“Jesus,” said the young man reverentially, “you seem to have a pretty good graft.” He wouldn’t stay reverential long: in fact he was already shifting on his seat, staring vengeful at the back of the cops who had brought him and had gone to turn his passport over to the marechaussée at the immigration desk, who were putting a lot of ominous rubber stamps in it. Nobody had asked for Arlette’s passport.
The airline girls did not quite know what to make of it either. She had been brought by an official car, and they hadn’t needed much telling to treat her with consideration. Her booking had been changed to first-class at no extra charge, and they knew what that meant. Whereas this boy wasn’t just an undesirable alien being deported, but looked it, which is much worse. His jeans smelt, and he scratched from time to time. And here he was in first-class, even if only as courtesy to the lady, and plainly under her wing.
Arlette, who was nearest to the jeans, was thinking she’d have to wash her hair again, and with ‘Marie-Rose’ at that. Did it exist still, that sinister bottle with a picture of a nice lady scrubbing a horrid little boy and ‘See how they run’ printed underneath? She hadn’t seen ‘Marie-Rose’ since she was a little girl at the village school, but ever since long hair came back in, the dear lady was doing a roaring trade.
The boy at first was extremely aggressive.
“I don’t want to know what you did or how you did it. Typical bourgeois interference.”
“Your family –”
“Fuck my family.”
So she kept her mouth shut.
A few hundred kilometres, a few thousand – one didn’t go counting them – mellowed him slightly. Drinks helped.
“I don’t usually drink. But since it’s all free … Not bad either, for airline stuff. They want to make a good impression, you see …”
“Oh I see.”
“You can still get good stuff cheap, if you know where to look. You’ll have seen nothing but a few tourist traps. Nothing.”
“No, alas.”
It got better.
“You know, they are pretty good. I don’t know whether you believe all that bullshit about the maricones. I’m not, myself, pederast, in case you hadn’t realized.”
“I had, in fact.”
“Not that I have to apologize, either way. Police of course do what they want, use the flimsiest pretext or invent one if they can’t find one handy. Anything’ll do. When it pleases them – to suck up to you with your fucking embassy connections – all those people who were at Normal-Sup with my ever-goddammed papa.”
“You are mistaken, as I hope to show you before we reach Paris.”
“You don’t know it, but there’s nothing nicer than an old queen; nothing kinder, more considerate, more unselfish. Just simply kind.”
“I do know as it happens.”
“I wasn’t shacked up with them, you know. Just sheer charity. Like Mother Theresa.”
“Really? Eat,” she said.
“Yes, I haven’t had a square meal since … Lousy jail. Boy, do I stink!”
“You do rather, yes.”
“It stinks a bit more. But Argentina is exactly like France. Come to that, if you’d ever been clapped in Les Baumettes you’d know a French jail isn’t any bunch of violets neither. There is though some attempt at hygiene.”
“Yes.”
“But on the whole – no difference whatever. Exactly the same fascist crowd. I could tell you a few things, you know, about the French government.”
“Gilles – tu sais? – you’re preaching to the converted.” He still wasn’t listening to anything but his own voice.
“I might be able to work up a piece of this. Flog it maybe to the Nouvel Observateur. You know the sort of thing – eyewitness stuff from B.A. equivalent of the Santé prison. They all have these wonderful names – like the one in Rome – ‘Regina Coeli’ – the queen of heaven.”
“Until you get to England, and find yourself in Wormwood Scrubs.”
“No kidding!”
“I promise you faithfully. But don’t – English prison food has you constipated rock-solid inside forty-eight hours. You’d pray for those beans, back in B.A.” There was a silence.
“You know about those beans?”
“Oddly enough, I do.” But the young find it very difficult to believe that anybody knows anything but themselves.
“America, France, Russia. Sing a song they don’t want to hear and they’ll clap you in jail just the same. What the hell do they go on about Argentina for?”
But he began looking at her, which was a good sign. This elderly dowdy female – well, perhaps that was a slight exaggeration – what did she know?
“You’re not going to tell me you’ve been in this English jug.”
“No. But my husband has.”
“Inside?”
“No – prison visitor.”
“Oh – a do-gooder.”
“That’s right,” losing patience, “stupid, meddlesome, invincibly ignorant; exactly, in fact, like myself.”
“Look – all right; I’m sorry. But don’t expect me to sit here overwhelmed with gratitude. I was perfectly well off where I was.”
“Yes,” said Arlette. “Perhaps. People disappear. They get assassinated on the street. That happens everywhere.”
“What d’you know about it?” contemptuously.
“My own husband got shot on the street, that’s what I know about it.”
“I said I was sorry,” deflated.
“People likewise get put arbitrarily in jail, for no reason at all; simply as an administrative convenience – or perhaps to lessen their vanity a little. And this too happens all over the world – on a larger scale in some places than others. And certainly, whatever happens in Argentina is no worse than what happens in Czechoslovakia. If you want to see the world, go there next.” There was silence. The plane began its descent. “Lovely Roissy,” said Arlette.
