I would pile on. Bathtub, water cure, beer bottle up the ass, electrodes to the genitals, and, invariably, the slit throat. Eventually this all got around.
The school was quite politicized at that time. On one side you had the Communists, who didn’t do a thing but were still the most dangerous, and the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU), clustered around a Jewish journalist who was a friend of Mendès-France; on the other side were the nationalists, just as idiotic if not more so.
I can safely say that I was sought out by inferior individuals who would have done nothing without me.
Not that they did much with me. To start with, it was stuff we did after drinking, when on our way home in a group we would write in chalk on walls. Later on, we got aerosol spray-paint cans and scrawled Celtic crosses and OAS IS WATCHING and things like that.
Sometimes we would brawl with the leftists when school let out. Never very seriously. Myself, I could hardly take part for fear of worsening my vision. But I had certain organizing skills. And I say that all the more readily because I now believe that organizing serves no purpose. Today it is every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
Be that as it may, at the time I was trying to impose some degree of order.
I remember two—no, three—attacks that we launched. One was at the Cité Universitaire, the student residence building, where we knew Trotskyists were holed up at the invitation of JSU types in their dorm rooms.
The Cité Universitaire of Mont-Saint-Aignan stands high above Rouen’s right bank. It is reached by a road with many hairpin bends. It was easy for us to see the leftists as they made their way up. We lay in ambush for them at the building entrance, posting lookouts. We saw and heard them arriving. I noted with satisfaction that they were more plotzed than us. We all used to drink a lot. When they reached our level I ordered the attack. We charged them.
We could hardly see one another in the darkness. Startlingly, the leftists were armed with lead-filled rubber clubs from Manufrance, while all we had were sticks.
We exchanged blow upon blow. I was wounded in the leg. Several of our opponents screamed in pain. I sounded the retreat. We melted into the night, silent as cats. They would not forget us in a hurry.
Another time was kind of funny and showed that things were not really so clear-cut. Partial elections were underway, and we ran into a bunch of JSUers who were putting up posters. We laid into them right away, and everyone was fighting furiously when all of a sudden a van pulled up belonging to a public relations firm, complete with professional bill-posters and the would-be candidate of the Gaullist Union for the New Republic (UNR). In a flash we quit battling with the leftists and all of us besieged the van. Telling the bill-posters to keep out of it, we gave it to the UNR guy and set the vehicle on fire. The Gaullist took to his heels covered in blood. We were about to renew hostilities, but just then the cops showed up and everyone split.
A third donnybrook was the one where I met up with Anne Gouin again. Every day there would be members of the Communist Student Union (UEC) outside the student cafeteria hawking their paper Clarté and JSU militants selling a local mimeographed sheet called Action.
We decided to teach them a lesson.
This time there were twenty of us, and we were well armed: quite a few iron bars and bicycle chains. There used to be a lot of talk in the papers about bicycle chains, which were associated with motorcycle gangs, but few people realize how lethal they can be.
You have to have some idea, of course, of their weight —about a kilo—and of how to wield them: the end that serves as handle is wrapped in adhesive tape, binding it to a cord looped around your wrist so that you don’t drop the chain in the heat of battle. In this way you hold a double chain weighing the better part of a kilo dangling from your hand, and the best way to strike is from below rather than lifting the weapon up in the air and bringing it down on the victim, which is what they expect. By striking upward, you generally get the guy under the chin, smashing or more or less exposing their jawbone. If the clown looks for more of the same, there is always time, now that your weapon is up, to bring the thing down on their skull like the merry woodsman you are. It is impossible to speak too highly of the bicycle chain; there is nothing better, nothing more natural.
Okay, enough of that. Thus equipped, we went to the restaurant.
It was girls selling Clarté at the doorway. They were skaggy, true, but all the same you can’t just attack women. Fortunately, they saw us coming and one of them screamed “Help needed!” and four or five pimply individuals flexing scrawny biceps showed up along with a very young Action seller.
We moved in.
I saw one of the Commies get an iron bar across the kisser. Blood spurted from his mouth. A mass of people ran out of the joint to see what was happening, and because at the same time those outside were jostling to get back in, a logjam formed in the place’s tiny vestibule. One fat chick gave a strangled cry and a great murmuring arose from within.
One of the Clarté hags began shouting “Down with fascism!” in a hysterical voice. Then you saw how stupid crowds are. Everyone inside started pushing toward the entrance, chanting. We lammed into their front row. A piece of cake. I located the crazy girl who had started the chorus and, over the heads of the others, quite forgetting my resolution about not hitting women, fetched my bicycle chain down on her chignon.
