Leaning over a balustrade festooned with mauve bougainvillaea, Glatigny and Esclavier stood and looked at Algiers. They had just got up and, barefoot and in dressing-gowns, were waiting for Mahmoud to bring them breakfast out on the terrace. Étienne Vincent, an old friend of Glatigny’s, had asked them to stay at this villa of his in the Balcon de Saint-Raphael for as long as they remained in Algiers.
Glatigny admired the white city rising in regular tiers above the bay where two cargo boats, reduced to minute proportions, described two long parallel furrows in the early morning sea which was as smooth and grey as silk. In a soft voice, without turning round, he said:
“A sailor friend of mine once told me that on the heights of Algiers the early morning air had a peculiar quality, unique in the world, a mixture of brine, tar, pine, virgin oil and flowers. I like Algiers, but with a slight feeling of uneasiness. It’s a disconcerting town which has always surprised me with its reactions. The French of Algiers, well, you’ve only got to look at the Vincents . . . They’ve got five thousand acres of vineyards and are considered one of the wealthiest settler families in the Mitidja. Étienne, of course, is rather inclined to judge people by the number of vines or orange trees they own and Juliette’s snobbery is the sort you find in the wealthy, provincial middleclass . . .”
“I’ve never seen you as lyrical as this before, Jacques. The air of Algiers . . . ?”
Esclavier inhaled the sea breeze in order to get a whiff of the brine, tar, pine and virgin oil that Glatigny had mentioned, but the air of Algiers seemed anything but intoxicating. He found it rather insipid.
“Étienne Vincent was with me in Italy,” the major went on. “He was wounded on the Garigliano, and it’s a miracle he’s still alive. He belonged to the Cherchell draft, all of whose cadets were killed or wounded, a draft of Algerian Frenchmen and refugees from France. Étienne loves his land with the ferocity of a Cevennes peasant, his town like a burgher of the Middle Ages, prepared at a moment’s notice to take his pike and helmet and mount guard on the ramparts, and France with the ingenuousness of a sans-culotte . . .
“Philippe, don’t hang back, surrender to the charms of this town.”
“No,” said Esclavier. “I’m a child of the Mediterranean. I love the sun, indolence, idle chatter and well-upholstered girls. I’ve a certain taste for jurisprudence and rhetoric, for café-life and the Republic, lay schooling and great principles. I’m certainly descended from the garrulous and demagogic Greeks and the high functionaries of Rome, but I don’t like Algiers.”
“Here you’ve got the sea and the sun. The people are handsome, young and athletic, the girls long-limbed and sunburnt, the boys manly and muscular.”
“Yes, but they talk . . . and what an accent, the most common I’ve ever heard . . .”
“You’ve also got, as in the south of France, outdoor cafés with belote-players and freemasons endlessly preparing for the elections . . . but also yaouleds, cigarette-sellers and boot-blacks . . . those pilfering sparrows of the Algiers pavements. The smell of the Mediterranean is somewhat stronger than on the other side of the sea. It’s the smell of the Barbary Coast which is already apparent in Spain: a mixture of amber and billy-goat.”
Esclavier shook his head.
“You’ll never win me over to Algiers. It’s a puritan town, puritan in the Spanish way. The girls are attractive, but they’re all far too keen on preserving their virginity, because that’s a currency which is still in circulation among the Barbary pirates. Money seems to be the only standard of values with these recently established parvenus. I find the complacency and ostentation of these vulgarians even more unbearable than the Arab attitude. Their talk based on sexual comparisons, their conception of honour which is limited to the loins, the perpetual affirmation of their virility . . . everything about them puts me off.”
“Philippe, you’re nothing but a fake Parisian Latin, a great big bourgeois purist. You can’t see the funny side of the tribulations of a Bab-el-Oued family going off for a Sunday picnic on the beach, complete with stove, pots and provisions, followed by all their children, grandparents, cousins and maiden aunts. It’s a real circus. The small talk is comic and almost always rather racy. The pataoueds switch from anger to laughter, from insults—and God knows they’re pretty fluent in that respect—to hugs and kisses, from tears to practical jokes, and always with the deepest conviction. France, as we felt on our return from Indo-China, is becoming a vast cemetery haunted by extremely distinguished dead. In Algiers people are at least alive. I sometimes feel sorry I wasn’t born in a little street in Bab-el-Oued. I should have had a magnificently raucous and ragged childhood even though I might have appeared somewhat vulgar and circumscribed to you in later years.”
“Didn’t you have enough sunshine and squalor as a child?”
“None at all; my parents were well-bred, terribly well-bred, and utterly boring.”
Mahmoud arrived, shuffling in his slippers. He carried a big copper tray laden with heavy bunches of black Mitidja grapes, oranges and grapefruit from the Chelif plain, pears as yellow as farm-house butter and apples as red as a schoolboy’s cheeks, which had just been plucked in the garden of the villa.
The light was now a trifle sharper but the atmosphere still retained the limpid quality of dawn. Washing flapped on the roof-tops; an Arab merchant ambled past with his donkey, shouting his wares.
“I like Algiers,” Glatigny said once again. “I feel completely at home in this town, in absolute harmony with it; I could never agree to our giving it up.”
“Nor could I . . . because we’ve no longer the right to give it up, but I feel that on principle, not by inclination. I don’t like Algiers.”
Étienne Vincent came out and joined them a few minutes later. He limped and in spite of his sunburnt complexion, his broad shoulders and the determined expression he attempted to assume, one could tell that some mysterious mainspring had broken inside him. He had been drinking heavily for the last three months and his eyes were extremely bloodshot.
The settler was frightened, he was ceaselessly haunted by this fear of his, which he could no longer exorcize by going off and fighting.
He sank back into a basket-chair.
“A bomb exploded last night at the Clos Salembier; there was a lot of damage. There were some hand-grenades thrown in the Boulevard du Télemly, and some revolver shots on the Rampe Bugeaud; a farm was set on fire at Maillot . . . The fellaghas dragged off all the Europeans who were there: men, women and children. They were found a little farther off and they had all been treated in the same way . . .”
He described this series of horrors and catastrophes in a toneless, monotonous voice and his hands on the arms of his chair—beautiful, nervous, muscular hands—were trembling slightly.
“It’s simple being a soldier,” he exclaimed all of a sudden, “it’s very simple, and I only wish I could join up again.”
He refused a cup of coffee and stalked off. Glatigny realized he had gone to have a swig of brandy in his bedroom.
“You know, Philippe, Étienne was one of the bravest men I’ve ever known . . . What are your plans for today?”
“I’ve got to go back to camp; a lot of junk to deal with . . . Then I’ll go and bathe at the Club des Pins.”
“Do you know the private beach there is the most exclusive spot in Algiers? It was quite a job to persuade the members to allow mere paratroop officers to come and lie on their sand.”
“Are those gentlemen really so anxious about their wives, so frightened of being cuckolded?”
Glatigny slowly filled his pipe, lit it and took a couple of puffs. The care he took to perform the simplest gesture with a certain gravity and complete lack of haste was inclined to get on Philippe’s nerves. As the captain left the terrace, Glatigny’s mocking voice made him turn round:
“The French in Algiers aren’t cuckolded any more than we are, Philippe, but they make more of a song and dance about it. Don’t forget dinner tonight; the whole of Algiers will be there.”
• • •
Lying in the sun on the beach of the Club des Pins, with his eyes shut, Philippe Esclavier found himself in an intermediary state between waking and sleeping. The sound of the surf, the cries of children at play, the rustle of the wind in the pinewood mingled with the incoherent images of his dreams and served as an accompanying sound-track to them, endowing each one with a reality of its own.
