There are many ways to resist ignominy. You can frolic around with laughter or insolence, take up an active struggle or carry out symbolic attacks, find a vanishing point to redraw the horizon . . . According to what I could find out, Maxime practiced alternately each one of these methods.
First of all, he does not follow the great tide of planters, factory owners, and mine owners, who more or less all rally quickly to the regime. Nor does he follow some of his Malagasy friends, who reactivate the old ethnic classifications of the nineteenth-century monarchical regime: the “coastal folk” are simple and straightforward, the Betsileos of the countryside are honest and hardworking, the Merinas of the highlands are shifty and unreliable . . . No, in these troubled times Maxime reacts as an ultramarine. (I call “ultramarine” everyone who likes finesse and variety and does not accept the injustices of the world: his aim is to savor knowledge, to soften suffering—and to achieve that, he uses a few simple weapons: pencil, paper, colors.)
He could easily go with the flow and join up with the Pétainists.
Work, family, the fatherland? He works hard, as everyone knows.
The frenzy of sport, as peddled by the new regime? He is an acrobat, as everyone knows.
And family . . . he has two! As everyone knows!
But the deep racism of all these people disturbs him, their obsession with morality and the land—he who is so at ease by the seaside or in the air on his trapeze. He no doubt recalls at this precise moment his circus companions, the Siamese sisters and the Rat-Child, the dwarf Groseille and the two Venus girls. He will also recall Madame Bartolini and her laid-back ways: all this tabataba, this agitation, is unbearable, isn’t it?
So, his body becomes once again that of a strange athlete, his face a passport of indeterminate color. During these years he describes himself successively as Malagasy, British, French, and Mauritian. To those who delight in heritage, filiation, and national identity, he offers in opposition this partial, precarious, mobile, and fluid response.
At the café he imitates the great personalities of the hour: he does Hitler; he does de Gaulle, down to the intonations, the hand movements, the slightest inflection of the voice. Right in the middle of the national consensus imposed by the visual image, he mocks the picture of Pétain’s mustache, which has pride of place on the walls of the town. Stalin, Franco, Hitler, Pétain: “Mustaches are for bigmouths!” he says. Always there is humor and impertinence. The whole world is angry; he responds with lightheartedness. It is the acrobat’s mode of warfare.
*
It is also at this time that he undertakes the construction of a strange edifice, which will be called the “Wall of the Mad.” Not far from the large beach at Amborovy is a little unknown beach that has never had a name. It is called simply “Petite Plage,” little beach.
It is there that Maxime throws out onto the sea a sort of parapet: every Sunday he is seen taking his trowel, knives, and spatulas, heading for Petite Plage. In a few months, with a few stones and some cement, he builds out into the sea a sort of small, narrow, low, shaped wall, which seems to cut the horizon with a perpendicular line. Arthur is by his side, and he nicknames this promontory “our Great Wall.” The wall, however, has nothing of the fortification or the rampart about it: it is just a stone walkway built on the sea.
At the time of its longest extension, the wall is thirty meters long. For a considerable time children use it for walking into the middle of the sea and fishermen for mooring their pirogues. After the war it will be progressively plundered by opportunist thieves and demolished by storms. In 2004 the two hurricanes Elita and Gafilo failed to carry it away completely. Today you can still see a little bit of it, licked by the waves and dotted with birds.
You have to wonder what spurred the two friends and what exactly their objective was in building the wall. Some say it was a building project, a house or hotel, others say it was a saltwater swimming pool, but none of these hypotheses is convincing: what good would it have been to either project to have a thirty-meter wall jutting out like an arrow into the ocean? None whatsoever. In fact, the wall will remain there, in its stone bareness, crossing the sea, a refuge for walkers who have lost their way, a promontory of the useless.