I heard the thud of the blow, and blood immediately flooded down over the bitch’s forehead and the nape of her neck. She fell backward with a sob and splattered a guy behind her wearing a white raincoat. Amazing how much blood the scalp can piss out.
The targets of our assault were resisting now. “Bastards! Shitheads!” they cried. I took a kidney punch. Someone tried to take my chain. The throng pressed forward and several guys stumbled into me and fell over every which way. I found myself in a heap of humanity. I lashed out and lashed out again.
A guy bigger than me grabbed me by the hair with both hands and bashed my head against cement. I landed him one in the balls. He staggered away bent double. At this juncture a Yugoslav who was with us, Milano, tossed a practice grenade into the dining room. There was a great hullabaloo, and windows shattered as clouds of plaster dust and a symphony of shrieks rose into the air. One guy was weeping in pain—such an ignoble sound. I collected myself and beat a retreat, whirling my bicycle chain above my head.
Half a dozen cops arrived on the double from up the street. We fled in the opposite direction. I came upon Milano flattened by a rugby player from the University Sports Association. I delivered a hard blow with my chain to this hero, who rolled into the gutter and curled up in a fetal ball, leaking uncontrollably and emitting piercing cries. We took off.
On balance, the operation was a success. Leftist publications were strewn on the ground. I was slightly injured and my dark glasses were lost. So far as I could tell by looking back over my shoulder, the cops were laying into the leftists, who were chucking chairs at them. Pure mayhem. I stashed my chain in Milano’s 4CV and strolled off calmly, tucking my shirt into my pants. The pants had a hole at the knee, which was a giveaway.
I saw a brunette emerge from a side street. I recognized her: it was Anne Gouin.
“You shit!” she went.
I smiled and said nothing.
“I hope you get it now,” she said.
It is extraordinary how everyone reckons they have taught their opponents a lesson after events like that. I gave a short laugh.
“Fancy a drink?”
“You’ve got some nerve!” she yelled at me.
“Yeah,” I said coldly.
That ruffled her. I know how to ruffle chicks. We went down to the Seine to find a bar. I asked her how she was getting on. She said she was doing everything she could to help the angry masses stop bastards like me doing any harm. I allowed myself a justifiable chuckle. Then asked, apart from that, what about her love life, etc.? She replied that she was in her foundation year for a degree in sociology. I spat through my front teeth—a trick I learnt in Oran from a cool guy, a pimp in civilian life.
We sat in a bar; she had a beer and I had a gin and tonic. We stayed for a while, as I let her take shots at me. Experience has taught me that hostility is a useful prelude to debauchery.
I left her then because I had to rejoin the others to recap the operation. And I needed to get another pair of pants; the ones I had on were fucked, but I didn’t care. They were worn out anyway. We made a date to go and see Hiroshima mon amour at an arts cinema. I remember that I was hoping for sex and violence, in view of the title. When the night came I was disappointed on that score, but I had to admit that the film was a work of art.
At the house, as I was changing, Goémond showed up. I had not seen the commissioner since before my posting to Oran. I acted normal, let him in, showed him to a chair, and poured us whiskeys. He had not changed an iota, Goémond. But now I saw new things about him: I saw the shiftiness of the two-faced bastard that he was. I went on acting normal; I put my spare dark glasses on and clinked glasses with him with an enigmatic smile.
“Your father isn’t in?”
I shook my head.
“That’s fine,” he said. “It was you I came to see.”
“How nice,” I said, not without irony.
He was quite up-front. Cops never hide their role. They have already accepted it, so they must accept everything that goes with it. Except for the ones who fought in the Resistance, who can’t stand being called Gestapo or SS. I found that out when I was going on left-wing demonstrations myself.
“Look,” he said, “I feel sure you have changed. A few months in the army has done you some good.”
“My eye!” I quipped. The black humor had an edge to it.
“You have certainly learnt some things,” said the commissioner. “So don’t be pigheaded.”
“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” I said, lighting a cigarillo without offering him one.
“I’m saying don’t be an asshole,” Goémond replied. “Don’t go thinking we don’t know about your antics. So long as it’s just student pranks, okay. But mind you don’t go further. Stay away from Milano. He’s a crazy.”
“I sort of like crazies,” I answered acidly.
“Don’t be an idiot. The OAS is going to be fucked in the ass. De Gaulle is going to make peace in Algeria and the OAS can’t do a thing about it. Anyway it’s not a serious organization. It’s full of royalists.”
“Ah,” I said, “so you’re a republican cop then?”
