Boisfeuras had parted from his comrades in Marseilles. On a grey November morning, with a catch in their throats, they had seen his slim figure disappear. With his old cardboard suitcase whose handle was reinforced with string, and his cape which was too long for him and hung down to his heels, he was the perfect picture of the poor soldier back from the wars who has no idea where to go and who will shortly be a human wreck destined for the workhouse.
He had given Florence’s address to the taxi which drove him off. The driver had a more pronounced accent than most Marseillais, which made him sound like a stage comedian deliberately overacting:
“So the war’s over at last, Captain, eh?”
“Yes, it’s over.”
“Personally, mind you, I respect everyone’s opinion—but Indo-China, we couldn’t very well hang on to it since the people who lived out there wanted to see the last of us.”
The taxi stopped outside a large modern block of flats in pink stucco built at the foot of Notre-Dame de la Garde. Boisfeuras felt the slight tremor that came over him each time he went to see Florence.
“There we are, sir, home again, with your little wife waiting for you inside. That’s better than war now, isn’t it? That’ll be three hundred and eighty francs. The tip’s not included. No offence meant, but some people, after being overseas so long, tend to forget the customs of our fair land of France . . .”
The driver laid particular stress on the last words. Feeling ill at ease, Boisfeuras said to himself:
“Our fair land of France is enough to make one sick.”
He paid off the taxi, gave the driver a tip and asked the concierge:
“Miss Florence Mercardier’s, please?”
“Third on the left. You can’t go wrong, there’s always music and a lot of noise.”
She spoke in a dry, disagreeable tone; Florence was obviously up to the same old tricks. He went upstairs, dragging the suitcase whose handle had broken yet again, rang the bell and Florence was in his arms, against a background of sugary, insipid music dripping from the radio; the chairs, the tables, the floor itself, were littered with empty bottles, saucers of cigarette-ends and the remnants of a cold supper.
“The maid hasn’t come,” said the half-caste apologetically.
She was barefoot and wearing an old dressing-gown, but her smooth slender body exuded a faint perfume of vanilla. Contemptuous and disgusted by all this mess, a white tabby cat had taken refuge on a shelf. She yawned, opening her pink throat, and stretched one paw above her ear.
Boisfeuras cleared an arm-chair for himself. Florence came and sat down on his lap; her thick black hair was pressed against his cheek.
“Haven’t you paid the maid?”
“She doesn’t like me, no one likes me in France.”
Florence unbuttoned the captain’s jacket, then his shirt, and with her long hand and hard nails began stroking his chest. The unmade bed, which still retained the smell of woman and love-making, soon beckoned them; and with his lovely whore Julien Boisfeuras once again experienced the intense sort of pleasure which she alone knew how to produce.
“Real pleasure is painful and degrading,” his father, taipan Boisfeuras, used to say. “Otherwise it’s little more than an organic function. It must defy all constraint and taboo to be what the Christians call a sin. When you make war, you risk your skin; when you make love, you must risk your soul.”
With Florence, the little half-caste who, with parted lips, was now lovingly stroking her stomach and breasts, Julien played with his soul in the same way as a bullfighter manipulates his cape.
“Shall we go out and eat?”
“No.”
“I want to go to Alex’s. We’ll have Chinese soup, fried nemes and abalones that come from Hong Kong already tinned; they’re very expensive. Then you’ll buy me some dresses and we’ll go to the cinema and tonight I’ll be . . .”
She ran the tip of her tongue over her full, fleshy lips:
“. . . very . . . very . . . sweet to you.”
He slapped her in the face, deliberately, without anger, and she clung to him, limp and chastened; sobs, which were succeeded by pleasure, made her firm stomach expand and contract.
He thrust her aside and lit a cigarette.
“I’m behaving like a pimp in a film,” he said to himself, “but that’s the only way to avoid being relegated by Florence to a mere accessory. She spent last night with another man; then, when he went off, shortly before I arrived, she stroked her stomach and breasts in the same manner to thank them for the pleasure they had just given her. And she’s already forgotten the accessory which served her purpose. A cruel, selfish, soulless little strumpet! But I’m only interested in her body and my degradation.”
Florence took his hand, rubbed it gently against her lips and kissed it. He reacted to this with complete indifference, while the cat with her red-brown eyes stared down at them from her shelf.
Julien heaved the half-caste out of bed:
“Turn off that music and go out and buy something to eat.”
Florence looked at herself in the wardrobe glass and twisted round to catch the reflection of her lightly arched loins. She would have liked to be a man so as to adore her body and make love to herself. In a science-fiction novel she had read about a creature which reproduced itself in order to go out and kill people, the fool, instead of giving itself pleasure. There was a faint mark near her eye where Julien had slapped her.