By an unlucky coincidence, the Wall of the Mad is the exact contemporary of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall. On the Atlantic coasts there were kilometers of barbed wire, machine gun boxes and gun turrets, concrete fortifications, and steel bells. It was a fixed defense system, an impenetrable line, as if the sea were a space never to be crossed. On the other side of the world, conversely, some granules, some bits of gravels, and a few yards of stone that serve as a refuge for birds.
*
The Wall of the Mad attracts the protests of the authorities right away. There is no construction permit, no announcement of the work, Maxime and Arthur don’t pay the taxes, and, of course, there is no portrait of the Marshal on the horizon. According to Jean Pivoine, the old Indian jeweler, this wall, which is actually quite long, was built simply to welcome the landing of the British forces. No historian has ever engaged with this hypothesis, nor does any work on these questions today.
But at the same time Maxime makes things worse for himself: indeed, it is at this time that the rumor spreads of his faty-dra, an old Malagasy custom, a “blood oath” according to which two men promise reciprocal aid and protection for all of their lives. Maxime has just undergone the ceremony with a Malagasy called Ando. There is no need to underline the symbolic charge of this act. At the very moment when all across Europe people’s facial features and skulls are being calibrated, when one’s merit is calculated according to the size of one’s nose (the Negroes’ lime kiln noses, the Yids’ hooked noses), the two men have just been playing with a dangerous taboo.
People suddenly remember that Maxime is originally from Mauritius and therefore has British nationality, which at the time was enough to arouse suspicion: was he a secret agent? What secret pact had he just sealed with the Malagasy? People were calling on the spirits of dead sailors in the British attack against the French navy at Mers el-Kébir. “It is Fachoda all over again!” You hear phrases like “The British stole Mauritius from us, they wanted to take Quebec from us . . . now it is Madagascar’s turn.” People have not yet forgotten that it was the Franco-British archipelago of the New Hebrides that was the first to rally to de Gaulle, on 23 July 1940. This time it is certain: this Englishman is a traitor, who is plotting with the Malagasy.
Enough is enough. New letters denouncing Maxime arrive at the administration: Maxime was heard to declare—according to one letter—that it was a strange historical juncture where, to be worthy of France, you had to go through England. Another letter attacks his family, with the smooth genealogical fastidiousness that people are capable of in times of decay and rot: Pauline’s aunt, Émilia Jane Nuñes (called Tatamiya), is living with Nicolas Pagoulatos, a Greek, who works in a bakery owned by his brother-in-law Zapandis. And the Greeks, as we know, are rabid Gaullists. Another letter asks: what does he get up to all these days he is at sea? His business is virtually dead, like everyone’s. For the Vichyists there is no doubt: people are aware that Maxime knows “the science of the currents,” so he must be helping the British set their floating mines. Finally, a missive affirms that the Wall of the Mad could be used to help the British troops land on the island (which is also the opinion of the old Indian jeweler). Presented with this avalanche of “proof,” the authorities move quickly: a few days later Maxime is thrown in prison.
As for the Malagasy with whom Maxime made his blood pact, no one knows much about him. I had long thought his name was Zamy, before learning that this name signifies uncle and that it is the Malagasy term for “blood brother.” I learned later that his name was Ando, which means “dew”: he was a descendant of slaves who became a farmer, was known for his plant grafting skills, and was a seller of flowers and fruits. But that is it: Ando disappeared from all records, all books, and virtually all memories. Maxime was imprisoned for the first time in August 1941. It is also at this precise time that we lose track of Ando.
*
As soon as you are imprisoned, you find people who want to complete your incarceration. Bars are not enough, you need trapdoors, cages, dungeons, isolation cells, dark deep pits from which you will never get out. You have disappeared physically, but they will do all they can to eliminate you completely from people’s memories. You are thrown into the oubliettes, with their connotations of forgetting and oblivion.
However, Maxime’s first prison stay lasts only a few days. People say he must have pulled a few strings or greased the palm of his guards. Perhaps through bravado or recklessness, he doesn’t change his behavior much. On the contrary, he is hardly out when he launches into selling radio sets illegally with Arthur. At this point their tracks become hard to follow, a fine game of hide-and-seek begins. At this time, to buy radio parts is a crime: you gamble your life for an antenna wire, you could lose it for a few grams of galena, for a bit of crystal, an ounce of lead sulfide.
