IT IS NOT KNOWN if Churchill, when he offered the British blood, sweat, and tears, considered these detergents. We are accustomed to regard them soiling agents, and so they are in all too many cases. But they can cleanse as well. Some stains can be expunged only in blood. Sweat works for others. Tears are fine solvents too, if they be tears of grief and not self-pity. Besides these, many heinous blots are washed away in the adrenaline of fury. León Fuertes bathed in these hot fluids for five years and emerged clean.
War is an evil, or is thought so now. Love is a good, or so it’s held to be. But nothing in this world is pure or simple, nothing is absolute, no general truth obtains in every case. Love has ruined millions—war, which is mostly waste, sometimes preserves. Such was the case with León.
In late June, 1940, when he’d recovered from the torments of morphine withdrawal, my father, León Fuertes, lay, feeble and penniless, in a flophouse in Marseilles, more or less in the same moral condition as the French Republic: after years of self-indulgence and excess he was defeated and dishonored. Then his three military ancestors65 came to him in a dream. General Feliciano Luna wore the stylized vaquero outfit with twin six-guns in which he had been decked with a bogus presidential sash in La Merced in 1883. General Epifanio Mojón wore the blue uniform of a subaltern in Simon Bolivar’s army. General Isidro Bodega, who had never seen a battle, not even from a distance, was the most resplendent of the three, festooned with glittering stars and decorations and dangles of gold braid. He stayed in the background and said nothing. The others talked of war.
War, said General Epifanio Mojón, appeared a monstrous evil to all men of worth—that is, men who had work to do and loved ones to care for. It came to the worthless, though, wearing the mantle of a savior. In war, the general said, worth didn’t matter. One man was as good as the next for filling up a rank and stopping bullets, and if it came to close quarters, the worst men were the best. And there was plenty of fresh death about to cure all past remorse. War was a resurrection.
War, said General Feliciano Luna—why, if it hadn’t been for war, he would have pissed his life out nameless in Salinas. War had made him a national hero, with all Tinieblas fiesta’d on the anniversary of his hanging, and schoolboys parading in their Sunday suits. León couldn’t see his own good fortune. He, General Luna, had had to make his own war, while León had a full-scale conflagration raging on his doorstep. León should get off his back and go to war!
León woke resolved to follow in war’s train, and with this very resolution his hormones began to flow correctly once again, and his beard grew, and his voice dropped, and his body regained male contours.
León Fuertes took part in the Second World War on the side of the Allies. One would prefer to say he joined them for the justice of their cause, but that would be dishonest. He knew nothing of polities in those days and had lived the four preceding years in utter disregard of world affairs. He viewed the war not as a struggle between good and evil but as a personal opportunity, and since it seemed the Axis had it all but won, there was a better chance for death or glory with the Allies. England’s pigheaded resistance appealed to him, but the English still had their island and the empire and their pride. As a loser, he identified with the French. They had nothing but ignominy, a brigadier general invented by Cervantes, and a military unit designed expressly for men like himself. So he sold his beautifully faked passport to a refugee Czech Jew and got a piece of paper from the Tinieblan Consul attesting his true name and nationality and took himself over to Sidi-bel-Abbès to join the Foreign Legion.
The Legion wouldn’t have him. The Vichy government was holding back recruitment. The Legion leadership adored Pétain, despised de Gaulle, and were in such a state of moral paralysis that they scarcely had will enough to keep the Nazi Armistice Commission from pirating legionnaires into the Wehrmacht or the concentration camps, much less make room for men who wished to fight. It was a bad blow to León’s fragile self-esteem to be turned off by a formation famous for its hospitality to the worst scum of Europe, but in his dreams General Feliciano Luna growled for him to go somewhere and fight, so he decided to cross North Africa and join the British Army on the Nile. Then, when he was in Constantine, he heard the most amazing tale from Central Africa: a French nobleman who, wounded, had survived the May debacle and escaped through Spain, who, feeling France’s shame in his own person, had taken a nom de guerre and joined de Gaulle, who had appeared as by enchantment in the Cameroons, embarked a handful of adherents in native dugouts, gone to Douala, seized full power, and declared the colony for Free France, was now at Fort-Lamy, where, with a little ragtag army, he was going to command operations in the Sahara. It was the sort of thing León had read of in old poets but didn’t think occurred in the “real” world. Here was this disinherited knight knocking about Africa with visor down and no device upon his shield except the Cross, the Cross of Lorraine, looking for a fight. León thought of great blundering British divisions with their Sandhurst officers and the stiff-collared sergeants major; then be thought of operations in the Sahara and thought no more. He hadn’t really thought at all, in the sense of weighing alternatives and making what is called a mature decision. General Luna was sympathetic. The fellow was a cavalryman. His “operations” sounded like mobile raiding on an open flank, out of a base too poor and too remote for anyone to threaten, over country too tough for a regular army’s taste: in short, the kind of war he knew about and savored. León had made his mind up anyway. For the first time in years he had a clear sense of purpose. He headed for the Chad and Jacques Leclerc.