Here was Étienne Vincent, in evening clothes, with a rifle in his hand, commanding a patrol in a cork forest in Grande Kabylie. He took an enormous bottle of brandy out of his pocket and said that Algeria had better be drunk while it was still in good condition. Glatigny refused the bottle which Vincent offered him but Esclavier, out of politeness and because he didn’t like Algiers, felt obliged to accept it. The brandy was as sticky and cloying as blood . . .
A woman’s voice close at hand dispelled this disjointed image.
“He’s sleeping like a dog.”
It was a pleasant, gentle voice, which seemed to settle on him like a butterfly. Cautiously, another voice inquired:
“Who is he? I’ve never seen him in the club.”
“He’s a Frangaoui. You can see, he’s as white as an aspirin tablet. He’s also got a scar on his stomach, another on his chest . . . How thin he is . . . He’s an officer . . .”
“You’re cheating; you saw the identity bracelet on his wrist.”
“I didn’t see anything, but I’m a psychologist.”
Esclavier half opened his eyes and saw two young women sitting on beach towels and rubbing sun-tan oil into their skin.
One was dark, tall and slender, with a slightly boyish manner. She looked about twenty-eight, thirty at the most. The other was an ash-blonde and, when she sat up, he compared her body which was bursting with vitality to a wooden bow, supple and at the same time firm. She was the one who had referred to him as an aspirin tablet. Her friend’s name was Isabelle. They went on with their conversation:
“Isabelle, are you going to come tonight? Bert will be there . . .”
“Bert’s a bore. He mopes and always looks as though he’s about to ask my husband for permission to make a pass at me. I feel like hitting him at times . . . No, I’m dining with the Vincents up at the Balcon de Saint-Raphael. Haven’t you been asked?”
“I don’t belong to the vineyard nobility, as you do . . .”
“Juliette Vincent told me there’s going to be a count there, the genuine article, crusades and all the rest of it . . . He’s a paratroop major . . . You know, those paratroops with the funny caps . . .”
Amused by this, Esclavier came over and knelt down beside the two young women. They looked scandalized.
“Major Glatigny,” he said, “is the father of five children, a good Christian and faithful husband. Let me introduce myself: Captain Philippe Esclavier of the Tenth Parachute Regiment, the ones with the funny caps. I’m also staying with the Vincents. If I look like an aspirin tablet it’s because we didn’t have much time for sun-bathing up in the mountains. I’m a bachelor and have no moral sense . . .”
“Captain,” Isabelle retorted, trying to make her voice sound as dry as she could, for she found the big paratrooper far from unattractive, “Captain, here in Algeria we’re not used to being accosted by strangers on the beach. It’s just not done.”
“I know, I’m just a filthy Frangaoui . . .”
“But since you’re a friend of the Vincents, don’t go on kneeling there like that as though you were on your mark for a hundred yards’ sprint. Come and sit down.”
The dark-haired Elizabeth lit a cigarette with a gold lighter she took out of her bag. “Men have no sense at all,” she was thinking. “They fall for Isabelle who turns love into a sterile, disappointing game; she’s frigid and therefore provocative.” Elizabeth, when she felt like it, could be warm, gentle and maternal with these hard and tender, saturnine and innocent child-men who were just back from the wars and would shortly be leaving again.
She would have liked to entertain the captain in the spare bedroom which she reserved for her guests and her lovers in her old Moorish house overlooking the ravine of the Femme Sauvage.
• • •
At a loose end, Glatigny strolled down to the Rue Michelet to have a drink in the Bar des Facultés. He wanted to behave like a selfish old bachelor and forget his wife and children for once. He planned to lunch afterwards at La Pêcherie on grilled red mullet and fried squid.
As he walked down the little lanes and stairways, he felt happy and vaguely uneasy, as though he was playing truant; he almost bought some flowers from an old Arab crouching by his basket—but to whom would he have given them? A girl-friend of his had once told him that Saint-Exupéry, on certain evenings in Les Halles, when he was drunk, used to buy up armfuls of flowers and solemnly decorate the dustbins with them. But Saint-Exupéry didn’t have any children and he wasn’t married to Claude.
He sat outside on the terrace of the Bar des Facultés and ordered an anisette, which was served with black, oily olives and little pieces of cheese. A lovely young girl, a brunette with the dark eyes and velvet skin of certain Andalusian women, carrying a beach bag in her hand, was jostled by a young man. The bag fell on the ground. Instead of picking it up and apologizing, the young man spat like an angry cat:
“You Moorish whore, get back to the Kasbah.”
Then he rushed off to rejoin a skinny, dried-up European girl with straw-coloured hair drawn back in a pony-tail.
Glatigny rose to his feet, picked up the bag and handed it back to the young brunette. She gazed at him with eyes burning with hatred.
“Didn’t you hear, Major? I’m only a Moor, a Moorish whore.”
The words came bubbling out of her mouth.
“I apologize for that little idiot. Please, don’t take it to heart. Here, come and sit with me.”
The girl hugged her bag tightly, as though she was frightened it would be snatched away.
“You, a paratroop major, are asking a little Moorish whore to sit at your table?”
“Please.”
She looked at him, hesitated, then sat down next to him, but ostentatiously moved her chair away from his. She ordered an orange juice and began to look a little more composed.
“That student who jostled me,” she said, “has failed his first-year medical exams twice. He’s a fool. I started at the same time as he did and now I’m in my third year . . .”
“My name’s Jacques de Glatigny,” the major gently told her.
“And I’m Aicha . . .”
She almost gave her surname, but suddenly stopped.
“I’m also from a ‘big tent.’”
The expression brought a smile to the major’s lips but it appealed to him. To him racialism and exaggerated nationalism were due to the middle class and parvenus and he felt close to “big tent” people, no matter what their country, their religion or the colour of their skin, for in them he found the same reactions as his own. Aicha was twirling the stem of her glass between her fingers and gazing at it pensively.
“They say,” she said, “that the lizards have caused a lot of bloodshed up in the mountains.”
“It’s a painful, unfortunate war . . .”
“Mere repression, that’s all, with guns, tanks and aircraft against bared breasts. The revolutionaries of 1789 wouldn’t be very proud of you.”
“You know, Aicha, those revolutionaries of 1789 went to a lot of trouble over my family, but only in order to cut their heads off. Would you like a cigarette?”
She took one, but he could see she was not used to smoking. Her lips made the paper wet, the tobacco came apart between her teeth, and she kept coughing.
Aicha was as beautiful as the fruit they had had for breakfast that morning up at the Balcon de Saint-Raphael, highly coloured and luscious, with firm, youthful breasts and naturally scarlet lips. He pictured her firm, sunburnt thighs under her light dress and was ashamed of the thought.
“I must be off,” she suddenly said.
She assumed a saucy manner which did not suit her at all.
“Would you go so far as to see me home?”
“Of course.”
“I live in the Kasbah.”
He settled the bill and took her by the arm; her skin was soft and downy. He hailed a taxi.
“Rue Bab-Azoum,” she told the driver, “yes, that’s right, at the entrance to the Kasbah.”
The driver, who was a European, pulled a face.
Just before they arrived, a patrol stopped the taxi. Aicha hugged her bag tightly. Seeing Glatigny, the sergeant saluted and waved them on.
The entrance to the Kasbah was sealed off by a network of barbed-wire entanglements and guarded by steel-helmeted Zouaves with their fingers on the triggers of their submachine-guns. They had the tense expression and drawn features of men who are frightened.
Glatigny stepped through a gap in the barrier, still holding Aicha by the arm.
“Is the lady with you, sir?” asked a fat captain in a uniform that was too tight for him. His eyes were alert but his voice was friendly.