Hiding, making contacts, vanishing, moving around—Arthur is in his element in this world of secret agents. The acrobat from Wuqiao proceeds with such discretion in running the operation that it is difficult, even today, to work out how it ran. He is always working behind the scenes, in secret, clandestinely. Prudence in the planning, precision in the execution. It is also quite possible that the two men worked together to cover their tracks: Maxime attracts attention to himself by provoking, firing up, and prodding—during this time Arthur works in the shadow cast by his partner, furtively, in parallel. A police report drafted in Antananarivo in May 1941 even suggests the strange idea that they could be the same person. During this time ideas spread in waves, and spare parts circulate.
The enemy is omnipresent and all-powerful. The Vichy regime broadcasts its programs across the whole of Madagascar from a little village called Allouis, in the Cher region of France, using a formidable radio transmitter: four aerial masts in a radiating system, using 150,000 watts of broadcasting power, the largest station in Europe. In Madagascar people resist as they can. It is the battle of the airwaves: they try to tune in to Radio-Brazzaville or Radio-Algiers, instead of Radio-Paris and Radio-Vichy. It is not said often enough: the capital of Free France is not London or even Algiers; it was first of all Brazzaville, with its crew of European and American scientists and Congolese technicians.
The crystal radio set is the least expensive, with no need for batteries or electric current. But there are also cathedral-style radios, with the speaker in the upper part of the arc. Radia . . . Radio Sigma . . . Radiola . . . Sonora: they have the names of Greek divinities with open final vowels that enchant Arthur and Maxime. They dream of making a set with the materials they have. Everything can be used in battle. A few meters of copper wire, a cardboard cylinder, and a metal cigar box can be transformed into a condenser. A bicycle rim, three leaves of tin, a spring and two ball joints: you have an excellent inverter, which will allow you to amplify the frequency and increase diffusion.
The two friends are known as experts in odd jobs, they are helped in this field by three Malagasy about whom I have been able to find only their names—Rakoto, Ramanarivo, and Ratoandro: they were known as the “three Rs,” they were masters of recycling. Rakoto, Ramanarivo, and Ratoandro are geniuses in recovering and reusing things: they understand quickly, adapt perfectly, rediscover, spruce up, and renovate. All three venerate the cathedral in the town of Ambanja, which was built at the beginning of the century from the former metal railway station in Strasbourg, taken down, and put back together bit by bit. They say that if you can transform a railway station into a cathedral, anything is possible. And there you go—they’ll transform for you an old iron pot into a radiator.
On the Pétainist side the strategy is different: faced with this outbreak of technical inventiveness, they try to scramble the airwaves and confiscate radio sets . . . Above all—in a tactic that would be used extensively—they mix propaganda and entertainment: messages designed to mollify are wrapped up in a few popular hit songs. In the battle even jazz is used, that music of black people! A contemporary music critic called André Cœuroy has just shown that “at its origins” jazz is a French musical form . . . In this case the recuperation of memory is at its peak. “Lady Be Good” becomes “Les Bigoudis,” or “The Hair Curlers”! And “Some of These Days,” even this tune, this magnificent jazz track that Michel Leiris, set sail at the same time on a cargo ship bound for Greece, describes wonderfully as “those great blasts of horns that carve cliff sides into your heart,” the same one that is sung by the black woman in Sartre’s Nausea, finally saving Roquentin from his existential depression—the radiant “Some of These Days” is passed through the saccharine propaganda mill: it is renamed “Bébé d’amour,” or “Love Baby.” And that is how a ragtime composed by a black man, Shelton Brooks, and popularized by a little Jewish woman of Ukrainian origin who performs in blackface, Sophie Tucker, becomes a sugary nursery rhyme, with insipid rhythms. Playacting, mushiness, generalized deafness. Jazz under the jackboot of Propaganda-Staffel, it is all too much: Pauline flies into a rage, and Uncle Pierre turns off the radio, a sad look on his face.