Had León Fuertes never reached the war, his journey toward it would have served to purge the shame of his preceding years. Fort-Lamy is a good twenty-eight hundred kilometers from Constantine as the crow—or more usually the buzzard-flies, and León did no flying. He rode a bus66 to Biskra and an oil truck from Biskra to Touggourt. He rode a mule from there past Fort Lallemand. He rode a stretcher for a while after that, and later on a series of bad camels. Often he walked,67 leading a beast sometimes or packing all his water and belongings. He covered over four thousand kilometers, more than twenty-five hundred miles, a lot of it on foot, across the Sahara Desert. It took him the best part of a year. It taught him an abiding respect for the value of water, so that years afterward and in a country where it rains daily, often in torrents, from May to December, he couldn’t bear to see it wasted and would come in the bathroom while my sister, Clara, or my brother, Carlos, or I was washing up and close the tap down to a trickle. But mainly it gave him hardship, the sovereign remedy against the moral ravages of self-indulgence.
At Fort Lallemand he was arrested by Vichy police and questioned. He showed them his piece of paper with its rampant alligator stamp, and they checked and learned that the Tinieblan government was stridently pro-Axis and released him. But he suspected that the man in charge had doubts about his reasons for being in southern Algeria, and so he set out at once across the Grand Erg Oriental: on muleback: with a pocket compass and a map torn from an atlas.
It was a stern welcome to the desert: dunes, building as he progressed until they rose two and three hundred feet above him; airless ravines between them through which he had to tack; stifling oven heat which killed his mule; loose, sliding sand that seized his feet with every toiling step and scorched his ankles. His luck was that he didn’t know erg means death, and that he was delirious after two days and scarcely suffered. A Legion patrol, a group of anti-Nazi Germans sent south to escape an Armistice Commission visit, found him stumbling in circles on a stretch of packed-sand reg, raving with thirst and heatstroke, less than a day from death. They carried him down to Fort Flatters.
He came to a week later but could think only of the time he’d lost and the two hundred-odd kilometers now added to his journey. He set out again as soon as he could stand, crossing the Erg Edeyen to Fort Polignac with a Legion column and the Tassili-n-Ajjer alone on camelback. Northwest of Ghat he blundered within range of his camel’s teeth and nearly died of blood poisoning. He lay in that filthy crossroads village for a month, stewed in fever, writhed in a monster-thronged delirium which faded only into the greater horror of a traveler from Tombouctou who claimed to be a doctor and who proposed to lop his arm off at the shoulder. He had long staring sessions with Death, who bore a great resemblance to an ebony carving from somewhere in black Africa that his half-Arab-half-Italian host left in his room. Death was about half a meter tall, thin, hard, and shiny black. He stared at León for hours on end, ready to collect him the moment his concentration waned and he turned his eyes away. Sometimes Death swelled gigantically until he filled the room and his face was but a millimeter from León’s. Mostly he simply waited, and León would bite his lip and stare back at him, till he shrank smaller and smaller and then looked away. At length Death grew familiar and no longer frightening and would look away almost at once. León learned that Death’s rumored implacability is vastly overrated and that there is no call to fear him. When he saw Death again in Italy three years later, it was like meeting an old acquaintance, one he knew for a dull companion, and he told Death to go away and come back later.
The desert was a harsher master. It tested León cruelly. There was the endless weariness of day on day with the sun drumming on him, while some nights chilled his bones so that he felt he might as well be bedding on an ice floe. He was always thirsty, usually hungry, often famished. He ate things out of Arab pots that would have turned his stomach when he was scavenging on the Bowery, ate them and licked his chops. He was chafed raw when he rode and blistered when he walked. He was bitten by flies and stung by wind-blown sand. Once he woke to find himself infested with huge ants which swarmed inside his clothes and gnawed such chunks out of his thighs he couldn’t sit his camel and went for days at a kind of searing waddle. He lost his way time and again and had to backtrack. He knew that any day might bring one of a large variety of deaths, all disagreeable, and that if he survived, he had nothing to look forward to except another day of painful journey. He pushed on till he forgot who he was, why he’d come, where he was headed, until he moved out of a kind of mindless habit, like an ox who trudges round and round, pushing a mill wheel, and the desert glittered at him, winking from a million separate pinpoints, striking him like a tremendous noise out of an endless blue-white sky.