“Yes, Captain.”
He waved the young girl on, but stopped Glatigny.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t go any farther. You’re not armed, I should have to detail a patrol to escort you . . .”
Aicha turned round with a mischievous grin on her face.
“I should like to see you again,” said Glatigny.
“Tomorrow, at the same time, at the same place, Major Jacques de Glatigny . . . And thank you for my bag.”
She started off up a stairway, her skirt swirling round her thighs.
The Zouave captain, who was bored, tried to start up a conversation. He said to Glatigny:
“There are still a few Europeans and quite a number of Jews living in the Kasbah. I wonder how long it’ll last . . .”
So the captain thought Aicha was Jewish or European. Glatigny saw no reason to disillusion him. He asked:
“It’s as bad as that, is it?”
The captain threw up his arms:
“Even worse. We’ve got absolutely no control over the hundred thousand Arabs in the Kasbah. We need a platoon escort just to move a few yards . . . So, like rabbits in a hutch, we’ve wired them in. It’s dotty. We’re simply mounting guard over the F.L.N. headquarters. Yes, sir, that’s what it has come to.”
Glatigny did not enjoy his red mullet and squid, and the rosé wine seemed to taste of vinegar.
• • •
Aicha went up the stairs at a run, putting to flight the cats which were feeding on the refuse outside some heavy, studded doorways with brass knockers. The ruins of an old moucharabieh overhung the lane; behind a little window with iron grilles a curtain was raised, then lowered again. But Aicha knew she was now out of danger. Since March French law had ceased to apply in the Kasbah. The Front was in complete control. All the stool-pigeons had been liquidated or were working for the F.L.N.: the last M.N.A. dissident had been killed the previous day and the police inspectors behind their sandbags received no more callers. The police were waiting in terror for the killer gangs which would one day come and cut their throats.
Aicha was proud to belong to this organization, to be a militant working for the cause, instead of wasting her time over pointless studies. Later on she would take them up again, when the green and white flag fluttered above Algiers.
At the corner of the Rue de la Bombe and the Rue Marmol she came across the whore Fatimah leaning against a wall. Fatimah was wearing the heavy silver ear-rings of a tribal girl, a yellow scarf and a fluffy white sweater; she had the attractive, brittle face of a girl who has seen a lot of life.
Fatimah gave her a friendly wink and murmured:
“God be with you, sister Aicha.”
Fatimah was aware of the young girl’s role and dangerous work; she too belonged to the Front, like everyone, like the whole of Algeria. Its members addressed one another as brother and sister. And Aicha’s heart swelled with pride, she felt she was doing something really worthwhile. She stopped for a moment to stroke a child whose head was covered in ringworm, who stared at her in astonishment.
At 22 Rue de la Bombe, she knocked three times, paused, then knocked twice again. She wondered what the paratroop major would have said if she had told him:
“In my bag I’ve got the wherewithal to blow Algiers and its rich modern quarters sky-high and I’m going to 22 Rue de la Bombe, where there are some men who will know how to use it.”
An old woman with hennaed hands opened the door. She looked at the young girl with disdain. Old Zuleika still observed the laws of Islam and considered Aicha a shameless wench for not wearing a veil and for dressing like a European woman.
But Aicha knew that once the Front had conquered the settlers, it would make every woman shed the veil, forbid polygamy, and put men and women on equal terms, as in the West.
The major had treated her like a lady, he had picked up her bag for her, the bag containing the detonators that the Communist woman had just handed over to her; he had opened the door of the taxi for her and had bowed as he said goodbye. The major had a slim, distinguished figure and his eyes were gentle and full of tenderness . . .
“Well, don’t stand there gaping,” Zuleika shouted in her strident Arabic, “come in.”
She went down a series of passages, up some stairs and across an outdoor terrace, then up some more stairs and down some more passages, where men and women whistled or signalled to one another as she passed. The whole of Amar’s bodyguard was in position. So it was he who was waiting for her.
The old woman still led the way. She was extremely quick on her feet in spite of her advanced age. She was said to be the mother of Youssef the Knife. As though that dirty dog could ever have had a mother!
Zuleika opened a door adorned with a partly obliterated black hand of Fatmah. In the little room beyond stood Youssef the Knife and one of his henchmen; they were both armed with Mat submachine-guns which they had seized from some French soldiers they had killed.
“Come in, little sister,” said Youssef.
He motioned to her with a hand loaded with heavy rings. He was trying to behave like a man of the world and was puffing at a long cigarette-holder, but he still looked like the pimp he was.
“Did you get the stuff?”
“Yes,” she said, “it’s in my bag. The European woman gave it to me.”
Youssef’s cold, cruel little eyes surveyed her from head to foot, pausing at the buttons and zip-fasteners of her dress, delving into her breasts and between her thighs. He ran the tip of his long, obscene tongue over his lips, while his acolyte gave an inane snigger.
Aicha handed the bag over to Youssef; he put it down on the table and seized her by the arm exactly as the major had done, but this contact repelled the young girl whereas she hadn’t minded the officer’s touch at all.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “Where is brother Amar?”
She could hear how unsteady her voice sounded.
“You’ll be seeing him. Aren’t you touchy, my little gazelle? The daughter of Caid Abd el Kader ben Mahmoudi doesn’t like being touched, at least she doesn’t like being touched by Youssef because Youssef was born in the gutter. Is that it?”
He shook her, while his acolyte smirked all the more inanely. Aicha suddenly felt weak, defenceless and infinitely vulnerable, and Youssef embraced her more closely. The pimp’s lips brushed her hair.
The young girl shuddered with disgust and tried to snatch her arm away. Amar came into the room; he was a frail, nattily dressed little man. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and his hands were as chubby as a child’s. He looked fragile and disarming. His voice was soft and gentle.
“Take your hands off her, Youssef.”
“It was only in fun, brother Amar.”
“Take your hands off her and don’t ever do that again, otherwise the Front will have to get rid of you.”
Youssef took a step back; his strength and virility were of no avail against this little man who, they said, had never touched a woman and for over ten years had been hunted by the police. If he was expelled from the Front, Youssef knew he would die . . . perhaps even before being told he had been expelled . . . like Lou Costello, the mobsman who controlled all the girls in the Kasbah, all the tchic-tchic players and kif-sellers. He was known as Costello because he was so tubby, like the American comedian, but his real name was Rafai and he was a killer whom everyone feared. A machine-gun burst through his body had taught him he was no longer the master.
Youssef was in France at the time because of some trouble over a woman. On his return he had been summoned to this very room. He had been ordered to put his hands up and, “to purge himself,” had been forced to swallow a big bowl of salt. Then Amar had told him about Costello’s death and demanded that he work for the Front with the rest of his gang.
Amar had spoken in his usual gentle voice, while behind him one of his henchmen had prepared a garrot with which to strangle the pimp in the event of his refusing the offer.
Youssef had that little strumpet Aicha in his blood; she came and inflamed it in his dreams, but he was still keener on saving his skin.
“Come along, sister Aicha,” said Amar.
He was the one who had suggested that they call one another brother and sister. Youssef thought the whole thing was ridiculous but never dared to laugh about it.
Amar led Aicha across a passage into a slightly cleaner room which had just been freshly whitewashed. Its only furniture was a wooden table, a camp bed, and two wicker chairs. On the table stood a portable typewriter, on one of the walls hung the F.L.N. flag.
Amar made Aicha sit down on the bed and the young girl embarked on her report, while he paced to and fro with astonishing litheness, making no more noise than a cat: a habit he had developed in the cell in which he had spent five years.