“You’ve given me a bruise.”
She said this simply as a statement of fact. When she saw Maguy, she would tell him that her captain had come back from the war and that for the time being it would be better for her not to do the round of the bars too regularly. Florence was happy that Julien was back, for she was tired of her freedom. The half-caste was bored in Marseilles and missed Saigon, the Dakao quarter and its seething life, its little bars, its “compartments” thronged with amoral, sexual families. Old fathers there sold their daughters, assuming the haughty air of hidalgos. Brothers got a rake-off for introducing their sisters to “friends.” The whole quarter wallowed in a warm miasma of sex, nuoc mam, and dried shrimps. Then came the war, as fiery as red peppers, which lent an unexpected zest to each fresh embrace. Florence had experienced passion as furtive and brutal as that of wild beasts, pursuits, fights, and murders. One day she had fallen into the hands of the Binh-Xuyens and Julien had saved her. The chief of the arroyo pirates who ran all the gambling-dens in Cholon could not afford to fall out with Captain Boisfeuras who knew the name of the coolie whom he had once killed in order to steal two piastres from him. That was ten years before he became a colonel and a friend of the Emperor.
Florence disappeared into the bath-room and came out again wearing close-fitting leopard-skin trousers, a chunky black sweater and a canary-yellow scarf. She looked common and provocative. Her dull skin and slanting eyes, the sinuous movement of her limbs, gave her the additional tang of some exotic fruit. Boisfeuras lit another cigarette. He surrendered to the clammy but beguiling self-disgust in which his energy and resolution melted away. He had to plumb the depths of this disgust so as to have the necessary purchase for his foot which, with a kick, would send him rising to the surface again.
The captain spent a week with his lovely whore, took her out to the cinema once or twice, ran through several detective novels and smoked enough cigarettes to sear the roof of his mouth.
At the most unusual hours Florence produced a number of meals in which Vietnamese dishes which she cooked herself were supplemented by poor quality cold cuts from the neighbouring butcher’s shop. To drink she bought nothing but sugary aperitifs tasting of chemicals which cloyed palate and stomach alike.
When his disgust almost swept him off his feet like a wave, Julien went out on to the balcony and watched the cats.
At the back of the building there was an empty plot of ground enclosed by a high wooden fence. Hundreds of cats, grey, white and black, romped about in this playground among the bits of corrugated iron, piles of rubble, broken bottles, clumps of nettles and carcasses of old trucks. The darkness sparkled with countless gold and emerald-green eyes.
They reminded Julien of his big game hunts by night in Burma, of the eyes of the animals caught in the headlights, which the rifle shots extinguished like so many candles.
Burton in his sentimental way used to say:
“One gets the feeling one’s killing eyes. It’s far nastier than shooting animals whose head, limbs and body are visible. Putting out their eyes in the dark is like killing life itself.”
Men’s eyes do not shine in the dark. During a hunt in the Naga hills they ran into some Japanese and Burton was shot dead.
The cats, Julien noticed, had a recognized leader, a gaunt, lean-ribbed grey beast. Whenever any refuse wrapped up in a piece of newspaper was thrown down from one of the balconies of the building, they all pounced on it, fur bristling, claws bared, and formed a circle round the packet, not daring to advance for fear of being attacked by the others.
At this point the grey cat intervened. He would pick the packet up in his jaws and make off with it. But the newspaper, dragging along the ground, would fall apart, spilling out the old bones, crusts of bread and kitchen refuse, which were snatched up by his pursuers, and the grey cat would find himself on the discarded dustbin which served as his throne with an empty piece of torn paper between his teeth.
The cats disappeared in the afternoon, but in the evening, when the lights began to come on in all the villas scattered over the hill, they would suddenly reappear and embark on their saraband. They clawed and nibbled, squealed with passion, made love and killed one another. The white tabby cat would start trembling, brushing up against the captain’s legs and mewing. One night he opened the door for her and she scuttled off to join the free world of cats covered with scabs and mange, ruled by a stupid and short-sighted tyrant.
On the following day Julien Boisfeuras gave Florence her freedom. She too needed to scamper about the wastelands of Marseilles and resume her adventurous love-life; he left her enough money to live on for three months; she pretended to be grieved.
When he left, she cursed him up hill and down dale, burst out laughing when the door closed behind him, shed a few tears shortly afterwards because she was already beginning to miss him, and consoled herself by promptly spending some of the money he had left her on a television set. That evening she went out and met Maguy and her old bar cronies, while the white tabby in the empty plot of ground squalled with love as she let herself be mounted by the stupid king, the big gaunt grey.
