The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  As we pick our way towards Belleville, I marvel once more at the capacity of revolution to generate mess. Shredded banners, pools of blood and petrol, corpses covered with newspapers – Arab victims of random lynchings. And there is all the normal refuse that has not been collected since the strike began, spilling out of bins and bags. Already the rats are out in the streets here – and in Constantine, Philippeville and Oran.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Götterdämmerung has been postponed. A curfew has been imposed by the Governor of Algiers. De Gaulle has broadcast on radio and television telling the army and the people to stand firm. When Frenchman fires on Frenchman, then. ‘France has been stabbed in the back before all the world’, but ‘nothing is lost for a Frenchman when he rejoins his mother’, and in fact the army’s coup fails to materialize. The beautiful weather breaks and people drift away from the barricades. Thunder clouds roll over the city and the steep and badly guttered roads become dangerous sluices. The army makes its appearance at last to help the shopkeepers in demolishing the barricades. The curfew is lifted, but too late for the staging of the last episode of the Ring cycle. All the same, the de Serkissian party for the visiting cast is announced in the Gazette d’Algérie.

  On the morning of the party I wake from a curious dream. I dreamt that Chantal and I were twins entwined in each other’s arms in a cocoon which has been laid by a human-headed creature with wings and left to float on the tides of the Bay of Algiers. Then thick red curtains sweep down and nothing more can be seen. That was the dream. If, in fact, I were living inside a melodramatic opera, then, yes, when I go to the villa tonight I would discover that Chantal and I were twins. I was the one stolen at birth by a wandering bedouin. Inside the villa Chantal’s old nurse would identify me by my birthmark. She would tell the story to Maurice and the chorus of assembled guests and I would renounce my murderous ambitions, but it will be too late, for Chantal will have drunk the poison. Though the dream fills me with foreboding, I have no time for dreams and in fact I am heading for an end which is more squalid than that.

  Nounourse and I are getting on one another’s nerves and, now the weather has turned, it is bitterly cold in the flat and there is no heating. We can find nothing do do but clean our guns. I am still hanging on to my faithful old Tokarev, but I only have three more shots left in the magazine. I am full of doubts. I am unable to imagine how it will be when I come face to face with Chantal once more and aim this gun at her. It is not just that either. I am beginning to distrust my motives in heading for the villa tonight. Not that I believe that I am a prey to murky subconscious forces. There is not evidence at all there is such a thing as a subconscious. It is the invention of nineteenth-century bourgeois thought. It makes the doctors rich and the bourgeois believe that there is more of interest in themselves than they could ever have guessed. No, no subconscious. But, looking at my problem with materialist objectivity, there is the matter of simple sexual desire. According to Arab folklore, there is such a thing as magnetic meat. There is a fish which swims in the sea which lures its victims to it by virtue of its magnetic flesh. It may be like that with Chantal and me. Never mind what goes on in the head: meat calls to meat. This is morbidity …

  At last it is time, if we agree to walk to the villa slowly, for us to get ready. We still have our opera gear, though both suits are very crumpled and, in Nounourse’s case, slightly soiled. Nounourse has stolen an umbrella and, pressed together under it, we make our way up the hill of the corniche and past the casino and on towards the Villa Serkissian. There is a police van parked outside the gate, but the gendarmes are not going to challenge people in dinner-jackets, no matter how sodden and crumpled they may look. The drive is lined by sullen Corsicans with guns. I wave Raoul’s invitation in the face of the guard at the door and jerk my thumb at Nounourse behind me.

  ‘My bodyguard.’

  The man at the door does not bother to examine the card carefully and we are through. Paoli, Maurice’s major-domo, is just inside the door waiting to shake the hands of new arrivals and guide them to the drinks.

  ‘Monsieur Rouge,’ I say and stroke my beard complacently. Paoli looks puzzled. Perhaps I am familiar to him, but he cannot quite place me. Finally, doubtfully, ‘Of course. How good of you to come.’

  ‘I shouldn’t shake hands with my bodyguard if I were you. He has a rather strong grip.’