When Aicha started talking about the group of the Algerian Communist Party with whom she had made contact, Amar asked her for detailed information and made her describe every one of its members. He was wary of them because they were mostly Europeans or Jews who had proved their efficiency and had a doctrine and methods which had been put to the test in the rest of the world. Amar was a nationalist, “a Maurras type of nationalist,” as he had once been told by his cell companion at Lambèze, a former lieutenant in the L.V.F. As a Moslem, Amar had a deep aversion to renegades and pimps but he was already making use of the Algerian underworld and was quite prepared to co-operate with the Communists. He needed bombs and the Communists alone knew how to make them . . . so far. When they had served their purpose he would get rid of them in the same way as those who had joined the Tlemcen guerrilla band: Guerrale, Laban, Maillot, Bonalem . . .
“Let’s take them one by one, Aicha,” he said. “What’s this man Percevielle like? Do you know if he takes kif, or drinks, or has a weakness for women?
“You say they’re willing to take on two of our men in their workshops and teach them how to make explosives? What do they want in return? To belong to the Front? We could only accept them on an individual basis, provided they’re prepared to resign from the A.C.P. We’ll see about that . . .
“Tell me, do you ever see your brother, Captain Mahmoudi? He’s serving in Germany at the moment? Give me his address, will you. No, don’t be frightened, we don’t wish him any harm . . . None at all . . . Rather the reverse, in fact. We regard him as one of us. Not everything that France has done out here has been entirely useless; she’s provided us with some very fine soldiers . . . Like your brother . . .”
The Vincents had invited about twenty guests to dinner, all people of quality, at least they thought so.
Juliette Vincent counted them off on her fingers, wrinkling her brow as a rebellious fly kept buzzing just above it. Four army men: the general commanding the sub-division and his chief of staff—the general was paying court to her slightly more than mere politeness demanded—Jacques de Glatigny, for whom she had had a soft spot ever since 1945, and his friend Captain Esclavier; a professor of geology from the Faculty who was just back from the Sahara where, so everyone said, he had made some wonderful discoveries . . . anyway he was all the rage that month; and his wife whom she had never seen, whom no one had ever seen. There are women like that, whom no one ever sees anywhere. That accounted for six of the guests—the foreigners, so to speak.
Then came the Algerians, those who were exclusively from Algiers and did not own a country estate handed down to them by their ancestors. First of all, Dr. Yves Mercier with his wife and Geneviève, his sister-in-law, who was reputed to be his mistress; the three of them were always asked out together. After that, Bonfils and Maladieu, two big Public Works contractors who were established on both sides of the Mediterranean and dealt in millions. They had important political connexions and were lavish with their inside information. Bonfils had married a girl from the upper-crust of Algiers whose first husband had been killed in Italy. Dear little Yvonne still made a great show of being a war widow. She was also worth about fifteen hundred acres of the finest land. Maladieu was coming with a young actress who had a leading role in the company which was presenting Bal de Voleurs at the Grand Theatre—“My God, what have I done with the tickets?” she suddenly thought—Maître Buffier and his two daughters. People were saying that since he became a widower, the lawyer sought consolation among his youngest secretaries; his daughters, Monette and Loulou, were very much in the swim; they were to be seen at every ball, at every surprise party. They were both looking for husbands, preferably from metropolitan France. Juliette already knew that the two Buffier sisters would throw themselves at Glatigny and Esclavier. When they discovered the major was married they would quarrel over the captain. Loulou would get him, as usual, and Monette would come and weep on her shoulder. Juliette had a certain affection for poor little Monette. At one time, in order to hang on to a possible fiancé, she had surrendered to him entirely, which had been unwise and useless. Luckily only a few close friends knew about this.
Then Isabelle Pélissier, her husband and their follower. That was what Juliette called Bert, “a follower.” The Vincents, the Pélissiers, the Bardins and the Kelbers belonged to the same clan: the big settler overlords of the Mitidja and the Chelif. Isabelle was a Kelber and Juliette a Bardin.
Things weren’t going very well between Paul and Isabelle; yet they were childhood friends. What a curious girl, that Isabelle, Juliette reflected. She was considered flighty and flirtatious and whenever she disappeared for several months from Algiers, every one thought she was having an affair. But in point of fact she had gone off to stay with old grandpa Pélissier on his farm which he had sworn never to leave again.
Before the troubles the old man used to spend six months of the year in France; since November 1954 he had not set foot in Algiers.
“Whatever happens,” he had said, “I shall only leave the farm as a corpse—having died from old age” (he was eighty years old) “or because the fellaghas have killed me or because we have lost Algeria and I have put a bullet through my head.”
They said he still drank a litre of rosé wine at breakfast.
There would be no one from Government House at the dinner. The Vincents had fallen out with the Resident Minister.
Isabelle was the first to arrive, in a very simple grey dress.
“It suits you perfectly,” Juliette told her, as she kissed her on the cheek.
Isabelle knew that the compliment was sincere for it was slightly tinged with envy.
“I’ve come to help you receive your guests,” she said. “Let’s see your table plan. You’ve put me next to old Colonel Puysange. He gives me the creeps; he’s as lecherous as an old curé. No, put me here, that’s right, next to this Captain Esclavier.”
“But what about Monette?”
“Give her Bert.”
“Captain Esclavier is bald and bloated and suffers from B.O.”
“Liar. He’s tall and slim, with lovely grey eyes. He’s brash and very sure of himself.”
Out in the garden, as the sun went down, iced champagne was served by Arab servants. They were dressed in the traditional uniform: red leather slippers, baggy trousers, and short tunics with gilt buttons.
While paying his usual subaltern’s compliments to Juliette, the general automatically kept an eye on Monette and Loulou Buffier, who made their skirts swirl every time they moved so as to display their golden legs.
The general was uneasy. He had just heard that on the 10th of August a big meeting of the rebel leaders had been held in the Soumann Valley, that it had taken place quite openly and that the Kabyles and the hard core of the interior had got the better of the Arabs and the politicians from outside. Open warfare was now inevitable, irregular, guerrilla warfare which would now be conducted by the most intelligent of the Algerians. Furthermore, they would be able to rely financially and politically on the 200,000 Kabyles who were employed in France.
The general asked for some more champagne. It was dry and chilled, exactly as he liked it. The Vincents certainly did their guests well, they kept the best table in Algiers. He decided to forget his worries.
Colonel Puysange had joined Glatigny and Esclavier who were chatting to Isabelle and her husband. He seized the major by the arm in a friendly manner.
“Glad to see you again, my dear Glatigny. What news of Claude? And how are your five children?”
He was warning Isabelle, if she did not know it already, that Glatigny was the father of a large family. Every woman, he thought, had a horror of that buck-rabbit sort of man.
Ever since he arrived in Algiers, Puysange had had his eye on Isabelle and kept weaving intricate webs all round her.
Glatigny introduced Esclavier to him.
“Delighted to know you, Captain. Your name’s familiar to me, of course. It’s a great name in our Republic . . .”
Isabelle looked at the captain with renewed interest. Puysange was a pain in the neck. He turned to Isabelle, fully aware of her passionate nationalism and attachment to the land of Algeria:
“This name may mean nothing to you, madame: the Dreyfus case, the Front Populaire of 1936, the Fighters for Peace, the Stockholm Appeal. Of course, the captain’s absolutely on the other side, since he’s out here with us.”
Esclavier went white in the face.
“You seem to have forgotten my family’s activity during the Resistance, sir, not to mention the part played by my Uncle Paul, General de Gaulle’s delegate. Our Resident Minister was one of his closest friends. I hardly dare call on him as he’s anxious to take me into his military department whereas, by temperament, I prefer to be in action . . . in the mountains.”
