‘But I know. I was there. I saw: that day eleven years ago: paused in that iron maw of war, not fragile actually: just fixed and immune in fragility like the figure in the stained window; not through any Alice’s mirror into unreality, but just immune, moral opposed and invincibly apostate; if there still existed for you even in dream the splendid and glittering boulevards and faubourgs of your old cradle and your lost estate, it was merely as dream forever inextricable from your past and forever interdict from your destiny; inextricable the dream, yourself and the dream annealed, yourself interdict and free from that pain and that longing forever more; inextricable from that youth who is this man now, as is this little lost barren spot here inextricable forever from that destiny, — never that uncle’s and that godfather’s private donjon but rather the figment of that consecration’s necessary tarryment for this time, this space, somewhere in time and space, — not the youth: the fragility; not to test the youth but to test the fragility: to measure and gauge and test; never an intractable and perverse child who fled, never an uncle and godfather coercing and compelling by attrition, starvation, but all of them, the trinity still intact because it had never been otherwise, testing as one the fragility’s capacity for the destiny and the consecration, using the desert for yardstick as when in the old days the cadet would spend that last night of his maiden squiredom on his knees on the lonely chapel’s stone floor before the cushion bearing the virgin spurs of his tomorrow’s knighthood.
‘That’s what they think: not that man failed rapacity, but that man failed man; his own frail flesh and blood lets him down: the blood still runs but cooling now, into the second phase of his brief and furious span when the filling of his belly is better than glory or a throne, then on into the third and last one where anticipation of the latrine is more moving than even the spread of a girl’s hair on the pillow. That’s what they believe is to be your destiny and end. And ten years from now they will still know no better. Because your time, your moment, will not have come even in ten years. It will take longer than that. It will need a new time, a new age, a new century which doesn’t even remember our old passions and failures; a new century from that one when man discovered God for a second and then lost Him, postulated by a new digit in the record of his hope and need; it will be more than twenty years even before the day, the moment when you will appear again, without past, as if you had never been. Because by that time you will no longer exist for them except in mutual remembering: a lay figure not only without life but integrated as myth only in mutual confederation: the property of no one of them because you will be the property of all, possessing unity and integration only when your custodians happen to meet from the ends of the earth (which is the French empire) and match fragments and make you whole for a moment; you will lie weightless across the face of France from Mozambique to Miquelon, and Devil’s Island to the Treaty Ports like a barely remembered odor, a fading word, a habit, a legend — an effigy cut by a jigsaw for souvenirs, becoming whole only over a cafe or mess table in Brazzaville or Saigon or Cayenne or Tananarive, dovetailed for a moment or an hour as when boys match and exchange the pictures of the actresses and generals and presidents from the packs of cigarettes; not even the shadow of a breathing man but instead something synthetic and contrived like the composite one of the homely domestic objects contrived by the nurse’s hand between the nursery lamp and the wall for the child to take into slumber with it: a balloon: a duck: Punchinello: la gloire: the head of a cat — a shadow cast backward on that arid curtain behind Oran beyond which you disappeared, not by the sun but by that quartermaster captain’s commission the refusal of which first struck them with terror and rage, until after twenty years not you nor even your two powerful kinsmen will be real, but only that old fading parchment, and it real only because your refusal of it incorporated it onto your legend — the shopworn and now harmless vellum vainly dangling its fading seals and ribbons beside the rent beyond which you vanished in the oldest of comedies: the youth fleeing, the forsaken aging yet indomitable betrothed pursuing, abject, constant, undis-mayable, undeflectable, terrifying not in threat but in fidelity, until at last those who feared you once will have watched you pass out of enmity to amazement: to contempt: to unreality, and at last out of your race and kind altogether, into the dusty lumber room of literature.
‘But not I,’ he said, looming, visible only as a gaunt gigantic shape, sick, furious, murmuring: ‘Because I know better. I knew that first moment eleven years ago when I looked and saw you standing there in that gate. I knew. I wont be here to see it of course (my last medical survey, you know: that marvelous and amazing thing, a human life, spanned and then — what’s the Boer word? — outspanned by one dry and dusty page of doctor’s jargon. They are wrong of course. I mean in the Quai d’Orsay. They didn’t want to post me here at all, since in doing it they would in their opinion simply double the work of whatever clerk would not only have to relieve me but discharge me from the army list also and then post my successor before my tour here was even completed) and at first I grieved a little because once I thought that you might need me. I mean, need me other than for my simple seniority of hope in the condition of man. — That’s right,’ he said, though the other had made no sound: ‘Laugh, at that dream, that vain hope too. Because you will not need anybody wherever it is you are going now in order to return from it. Mind you, I dont ask where. I was about to say “to find whom or what you will need to be your instrument” but I refrained from that in time too. So at least you dont need to laugh at that, since I know that you are going wherever it is you are going, in order to return from it when the time, the moment comes, in the shape of man’s living hope. May I embrace you?’