“Butron, you’ve been warned. What you’re doing is worthy, but stupid. You are making a bed for anarchy. They have already killed a police commissioner, in Algiers. Not too smart.”
“Are you afraid they’ll kill another one in Rouen?” I asked, laughing insultingly.
He left without finishing his drink, and as for me I went to find the guys, who had been waiting for me for a good while now. They were pretty well beaten up and filthy. The only one that this condition suited was Milano, who was a real brute. That was when I reveled in the fact of having so cleverly gone home to change, for now I seemed much fresher than them, and my Tergal pants, white turtleneck sweater, and very soft leather jacket gave me an instant advantage.
My face was a mosaic of bruises, but my dark glasses prevented anyone from making fun of me.
We drank for an hour or two as the guys congratulated themselves and took turns telling their respective versions of the fight. They left one after another as I waited to be on my own with Milano. He seemed to cotton to this.
When one guy, a pinball maniac, showed no signs of leaving, Milano and I changed bars. We went to a hole-in-the-wall owned by a newly arrived pied-noir. We knocked back anisettes.
“They’ll get there,” I said,
“What’s that?”
“The guys, I mean, they’ll get serious. But in the meantime they have to warm up with little actions like today’s. Later, we can use them for real jobs.”
“What real jobs?” Milano asked suspiciously.
“Don’t shit me,” I said. “I have information.”
He was impressed.
“You have contacts?”
“Pretty much,” I answered. “Just now I am out of touch with my sources.”
“You’re looking for contacts?”
I sniffed and shrugged, leading him on.
“I’m looking for action,” I said.
“I can get grenades.”
“Like you did at lunchtime?”
“No, operational.”
“That’s better.”
“The problem is the target.”
“Why not right here?” I said. “That asshole of an owner quit Algiers despite the orders of the OAS. We can blow his business up real good.”
Milano gazed at me. He realized I wasn’t joking. I could see the admiration in his eyes. He had blue eyes, a broken-down mug and curly yellow hair. Milano was an abbreviation of Milanovitch or some such name, the name of a gun. We sized each other up.
“Let the owner be,” he said after a moment. “We’ll manage to make him pay. Let’s attack our main enemy, the Marxist-Gaullists.”
“Okay,” I said gravely.
“I can get you together with some guys,” he said. “We are setting up an action, with real weaponry. Are you free tonight?”
“Not tonight. I have a hormonal obligation,” I replied in a macho kind of way.
We both chuckled.
“Anyway, it won’t be tonight,” said Milano. “I’ll be in touch.”
We left the dive in different directions, one a few minutes after the other. Dinnertime had almost passed. I stopped off at another bar, ate a buttered salami sandwich, then picked up Anne Gouin and went to the art house with her.
To begin with, as I said, I was rather disappointed in the film, with its literary and aesthetic pretensions. But after a while I got into it and was touched by Alain Resnais’s lyricism. Meanwhile I had my hand under Anne’s skirt. She resisted feebly. During the flashbacks, around the moment when good old Emmanuelle Riva is in the cellar, her head shaven, I put my fingers seriously to work. I really liked the end of the picture when everybody is left to draw their own conclusion. Afterward I took Anne back to her place.
I had vaguely understood that she was alone at home that night because her father had not been living with her mother for a long time and her mother was in Paris for a day or two. I unnerved her with my kisses and my hands roving all over her body. She lost her head. We went in and ended up in Anne’s bedroom, which was decorated with album covers and photographs of revolutionary leaders. I found whiskey in the living room and had her drink a few glasses, panicking her even further.
“No, please,” she stuttered. “I despise you too much and I would despise myself too.”
I snickered, tumbled her, and screwed her.
There were ups and downs, but this became the pattern over the next few days.
Meanwhile Milano arranged a dawn meeting for me, in a VW minivan parked in a sunken lane, with some OAS guys, an officer and a Breton wearing a balaclava. They gave us some illegal leaflets and three grenades. We were assigned a mission: sow terror in the lower Seine valley and give the bullyboys of the Gaullist police pause.
The next night we stole a Dauphine Ondine near the Place du Marché. I took the wheel, stone-faced. Milano was in the back and we had opened the top. We drove full tilt down Rue Jeanne d’Arc past the headquarters of the Association in Support of General de Gaulle, and Milano threw the three grenades. Two of them failed but the third produced a tremendous explosion. The association’s blue sign was toppled. I raced to the train station. We ditched the car and met up with the guys in a bar.
The following day, at the end of natural science class, several of us were summoned to the principal’s office. I turned a deaf ear and left the building. That night I did not sleep at home. Someone had snitched, obviously.