Glatigny appreciated this passage of arms. Esclavier had just scored a direct hit. Puysange had been doing all he could to join the Minister’s military department, and his horror of combat and campaigning was a legend in the army.
The professor of geology came and joined them. The lenses of his spectacles were like magnifying glasses, behind which his eyes seemed to swim like a couple of fish in an aquarium. He was extremely thin, with the coppery red complexion produced by the Sahara, he wore thick winter clothes and one of his shoe-laces was undone. He asked the captain:
“You’re the son of Professor Étienne Esclavier, are you? I’m delighted!”
He seized Philippe’s hand and started shaking it with an energy which one would never have suspected in such a skeleton.
Seeing that things were not turning out as he expected, Puy-sange stumped back towards his general. But the innocent pleasure which this worthy man felt at the good dinner which was about to be served in the loveliest surroundings in Algiers, made him all the more exasperated. He decided to ruin his evening for him and leaned towards him.
“I almost forgot, General. The commander-in-chief wants a detailed report on the situation in Algeria for the Ministry of Defence. He’d like you to let him have it by Monday morning.”
“Hell!” said the general. “There goes my Sunday . . . The situation . . . well . . . you know it as well as I do, Puysange . . .”
“The Minister needs it for a question to be put before the Assembly . . . This report, without disguising the known facts, must be on the optimistic side . . .”
The consommé au madère was served.
Paul Pelissier was watching his wife, the other Isabelle, the woman she suddenly became when she wanted to appeal to a stranger: her eyes were sparkling, her skin looked brilliant, her voice sounded warmer. He himself was only entitled to her withdrawn expression, her inert and unresponsive body. For the last six months they had been sleeping in separate rooms.
He noticed Bert who was also looking at her, who was suffering as he was but who had not had the luck to hold her at least once or twice in his arms, the luck or the disappointment.
Isabelle was trying to seduce the captain who was sitting next to her; she was displaying all her charms but would certainly get rid of him before he ever became her lover. There were moments when Paul was glad that his wife was frigid.
His neighbour was Monette. He knew the little idiot had gone to bed with Tremagier in the hope that he would marry her. He felt an urge to be unpleasant:
“Well, Monette, have you heard from Albert recently?”
The young girl blushed and hung her head.
On the other side of her, Bonfils and Maladieu were discussing business across the little actress who was sitting between them. He lent an ear. Maldieu was talking about the plans for a new building project out at El Biar. Paul was interested in this; if the project materialized, the land he owned would increase its value threefold.
Real estate and dealings on the stock exchange fascinated him as much as gambling, whereas he had never been interested in vines and citrus fruits. The settler’s days were numbered. Isabelle still felt deeply attached to the land, but then she was just a sentimentalist. Paul regarded himself as someone up-to-date, a man of the times, with an international outlook equal to that of a New York broker accustomed to luxury hotels. Summer on the Côte d’Azur or in the Balearics, winter in Switzerland. He had a certain prediliction for that country, with its stable finances, and he was far from insensible to the respect its inhabitants showed for money . . . He had spent three months in a sanatorium there and retained a pleasant memory of that period of aseptic semi-consciousness.
When he had left for the sanatorium, old Pélissier had said to Paul’s father:
“Only one grandson you’ve been capable of giving me, and he’s turned out unsound.”
Paul could not understand why his grandfather had such a passion for Isabelle. In moments of doubt and defiance, when he had drunk too much and his wife had denied him his rights, he imagined there was a vast plot hatched against him and made a show of sniffing at his food as though it was poisoned.
Glatigny was exchanging small talk with Loulou Bouffier. The young girl found the major distinguished and intelligent and was sorry he was married. Another pointless dinner, she thought. She turned her attention to Captain Esclavier, but Isabelle had appropriated him completely. That little bitch had an astonishing talent for keeping the man in whom she was interested apart from everyone else round him. Paul was bursting with jealousy and Bert could not bring himself to eat—it was very funny and served them right! Hallo, there was Monette wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. Still thinking of Tremagier, the little fool! In strict confidence she had told him she had not even enjoyed it, which really was the limit! The professor of geology was gulping his soup rather noisily. Every now and then he would stop, with his spoon in mid-air, and declare that there was oil in the Sahara.
Glatigny was thinking about Aicha. He tried to imagine her at this dinner, violent and rebellious, reminding them all of the tragedy being enacted in Algeria; she would have been the loveliest woman present apart from that strange Isabelle who was leaning over towards Esclavier and arguing with him, her cheeks aflame.
“No,” Esclavier was saying to Isabelle. “The only reason I’m here is to do my duty as an officer and I try to do it as best I can. In Indo-China, I sold my soul: out here, I’m simply doing a job.”
“Out here, you’re in France, Captain. My grandfather came from Alsace. He was driven from his home by the Germans in 1870, and he was given a settler’s plot. My name’s Kelber and our village in Alsace is called Wintzeheim. They also make wine there. My grandfather brought some vine plants with him when he left, with five hundred gold francs as his total assets.
“No, don’t look at my husband; he’s not one of us, he’s from Algiers. His grandfather and mine were close friends. He came from Touraine with his vine plants. I do so wish I could make you understand . . .
“Would you like to come with me tomorrow to our estate in the Mitidja? We’ll go and see old Pélissier; my own grandfather is dead, but Julien Pélissier is so like him . . . that I feel I’m his grand-daughter. We’ll leave at dawn, as soon as the road is open.”
To Esclavier, Isabelle had suddenly stopped being that flirtatious, winsome girl with the magnificent body whom he would have liked to hold in a long embrace; she was beginning to assume a proper shape and existence in these surroundings which had no attraction for him.
Going to look at some vineyards in the company of a French colonial Egeria did not appeal to him in the least. Nevertheless he accepted the invitation in the hope that the drive would bring them closer together and offer certain opportunities which he would be able to exploit.
“I’ll come and fetch you at seven o’clock,” Isabelle went on. “Bring a weapon with you.”
“A dramatic outlook on life peculiar to the Mediterranean races,” thought Philippe.
Vincent, who had drunk a great deal, left the table before his guests. Everyone pretended not to notice. Maladieu was speaking with brutal lyricism about Algiers where buildings were going up like mushrooms. One could tell that, as far as this particular businessman was concerned, the development of the Algerian capital was not only a sound speculation but an adventure which suited his sanguine nature.
The little actress was charming and silly; she recited some poems and everyone applauded. The general left; he looked very worried. Puysange asked Esclavier and Glatigny to lunch with him next day at the Saint-Georges. They were glad to be able to refuse, Esclavier on the grounds of a previous engagement with Isabelle Pélissier and Glatigny because of urgent matters that required his attention.
The geologist was still talking about oil, anticlinals and grapholithic sandstone. Everyone nodded his head very wisely.
• • •
Lieutenant Pinières was dining alone in the Brasserie de la Lorraine. He had been trying to write to Merle’s sister, but had torn up several rough drafts one after the other. It was all over. What answer could there be to the young girl’s declaration:
“I loved Olivier so much that I could not bear the idea of having his best friend always with me . . .”
Pinières had toyed with several ready-made phrases, such as: “Life must go on” and “Nothing lasts for ever” but on paper they looked pointless and odious.
Pinières could not bear his dreadful solitude any longer. He ordered a double brandy and decided to visit the clandestine brothel where he had been told he could find a Vietnamese girl . . . Tomorrow he would seek refuge with Dia who would take him out deep-sea fishing, which was the doctor’s latest passion. Then they would have some fish soup and get so drunk they would have to crawl on all fours up the grey sandy beach.