Julien Boisfeuras had cured himself of Florence as of a fever which is suddenly brought down. He had needed her out in Indo-China in order not to think about the war. This war had begun to lose its appeal when the flavour of exotic and unusual adventure that it had at the beginning began to fade. By 1952 it was already nothing more than a useless dissipation of heroism, suffering, endeavour and human life, while corruption, the black market and chair-borne warriors were all on the increase.
Boisfeuras had been forced to make false promises to his partisans in the Baie d’Along and on the Chinese border. When he came down to Saigon to ask for arms, rice and money, more often than not he met with a refusal. The money had been spent in the capital to swell the coffers of some political party or other; the arms had been issued to some parade-ground Vietnamese units who neither knew nor wished to learn how to use them. Then, so as to have the courage to deceive his partisans with further lies, he used to go and see Florence in her “compartment” at Dakao and expend all his strength and fury on that smooth, eager, selfish body. There were times when Julien felt he would like to alter the course of history all by himself, to be as puerile as a Don Quixote, who, armed with a spear and encased in a suit of armour, attempts to halt a heavy tank attack. Heroic, stupid, play-acting!
Because he thought the conflict was pointless, he had needed the heady drug which was secreted between his mistress’s thighs. Eroticism was the answer to despair.
When Julien thought about that war, all he remembered was a series of disconnected adventures, adventures of the kind that Esclavier called “hare-brained schemes.” A big junk prowled up the Chinese coast in the darkness; the wind rose and filled the sails which were reinforced with slivers of bamboo; the tiller creaked at every movement of the vessel. Julien was lying out on deck next to his batman Min. When Vong, the owner of the junk, drew on his water-pipe and made the embers right next to them come to life, his face emerged out of the darkness like a ghost. It was a wrinkled old face with cruel little eyes. Vong may well have betrayed them—but not for political reasons or out of self-interest; he was above anything of that sort. The gamble was all that could make his deadened nerves tingle any longer.
The sea was like a millpond and the stifling salty air seemed to be glued to its surface. Min rolled over to shift his revolver from his hip to his waist; like that he would be able to fire more quickly while lying flat on the deck. He believed in Vong’s treachery but had never mentioned it to his captain who had known about it for some time; for Min trod warily, bristling like a cat on guard against dogs.
Vong’s head emerged out of the darkness again. He spoke softly:
“The junk’s arriving.”
The sound of flapping sails and rippling water grew louder. A pin-point of light flashed on and off in the distance. So Vong had not betrayed them. Why not? He hardly knew himself—maybe because this time the stakes were so much higher. He was gambling with the lives of the whole of his family left behind in China.
Min went down into the hold to rouse the dozen men of the commando. They came up on deck barefoot and fully armed. Boisfeuras made them lie down along the scuppers. A machine-gun had been set up in the bows, concealed behind some sacks of rice.
Vong put down his water-pipe and began signalling with an old hurricane lamp.
The little Corsican sergeant in command of the Nung partisans sidled up to Boisfeuras.
“What do you think it’s going to be, sir, opium, girls . . . ?”
He might equally well have said gold, rum, spices or pearls. Andréani and Boisfeuras savoured the deep, savage joy of piracy; this war had granted them an adventure of some bygone age: a boarding on the China seas.
The junk from Hainan drew closer; there was a sound of voices. How many were there on board? Were they armed?
Vong embarked on a palaver with the other owner. The wind had dropped completely and the two vessels now lay side by side. The machine-gun loosed off three bursts and the dozen men of the commando sprang to their feet with a yell.
The Chinese put up no defence, but the crew had to be pitched overboard just the same, for there was nothing else to be done with them. The junk was loaded with arms and medical supplies for the Vietminh.
No, for all his money, taipan Boisfeuras could never have offered his son sensations of such power and intensity.
Then one day Julien grew tired of these stereotyped romantics and tried to find some purpose in this fighting. Since there was none that he could discover, he took to Florence who proved to be a much more potent drug than anything else.
At Dien-Bien-Phu he met officers who claimed to be fighting simply because they had been ordered to do so. It had needed the defeat to make them subsequently seek a more or less valid reason for their having fought and to dismiss from their minds the myth of discipline which the defeat of 1940, the Resistance and the liberation had deprived of all its content.
From some incomprehensible sense of shame, however, those officers still would not admit, as he did, that their war had become a mere game for desperate dilettanti.
Boisfeuras had no feeling of nationalism; he was therefore unable to invoke the defence of his country, of “mother France.” He needed a more universal cause; like many of his comrades, he believed he had found it in the struggle against Communism. Communism as he had known it in Camp One, deprived of all human substance by the Vietminh, could only result in a universe of sexless insects without contradictions and therefore without genius, without any extension in the infinite and therefore without hope.