  Paoli eyes Nounourse admiringly. I’m sure Nounourse could get a job with Maurice’s establishment. Nounourse grins savagely down on him.

  ‘Well, no then, but let me find you both a drink.’

  ‘I’ll have gin and he’ll have fruit juice.’

  We are guided to the bar behind which a black waiter is at work mixing fancy cocktails. We get our drinks and Paoli is called back to the door. I am both excited and apprehensive. I pat my hip to reassure myself that my gun is still there and in doing so, I notice that I have an erection. I turn to face the guests. This is not supposed to be a fancy-dress party, but I see plenty of clowns here. Distinctly elderly members of the jeunesse dorée, alcoholic landowners, public servants who retired after Vichy, officers who have resigned from the army to find new careers as mercenaries and the mafia of grandes dames who run the big charities in this part of the world. A few of them sport Vercingetorix tie-pins or brooches. Generally, decorations and bosoms are much in evidence. I can’t actually see anyone sporting the iron cross, but there is a man with a monocle and duelling scars. I can’t see Chantal.

  When the major-domo comes back to the bar with two new arrivals, I call out to him.

  ‘Hey, Paoli! Where is the lovely daughter of the house, Chantal? Was that her name? I so much enjoyed meeting her last time.’

  ‘Chantal has a headache and is lying down upstairs, but she has promised to come down later.’ Paoli looks rather pained himself. I am certain that he is lying, I don’t know why.

  ‘And where is our host, Maurice?’

  ‘He is attending to Chantal.’

  He continues, ‘But let me introduce you to some of the other guests.’

  ‘No need. Isn’t that Christa Mannerling over there? I’ll go and introduce myself.’

  Nounourse positions himself against one of the walls and I move off towards Christa Mannerling. Christa (Freia in Rheingold and Brünnhilde in Die Walküre) has breasts like great sweating cheeses. Only a rich society could have produced all the fine quality meat that has been pumped into this lady’s corset. I insert myself into the group of attentive listeners who have clustered round her. I have nothing to say to her. I just want to be quiet and inconspicuous in a group while I work out what my next move should be. I knew that getting in would be easy. Getting out will be difficult and has not been planned for. One shot fired inside the villa and the grounds will be alive with police and Maurice’s gunmen. It may be a heaven-sent opportunity that Chantal lies on her bed upstairs where I may kill her silently.

  In a moment then, when I see that Maurice is back downstairs, I should slip away from this group of bores and make my way quietly up the stairs and then I should … and then … and then I will ease the door handle round and step silently into the room. Chantal will be lying on the bed in a long evening gown. On the bedside table will be the familiar crucifix and much-thumbed copy of Le Hobbit. Her eyes will widen when she sees me. I will show her the gun and tell her to strip. As soon as she has stepped out of her panties, she covers her breasts with her arms. An appealing gesture. Meat calls to meat. The gun falls disregarded from my hand on to the bedside table, but as I move forward to embrace her, she snatches up the pistol and points it triumphantly at me. I tell her to fire away. ‘It’s not loaded.’

  ‘And what do you do. Monsieur … er …?’ inquires Christa breaking into my reverie.

  ‘Madame? I? I er … am in pharmaceuticals in Grenoble.’

  ‘How interesting.’

  ‘Well, it is kind of you to say so, Christa, but you don’t look as though you mean it. Actually, it is interesting. I am th
e biggest man in pharmaceuticals in Grenoble. Remember the name – Rouge. And when I say I am the biggest in Grenoble, we are talking about big money here, a pre-tax turnover of around 2 billion francs. Have you ever heard of phylodoxidrine?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Very few of your sort of people ever have. But it is a very big seller, especially in Africa, very big in Africa, and it is the taxes on the growing sales of companies like mine which keep the opera and the army going in this part of the world.’

  As I keep talking, I notice that Paoli and one of his henchmen have come over to join our group.

  ‘I have to say though that I’m not sure that we really need an army out here. Speaking as a major tax-payer, I can tell you that it seems a disproportionate fiscal burden and, speaking as a big exporter to Africa, I can tell you that we have been pleasantly surprised how much our sales have shot up in our former colonies since independence. Under the old regime there were a lot of restrictive regulations that really were getting in the way of efficient pricing and distribution of our drugs. So the message is – the colonists can go and we can still clean up on the profits.’