• • •
“Don’t you know how to eat with chopsticks?” Marindelle asked Christiane. “It’s quite simple; you hold one of them steady and use the other as a lever. No, hold them a little higher up . . . Now then, let’s try again.”
They were in a little Vietnamese restaurant which had just opened at the top of the Boulevard Saint-Saens.
The only other people in the room were half-a-dozen Nungs in black berets belonging to the commander-in-chief’s personal bodyguard, two colonial infantry sergeants, and a half-caste.
Christiane Bellinger abandoned her chopsticks and used a spoon to eat her rice. She was surprised and secretly delighted with her adventure: this impromptu dinner with a young paratroop captain.
Because he was five years younger than she was, he had appeared to her as a sad young lad at a loose end, with great curiosity and a lively mind. She was astonished when he had told her he was a professional soldier and had been in the army since the age of nineteen.
At the Prado Museum, in a little cubbyhole next to the Saharan gallery, she had been busy taking a plaster caste of a neolithic skull which she had discovered herself at Gardhaia. She was just wiping her hands clean on her old white smock when the captain had bashfully come in, with his red beret in his hand.
“Could you tell me where the guide has gone, please, madame? I can’t find anyone in the museum, even to pay for my ticket.”
She had laughed:
“Are you as anxious as all that to pay for your ticket?”
“No, but I’m looking for a catalogue with some information on those primitive paintings discovered in the Sahara . . .”
“They’re only copies, the originals are at Tassili des Ajjer.”
“I don’t even know where Tassili des Ajjer is. You see how badly I need a catalogue, or a guide!”
Thus it was that Christiane Bellinger, a lecturer in ethnology at the Faculty of Algiers, after washing her hands and taking off her smock, had acted as the young captain’s guide for the entire afternoon.
Never had she had such an attentive and passionately interested pupil; the conscientious, unassuming Christiane had shone as a result. She had launched into the boldest comparisons, conjuring up the history of the dark ages of the Maghreb, with as much dash as the worthy Maître E. F. Gautier. The captain had asked her out to dinner. He was now the one who was doing the talking, as he initiated her into the mysteries of Vietnamese cooking, telling her about the Far East, about that war in Indo-China whose complexity she had never realized, about the Vietminh for whom he unmistakably displayed a certain sympathy.
When he saw her home afterwards, Christiane asked him in for a drink. It was only as she opened the heavy studded door of her old Arab house that she remembered that men meant nothing to her, that she had decided to do without them and organize her entire life round her work. But the captain was more of a child than a man, with that odd tuft of fair hair on the top of his head.
• • •
“I shan’t go,” Raspéguy said to himself.
Boudin was contentedly smoking his pipe, buried in a rickety old armchair with a detective novel in his hand.
“What do you think of women?” the colonel asked him all of a sudden.
Boudin peered over the top of his book in surprise:
“I haven’t really thought of them much . . .”
And he returned to his book. Raspéguy looked out of the window at the sea and the crowd of bathers on the beach. An Arab went past, carrying a sort of jerrycan containing ice-cream.
“Ices . . . Ices . . . Cold as snow . . . Fifty francs.”
“Right, I’ll go, but in civvies,” the colonel decided. “And I’ll tell her that if she won’t sleep with me tonight, she can go and get stuffed elsewhere: a dirty little slut of a Mahonnaise who can’t see a pair of pants without . . .
“If Esclavier or Glatigny got to hear about this, I’d look pretty silly. With Boudin, there’s no danger; he’s not sharp enough.”
The colonel went into his room to change; when he came back Boudin was still reading.
“Going out?” asked the major.
“Yes, I thought I’d go into town, see what’s on at the movies, maybe spend the night at the hotel.”
“See you tomorrow, then.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Boudin dashed into his room to don his walking-out uniform. The colonel, he was certain, was off to see his little slut of a Mahonnaise.
This evening Boudin was going to dine at the Ambassade d’Auvergne, have a good solid meal of sausages and cabbage, and all his compatriots would listen to him religiously and count his medals. They had asked him to bring the colonel along, but the dinner would then lose all its spice, for Raspéguy would be the centre of attraction.
Concha was seventeen, with dark curls and the rounded forehead of a young kid. Her red skirt set off her slender waist, and her blouse her firm young breasts. The merest suspicion of a moustache emphasized her full lips which were thickly coated with dark red lipstick.
The whole of Bab-el-Oued was hanging out of the windows waiting for the promised arrival of the colonel with whom she went out. Paulette, her friend and best enemy, was standing beside her outside the Martinezes’ house to see “if the colonel was true.” Concha stamped her foot.
“Mira, I keep telling you. It’s a colonel he is, I’ve even seen his badges, five bars on each of his shoulders.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Well, nearly. You are a beast! The paratrooper came and spoke to him in his Jeep and he called him colonel.”
“That’s a good one! He’s probably only the driver, your colonel.”
“Colonel, I tell you, even though his name is Raspéguy, and he’s going to arrive in full uniform.”
“Raspéguy, that’s not a French name!”
“Not French? It’s as French as Lopes, isn’t it?”
Paulette’s surname was Lopes, but her christian name made her intransigent in matters of origin.
The big black car came gliding up the slope and drew up in front of the two girls. Furious that a little slut could get under his skin to such an extent, Raspéguy slammed on the brakes. He opened the door and leant out:
“Are you coming?”
“Why didn’t you put on your uniform?”
“Maneate un poco,” he shouted to her in Spanish.
With her hands on her hips, Paulette gave a snort of triumph.
“You see, he’s only the driver . . . a Spaniard from Oran who wants people to think he comes from France.”
“Never mind, you’ve never driven in a car like this!”
Concha bundled into the car, furious at having lost face, while the old women leaning out of all the windows shrieked with laughter and slapped their thighs.
“Where shall we go?” asked Raspéguy.
“It’s all the same to me. I’ve got to get back early.”
“You told me you were free this evening?”
“With a colonel, yes, but not with a driver.”
The colonel switched off the engine and took his officer’s identity card out of his pocket.
“Can you read? No! You can see the photograph, though. Now either you get out at once or else you stay with me. Pronto, puta de chica . . . make up your mind about it.”
“What a way to talk to me!”
She threw him a sidelong glance and sat back in her seat.
“I’ll stay.”
“What good does it do me, your being a colonel, if the others don’t know it,” Concha presently said, pouting as the car streaked along the coastal road. “Don’t drive so fast, you’re going to kill me, you great brute.”
But she was proud of the colonel’s contempt for the rules of the road and whenever he passed a car, hooting furiously, she gave a saucy little wave; once or twice she also put her tongue out but that was only because she thought she had recognized some merchants from her neighbourhood.
The young girl’s presence inflamed Raspéguy’s blood and sent shivers up his spine. He had booked a room in a small seaside hotel and carefully set his trap. The owner, a Maltese, whom he had gone to see in uniform in order to impress him, had proved extremely understanding.
As he drove along he fondled Concha’s breast. She allowed him to do so for a few minutes, then suddenly scratched his hand.
“You’re for it tonight, my girl,” he said to himself, “or else I’ve forgotten all my Latin.”
Then he realized he couldn’t very well forget all his Latin since he had never learnt any in the first place, and put his foot down on the accelerator.
First of all they went for a bathe and Concha admired the colonel’s powerful physique, his long muscles without an ounce of fat on them.
“He’s a handsome man,” she thought, “but there isn’t a single hair on his body.”
Hairiness was very popular in the Martinez family, who regarded it as a sign of virility.
“Frangaouis,” Odette had told her, “are not so quick off the mark as our men . . . but they’re much more cunning.”
She made up her mind to be extremely careful. She had already been close to disaster more than once. Men’s desire disturbed her most of all at night, when “her blood boiled” at the thought of their caresses.
