(Algiers)
I REMEMBER THAT ALONG THE HARBOR OF ALGIERS THERE’S A SEA wall. It dams the city up on the side of the hill lest it slide into the sea. In daylight I used to walk along this wall back of the Hôtel Aletti. There were Ayrab cameramen who took pictures that came out in reverse on gray sensitized paper. These photos made me look as though I’d happened before 1865, in a sad light such as surrounded Mr. Lincoln. And alongside the box camera on clothespins there were suspended pictures the Ayrab was especially proud of: a French family on Sunday afternoon, sailors with their arms around girls, and GI’s peering out of an evil mist, with their shirts open and flowers in their buttonholes. Then I knew that they were drunk, with that same sharp exhibitionism of convict photos or those taken in penny arcades under cruel lighting, so that all subjects look depraved and pimply.
I remember how men overseas in Alger in 1944 tended to gather round the water front, as though by going near water they were challenging the barrier that kept them from home. They’d hang over the concrete balustrade and glare at the water and at the hospital ships and at the barrage balloons. They were people who stood on the edge of the moon, looking longingly at the earth. And all along this sea wall were sentry posts of antiaircraft installations. Back of these, thousands of soldiers peered out to sea or into the heavens. The British in their shorts rubbed themselves against the cement and murmured to one another:
—Choom, I’m browned off. Are you?
I remember how they talked of Africa and Africa and Africa, of how they’d been in the bloody place for four years, and would they ever get back to Blighty. Nor were the Americans any the less on the griping, except that it was more focused—against officers and against food and against what the folks in America were doing. The Americans and the British rarely liked one another. The Limeys thought we had too many PX’s and cinemas where they couldn’t go, and too good rations and all the wimmin. And we thought that their battle dress smelled musty, and that what with the radio there was no excuse for so many accents and dialects as they spoke. Neither understood the other, or tried to. But we shared places with them along the Mediterranean at Alger. Their shorts hitched high as they leaned over the wall, pointing out things in the harbor. And our pants tightened over our buttocks as we pressed ourselves against the concrete, observing the shipping riding at anchor. There’s a torture in ports when one is landbound. Along this gauntlet of men reaching out to sea and wishing they weren’t there the French families of Alger used to take their Sunday walks. I thought it wasn’t fair for them to be so natural and at home in a foreign land. Also there used to be ladies who got whistled at, and French officers on leave, and little Ayrabs trying to turn a franc. For the money in North Africa was like tinted toilet paper with murals on it. It was so dirty I couldn’t be convinced of its value. It was printed in Philadelphia, however.
I remember that in the evening the press around the harbor got thicker. Then the wall was lined with uniformed men standing elbow to elbow, as though they were in a firing squad. The moon showed their faces or their backs. There was a ripple of talk like the afterswish of a wave. But most just stared. Their eyes were points like a battalion of waiting cats in single file. There was a mute panic in them. At one cry they’d have pushed down the wall and tumbled into the Mediterranean.
—I should thrill to be in Algiers, I suppose. But in wartime nothing gives you any satisfaction, does it? You do all sorts of things and find that it’s like sucking dried fruit. You thought you wanted it from the outside, but inside there’s nothing but ashes.
—The MP’s let me into the Kasbah this afternoon. I went to a house and persuaded the Fatima to let me take pictures of her, bollocky. Such exposures too. I’m squeezing this and I’m squeezing that of her anatomy. She just loved to be photographed . . . for a price. So now I have my own French pictures. But much clearer than those they peddle on the streets back home. I’m having copies struck off for all my boys.
By moonlight too I remember the mustaches of the old French gentlemen who use to talk to me and bum cigarettes. I’d lift them up on the wall beside me. In their quavering voices they’d speak of Pétain and De Gaulle and Paris before 1940. They hated the Germans as a father hates the man who has ravished his daughter. Shaking palsied hands in the moonlight, they’d vow that France would rise again. Only my country wasn’t helping her enough.
—What in God’s name do you want, monsewer? We have our own war to win, you know.
—Frogs, frogs, frogs. First and last and always frogs. They kicked us in the pants in 1919 and they’ll do it again. Mark my words. That goddam little teakettle still thinks she’s in the eighteenth century. You may talk of the perfection of their culture and the polish of their language. But you must consider too their penury and their bigotry for anything that isn’t France. And her squat little men with the braided caps were caught snoring in 1940. France had graft and filth within her . . . and that disease has sapped all the frogs.