‘Must you?’ the other said. Then: ‘Should you?’ Then quickly: ‘Of course,’ but before he moved the taller one had stooped, loomed downward from his vast and depthless height and took the smaller man’s hand and kissed it and released it and, erect again, took the other’s face between his two hands almost like a parent, a mother, and held it for a moment, then released it.
‘With Christ in God,’ he said. ‘Go now.’
‘So I’m to save France,’ the other said.
‘France,’ he said, not even brusquely, not even contemptuously. ‘You will save man. Farewell.’
And he was right for almost two years. That is, he was almost wrong. He did not remember the camel or litter — whatever it had been — at all; only a moment — probably, without doubt, in the base hospital in Oran — a face, a voice, probably a doctor’s, marvelling not that he had failed to keep consciousness over that fierce and empty distance, but that he had kept life at all; then not much again, only motion: the Mediterranean: then he knew peacefully, not with joy or exultation: just peacefully, almost unattentively, unable yet (nor did that matter either) to raise his own head to look, that this was France, Europe, home. Then he could move his head and lift his hands too even if the vast peasant Norman frame did seem still to lie outside its transparent envelope; he said, weakly but aloud, with a sort of peaceful amazement, weakly, but at least aloud: ‘I had forgot what winter looks like,’ lying half-propped all day now on the glassed veranda above Zermatt watching the Matterhorn, watching not the ordered and nameless progression of days fade but rather the lesser earth, since always the great peak carried into the next one as in a gigantic hand, one clutch of light. But that was only the body and it was mending too; soon it would be as strong, not perhaps as it ever was nor even as it ever would but rather as it would ever need to be, since they were the same, — only the body: not the memory because it had forgotten nothing, not even for one second the face which had been the junior that afternoon two years ago around the table on the Quai d’Orsay terrace, come all the way from Paris just to see him ——
‘Not Paris,’ the other said. ‘Verdun. We’re building fortifications there now which they will never pass again.’
‘They?’ he said peacefully. ‘It’s too late now.’
‘Too late?
Nonsense. The fever and the fury are still there, I grant you. It seems to be born in them; they probably cant help it. But it will be decades, perhaps a whole generation, before it reaches convulsion again.’
‘Not for us,’ he said. ‘Too late for them.’
‘Oh,’ the other said, who did not see at all; he knew that. Then the other said: ‘I brought this. It came out just after you left for Africa. You probably haven’t seen it yet.’ It was a page from the Gazette, yellowed, faded, almost three years old now, the other holding it spread while he looked at the rigid epitaph:
To Lieutenant-Colonel:
Sous-Lieutenant (and the name)
March 29, 1885
Relieved and Retired:
Lieutenant-Colonel (and the name)
March 29, 1885
‘He never came back to Paris,’ the other said. ‘Not even to France — —’
‘No,’ he said peacefully.
‘So you were probably the last to see him. — You did see him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then maybe you even know where he went. Where he is.’
‘Yes,’ he said peacefully.
‘You mean he told you himself? I dont believe it.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is nonsense, isn’t it? Not for me to claim that he told me, but that he should have to have told anyone. He’s in a Tibetan lamasery.’
‘A what?’
‘Yes. The east, the morning, which even the dead, even the pagan dead, lie facing, so that the first faint fall of shadow of the risen son of it can break their sleep.’ Now he could feel the other watching him and there was something in the face but he would not bother about it yet, and when the other spoke there was something in the voice too but he would not bother about that yet either.
‘They gave him a ribbon too,’ the other said. ‘It was the red one. He not only saved your post and garrison for you, he probably saved Africa. He prevented a war. Of course, they had to get rid of him afterward — ask for his resignation.’
‘All right,’ he said peacefully. Then he said, ‘What?’
‘The camel and the soldier he lost: the murderer — dont you remember? Surely, if he told you where he was going, he told you about that too.’ Now the other was looking at him, watching him. ‘There was a woman in it — not his, of course. You mean he didn’t tell you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He told me.’
‘Then of course I wont have to.’
‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘He told me.’