Raspéguy swam far out to sea until his head was nothing but a black dot, and when he came back she could see his diaphragm expand and contract as he panted for breath.
“Well I never!” she said. “I thought you were going to drown yourself.”
“What would you have done?”
“Hitch-hiked back.”
With their apéritifs they ate some skewered meat. Calmer after his long swim, Raspéguy watched the Sunday-afternoon Algerian crowd. Its vitality, its mixture of child-like innocence and vulgarity, appealed to him, but he thought the men made too many gestures with their hands when they talked and that in that respect they resembled the Arabs. A number of sturdy, handsome young men walked past their table and ogled Concha, but they were not the sort who would ever join up in a parachute regiment and Raspéguy felt almost inclined to tell them so.
“Listen,” said Concha, “after dinner let’s go out dancing or to a movie. I’ve got to be back by midnight because of the curfew.”
“I’ve got a pass.”
“I haven’t.”
Bowing from the waist, the manager ushered them into the restaurant.
“There’s not a table left, sir,” he said, “they’ve all been booked; but if you would like to go upstairs you could have dinner in one of the small rooms with a balcony looking over the sea. They’re used as bedrooms during the week, but on Saturdays and Sundays we serve meals up there.”
“Let’s go somewhere else,” said Concha.
“No.”
She looked askance at the colonel but her woman’s intuition, which in her case took the place of intelligence, told her that he would not yield an inch and would rather leave her stranded on the road.
A small table was laid out on the balcony. Concha noticed the bed with its white coverlet in the corner of the room and the towels hanging by the side of the wash-stand.
While they were eating Raspéguy made no attempt to kiss her or fondle her. He showered her with little attentions, but his cruel eyes never left her and followed each of her gestures, her slightest movement; they were as cold and fascinating as the eyes of a reptile.
Concha began to feel drowsy.
At the end of the meal the colonel ordered champagne. It was the first time she had ever drunk champagne. It tickled her nose and she would have laughed out loud if she had not felt so frightened and if she had not at the same time derived such pleasure from her fear. She was both hoping and dreading that something might happen.
The colonel got up and locked the door; he moved with dangerous deliberation, without making a sound.
“No,” she said, “the curfew . . .”
He still had not touched her and yet she felt her whole body was being caressed and ready to surrender.
He picked her up in his arms and, just as he was putting her down on the bed, she summoned up all her strength and aimed a kick at his groin. She struggled valiantly for several minutes, remembering the story she had been taught at school about Mr. Séguin’s nanny-goat, but she soon realized that the nanny-goat had always wanted to be eaten by the wolf and so, like the nanny-goat, she surrendered with a sigh of relief.
Raspéguy did not bring Concha home until the following evening. The whole neighbourhood realized what had happened. Out of bravado, just as she was leaving her lover, she bent down and kissed him. She shrugged her shoulders as she saw all the familiar faces leaning out of the windows.
“Those lads smirking there, little do they know that none of them’s as strong as my colonel, for all the hairs on their chest!”
For several years now, Concha had had a detailed knowledge of the sexual possibilities of men. At Bab-el-Oued these were discussed by the women with the same passion as football matches were discussed by their husbands.
To avenge the honour of the Martinezes, her mother gave her a sound drubbing with a broom-handle, though without hurting her at all, but Concha, who knew what was expected of her, promptly began screaming at the top of her voice that she was being murdered, which gave all the neighbours an excuse for gathering en masse out on the landing.
When they began to protest rather too loudly, Angelina Martinez came out and gave them to understand that her daughter was a little tart and that if she wanted to kill her she was perfectly entitled to do so.
Then she rounded on Montserrat Lopez and, since both of them were fairly articulate, there was a slam-bang brawl which echoed and re-echoed through the sonorous cul-de-sac which was Bab-el-Oued.
“Anyway my daughter needn’t feel ashamed,” said Angelina, “because as least if she does go whoring, it’s with a colonel, yes, a genuine colonel. My son Lucien went to check up. Colonel Raspéguy, he’s called, he’s in command of the ones with the funny caps; whereas your daughter goes out every night and gets tumbled by the soldiers in the guard-post and by some who aren’t even sergeants!”
“My daughter! A lieutenant asked her to marry him, but she didn’t want to . . .”
Meanwhile old Martinez had not even budged from his armchair; as a good Spaniard, he felt that a man worthy of the name had no business interfering in women’s affairs.
He simply said to his daughter:
“Now that the damage is done, do whatever your colonel wants, anything, you understand, anything, like a puta, to hang on to him. That was how your mother married me.”
Then he relapsed into silence and appeared to take no more interest in the matter.
• • •
“How much farther is it?” Esclavier asked.
They had been driving for fifteen miles through a flat, monotonous countryside, between vines laden with grapes ready to be picked for the vintage. The sun was hot and dazzling. At rare intervals they passed vast corrugated iron sheds and huge farmhouses roofed with red tiles that looked like factories.
Several times they had to pull over to the side of the road to make room for convoys of armoured cars.
“Here we are,” said Isabelle.
She turned off to the left and through a big wooden archway which bore the freshly-printed inscription: “Domaine Pélissier.”
The car skirted some sheds and outhouses behind which a company of infantry was encamped with its tents and vehicles, crossed a sweet-scented orange-grove and drew up in front of a long, low, freshly-whitewashed house with a veranda running all round it.
An enormously tall old man appeared, walking on two sticks. He had a rubicund complexion and white whiskers growing on his chin, out of his nostrils and out of his ears.
He appeared to be in a fury of rage and began by barking:
“Where’s Paul? He didn’t come with you. Come here and give me a kiss.”
Esclavier saw that as the old man put his arms round the young woman, his eyes shone as though brimming with tears.
“Who’s this fellow?”
He pointed at the captain with his stick.
“I’ve brought him here, grandfather, so that you can tell him why we want to stay on in Algeria, because he doesn’t understand. He’s dirty Frangaoui who has done a lot of fighting . . . for the Chinese . . . But he doesn’t care for our war at all.”
“Come here,” said the old man. “Come on, I’m not going to eat you. You’re like my other grandson, the real one who was killed in Italy, tall and lean, all bone and muscle. You’ve got the Légion d’Honneur, I see, but what’s that, yes, the green one?”
“The Croix de la Libération.”
“So you were with de Gaulle? I was all for Pétain and Giraud myself, because they at least were gentlemen and your de Gaulle was just a politico who brought the Communists back. But you fought, which was the right thing to do.”
In the drawing-room with its tall shutters, through which the sun’s rays filtered, shimmering with dust, they were given some iced rosé wine whose sharpness disguised its strength.
“I made this wine myself,” the old man told them, “the best rosé in the Mitidja. I sell it in bottles with my own trademark, I don’t export it to France to strengthen our anaemic wines.
“Would you like to know why I want to stay on here in Algeria? For the sake of this wine and a number of other things. When I brought the first plants out here, it was a pale little Anjou. Look what the soil of Algeria has done for it; it has given it some of its own fire.”
“That’s true,” said Esclavier, “but perhaps your wine is lacking in subtlety and tact . . .”
“We’ve had enough of subtlety and tact; what we need is strength and justice.
“Is he your lover?” he suddenly asked Isabelle. “No? Yet I told you to get yourself one. Our women must choose their husbands or lovers from among the men who are capable of protecting us.”
“I told you, grandfather, this one doesn’t want to protect us.”
“I never said anything of the sort,” Esclavier protested.
He was beginning to like this old man for his violence, his outspokenness and absolute contempt for convention.
“Well then, what did you say?” the old man barked. “Women always understand the men they’re in love with either too well or not well enough.”