I remember how some nights I’d walk up from the sea wall through a little park into the Place de l’Opéra. I’d climb a flight of stairs into that intimate theater. I heard Tosca and the Barber of Seville in French. There was also the Desert Song with asides in English to please the Americans. I heard opera in a warm frenzy because I could drink white wine between the acts. The orchestra was thirty. The singers looked better than they sang. In the intermissions the white wine tempted me to slide down the Lon Chaney staircase and mistily eye the people there: chic women of Alger fanning themselves in the heat, French naval officers, British holding receptions in bad French. I soon discovered that the Opéra of Alger was a great meeting place, classier than the parks or the sea wall. For to the opera came coiffured ladies whose husbands had died in France or in Tunisia.
—Jeez, what a dainty little auditorium! Like Liederkranz Hall.
—What the hell is all this movement that goes in theaters? I came to see the show even if they didn’t. Why don’t they have some consideration for others? I didn’t come to be stared at.
—And those ushers that make ya stand in line till they get around to showin ya to ya seat. They just want my tip.
—Of course, of course, butch. You’re beginning to see into the parasitical life of Europe.
—And while we’re on the subject, it burns me to haveta shell out five francs to some old doll every time I take a notion to relieve myself in the little boys’ room. What’s she there for, ta see that I don’t spill it all over myself?
Or I remember how some nights I used to climb the interminable stairs to the Salle Pierre Bordes for concerts. There the Orchestre Symphonique gave a concert of modern English music. All the French walked out when they heard Vaughn Williams and Arnold Bax and Delius. And there too Lélia Gousseau used to play the piano. I’d sit and watch the somber trance in which she floated onto the stage of the Salle Pierre Bordes. She played Ravel with a rush of silver. Lélia Gousseau never seemed to me to be fully awake. But she was something miraculous and noble. She leaned over the keyboard and stopped breathing while she played.
—Ya see how that babe plays the pianer? Ya know what she needs, don’t ya?
—Ah, can it. Every time I try to get kultchah, ya open ya trap and talk like ya was at a stag party.
At one of her concerts a Negro corporal started a ballet on the stage behind her. She simply lifted her hands off the keys and laughed without a sound till the drunk had been removed by two French janitors. Then I was sure that Lélia Gousseau was a great artist.
I remember that in Algiers, because I had too much time to think and because the Mediterranean lay in front of me like a soft yet cynical mirror of time, I began to ponder on variety and difference. I lost something, because I became other people by thinking about them. For better or for worse I think I annihilated myself at this time.
—Just wait, said the pfc with the horn-rimmed glasses, everything we know is going to be swept under.
—But sex is here to stay, the mess sergeant said, chewing on a toothpick.
—I didn’t say it wasn’t, the pfc said. But so many things are coming into your life that you can’t imagine. Imagine a world in which there’s a flatter plane of possible experience, in which the levels of poetry and prose come closer together than they ever have before. There’s too much difference between the people of the world, yet surprisingly little variety . . . What sort of world do you want, anyway? A world in which no one speaks to anyone else, like the people in a New York apartment?
—If ya’d take off ya glasses, the mess sergeant said, and look at the world insteada books . . .
—Well, that’s my tragedy, the pfc said. I’m steeped in the past. I’m not yet convinced that the break with the past is going to be complete. . . . I hope not, anyhow.
I remember the tiny dark Ayrab kids with brilliant eyes who shined shoes in front of the Red Cross. What was the difference between them and me, except that they were Ayrabs? They were so much smarter than I, but they hadn’t been born in Detroit. They had the same mouths as I; they loved American chewing gum. But they lived in a world where people didn’t even pretend to have ideals. Consequently they lived in a world realer than my own. And I wondered who was equal to the world in 1944, who was capable of seeing and understanding everything. Why wasn’t I a prostitute? or a French child begging? or a Foreign Legionnaire with scars instead of milky skin? Why was I alive at all? How had I possibly managed to live?
—You won’t go mad, the pfc said laughing. You’re attempting to be great in the old patterns. You have the disease of empathy. You try to enter into the minds of others. Perhaps you do.
—When I see an Ayrab child watching the chocolate bar in my hand, something tears at me.