  Paoli looks murderous. I turn to face him directly.

  ‘We see very good prospects in the Congo, now that the Belgians are pulling out. Generally, we see a lot of possibilities in the newly emergent nations of Africa … If my company’s experience in Senegal is anything to go by, one can get away with murder in these People’s Cannibal Republics. Well, not murder, but marketing contraceptives as virility pills and …’

  Someone has started to play the ‘Tarnhelm’ motif from Rheingold on the piano and Christa drifts off in that direction. Paoli is whispering to his side-kick. The man has a vaguely military appearance. I prod the side-kick in the chest with my finger.

  ‘One does not find the real buccaneers of our time in the ranks of the Foreign Legion or the Paratroops, for all their smartly tailored uniforms. No, indeed. Today’s adventurers are going into the front line of the developing new technologies. Pharmaceuticals is one of them and I’m proud of my role in that industry.’

  I am talking more and more loudly. But it is no use. They are not listening to me. I am effectively talking to myself. I return to my gin and to contemplation of the staircase – the murky ascent to the scaffold of a death-in-love summation – killed by the woman I love – effectively the auto-execution of the terrorist. Crap, all crap. I don’t want to die. I am too useful to the revolution. If I do have a death wish, it takes the form of wishing all oppressors and collaborators were dead. But now, as I look around the room, it strikes me that these people had their chance with Hitler and Mussolini and they muffed it. As for neo-fascism, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. Looking at the Children of Vercingetorix scattered round the room, I am struck more powerfully than before by their preposterous appearance. They are the amateurs of revolution. History is not travelling in their direction and in the deepest recesses of their shrivelled hearts they know it.

  Atrocity is no longer the monopoly of the Junker and the Nazi and the owner of slaves and plantations. For, in my time, the politically mobilized working class and the freedom fighters of Africa and Asia have learned to make much more effective use of terrorism and torture than these played-out reactionaries ever could. And indeed the jokers in this room are not the real enemy. The real enemy is Monsieur Rouge, who is so big in pharmaceuticals in Grenoble, and his friend Monsieur Jaune, the technocrat in one of the Paris ministries, and Monsieur Bleu, the leader of the Farmer’s Union, and Monsieur Vert, the Left Bank novelist they all read, and the vast mass of busy lawyers, doctors, publishers, journalists, librarians and undertakers who toil for the repressive democracies of the Western world. The structures of oppression are indeed diffuse and subtle.

  It follows that Chantal is a glamorous irrelevance. I am getting out of here. I am not going to be redeemed by the love of a bad woman after all. I signal Nounourse over and together we confront Paoli.

  ‘It has been wonderful talking to your guests. So sorry not to be able to thank our host, but we must be going now.’

  ‘But you have only just arrived. I hope you are feeling all right?’

  ‘I’m feeling fine – only just a little bored that’s all. But thank you for having done me the honour of receiving me in the de Serkissian home.’

  If Nounourse had not been standing beside me, I think Paoli might have declined to shake my proferred hand. I walk over to Christa Mannerling to say goodbye to her too. I offer to send her a free sample of my company’s slimming pills. Then, ‘Come on, Nounourse. Let’s go.’

  This winter the French lost the game in Algeria. In two years, three years at the most, they will be ceding independence and pulling out. I think that tomorrow I shall go down to the office of the Compagnie Transatlantique … I think we may go to Cuba – or perhaps the Congo.

  ‘Find the umbrella, Nounourse.’

  But Nounourse is blocking my way. I should have realized that he was going to be more trouble than he was worth.

  ‘Captain Addict, I did not come here to drink fruit juice or to listen to your joking with your white friends.’ Nounourse is whispering, but his thunderous whispering can surely be heard by Paoli and half the people in the room behind us. ‘Are you a legionnaire or are you chicken? What is with you? Your Chantal must die and I came here to fix it for her. Now I am going to do it and you are going to help me do it. We go upstairs together now, or I shoot you dead here on the spot.’