Man in his diversity and richness was suddenly menaced, but were not those who wished to take up his defence bound to find themselves harnessed to this mass of rubble which was all that was left of the West, its myths and its beliefs?
Boisfeuras felt it was his duty to take part in this defence of the individual. But he refused to confuse this new form of crusade with the guard mounted by a motionless sentry over the walls of a deserted citadel, the porch of an empty church, or the bars of a museum or library in which no one set foot any longer.
As he made his way towards the Saint-Charles station in his civilian suit which made him look like a workman in his Sunday best, Julien Boisfeuras recalled the hordes of cats in the empty plot of ground, their cruel habits and their king who was as stupid and brutal as an American gang leader.
Still carrying his battered old suitcase, he got into the train for Cannes. Someone had left yesterday’s paper behind in the compartment; he glanced through it. The insurrection was spreading through the whole of Algeria. Fresh troops were being sent out. G.H.Q. announced that it would all be over in a matter of weeks.
He thought of Mahmoudi. What would he have done in his place? The finest role is always that of the rebel; books, films and men of goodwill are always on his side. But defending rubble is an ungrateful and demeaning pastime.
What passed through the minds of the Roman centurions who were left behind in Africa and who, with a few veterans, a few barbarian auxiliaries ever ready to turn traitor, tried to maintain the outposts of the Empire while the people back in Rome were sinking into Christianity, and the Caesars into debauchery?
At Cannes Julien Boisfeuras took the bus which dropped him off at La Serbalière, his father’s estate. It stretched all the way from Grasse up the hill towards Cabris and was hidden from the public eye by thick smooth walls like those of a prison. He rang the bell at the gate; an old Chinaman opened a peep-hole and curtly inquired through the grille:
“What you want?”
Then suddenly he recognized him and a broad smile came over his grumpy face:
“Ong Julien, me velly happy . . .”
He threw the gate wide open to allow Julien’s car to drive through, but there was only the young master with his battered suitcase standing there. He snatched the suitcase out of his hand and scrutinized him closely. Ong Julien was mad; perhaps it was the fault of that Vietnamese nurse who had brought him up and used to take him with her every day to burn incense in the pagodas of the Buddha. He had inhaled too much incense, which must have disturbed his mind. He, Lung, was a good Christian, a good Protestant, who preferred the smell of soap. Ong Julien had not changed, he was still dressed like a tramp. Neither large cars, nor fine clothes, nor opium, nor good food, nor, like the old master, pretty little girls—nothing interested him but war and politics . . .
A man appeared outside on the veranda of the house. He had a long narrow head culminating in a mouth that was more like a sucker. His lips were so red that they looked made up; his skin so pale as to be transparent, revealing a blue network of veins and arteries. His emaciated frame was swathed in a sort of monk’s cowl.
All round this creature who had just emerged from the dark and was blinking his eyes, splendid beds of flowers blazed in the late autumn light. The breeze brought with it all the scents which are those of Provence, sunshine and life: the scent of thyme, mother-of-thyme, fennel, sweet marjoram and the pungent smell of pine-trees. But the man looked like a corpse in this magnificent garden.
“Ah, there you are at last, Julien!”
“Yes, Father.”
“I sent you out an air ticket to the bank at Saigon.”
“I preferred to come back by boat with my friends.”
“Still refusing to touch a penny of what you look upon as my ill-gotten gains?”
“No, it’s simpler than that: I’m ill at ease with money, I feel it keeps me apart from something that is basically essential to me. Anyway, I’m very happy to see you again.”
“So am I; come in.”
Julien at once noticed the heady, penetrating smell of opium, mingled with a faint effluvium of pharmacy. They went through a big hall with Chinese hangings and lacquer furniture, then entered a dark little room. Two thin rush mats were spread out on the floor. Between them stood all the smoker’s paraphernalia: the little oil lamp with its golden flame, the bamboo pipes. The smell of the drug, like leaf-mould after rain, was unmistakable, drowning all the others.
Above the lamp the roll of painted silk which had been looted from the Summer Palace hung like a Japanese kakemono.
“I often thought of that painting,” said Julien, “especially when I was marching in chains along the tracks of the Moyenne Région. I imagined it much bigger and it’s nothing but an old bit of faded silk.”
He settled down on the mat facing his father and watched him hold the little pellet of opium over the flame between two long silver pincers.
The old man peered at him with his rheumy eyes:
“Well, what’s your opinion of this war we’ve . . . yes, this war we’ve just lost.”
“It was inevitable we should lose it.”
“Not enough arms, enough money . . . ?”