She had one more bad moment, which she feared might be an odtaa moment – passing the immigration barrier at the airport. France, land of refuge. Her own passport was handed back without being looked at. The boy’s was kept some moments and studied with attention.
“Well,” said the boy flippantly, “I leave you here, in the big bad city.”
“Come on back with me, Gilles.”
“Makes a difference to you, huh? You’ll get paid.”
“Oh, I consider myself paid. But it will make a difference to you. Your family is an intense annoyance and irritation to you, I realize. But there’s not much asked of you. That you should not be lost to them. You don’t have to stay, in an atmosphere that makes you sick. You don’t have to fight so hard against them either. The same as with the people in Buenos Aires – accept the different sorts of love offered you. Do it for your sister.” Unexpectedly enough, he offered no further argument.
She phoned home. To hear Arthur’s voice, unfussed and matter-of-fact, was something extraordinary.
“And how was Argentina?” deliberately casual. “Oh go on, stupid, the light’s green,” to the unwitting driver in front of him.
“It was a very specialized, sterilized slice of Argentina. I really saw very little of it.”
“That was one success anyhow.” The awkward, self-conscious reunion between the brother and the sister had been spontaneous and touching. “And the adventures in the skin trade, which amount to a whole saga by now – success beyond your wildest dreams.”
“I don’t want to hear yet. Let me get home, and realize I’m at home. Because I’ll be very glad indeed to get home.” Successes; failures: what difference was there? Was not the boy perfectly happy there in Argentina? Tomorrow he would be quarrelling with his family. Whatever the saga, would it bring back Solange Bartholdi’s son, or do anything at all for her remaining son? Did it help Jacky Karstens’ children, learning who their father wasn’t? Did it help her, to know or to guess that the police had tipped Henri le Hollandais into the Rhine?
She had done nothing for Sergeant Subleyras. He would have made his own mind up whatever she did. And Xavier … God alone knew.
Aunque se hunda el mundo. Although the world collapses … After us the deluge: every single generation had always said it. Always the world goes on, whether one hopes or despairs.
She had learned a lot of sententious Spanish phrases, that was all.
Tomorrow there would be more people, more weird letters, confused gabbles on the tape.
One would have to try to do better, that was all.
Arthur listened to her tale. Well, tale … Selected pieces of tale, suitably censored for an innocent male audience. He said nothing for a while, though he made a good many faces. Stop making faces! she wanted to say. General Valentin de Linares – by way of being a friend of mine – does not make faces.
“Women!” he said at last, in the deepest of deep bass voices.
“Yes.”
“You know, to coin a phrase, there are things in this story fit to frighten the French.”
“Yes.”
“You actually succeeded in meeting all these generals, and talking to them.”
“Well, there was quite a lot of argument with janitors. And, of course, I did get put in jail.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. As a sort of administrative convenience? Or as a sort of test. I never will know.”
“Appalling.”
“I don’t know. I got what I went for. At least it wasn’t a lot of double-talk, just putting me off. They were accessible, polite, intelligent. The further up one got, the less pious platitudes one encountered. Compare that with the way things would happen in any European country.”
“Except that there, one wouldn’t get put in jail.”
“Maybe not. Maybe something else, nastier still, might happen. Or more likely, nothing at all would happen. Just a great cloud of anaesthetising gas. Isn’t that what’s wrong with us here? There’s an immense amount of talk, but nothing ever happens.”
“Yes girl, but good heavens … Dreadful place. As the man said, would you like to make your home there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you even read that Amnesty report? Ten thousand people have simply vanished.”
“Yes, it’s deplorable.”
“It’s worse than that, it’s quite unanswerable.”
“Then why d’you want me to try answering it?”
“Women …” said Arthur.
It was the cleaning woman, sententious soul, who summed things up. Arlette crawled blearily out of bed, came looking for coffee: there wasn’t any.
“I’ll make you some fresh. Where have you been then, these last days?”
“Argentina.”
“Argentina! But that’s said to be a terrible place.”
“It was that terrible plane really. Upsets all one’s normal rhythms.”
“They assassinate people. It was in the paper.”
“I suppose it is awful. I don’t know, really. Everywhere is awful. We have to begin again everywhere.”
“Take my word for it.” The expert! “They machine-gun people in the street.”
“Do they really?” vaguely, hunting for a teaspoon.
“Dreadful! Now I can remember the Republic, back in Thirty-five …” This flow of reminiscence had to be stopped.
“Well, I came back, safe, anyhow, I went on a job, you know, and I even managed to get it done.”
“Ah,” ominously. “Que tiene capa, escapa!”
“One sees a new place, and one tries to learn. One goes on learning, but I’ve no idea what.”
“Eh oui,” said dear old Inocencia, with much solemn gravity, “I’ll tell you. One learns that life is hard, what, and as my dear father used to say, that women are expensive.”
“What on earth am I to cook for dinner?” asked Arlette.