—It should. You’re arriving at the focus of the modern world. People are killing one another right and left. The newspapers don’t say why. It’s very simple. There’s an unfair distribution of the world’s goods. . . . We’re heading either for world socialism or complete destruction.
—You mean I’m not crazy when I feel like crying all the time?
—You’re hopelessly sane. Most people have to go to the movies to bawl. A few do it over the life they see around them. . . . The only advancement made by the human race is because some guy discovered pity. He found out that everyone was really quite like himself, with unimportant differences. We all must die alone. And we start dying with our birth. And a thousand years from now we’ll all look equally silly: the movie star, the Ayrab whore, the financier, and the hustler. . . . If only we could publicly acknowledge our silliness for the few years that we are alive, we could then pool whatever dignity we possess. Then life would be worth living for all, instead of for the few.
I remember that in Alger, through too much thinking, I did something I never used to do in the States. I’d leave the boys and go into the city by myself. Perhaps it was because I was getting to know them too well. When you live only with men, something in you revolts after a while. Men by themselves are sterile; they tend to become brutal and onetrack. Night after night the same jokes keep popping up, the same crap games, the same vocabulary, the same weary comedy. So everyone in a group of men grows to hate the others with affection, as people do after a long marriage in which they’ve had no children to distract them from themselves.
To this day I don’t know what I was looking for in the dark streets of Algiers. But I was alone; I heard my blood softly boiling. My brain was going like a stove. I started again to justify my own life. Why had I been born? Was there some scheme from which I wasn’t distracting, some harmony that I was smashing? In those evenings whatever God I believed in receded from me like a comet. I found myself walking in a world in which I was an alien. I’d just come out of the womb, but there was no mother to take me by the hand.
Often around midnight in a glacial fever of horror and loneliness I thought I hated everyone in the world, which had thrust me into exile. And all the cordialities that men pay to one another seemed to me only a polite uproar to drown the rattle of death. All men, I came near deciding, were secretly enemies. I’d wonder what would happen to three men who found themselves alone at the end of the world. Would they kill one another? Was society therefore simply a charade to ease the torture of life? Were we all more divided than we were united? At such times I’d lay my head on the concrete wall along the Mediterranean. I wanted to cry, but nothing came except some dry hiccoughs. You’re a monster and a misanthrope, I’d tell myself. . . .
I remember that one night in June, 1944, I was walking in the garden leading from the Place de l’Opéra to the port of Alger. It was near midnight. The lights flickered yellowly through the trees. Sometimes an Ayrab working at the port would stumble past and cadge a cigarette. Little old men muttering to themselves made their way home. I thought of my tent at Maison Blanche. I wasn’t sorry for myself, but I felt passionately displaced, a body already buried alive. I chattered in my bones with a paroxysm of anguish. I put my hands tightly against the suntans on my back and called out to the leaves and the moon and the sky:
—O my God, my God! . . .
I was still sane enough to laugh after my outcry because something in a safe corner of my brain said I was acting like a Shakespearean ham. But all the same I was alone, and for the moment out of my mind. I heard a noise behind me and turned to look, with my cry still dribbling on my lips.
Behind me was a Frenchman of Algiers, not a man, not a boy. Under the twittering uncertain French bulbs his face was like a hawk’s in repose. He was wearing shorts and a torn faded blue shirt that was open in the June heat. Under his arm he had a sheaf of typewritten papers.
—Qu’est-ce que tu as, Yank? Nous autres Français, nous connaissons bien la mélancholie.
I felt compelled, like a little child, to give him my arm. He took it naturally.
—Je suis écrivain, he said, flourishing his manuscripts with a smile bitter and consoling.
And I knew he’d been farther down than I’d ever yet known. He talked of Rimbaud and Verlaine and Debussy. His voice was all around me in a stream of cool elegance. He told me he’d been born in Rio, but had sought out Paris:
—Parce que c’est là, tu vois, ma patrie spirituelle. . . .
His room smelled of the linen on his cot and a dish of fruit on his night table and the leather of his books. These were his only riches. He poured me a glass of sweet yellow wine. I sat in his one chair while he read me verses out his few books. He made shooting gestures of delight with his hands, often looking at me to see whether I was following him. Evidently he desired to know how good an audience I was. Sometimes he reached over and took a cigarette out of my breast pocket. He knew some magic of disenchantment and exorcism. He told me that I was still young, and that all was vanity. But not yet. He said that men had wept before I was ever born. . . .