“We had too many arms, too much money. With the money we bought up a lot of puppets, while we let the Vietminh take the arms. We had no valid reason for fighting, apart from preventing the Communists from fanning out into South-East Asia. To succeed in this aim, we needed the support of the Vietnamese people. But how could they give us their support since, at the very outset, we denied them their independence?
“But it was only much later, in the prison camps, that we realized this conflict had overreached itself.”
“But you, what part did you have to play in this business?”
“A quick-change music-hall performer, by turns a partisan leader, a political adviser to racial minorities, an intelligence agent; but more often than not I acted as an observer, a witness.”
“Care for a pipe of opium?”
“No, thanks.”
“Yet opium is the vice of witnesses.”
Armand Boisfeuras drew on his pipe. The little pellet bubbled, expanded, and the taipan exhaled the smoke.
“Do you want to go and lie down? Your room has been ready for you for over a week.”
“No, thanks.”
“Go on, then.”
“Asia is lost. The Communists have introduced extremely effective and worth-while methods out there. They have transformed China and Northern Viet-Nam into a vast, perfectly organized, perfectly inhuman ant-heap. It will hold out for quite a time . . .”
Old Boisfeuras clapped his hands and Lung came in with some tea.
“It will hold out as long as their police system holds out.”
“Supposing a sort of popular tidal wave suddenly wiped out the whole Chinese Communist organization. What would be the result, Father?”
“Anarchy, monstrous, cosmic anarchy on a world-wide scale, a human ocean lashed to fury by the winds and smashing down every breakwater . . .”
Julien again remembered the hordes of cats in Marseilles and their stupid king. Kuomintang China was rather like that, with its war-lords and brigand generals.
“A nasty thought, isn’t it, Father? On this over-populated earth of ours, where distance has been abolished, we can hardly afford an anarchy six hundred million strong.”
Armand Boisfeuras emptied the bowl of his pipe, shook out the dross which he put aside in a little box, stretched out and laid his head on a small cushion:
“The Communists have either absorbed or liquidated every branch of society that might at a pinch have controlled that anarchy. The world is becoming an extremely disagreeable place, my dear Julien, with more and more insoluble problems presenting themselves every day. I shall soon be of an age to take leave of it, so for me those problems don’t exist. Meanwhile I’ve got this refuge: the smoker’s den where the sound and fury of the present age only reach me in the form of a muffled echo, deprived of all hysteria and pathos. You’ll be leaving the army, I suppose. I was planning to give you the directorship of our group of insurance companies. You’ll have absolutely no work to do; it’s the sort of sinecure that only a capitalist world can offer. It will enable you to live on a grand scale, to travel anywhere that takes your fancy, to have, shall we say, a social purpose . . . Stay here for a bit, have a good rest, go to bed with some girls . . . and in the evening, as you used to in Shanghai, come and lie down here with me on the mat. I’m rather bored, but I refuse to live in Paris. I have a horror of big towns in the West. I need warmth, silence and the beauty of flowers. A shark but at the same time an artist, my boy, and also resigned—resigned and weary to the point of not wanting to corrupt anyone any more, not even you. Yes, I’m decidedly bored with this world. Take advantage of its decline and its perversions, Julien, whether as an artist or a moralist, it’s much the same thing. You can have as much money as you like. I don’t enjoy things any more. What one can do with a woman or even a very young girl is pretty limited in the long run . . . You don’t bother about it, Julien? That sort of thing leaves you cold? You’re merely obsessed by your lust for power, the longing you have to fasten your name to some historical incident. Beware of the temptation of Communism; you’ve already experienced it, it might easily come back. In another age you would have been a financial tycoon, but money has lost its power and perhaps that’s why you despise it. The masses now represent the only power, and in order to win them over men indulge in the same savage, cynical tussle as the sharks of Wall Street or the City did in the old days.
“Only this new form of capital can’t be locked away in the vaults of a bank. This capital lives, eats, suffers, dies and rebels.
“In spite of my ghastly reputation, I believe I’m more human than the whole lot of you. I’ve only tried to corrupt my fellow man, not to use him as a limited capital. You think I’m off my head, that I’ve smoked too much opium. No, I’ve merely realized the absurdity of our condition and the immensity of our vanity . . . Don’t bother about the human race, Julien, just eat, drink, make love or listen to music, take drugs, you’ll be all the better for it. Why not marry? You’ll have children, you’ll build yourself a home, you’ll bring off a big deal, and one day you’ll be old and there’ll be nothing left for you but to wait sanctimoniously for the sky to drop on top of you . . . Come on, have a little pipe . . .”
Julien Boisfeuras got up and went to bed. He knew how deeply his father was suffering through having nothing more to do, through rotting away all alone in the sunshine of Provence without being able to contaminate any more continents with his personal gangrene.
