Unknown

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

Gringoire is a comic drama by 19^th century French playwright, Théodore de Banville. The play is loosely based on the life and travails of poet Pierre Gringoire, a Villon clone immortalized by Hugo in Notre Dame de Paris. Like Villon, Gringoire is a firebrand, pitiless annotator and critic of his time. Weak from hunger, burning with fever, hunted by the authorities, he composes verses that excoriate the king and his court, mock the clergy, ridicule the oligarchs and galvanize the proletariat. I’d played the lead role in a school production staged in a theater in Jerusalem when I was about thirteen. The press lavished generous reviews and my performance brought accolades from teachers, fellow students, the French Consul -- Monsieur de Neuville -- and the audience. I enjoyed playing Gringoire. I liked and admired the character, and found myself being Gringoire long after the curtain had fallen and I’d shed doublet, leotards and buskins. His exhortations and caustic commentaries, his defiance and solemn forbearance in the face of adversity kept dancing in my head for months after that. Gringoire -- as Villon did -- made a powerful and lingering impression on me. I became Gringoire for a mere two hours on stage during three performances. He would dwell within me and inspire me for years to come. No doubt, his nonconformist ideas continued to simmer on some back burner in my mind. A month or so into my first term as a journalism student, the cauldron came to a boil. Rich in acidity, the overflow inspired a composition on the vestiges of feudalism in modern society. Set in rhyming quatrain form and entitled The Ballad of the Rolling Heads, the essay was a stinging satire on the guillotine and the political structures that sanctioned its use. [The contraption was retired in 1981 when France abolished the death penalty.] Honed to sow consternation, my words and the imagery they conveyed shocked some members of the faculty but earned me private praise from my creative writing professor.

It was with the same testosterone-driven verve that I attacked other school projects, often with less than glowing results. I took on assignments that I liked, ignored those that I didn’t or, worse, completed them with transparent scorn for the topic. Sometimes I turned in papers on themes of my own choosing, short lampoons in which I parodied teachers, students, political figures and my bosses at the U.S. Embassy where I worked on off-school days.

I did receive a special commendation for an essay on the 50^th anniversary of the death of Jules Verne. The piece was “scrupulously well researched, written with obvious knowledge of and regard for the subject,” as one of my professors noted in his report. This minor tribute would be obscured by repeated infractions that exasperated the faculty. I often played hooky. My papers were late or unfinished. I tried to seduce one of the professors, the voluptuous blonde sociology instructor. She resisted my advances with skill and refinement and had me promptly transferred to another class.

To supplement my parents’ meager monthly stipends (and help subsidize my nightly outings), I worked as a foot messenger, ferrying mail and unclassified documents between the U.S. Embassy on Avenue Gabriel and the U.S. Information Service office on Rue St. Honoré. This was my first real job. I learned early on that the only way to survive the humiliation of a menial job is to take pride in it and do it with dignity and skill. There was nothing shameful about the work itself. My routine kept me mostly outdoors, which I enjoyed. It was the behavior of my superiors -- leery, often choleric third-echelon paper-pushers who’d found in civil service an obliging refuge for mediocrity -- that I resented. Hard as I tried to read them, to distill from alternating states of aloofness and irascibility some self-revealing trait, the Americans with whom I worked remained distant and impenetrable. I learned little more from them about America than I did from “Mademoiselle Vanda’s” booze-induced recollections of her childhood in Steubenville and her failed marriage to a pig farmer in Topeka. I concluded that the image of fairness, high moral fiber, gallantry and altruism associated with Americans was a myth. How could a race of He-men and dragon slayers be so … human?

Of America, which forswore all princes and potentates in exchange for the majesty of self-rule, I would soon distill a theocentric nation given to hero-worship and gluttonous consumerism, beguiled by its grandiose self-view and readily seduced by the idolatrous slogans it keeps coining in its own name; a nation of superlatives obsessed with bigness: Big Macs, huge SUVs, giant trucks, enormous TVs, gargantuan pizzas. Of Americans, I would deduce a sanguine, gregarious and generous people, outwardly cocksure, inwardly skittish, overindulged, overfed and oversexed -- the men high-strung, homophobic, sexually conflicted, testosterone-bursting badass action figures desperately protective of their masculinity, enamored of their weapons which they keep oiled loaded and cocked; the women prematurely pubertal, neurotic and capricious -- all in awe of status symbols, deaf or hostile to unorthodox ideas, and with whom, owing differences in temperament, tastes and attitudes, I, a hopeless cynic and restless solitarian, would never entertain long-term relationships.

Human nature denatures man. It is the chief impediment to harmony among the species.

Another myth, this time perpetuated by France, proclaimed that Algeria was French. Algeria was in every sense a wretched colony whose subjects, nine million strong, had been held in a crushing vise of political, economic, social and cultural inferiority by fewer than one million French for over 100 years. France had built roads, hospitals and schools. Infant mortality had dropped significantly and many endemic diseases were eventually eradicated under French rule. But the overwhelming majority of Algerians enjoyed neither the rights nor the privileges of their colonial masters.

The humiliation endured by the colonized rests less in the inequity of their circumstance than in the figurative and literal status of inferiority imposed by the colonizer. The division of colonial society into two separate and distinct realms -- the conqueror’s and that of the conquered -- lasted well into the mid-20^thcentury. By then accorded “conditional” French citizenship but denied political representation, Algerians eager to exercise their newfound rights at the polls were thwarted in their effort by a tangle of bureaucratic obstacles, including “misplaced” or fraudulent muster rolls, sudden and arbitrary change of venues, and defective or doctored ballot boxes. When rigged elections drew widespread protests, censorship, mass arrests, extra-judicial executions and disappearances followed.