*
But when evening comes, they switch the radio back on.
The Voice of France is on every evening from 6:00 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. GMT. The show begins; a green glow fills the room . . . The sound is sometimes very feeble, almost inaudible. You need to learn how to use the radio-weapon: you listen, you concentrate, you don’t touch the antenna. You turn the buttons gently, looking for all possible sources. The needle shifts across the dial, but you have to have great dexterity in your fingers.
In this regard Pauline works wonders. The old radio set crackles, first emits a terrible background noise, but soon the whistles and interference are transformed into clear, measured words, with barely discernible crackling sounds, like stitches of clarinet playing woven into the sound. The rectangular dial becomes a musical scale on which Pauline’s deft fingers move in small anticipations and unexpected rhythmic substitutions. She advances, goes back, one more two-bar coda, and that’s it, no more movement, she has found the exact place: it is the science of the lateral movement.
From there they can listen to New York, Berlin, Washington, London, Stockholm, Ankara . . . it is a question of technique. Maxime has a soft spot for Radio Mauritius, which retransmitted General de Gaulle’s call, and especially for the BBC and its show Les Français parlent aux Français, the French speak to the French. The language of this show pleases him, the easy blend of spoken and written expression, the maritime metaphors (“the lighthouse of Free France”), the tone of voice also, extraordinary voices rising from who knows where, charged with gum and resin. And more than anything, he likes the supernatural poetry of the coded messages: “Here in London, Marguerite will not come this evening, and yesterday the torrent overflowed.” Or else, “Five friends will visit tonight Xenophon’s wig.” Or again, this one, which has lost none of its relevance: “The humming is overwhelming (the telegraph needs to be suppressed).”
Evidently—a sign of the times—all we retain today are the violins of Verlaine’s “sanglots longs” that served to announce the landing, but behind these amusing, incongruous, surprising phrases are often hidden serious decisions: calculations about places and sites, raids from the sky, reception of materials and parachuted agents, financial transactions, resistance operations . . .
Listen.
Listen. “Andromaque wears lavender scent.”
Let your inner auricle open up, in a great auditory ecstasy. “Athalie has remained in ecstasy. We say it again: Athalie has remained in ecstasy.”
There is an extraordinary logic, which is implicit and immediately perceptible to the trained ear. There is a simultaneous translation from the mouth to the ear, a passage from the throat to the physical act; the word is transmitted by hand . . . You need to know, of course, all the workings of this clandestine poetry. The atmosphere is electric; the calls are extremely subtle; it is a poker game.
“Gentlemen, place your bets”—and it is a sabotage.
“The cock will crow at midnight”—the agents have entered into enemy territory.
“From Marie-Thérèse to Marie-Louise: a friend will come this evening—we say it four times”: that is a parachute landing (four airplanes).
And what do you do when you hear the following phrase: “He has a falsetto voice?” Of course, straightaway, it is the triggering of guerrilla warfare! No question of submitting to the falseness of the voice.
Then fruits and vegetables come into play. “The carrots are cooked,” “The die are on the table,” and “The strawberries are in their juice”: “It is time to cook the tomatoes”! In this loaded radiophonic poetry, anything can be used as a weapon in the struggle. Climate and geography are also used: “It is hot in Suez,” “It always rains in England.” But there is also political and religious history: “The death of Turenne is irreparable,” “Saint Liguori founded Naples”; proverbs: “Fortune comes in sleep”; and songs: “There is no more tobacco in the snuffbox.”
From time to time there are a few excursions to the Far East, to Japan: “The sun rises to the east on Sundays.”
I repeat: “The sun rises to the east on Sundays.”
Do you understand?