  There is no time and this is not the place for me to argue with Nounourse. I have only just understood myself how irrelevant killing her will be.

  ‘Enough. Let’s get out of here, Nounourse. Something is wrong. Where is Chantal? Where is Maurice? It all feels wrong.’

  ‘We will find her upstairs and then we will kill her.’

  So we stand, glaring at one another, when I hear a shout from behind me.

  ‘Captain Roussel – that is you with the beard, isn’t it? – it is I who ask you to stay.’

  The shout has come from halfway across the room and the voice is that of Maurice. Paoli who had been standing with the door open for our exit now closes it again. The guests part between us and Maurice crooks his finger summoning us to him. We go towards him, but, before we are close, he gestures with his head towards the stair.

  ‘You are needed up there. My daughter needs you now. Please, now go up.’

  There is something in his voice I can’t quite make out. Menacing, of course, but perhaps wheedling too?

  ‘Go up. It seems that you are expected. In the name of God, hurry!’

  I look at Nounourse. Is he in on this too? But he looks baffled and terrified. We ascend the staircase. Maurice and Paoli watch us from the foot of the stairs. Why don’t they shoot us now? Or must it be done upstairs, out of sight of the guests? Indeed, there is a Corsican with a rifle at the head of the stairs and I see another, similarly armed, at the far end of the corridor. The nearer ’of the two guards inclines his head to us.

  ‘Her bedroom is over there, but you must knock before you enter.’ And he motions us past.

  Clearly everything is wrong, but I see no way of walking out of this trap. Nounourse has lost his confidence and he makes me knock upon the door while he flattens himself against the wall and his head turns from one Corsican to the other. A strange mewing sound comes from beyond the door. I take it that we are to enter. The bedroom is mostly in darkness, but a table lamp illuminates something shaking under the blankets on the bed. Nounourse covers me with his gun while I walk over to strip the blanket away. The mewing noise redoubles in volume. It is made by the bloody thing on the bed, a body that is swathed in silk streaked in red. I cannot understand it. Raoul comes in from the bathroom and he says something to us, but I am not taking it in, for I am slowly coming to interpret and to understand what it is that I am looking at. Chantal’s eyelids are fluttering up and down at a fantastic rate. I am looking at Chantal, but she does not lo
ok like Chantal.

  ‘… and there is no point in talking to her. She can’t talk back.’ Raoul is in a sports jacket and he carries a gun, but he regards Nounourse with a friendly eye and it is clear that there will be no shoot-out in this room.

  ‘Are those gumen still posted on the corridor? Is that really the party I hear downstairs? Incredible. You took your time. Who is this gorilla? I take it that he is your man? I’ve been here over three hours now, but I waited, certain that you would be coming. I told Maurice that I was sure that you would be coming and I told him – yes, I ordered him – to send you up when you came.’

  Despite his casual dress, Raoul himself is far from casual. He is sweaty and he gabbles. The holes in his face seem to dilate. Nothing makes any sense to me. I go and sit down with my back against the wall. Then I ask him to explain himself.

  ‘When we met on the quayside and you took my invitation card from me, it was not difficult for me to work out what you wanted it for and what you were going to do to Chantal. Then I began to reflect on Chantal and her values and then I thought about Anne Frank and her values. (I told you that I had been reading her Diary, didn’t I?) Then I thought about your values and what you are trying to do in the world. Everything passed in a dream, as I came to examine my own values – prejudices, as I now regard them – and I realized that I had only been using sophistry to defend the interests of my class formation. Then I went back over the arguments we had at Laghouat and I realized that you were right about the labour theory of value! It was a wonderful moment for me. I now understand that labour cannot have two values, one for the labourer and one for the capitalist who employs him. (We are talking about the capitalist’s margin of profit here, are we not?) As Engels says, “Turn and twist as we will, we cannot get out of this contradiction, as long as we speak of the purchase and sale of labour and the value of labour.” No, what we should be talking about is the sale and purchase of labour power. Labour power –’