Isabelle tried to fight back.
“I’m not in love with anyone.”
“Yet this is the first officer you’ve ever brought to see me. And I must say, you haven’t made a bad choice. When the war’s over he can leave the army and move in here with you.”
“What about Paul?”
“Paul will get what he deserves: a kick in the ass.”
As they went into lunch, Isabelle took Esclavier by the arm and held him back for a moment.
“You must forgive him, Philippe . . . The troubles have gone to his head a bit.”
The captain was dimly aware she had called him by his christian name. After the long drive in the sun in an open car, the wine had made him slightly fuddled and his reflexes were slow—“all velvety” as his mother used to say. It was not often he thought of her.
The meal consisted of fried courgettes and a highly spiced couscous, washed down by the same rosé wine which went to the head and caused a pleasant torpor in the limbs.
After venting his anger on Algiers, Paris, the Republic, the other settlers and these idiotic Moslems who were going to lose everything in their rebellion, the old man fell fast asleep at the table.
Two Arab servants came and helped him to his feet and gently guided him up to his bedroom.
“They worship him,” said Isabelle. “He curses them, tells them to go off and join the fellaghas and leave him alone, but they all know how much he loves them. He has built houses and an infirmary for them, and given them plots of land; he pays them much more than the other settlers, which has caused him quite a lot of trouble. At one moment they even spread the rumour that he was helping the Nationalists.”
“What’s the Arabic for ‘Independence’?”
“Istiqlal.”
“That’s a very strong word, like your grandfather’s wine, it’s stronger than gratitude . . . I say, I’m falling asleep in my chair . . .”
“There’s a bed made up for you.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to drive round the farm in the Jeep. As a child, I used to play in the orange-groves . . . with the boy who was killed in Italy. Paul used to hide behind a tree and watch us.”
Philippe lay down fully dressed on his bed in a room full of books, sporting trophies and club pennants.
On the opposite wall, in a lemon-wood frame, hung a picture of a cadet in uniform. He was twenty years old, with a dimple in his left cheek, and seemed to be contemplating him with a conspiratorial smile. Philippe dropped off to sleep and the young cadet’s smile accompanied him.
When he woke up, Isabelle was sitting beside him. She handed the captain a glass of iced water.
“You’ve slept for two hours,” she said.
He noticed she had changed her clothes; she was no longer wearing the light printed dress in which she had started out from Algiers but a coarse linen shirt, a pair of old jeans and desert boots, and from her leather belt hung a revolver in a highly polished leather holster.
“I don’t like women playing at soldiers,” he said.
“I’ve no wish to be raped and have my throat cut a few yards from home without being able to defend myself. What my grandfather was too upset to say is that we want to hold on to this land because we were born here and made it what it is. We’ve got as much right to it as the settlers of the Far West who drew up in their covered wagons on a river bank where there was nothing but a handful of Indians. They built their huts and began tilling the soil. Only the American settlers killed the Indians, whereas we’ve looked after the Arabs.
“It would be mad, unjust, unthinkable to drive us out of this territory which we were the first to cultivate since the Romans, out of these houses which we have built . . .
“What on earth have we ever done to you, you people from France?
“In 1943 and 1944 we came to fight for you. At that time we loved France more than you can possibly imagine, while our brothers and fiancés were being killed in the mud of Italy, the beaches of Provence and the forests of the Vosges.
“Why do you want to desert us?”
She had become very emotional, wringing her hands in front of the captain, and there were tears on her cheeks which she did not even wipe away.
Esclavier took her hand and drew her gently towards him. He was moved to see how the elegant little doll, the flirt of the Club des Pins, was transformed into a “Passionaria” of the land of Algeria.
Isabelle came and lay down beside him. He unfastened her belt and tossed it into a corner of the room together with the weapon hanging from it.
Later on, when Isabelle tried to recall in detail how it had all happened, she could not remember a thing, only a wave which came rolling in from afar, towered above her, broke over her and swamped her, dragging her under in a turmoil of sand and gold.
At another moment she saw herself as the land of Algeria. The warrior bending over her was fertilizing this land with his strength and by this union she became part of him for ever.
It was the first time she had found any pleasure in the act and when the wave receded, leaving her insert on the shore, when she saw Philippe lying beside her, naked but by no means shameless and repellent as every other man’s body had seemed to her hitherto, she felt that no harm could come to her ever again, that Algeria was saved and all the dangers dispelled.
She stroked his scars and his wounds, timidly at first with the tips of her fingers, then she kissed them.
In the evening they walked hand in hand through the orange groves. Old Pélissier accompanied them in his wheelchair.
“I’ve managed to make Philippe understand,” she told him.
He ran his hand through his whiskers.
“It must have been quite a job, you made so much noise about it. Do you really think he understood just because you rubbed yourself up against him like a cat in heat . . . Well, anyway, he’s now got something worth protecting in Algeria.”
“What?”
“You.”
Esclavier and Isabelle spent the night on the estate. The wave came and bowled Isabelle over again and Philippe no longer made any attempt to fight against this passion which was creeping over him.
In the middle of the night a servant came and woke them up. They went outside; there was a red glow in the sky; the neighbouring farm had been set on fire.
The Murcier estate was one of the oldest in the area; it had been founded a few years after the conquest by one of Bugeaud’s officers who had been demobilized on the spot.
Leaning on his sticks and sniffing the air, old Pélissier went on cursing without a pause. Eventually he had a stroke and had to be put to bed. Isabelle decided to stay behind on the farm and Philippe drove back to Algiers by himself in the young woman’s car. Before leaving her, he said:
“I’d like you to meet Dia.”
“Who’s Dia?”
“A Negro, our medical officer. To some of us, especially to me, he’s an extremely important person. If I ever had the urge to go to confession like a good Christian, Dia would be the man I’d choose as my father confessor.”
“Meaning?”
“That maybe I’m in love with you, maybe I’m genuinely in love, but I should very much like Dia to tell me so.”
• • •
Captain Boisfeuras had arranged to meet Chief Inspector Poiston in a bar next door to the Mauretania. He had known the inspector in Saigon, when he was dealing with the Chinese community there.
“They’re a bit wary of me,” said the inspector, “because I come from Indo-China, but at least I know my job and I don’t deceive myself . . . Algiers is in the hands of the rebels. We’ve got the names of all the leaders of the F.L.N. We know where they’re hiding out, but we can’t put a finger on them.
“The laws in force in Algeria are the same as in France; they prevent us from taking any action. The police are busy watching one another and every man is ready to denounce his rival if he commits the slightest irregularity. There’s only one solution . . . in my opinion. Let the paratroops loose in the Kasbah, a whole division of them. We’d keep them informed and they could pull off all the jobs that are forbidden to us. But it’s urgent.”
“We’re due to leave for Cyprus.”
“This is hardly the moment!”
“The Resident Minister says that a French division in Egypt would be worth four in North Africa.”
“But when you get back here, the fellagha flag will be flying over Government House and the Resident will have been strung up to a lamp-post unless he manages to get away in time. Things are moving quickly. Have you heard of the autonomous zone of Algiers?”
“No.”
“Well, imagine Saigon entirely in the hands of the Vietminh. apart from a few residential quarters, with Ho-Chi-Minh, Giap, Ta-Quan-Bu and all the rest of them firmly established in the town . . . Because, I may as well tell you, the leaders of the rebellion are already in Algiers . . . They’ve just come in from Kabylie . . .”
“Put them inside.”
“Algeria can go to hell, so long as our rivalries continue. I’d better be off, Captain; it’s rather frowned on to be seen talking to the army . . . But hurry up and come back from Egypt before everything is drenched in blood.”