• • •
Next day Julien Boisfeuras went for a walk through the narrow lanes of Grasse. Washing hung out from every window; round an old fountain some peasant women were selling the flowers and wild herbs from the mountains; hordes of children scampered up and down the steps and threw stones at one another; a beautiful, dark-haired girl with dull skin and a profile of classical purity was enthroned behind a stall of figs and lettuces.
Julien sat down on the damp rim of the fountain and appraised the girl dispassionately as a beautiful object.
“Hallo, Captain.”
A heavy hand came to rest on his shoulder. He looked up and recognized the journalist who had attended the prisoners’ release at Vietri and who knew Marindelle.
“Hallo.”
“Pretty girl, isn’t she? She might have been born in a Florentine palace in the Quattrocento. You can see her fingering her jewels. Her page comes in and kneels at her feet, bringing back the dagger with which he has killed her unfaithful lover. She kisses him, keeps him all night in her bed and gives orders for him to be hanged in the morning. She has taken so much out of him that the page doesn’t even have the final orgasm which all men who are hanged are said to have . . . I’ve just been reading the Chronicle of the Cenci, I’m so bored here!”
“Why don’t you go away then?”
“You may well ask, Captain. I’ve got a month’s holiday, not a penny to spend, and an old aunt who’s putting me up at Grasse. She is extremely well-born and extremely deaf . . . Do you live in these parts?”
“My father does.”
“Don’t you miss Indo-China?”
“I was born in China, so it’s China I should miss if anywhere.”
“I believe you know my cousin, Yves Marindelle?”
“Extremely well, we were prisoners together in Camp One.”
“For four years all he had to eat was rice. Now that he’s back in France, he only takes his wife out to Vietnamese restaurants. He wants to teach her Annamite. Are you free for lunch, Captain?”
Julien had no wish to go back to his father wandering about in his old dressing-gown among the flower-beds, leaving a smell of corpses and pharmacy behind him.
“Why not?”
“We could go up to Cabris. You’re sure to have a car. An Aronde or a Vedette, or maybe a Frégate? All the officers back from Indo-China have cars.”
“I don’t.”
“That’s odd. Let’s take mine, then, if she can manage the climb, she’s an old rattletrap. Are you building yourself a house? The few officers who haven’t bought cars are building themselves houses.”
“I’m not.”
During the meal the journalist never stopped drinking and kept ordering bottle after bottle. At one point he even clutched his glass so tightly that it broke in his hand.
“Are you feeling restless?” Boisfeuras asked him. “Bored with your long holiday?”
“You’ve got an ugly face like myself, Captain, a mug that’s enough to turn the milk sour, as the peasants say, and your voice is as grating as a rusty hinge. As for me, I’ve got about as much grace as an elephant, and when I sweat I stink like an old billy-goat. A girl must be either off her head or completely blind to fall for me. Have you ever been in love?”
“It’s never happened to me. I believe in carnal passion, not in love . . . and since I’ve got an ugly face, as you’ve just reminded me, I pay for my pleasure, which doesn’t in any way detract from carnal passion, rather the reverse in fact.”
“I was madly in love with a girl once. I don’t know if she ever loved me in return, but at least she was used to me. I brought her husband back for her from Indo-China after stuffing him with hormones and vitamins, beefsteaks and caviar; then I came down to Grasse to get over it.”
“Marindelle’s wife, I suppose?”
“Yes, Jeanine Marindelle. They hadn’t got a flat, so they took mine. They insinuated themselves into my life like a couple of tapeworms.”
“Yet you took advantage of the wife when her husband was a prisoner.”
“I behaved badly, I realize that, and yet . . . Have a brandy with your coffee, won’t you? Do you know Ussel—that’s right, in Corrèze? You ought to see that town in the rain: a long black road, flanked as far as the eye can see by horrible middle-class houses with blank façades concealing mysteries which couldn’t be anything but sordid. A creeping sense of despair grips your guts and you feel like slipping some arsenic into grandma’s cup just for the sake of a laugh.
“Three months after their marriage, Yves Marindelle flew out to Indo-China and Jeanine went to stay with little Yves’s parents at Ussel, in one of the dreariest houses on that road. The father made a packet in hardware, wholesale groceries or something of that sort—a radical-socialist, a freemason, though he sends his wife to Mass, and a member of the Rotary Club. The Rotary Club of Ussel! The aunts, a couple of ugly old maids. All of them hated her. Jeanine was young and pretty and when she laughed a dimple appeared in her cheek. She came from a good family, but her parents had lost all their money. To her middle-class in-laws she was the adventuress who had stolen the heart of poor little Yves.