There was the hardship, too, of isolation. Once or twice, early on, he came upon some Berber nomads, but he kept his distance, taking what companionship he could from the flare of far-off campfires. Along one stretch he moved with a caravan, but he felt far from welcome and came, rightly or no, to suspect that every whisper touched on him with murderous intent. Between Ghat and Marzúq, a trek of near five hundred kilometers, he straggled in the wake of some Senussi pilgrims bound for the oasis of Al Jaghbúb and the tomb of Sayed Mohammed bu ’Ali, the founder of their sect. He felt an instinctive fraternity with these Arabs, who had fought the Italians for nineteen years, who thought war the only occupation that befitted a free man, who lived in the most pure austerity, bound by a rigid code for which they were at all times ready to lay down their lives, but though he picked up something of their language, he could hardly converse with them; and besides, he had, as usual, been tricked when he bought his camel, and it soon grew too weak to bear him, and by the time he’d staggered in along their tracks each night to the Senussis’ camp, he was too weary to do more than gulp some food and drop in sleep. And for weeks at a time he did not so much as glimpse another human.
At first this isolation was a tonic. The desert, unsullied by the touch of man, threw up a barrier of purity between him and his years of degradation. But later his solitude grew oppressive.68 It struck him that his death out there would mean no more than the shriveling of a desert nettle or the expiration of a lizard torn by a bird of prey. He took to singing entire operas out loud, just to hear a human voice. Asleep at midday in some wadi, his blanket staked above him for a shade, he dreamed long conversations with Rosario wherein they played at being married and spoke of homes and children, and though on waking he felt guilty at these dreams, he fled into them eagerly at each lying down. On march he imagined dialogues with Dr. Grillo, inventing the doctor’s speeches and replying to them, and then for days on end it seemed that Dr. Grillo walked beside him, flapping his white-linen-jacketed arms, pulling his panama down over his brow, interspersing philosophical remarks with comments on the desert, drawing in references to the Pharsalia and Travels in Arabia Deserta and Burton’s memoir of his journey to Medina, books León had never read and couldn’t recall Dr. Grillo’s ever having mentioned back in Tinieblas. Quite often he was accompanied by his grandfather General Feliciano Luna, who rode a large bay gelding and wore silver spurs, who related his own hardships as a guerrillero and reminded León that swamps can be as difficult to cross as burning rock. These conversations made León’s isolation bearable, but when they faded he was buffeted by fears for his sanity, for he thought his visitors hallucinations.
Still, León’s journey was a beneficent ordeal. Austerity fed his spirit; hardship strengthened it; the desert sun tempered it and burned it pure. Enduring, he forged himself new and found a strange and telling joy of life. He would come to himself sometimes on waking, or after a day-long trance of march, and define the torments of his body: everlasting rasping thirst; hunger; sun headache, which made him feel like carving a wedge out of his cranium to let the pressure down; cramps of dysentery from bad water; saddle chafe; the sting of open sores and burst blisters; the itch of insect bites and filthy clothes; the anguish of stiff joints; the rebellious twitch of overloaded muscles; the general hubbub of complaint screamed out or whined from every segment of his organism at having been goaded so long across a hostile habitat. And having made this inventory, he’d likely think: Isn’t this fine! I’m still alive! I’m crossing the Sahara, and I’m still alive! This is the sort of thing you read about, and I’m doing it, on my own too! Why, I’m a better man than I thought I was!
No matter what happened to him—even when his camel took to lying down two hundred miles south of the Bi’r al Wa’r oasis, and after he’d got her going several times by lighting his Sterno under her, gave an evil smirk and died, and he had to walk two hundred miles to Bilma; even when he was caught in a sandstorm and lay three days, his face69 wrapped in his blanket, chewing sand—there was always a part of him which was taking joy in life. Such feelings coexisted even with fear and the conviction that he wasn’t going to make it.
He found his lost taste for life out there, found it redoubled, so that years later, he could smile kindly when he answered a despaired “I can’t” from his children or his associates with “You’d be surprised what you can do, truly surprised.” Through every moment of his journey he was sure that he was doing the right thing: in other words, he was happy.
He came down from Agadem oasis across the Tin Toumma Steppe out of the desert to Nguigmi. He crossed Lake Chad by boat and went up the Chari River to Fort-Lamy. He walked into French military headquarters in rags and tatters, and when a Senegalese sergeant tried to shoo him out, stood his ground, making a racket, until a captain—St. Cyr, from the look of him: crisp manners and a strong air of disdain—came out and asked his business.
Was the war still on? asked León in return.
Ah, yes, assuredly it was, and who was he to ask?
Was Commandant Leclerc still in the field?
General Leclerc had taken Kufra in the Soudan, had put his headquarters north on the border and was raiding into Libya, but what was that to León?
“I’ve come to fight,” said León. “Germans if possible; Italians, faute de mieux; if need be, Vichy Frenchmen.”
“Who the devil are you?”
“I’m nobody really, from a place you’ve likely never heard of, but I’ve come across the desert from Algeria, and I’d like to fight.”
An hour later he was a private in the Army of Free France.