‘She was a Riff, a native, belonging to the village, tribe, settlement, whatever it was, which was the reason for the post and the garrison being there; you must have seen that anyway while you were there, — a slave, valuable: nobody’s wife or daughter or favorite it appeared, or anyway was reported: just simply merchantable. She died too, like the other one back in Marseilles eighteen years ago; the man’s power over women was indeed a fatal one. Whereupon the next morning the camel — it was his — the commandant’s — private mount: possibly a pet if you can — want to — pet a camel — and its groom, driver, mahout, whatever they are, had vanished and two dawns later the groom returned, on foot and thoroughly terrified, with the ultimatum from the chief, headman to the commandant, giving the commandant until the next dawn to send him the man (there were three involved but the chief would be content with the principal one) responsible for the woman’s death and her spoliation as merchandise; else the chief and his men would invest the post and obliterate it and its garrison, which they could probably have done, if not immediately, certainly in the almost twelve months before the next inspector-general would turn up to look at it. So the commandant asked for a volunteer to slip away that night, before the ultimatum went into effect at dawn and the place was surrounded, and go to the next post and bring back a relieving force. — I beg your pardon?’ But he had not spoken, rigid, himself the fragile one now, who was yet only barely erect from death.
‘I thought you said “chose one”,’ the other said. ‘He didn’t need to choose. Because this was the man’s one chance. He could have escaped at any time — hoarded food and water and stolen away on almost any night during the whole eighteen years, possibly reached the coast and perhaps even France. But where would he go then? who could have escaped only from Africa: never from himself, from the old sentence, from which all that saved him was his uniform, and that only while he wore it in the light of day. But now he could go. He was not even escaping, he was not even entering mere amnesty but absolution; from now on, the whole edifice of France would be his sponsor and his purifaction, even though he got back with the relief too late, because he not only had the commandant’s word, but a signed paper also to avouch his deed and command all men by these presents to make good its reward.
‘So the commandant didn’t need to choose him: only accept him; and at sunset the garrison paraded and the man stepped out of ranks; and now the commandant should have taken the decoration from his own breast and pinned it on that of the sacrifice, except that the commandant had not got the ribbon yet (oh yes, I’ve thought of the locket too: to remove the chain from his own neck and cast it about the condemned’s, but that is reserved for some finer, more durable instant in that rocket’s course than the abolishment of a blackguard or the preservation of a flyspeck). So without doubt that would be the moment when he gave him the signed paper setting him free of his past, the man not knowing that that first step out of ranks had already set him free of whatever else breathing could do to him more; and the man saluted and about faced and marched out the gate into darkness. Into death. And I thought for a moment you had spoken again, were about to ask how, if the ultimatum would not take effect until dawn tomorrow, did the Riff chief discover that a scout would attempt to get out that night, and so have an ambush ready at the mouth of the wadi through which the scout would pass. Yes, how: the man himself probably asking that in the one last choked cry or scream remaining to him of indictment and repudiation, because he didn’t know about the ribbon then either.
‘Into darkness: night: the wadi. Into hell; even Hugo didn’t think of that. Because from the looks of what remained of him, it took him most of that night to die; the sentry above the gate challenged at dawn the next morning, then the camel (not the plump missing one of course but an old mangy one, because the dead woman was valuable; and besides, one camel looks just like another in a Transport Office return) cantered in with the body tied on it, stripped of clothing and most of the flesh too. So the siege, the investment, was lifted; the enemy retired and that sunset the commandant buried its lone casualty (except for the better camel: and after all, the woman had been valuable) with a bugle and a firing-squad, and you relieved him and he departed, a lieutenant-colonel with the rosette in a Himalayan lamasery, leaving nothing behind him but that little corner of France which he saved, to be mausoleum and cenotaph of the man whom he tricked into saving it. A man,’ the other said, watching him. ‘A human being.’
‘A murderer,’ he said. ‘A murderer twice — —’
‘Spawned into murder by a French cesspool.’
‘But repudiated by all the world’s cesspools: nationless twice, without fatherland twice since he had forfeited life, worldless twice since he was already forfeit to death, belonging to no man since he was not even his own — —’
‘But a man,’ the other said.
‘ — speaking, thinking in French only because, nationless, he must of necessity use that tongue which of all is international; wearing that French uniform because inside a French uniform was the only place on earth where a murderer could be safe from his murder — —’
‘But bearing it, bearing at least without complaint his rewardless share of the vast glorious burden of empire where few other men dared or could; even behaving himself in his fashion: nothing in his record but a little drunkenness, a little thievery — —’
‘Until now,’ he cried. ‘ — only thievery, buggery, sodomy — until now.’
&nbs
p; ‘ — which were his sole defense against the corporal’s or sergeant’s warrant which would have been his death sentence. Asking nothing of none until his blind and valueless fate tangled with that of him who had already exhausted the Comité de Ferrovie and the French Army, and was now reduced to rooting about among the hogwallows and cesspools of the human race itself; who, already forfeit of life, owed nothing to France save the uniform he wore and the rifle he oiled and tended, who in return for filling on demand a man’s width of space in a platoon front, asked and expected nothing save the right to hope to die in a barracks-bed still unregenerate, yet who had been tricked into giving his life, without even the chance to prepare himself, for that country which would guillotine him within fifteen minutes of putting its civilian hand on him.’
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 441