“Come on, have some brandy, Captain Boisfeuras. You were born in China, you wouldn’t understand how cruel and narrow-minded the French provincial middle class can be.
“Well, Jeanine made her escape for fear they might kill her by injecting all their poisons into her own life. I was her cousin, I used to buy her sweets when she was a little girl, gramophone records when she grew up. I was the only member of her family who went to the wedding. She was marrying her childhood friend, with whom she used to share the sweets I bought her and to whom she used to play my records.
“For the old house at Ussel, the rain of Ussel, the boredom of Ussel, had unaccountably produced the marvellous youth called Yves who resembled her so closely.
“Jeanine took refuge with me in Paris. She brought with her an entire childhood with all its strange and infinitely varied rites, and I, Captain, had never had a childhood of my own. She used to sing those silly little songs that school-children sing at round-games. She used to weep over a flower, smear her face with chocolate and talk of dying as though it was like going for a stroll round the garden.
“Now this is what I feel: love can’t exist unless it’s linked to that mysterious power and ritual of childhood. I fell madly in love, I stopped drinking, I found a job on the Quotidien.
“One day, while holding Jeanine a little too closely in my arms, I made her my mistress. It wasn’t particularly convenient, but it was inevitable.
“After that I experienced both paradise and hell. My pleasure was increased by a sense of sacrilege. There was I, the coarse old dullard, admitted into the fairyland of childhood, and at the same time being granted more pleasure than mortal man can have. The dragon taking advantage of the fairy princess he has captured! The prince came back, delivered his princess, and the dragon is now eating his heart out . . .
“Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as all that: it was the fairy princess who held the dragon captive . . . she had developed a taste for his embraces . . . but it was still the poor old dragon who went off and fetched back the prince.
“I’m drunk, I’m boring you to tears with this story . . . and yet I can’t talk about anything else. From the moment Jeanine saw Yves again I ceased to exist for her. Before seeing him, she wanted to leave him. Now, I could swear she doesn’t even remember that she lived a whole year with me.”
“Did Yves Marindelle know?”
“He amazed me, that boy. ‘Four years is a long time,’ he said, ‘and you’re handing me back my wife just as she was when I left her, as though you had kept her under glass, protected from the heat and cold. She hasn’t aged, she hasn’t changed at all, and yet she has acquired any amount of new tastes: the music of Stravinsky and Erik Satie, the poetry of Desnos, blue jeans and pony-tails. Thank you, Herbert.’ For you didn’t know, Captain, did you . . .”
Pasfeuro brought his huge fist down on the table:
“My Christian name is Herbert and I’m more well-born than the whole of the Polish aristocracy put together.”
• • •
Julien Boisfeuras took to meeting the journalist fairly frequently. Pasfeuro proved to be a mass of contradictions, with a taste for the weird and the unusual, mad and generous, cynical and tender-hearted at one and the same time. He hated all forms of hierarchy and lumped together the Communists, with whom he was once in conflict, the Jesuits, with whom he had been brought up, the police, with whom he had often had a brush, the middle class, towards whom he felt an aristocrat’s contempt, the military, whom he considered stupid, and all dried up old maids, members of the educational profession, clergy, technicians, inspectors of finances, pimps, Corsicans, people from Auvergne and infant prodigies.
Pasfeuro on his side respected the captain, his contempt for sartorial elegance, that manner he had of being at home anywhere, and his sound political and economic background. He seemed to belong to no particular country, had no national prejudice, attached no importance to money or decorations and was astonished and mystified to find himself in the army.
A slightly grudging friendship sprang up between the two of them. When Pasfeuro was posted as permanent correspondent in Algeria and had to go back to Paris, Boisfeuras decided to go with him. They took the holiday route along the Mediterranean coast as far as Montpellier and then crossed the Cevennes. This brought them one morning to the little Lozère village of Rozier on the edge of the Gorges du Tarn.
The trees had shed their last leaves and winter was beginning to assert its authority under the clear sky, among the quivering skeletons of elms, poplars and beech trees. All the gorges were bathed in a blue mist which the December sun could scarcely penetrate. The cliff of Capluc stood like a barrier at the junction between the black waters of the Joute and the green waters of the Tarn. Near a tumbledown old bridge a peasant pointed out a goat path leading up to the summit.
He was a nice old man in a black drill jacket, corduroy trousers, hobnailed boots and cloth cap. He spoke slowly with a strong accent, taking his time, happy to be alive:
“Up there at Capluc,” he said, “at one time there were Templars, as in many other places in the Causses. No one ever knew what they were up to in these parts.”