The battle is a great sonic treasure hunt, a game of clarifying misunderstandings. There is also created a whole fantastic, amazing bestiary: “The elephant has broken a tusk,” “The Angora has long hair” . . . Suddenly, tastes and colors are discussed (“I like Siamese cats,” “I do not like crêpes Suzette”), mixed up and debated, with all due respect to the old consensual compulsion: “I do not like veal blanquette.” It is the time to throw a smutty stone into the water, to mess with the narrow-minded: “Yvette likes big carrots” (immediate action: to dynamite the fire station!).
All is possible in this parallel world of free sounds and actions that lead to very concrete results: “The invalid wants to run” (sabotage of a railway line), “Giraffes do not wear false collars” (taking down an electricity line), and “The cow jumps over the moon” (we thank agent Charlie Parker for this courageous act).
Of course, all of French literature is evoked: Du Bellay, “Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has made a long journey” (transfer of banned books); La Fontaine, “The two pigeons walk along the balcony” (contact made with a comrade); and Pascal, “He cried with joy” (parachuting of weapons and agents, wrecking of railway points, bombardment of all the branches in the system) . . . “Joy, tears of joy!”
At all hours of the day Maxime plays in this way on the nerves of the authorities, muttering terrible phrases and words that soon no one will know if they are allowed or banned, charged as they were with gunpowder or inoffensive and meaningless. Under the noses of the informers installed on the terrace of the Nouvel Hôtel, he lays false trails and spreads real information. Let him read the news while sipping on an orange and cinnamon drink, and he will intone, slowly: “The Benedictine is a sweet liquor.” He is also heard, many times, reciting in a very distinct way: “The wine is in the library.”
People say that this phrase maddens the chief of security in Mahajanga, who desperately seeks to decipher its meaning. During this time Maxime sets himself up on the chaise longue, a little smile lighting up his lips, his head leaning back toward the sun, as if to say: “Make of it what you will.”
*
At the end of 1941 there are a growing number of acts of sabotage in the Mahajanga region: fires in hay warehouses, thefts of government supplies, destruction of signal equipment . . . A member of the Vichyist French Legion of Combatants and Volunteers of the National Revolution is thrown into the sea close to the Garden of Love. More seriously, two bridges are blown up round the Betsiboka River. To what extent are Maxime and Arthur involved in these diverse operations? It is precisely because they were efficient and discreet that we will never know for sure. It is also true that with one or two exceptions, no serious historian has ever looked into this subject, as if this overseas Resistance movement had never existed.
One thing is sure: the police keep a close eye on the pair, especially Maxime. At the beginning of 1942 the situation is very tense: combat rages in the Indian Ocean, right up to the Gulf of Bengal. Japanese forces, led by Admiral Nagumo, win several battles and plan to set up a submarine base in Madagascar. Terrible-sounding names circulate across the whole region—Akagi, Hiryū, Ryujo, Shōkaku, Sōryū, Zuikaku—and spread fear of submarines and aircraft carriers.
It is at this point that Maxime decides to lighten the tense atmosphere, in his own way. From now he will not go out without two bamboo poles, green and bendy, one on each shoulder. He says he is using them to pick mangoes or to drive the zebus. The authorities don’t quite get this clever allusion to the general “deux gaules,” a synonym for two poles . . . At this time new legislation permits the imprisonment of any individual for carrying a non-approved symbol. This law is directed principally to the Cross of Lorraine, but it will be invoked to demand Maxime Ferrier’s second incarceration: the police report indicates that the defendant went into his cell “humming a tune, and still accompanied by his two bamboos.”
Even under a Ubuesque regime, it is rare that anyone is condemned for walking with two bamboos. With the absurdity of the situation, with a bit of money and using the last of his contacts, Maxime leaves prison again. His house is searched, all his electronics material is confiscated, and they put a spy beneath each one of his windows. You might think that he would finally stay on the straight and narrow. Not at all: one week to the day after his second prison release, Maxime is incarcerated again; he was caught trying to light a fire on the beach. No doubt a signal for the British planes.