In November 1954, two months after I arrived in Paris, 70 simultaneous terrorist incidents against the French in Algeria turned a smoldering struggle for independence into all-out war. Not long before, according to James Bamford in Body of Secrets, the French, “driven by greed and replaced by the Americans, [who were] driven by anti-Communist hysteria” had abandoned Indochina after a bitter and fruitless war that culminated in a stinging defeat at the hands of anti-colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu. France’s debacle in its former colonies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, its loss of prestige around the world, kindled an upwelling of nationalistic fervor among the French, particularly those who were born in Algeria and claimed the country to be their own. France moved the bulk of its Foreign Legion troops to Algeria. Regular army conscripts followed. Soon, anecdotal accounts and isolated eyewitness reports of gross misbehavior by the French army surfaced in France, as did carefully filtered news of high casualty rates among French soldiers. Algerian women were routinely raped, the men treated to beatings, prolonged immersion in freezing water or excrement, and electric shock. Declassified documents, including photos and a glut of press reports, books and documentaries shed a stark light on the atrocities committed by the French in Algeria. Not to be outdone, the Algerians, who fought fiercely and lost over half a million people during the eight-year conflict, showed no mercy for the French they captured. The bloody war ended with Algeria’s independence and signaled the disintegration of France’s colonial empire.

My parents were now living in Marseille. My father had been appointed medical director of Camp d’Arénas, a compound Israel had leased from France and through which North African Jews fleeing Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, were examined and treated before being allowed to proceed to Israel.

Determined to keep me from becoming a statistic, my mother urged that I be dispatched to America. My father demurred at first. Strong-willed and persistent, happy, it seemed, only when called to rise against titanic obstacles, corporeal or transcendent, he argued that I should not be encouraged to run from risk or responsibility.

“He would have incurred the same risks in Israel had he stayed. We sent him to France to keep him out of harm’s way. Who is to say that he won’t face new perils in America? Is America immune from war? The world is forever teetering on the brink of catastrophe. War lurks at every turn. He’s at ease in France. I think he should stay put and finish his studies.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Ari. He is just a boy,” my mother retorted. “He was born in France. He’s subject to the draft. He’s bound to be called any day now.” She looked at me with tenderness and apprehension.

Gentle and conciliatory, my mother had always been a buffer between my father and me, especially on those rare occasions when hormones and youthful rebellion got in the way of tact and justifiable respect. She was the perfect arbiter. She pressed on, vividly conjuring up an array of gruesome scenarios.

“Ari, imagine: If they ship him to Algeria, he could be seriously wounded -- or worse. The idea brought tears to her eyes.

My father frowned and stroked his forehead as if brushing away monstrous thoughts.

“You’re right.”

The truth, the awful truth is that I would be dispatched to America not to seek my fortune but to evade the draft and near-certain service in Algeria where the French were dying like flies.

There was another reason. I was doing poorly in school.

“It’s not the writing,” the dean wrote in a letter to my parents. “He can write. It’s the rest -- spotty attendance, unfinished assignments, a penchant for rabble-rousing and an immoderate fondness for the opposite sex. Your son has been a constant distraction since he enrolled. We showed patience and restraint. We were lenient. When leniency failed, we took stiffer action, all for naught. Your son is smart but headstrong, gifted but undisciplined. He resents authority. He is not a team player. In time, perhaps, these shortcomings will abate. Meanwhile, we regret we cannot encourage you to enroll him for the coming term.”

I’d lasted two years.

All events are both cause and effect.

With the rest of the immigration paperwork out of the way, I was summoned to the U.S. Consulate for a final interview. The consul, a diminutive, overbearing civil servant visibly luxuriating in his American-in-Paris dream job, handed me one last document, a three-part sworn affidavit that he watched me read and fill out with depraved fascination.

I first had to pledge that I’d not engaged in “adultery, fornication or sodomy.” I asked him to define each of these infractions. He complied. Probing my political convictions, the second part inquired whether I was “now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party.” The third bluntly asked whether it was my intention “to overthrow the government of the United States by unconstitutional means.” Having answered all of the above in the negative and so affirmed with one hand on the Bible, I was issued an immigration visa and granted entry into the Promised Land. I would soon discover that in America, the most sex-obsessed nation on earth, promiscuity thrives in the very lap of Puritanism, that organizations such as the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and Opus Dei, to name a few, are far more malignant than the atrophied and decrepit Communist party, and that the Constitution is routinely violated through the use of loopholes and feats of acrobatic legalism that encourage the privileged and the powerful to defy the rule of law.

As yet unpolluted by such insights, I bid farewell to my parents for a second time in two years. I left Paris on a cold, rainy mid-winter morning and arrived in balmy Cannes that same evening. After a sleepless night, I embarked the next day on the USS Constitution for the 10-day crossing to New York. I had fifty dollars in my pocket, which my mother had dutifully sewn shut.

Lured by the siren call of adventure, I tried to mute the voices within. This time, they spoke with troubling vehemence and clarity.

“So, you’re on the road again, hey? Leaving against your will this time around,” they said. “What happened to your manifest objective? You could have stood your ground, but you didn’t. When will fails, fate triumphs. You must now learn to ride with the flow lest you be swept beyond your own reach.”

I would have cheerfully consigned America to that special cubbyhole where phantasmagoria, myth and legends are stowed. Why couldn’t America have been a vague eventuality instead of a destination?

All rivers spring from a source. All events have a cause. Every event triggers other events. The process is continuous and the permutations are endless. In a sense, all events are related. In apprehending this insight, I was taught a lesson that was both axiomatic and un-learnable.

I watched France’s coastline recede in the distance and I wept.