfeuras asked him. “Bored with your long holiday?”
“You’ve got an ugly face like myself, Captain, a mug that’s enough to turn the milk sour, as the peasants say, and your voice is as grating as a rusty hinge. As for me, I’ve got about as much grace as an elephant, and when I sweat I stink like an old billy-goat. A girl must be either off her head or completely blind to fall for me. Have you ever been in love?”
“It’s never happened to me. I believe in carnal passion, not in love . . . and since I’ve got an ugly face, as you’ve just reminded me, I pay for my pleasure, which doesn’t in any way detract from carnal passion, rather the reverse in fact.”
“I was madly in love with a girl once. I don’t know if she ever loved me in return, but at least she was used to me. I brought her husband back for her from Indo-China after stuffing him with hormones and vitamins, beefsteaks and caviar; then I came down to Grasse to get over it.”
“Marindelle’s wife, I suppose?”
“Yes, Jeanine Marindelle. They hadn’t got a flat, so they took mine. They insinuated themselves into my life like a couple of tapeworms.”
“Yet you took advantage of the wife when her husband was a prisoner.”
“I behaved badly, I realize that, and yet . . . Have a brandy with your coffee, won’t you? Do you know Ussel—that’s right, in Corrèze? You ought to see that town in the rain: a long black road, flanked as far as the eye can see by horrible middle-class houses with blank façades concealing mysteries which couldn’t be anything but sordid. A creeping sense of despair grips your guts and you feel like slipping some arsenic into grandma’s cup just for the sake of a laugh.
“Three months after their marriage, Yves Marindelle flew out to Indo-China and Jeanine went to stay with little Yves’s parents at Ussel, in one of the dreariest houses on that road. The father made a packet in hardware, wholesale groceries or something of that sort—a radical-socialist, a freemason, though he sends his wife to Mass, and a member of the Rotary Club. The Rotary Club of Ussel! The aunts, a couple of ugly old maids. All of them hated her. Jeanine was young and pretty and when she laughed a dimple appeared in her cheek. She came from a good family, but her parents had lost all their money. To her middle-class in-laws she was the adventuress who had stolen the heart of poor little Yves.
“Come on, have some brandy, Captain Boisfeuras. You were born in China, you wouldn’t understand how cruel and narrow-minded the French provincial middle class can be.
“Well, Jeanine made her escape for fear they might kill her by injecting all their poisons into her own life. I was her cousin, I used to buy her sweets when she was a little girl, gramophone records when she grew up. I was the only member of her family who went to the wedding. She was marrying her childhood friend, with whom she used to share the sweets I bought her and to whom she used to play my records.
“For the old house at Ussel, the rain of Ussel, the boredom of Ussel, had unaccountably produced the marvellous youth called Yves who resembled her so closely.
“Jeanine took refuge with me in Paris. She brought with her an entire childhood with all its strange and infinitely varied rites, and I, Captain, had never had a childhood of my own. She used to sing those silly little songs that school-children sing at round-games. She used to weep over a flower, smear her face with chocolate and talk of dying as though it was like going for a stroll round the garden.
“Now this is what I feel: love can’t exist unless it’s linked to that mysterious power and ritual of childhood. I fell madly in love, I stopped drinking, I found a job on the Quotidien.
“One day, while holding Jeanine a little too closely in my arms, I made her my mistress. It wasn’t particularly convenient, but it was inevitable.
“After that I experienced both paradise and hell. My pleasure was increased by a sense of sacrilege. There was I, the coarse old dullard, admitted into the fairyland of childhood, and at the same time being granted more pleasure than mortal man can have. The dragon taking advantage of the fairy princess he has captured! The prince came back, delivered his princess, and the dragon is now eating his heart out . . .
“Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as all that: it was the fairy princess who held the dragon captive . . . she had developed a taste for his embraces . . . but it was still the poor old dragon who went off and fetched back the prince.
“I’m drunk, I’m boring you to tears with this story . . . and yet I can’t talk about anything else. From the moment Jeanine saw Yves again I ceased to exist for her. Before seeing him, she wanted to leave him. Now, I could swear she doesn’t even remember that she lived a whole year with me.”
“Did Yves Marindelle know?”
“He amazed me, that boy. ‘Four years is a long time,’ he said, ‘and you’re handing me back my wife just as she was when I left her, as though you had kept her under glass, protected from the heat and cold. She hasn’t aged, she hasn’t changed at all, and yet she has acquired any amount of new tastes: the music of Stravinsky and Erik Satie, the poetry of Desnos, blue jeans and pony-tails. Thank you, Herbert.’ For you didn’t know, Captain, did you . . .”
Pasfeuro brought his huge fist down on the table:
“My Christian name is Herbert and I’m more well-born than the whole of the Polish aristocracy put together.”
• • •
Julien Boisfeuras took to meeting the journalist fairly frequently. Pasfeuro proved to be a mass of contradictions, with a taste for the weird and the unusual, mad and generous, cynical and tender-hearted at one and the same time. He hated all forms of hierarchy and lumped together the Communists, with whom he was once in conflict, the Jesuits, with whom he had been brought up, the police, with whom he had often had a brush, the middle class, towards whom he felt an aristocrat’s contempt, the military, whom he considered stupid, and all dried up old maids, members of the educational profession, clergy, technicians, inspectors of finances, pimps, Corsicans, people from Auvergne and infant prodigies.
/> Pasfeuro on his side respected the captain, his contempt for sartorial elegance, that manner he had of being at home anywhere, and his sound political and economic background. He seemed to belong to no particular country, had no national prejudice, attached no importance to money or decorations and was astonished and mystified to find himself in the army.
A slightly grudging friendship sprang up between the two of them. When Pasfeuro was posted as permanent correspondent in Algeria and had to go back to Paris, Boisfeuras decided to go with him. They took the holiday route along the Mediterranean coast as far as Montpellier and then crossed the Cevennes. This brought them one morning to the little Lozère village of Rozier on the edge of the Gorges du Tarn.
The trees had shed their last leaves and winter was beginning to assert its authority under the clear sky, among the quivering skeletons of elms, poplars and beech trees. All the gorges were bathed in a blue mist which the December sun could scarcely penetrate. The cliff of Capluc stood like a barrier at the junction between the black waters of the Joute and the green waters of the Tarn. Near a tumbledown old bridge a peasant pointed out a goat path leading up to the summit.
He was a nice old man in a black drill jacket, corduroy trousers, hobnailed boots and cloth cap. He spoke slowly with a strong accent, taking his time, happy to be alive:
“Up there at Capluc,” he said, “at one time there were Templars, as in many other places in the Causses. No one ever knew what they were up to in these parts.”
Pasfeuro and Boisfeuras embarked on the ascent. At each step the loose pebbles slipped away from under their feet. Pasfeuro admired the agility of the captain who effortlessly climbed the steepest slopes, swinging his shoulders slightly. The journalist was out of breath and, in spite of the cool breeze fanning his face, he sweated copiously. He thought to himself:
“What an unnatural life I led in Paris—the office, bars, cinemas and theatres to which Jeanine made me take her almost every night. She always seemed anxious to postpone the moment she would be alone with me. Each time we went to bed there was a minute or two of ghastly embarrassment. She would turn out the light and undress in the dark, but as soon as beauty’s body and the body of the beast came into contact, she would be overcome with passion. Does she turn out the light with Yves Marindelle, I wonder?”
The Centurions Page 25