From that point Maxime finds himself in a perilous situation. He is taken to be, in turn, a professional diver in the pay of the British, a relay radiotelegraph operator from Free France, or simply a madman. They hesitate between his multiple, knowingly arranged misdemeanors; no one quite knows anymore with what to charge him. As for his Chinese friend, where has he gone? Whatever the case may be, he is an “intransigent who should be locked up in the interests of public safety,” according to a new police report. He is a civilian, but in these senseless times he risks a court-martial for his bridge of stone, for his fire on the beach, and for his two bamboos.
Confused by the atypical prisoner who mutters between his four walls some enigmatic sayings—“The nuts are dry and the fir tree is green, I repeat, the fir tree is green,” “The sofa is in the middle of the living room”—the administration makes a serious tactical mistake: they let him out for half a day, under military surveillance, to get some toiletries. An hour later Maxime has disappeared, as if it was as easy for him to escape as it is for a bird to take flight. The two police officers charged with guarding him would be discovered the following day, bound and gagged in the church at Mahabibo.
This time Maxime has to flee; he has no time to lose. He thinks first, of course, of the Red Circus, of his numerous little hideouts. He could hide there for a few days, but the place is too close to the town, and he will swiftly be recaptured. He thinks also of joining up again with his old friends among the Bara people, those seminomadic herdsmen of the southern plateaus, who steal zebus and weapons and live all year surrounded by music and dance. It is an attractive prospect, but it is far away, and what would he do with Pauline and his children? Pauline, moreover, a fine strategist, makes the most of it: it is time to leave the town, to also leave the other women, to shelter all the children . . .
The decision is made in one night: they will go to Nosy Be, where there is not only the big house at Anfelana but also Maxime’s soap factory, which is supplied with coconut oil from the Seychelles. Even if he is in hiding, she could work at the factory. How can they do it? All his boats have been requisitioned, and in any case the island is too far away for one man to sail there, encumbered by a woman and several children. Thanks to a few secret arrangements that no one can unknot today, they travel by night, in a cargo ship called L’Île Bourbon. The journey is long and made in silence: they sail with all the lights out, in fear of the Japanese submarines that patrol the area. Maxime goes up to the deck a few times, the children sleep down below, among the cashew nuts and the vanilla pods.
As for Arthur, he is also threatened and leaves to hide out in the caves at Anjohibe. Eighty kilometers north of Mahajanga, it is a desert region and difficult to access. It harbors a network of tunnels formed by innumerable limestone corridors, full of vertiginous chasms, and crossed by an underground river: no problem, no one will find him there. He will live there right to the end of the war, in the passageways, braiding creepers and fishing for eels, suddenly returned to a quasi-prehistoric life, a clear and calm existence amid the surrounding chaos—whatever the circumstances, there is always a strange, muted poetry in the life of these men, they have no precise plan, but they let themselves be carried by the very movement of life, they are capable of existing in the way trees, fruits, and flowers do: a poetry of the chase, of the hunter and the hunted.
All that night, during the long crossing, to calm the children’s anxiety or perhaps quite simply to celebrate the new twist his life has just taken, Maxime hums these wonderful phrases that he will be fond of for the rest of his days: “The beautiful Helen’s eyes are not cold,” “The blue horse walks along the horizon” . . . He knows hundreds of them, with their specific intonation, their own color, and the fire of their meanings. But he particularly likes this one and its sublime simplicity: “Veronese was a painter.”
What does it mean, exactly? While everything around him is sinking into obscurity and noise, women and children on the run, his property seized, the world listless, boats and bamboos confiscated, he continues to hum this simple melodic line, this little background music, this art of the fugue in the layering of tones, the celestial glory of colors . . . On the ship’s deck, in the terrible sweetness of his escape, he speaks to the sea in a half-voice: “Veronese was a painter.”
I repeat: Veronese was a painter . . .