Pasfeuro and Boisfeuras embarked on the ascent. At each step the loose pebbles slipped away from under their feet. Pasfeuro admired the agility of the captain who effortlessly climbed the steepest slopes, swinging his shoulders slightly. The journalist was out of breath and, in spite of the cool breeze fanning his face, he sweated copiously. He thought to himself:
“What an unnatural life I led in Paris—the office, bars, cinemas and theatres to which Jeanine made me take her almost every night. She always seemed anxious to postpone the moment she would be alone with me. Each time we went to bed there was a minute or two of ghastly embarrassment. She would turn out the light and undress in the dark, but as soon as beauty’s body and the body of the beast came into contact, she would be overcome with passion. Does she turn out the light with Yves Marindelle, I wonder?”
Pasfeuro sat down on a boulder opposite a wall. He did not notice the splendid view, the ochre-coloured ledges of rock, the pinewoods punctuating the lighter expanses of stone and, far down below, the clear green waters of the Tarn.
The captain’s rasping voice broke into his unpleasant day-dream, plunging him into this bath of light and colour, and his love resumed its ludicrous dimensions.
“Come on, journalist, one last effort. There’s a village behind this rock, and above that the Templars’ commandery.”
Pasfeuro went on climbing and presently the ruins of a village appeared among the nettles, bushes and broom. Some of the houses were still intact with their dry-stone roofs, walls as thick as fortifications and semi-circular vaults. The Templars’ commandery dominated the village; all that remained of it was a vast stretch of wall which threatened to collapse and bury the rest of the ruins.
“It’s lovely,” said Boisfeuras, “this silence and solitude, these ruins and these gorges bathed in a blue mist, like some parts of the country in the north of China. It’s the first time I’ve come across a place in France where I don’t feel a stranger. What made the Templars, those strange warriors who owned most of the wealth of the western world, come and take refuge in this wilderness?”
“Not much is known of their history,” Pasfeuro told him. “The East, it’s certain, provided the Templars with a certain number of rites which they introduced into their Christianity, the initiation ceremonies among others. Perhaps they came up to these commanderies in the Causses to prepare the fusion between the Islamic East and the Christian West, which was the dream of their Grand Master Simon de Montferrat and which would have been the first step towards the unification of the world.
“The Templars discovered the power of money at a time when money was despised, and in Syria the sect of the Assassins had taught them the power of a dagger wielded by a fanatic, in other words terrorism. They were ready for the conquest of the world.”
“The ancestors of the Communists?”
“Perhaps. But the Templars were burnt on the stakes of Philippe le Bel just as the Communists were shot through the head by Stalin’s henchmen.”
“I’d rather like to rebuild this village and this commandery on this very spot,” said Boisfeuras, “bring a few men I know up here and re-create a new sect which might have its assassins but, above all its missionaries, who would attempt to bring about not the fusion of the religions of the East and the West, but of Marxism and what I can only call, for want of a better word, Occidentalism.”
“Do you really mean that?”
Boisfeuras gave a cynical sneer:
“Of course not. I’m in my father’s hands, I’ll soon be the director of an insurance company. Where would I recruit my initiates? Among the agents, clerks and typists? Initiates of that sort are only to be found among the young paratroop officers, who have a sense of brotherhood. They are still sufficiently unspoilt and disinterested to do without comfort. They are ready for any adventure and capable of laying down their lives for any high-minded cause, provided it does not conflict with certain prejudices to which they still cling.
“Can’t you see them in this restored village of Capluc, quarrying stones and reading books which they can no longer possibly ignore—Karl Marx, Engels, Mao-Tse-Tung, Sorel, Proudhon . . . ?”
“‘Go through the motions and you will believe,’ Pascal said. Go through the motions of the Communists, read their books, and you will become a Communist.”
“No. All the officers in my monastery would already be innoculated against Communism by the Vietminh camps.”
Boisfeuras gave another cynical laugh.
“But these are just words which are lost in the winds of Lozère, just a senseless dream which can never be realized, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like dreams of that sort, they culminate in Fascism, Communism, Nazism and unleash those epidemics which people find hard to cure. The Germans aren’t cured of Nazism, nor are the French cured of Pétain and the occupation. There’s not a single Communist country which has managed to stamp out the blight of Marxism. Don’t toy with ideas of that sort, Boisfeuras. Leave the tinder in the hands of the older generation; they’re in too much fear of dying not to use it with infinite precaution.”
“That’s also what my father thinks. He would like me to grow old quickly so as to leave the world in peace.”
• • •
A thick, soot-laden fog hung over Paris when they got there. It was cold and the city rumbled with a joyful ferocity, crunching and devouring mankind.
Boisfeuras and Pasfeuro were swallowed up in the seething crowd, the former cherishing his “big scheme,” the other his love, that darling vulture that was eating out his heart.