Birth of Our Power (25 page)

A young rogue resembling Punch gambols up, on tiptoe, toward the sleeping old man, and gets ready to send his hat flying with a tap. Jerry's eyes follow the direction of my glance; he turns around as if gathering himself for a spring, his face suddenly tense and hardened. But he only goes:

“Tsss …”

And this slight metallic grating of the teeth has the effect of a knife held at the end of a muscular arm: it stops the rogue, nonplussed, dead in his tracks; Punch, thrown into confusion, leaps grotesquely to the side and collapses like a rag doll at the foot of a wooden partition.

“Poor Mister Pollack,” murmurs Jerry, lying on his back, his arms folded behind his neck. “What kind of a dog's life must he have led? He detests me, do you know? He detests me: why? I don't know.”

We remain awake for a long while, in silence. And I can feel my neighbor's dark eye boring into me with brutal insistence. We are perhaps the only ones left awake, for the night must be, well advanced. All time is the same in this yellowish mist, filled with protracted, exhausted snoring.

Finally Jerry leans over to me and says, very low and right into my face:

“Who are you?” And he adds: “No point in lying with me. Nothing to fear.”

How do I explain “a revolutionary” to him? While I grope with my words, his face lights up.

“I get it. Like the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World]. They're a good bunch, all right. We killed one of 'em in Alabama.”

At this recollection a vague grimace, perhaps the beginnings of a crooked smile, twists his even mouth and accentuates the planes of his face.

“You'll never get anywhere,” he says. “But you're right anyway. Good night.”

Jerry and Stein reign over the big room. Jerry says he can knock out his man with one right to the jaw. Stein explains: “Me, I break in their teeth. I've never been able to do it any other way.” They have never struck anyone here. Their law is an unwritten law, but it is just and strong.

Someone is talking in a dream, visited by joy. A stifled laugh rises, stumbles and falls into the mire of our silence.

A SOFT RAIN HEIGHTENS THE NUANCES OF THE LANDSCAPES. THE RED-TILED
roofs have a sharp freshness. I could almost believe that I've been dreaming the big room and those all-night talks with Jerry, if Nounés the Argentinean weren't snoring quietly on the seat at my left; and if the fat gendarme accompanying us weren't snoozing as well, with his thumbs hooked into his belt, across from me. The Argentinean is dressed in the gabardine of a cardsharp down on his luck. The gray-haired, runny-nosed gendarme looks a little like a great foundered ox. He snorts and sniffles every five minutes; his red fingers, which make you think of half-cooked shellfish, fidget slowly: he half-opens one eye, distractedly checks our presence, and resumes his siesta. Villages with slate roofs follow villages with red-tiled roofs. Some oxen make their way through the rain-soaked grass led by a boy in wooden shoes. A train full of wounded men goes by, beaten by the rain: anemic faces, returned to a sort of plaintive childhood or lighted, one might think, from within by a heatless flame, appear for an instant behind the speeding windows. The November sun, breaking through clouds driven from the ocean by cold winds, suddenly projects extraordinary patches of brightness over the meadows. Here is a road wending its serpentine way between cropped yew trees. The train's pace slackens. Stretch your hand out imperceptibly toward the compartment door, open it sharply, leap straight out, hit the ground somewhere at the base of the embankment, then make a run toward that cluster of golden trees over there under the rainbow. My leg muscles awaken, my hand gets ready, I am on the watch, coiled up beneath a feigned quiescence—dreaming of the gravel path through the meadows … Indeed, to walk on the moist earth, under a leaden sky pierced by cataracts of sunlight is well worth the chance of a bullet. But will he shoot, this fat garlic soup eater? Anyway, let him shoot! (I shrugged to myself.)

But he stirs. His chest puffs out, his jaws spread apart for a full thirty seconds in a bulldog yawn; the invisible film of drowsiness has fallen from his eyes.

“Let's go,” he says. “We're there.”

The moment of sunshine has ended. The rain beats against the windows. I stare at the man's red hands, close to the revolver holster, with an absurd hatred—and I am astonished to discover that I only hate those hands. I'm indifferent to the rest of the man.

We had something to eat in a sub-prefecture wineshop. The Argentinean is getting familiar with our gendarme whom he addresses as “Monsieur Edouard” and for whom he asks my permission to buy a cigar, at my expense.

“As for you, my boy,” says Monsieur Edouard to him cordially, “you're no more of an Argentinean than I am …”

A little laugh of complicity still fills out our well-thrashed Sancho Panza's face:

Well, what do you expect, after living in Paris for twenty-seven years!”

“Twenty-seven out of twenty-seven, right? Less three in the clink at Loos or Fontevrault, I'd wager,” Monsieur Edouard ripostes with verve. “And if you know anything about Buenos Aires, it can only be the brothels …”

So much perspicacity vexes my companion, who tries his best not to show it. But I'm beginning to know him. His pitiful wilted collar is spread open around a chubby neck creased by hundreds of tiny wrinkles. His soul is like his flesh: flabby, with a strange capacity for adhering to things, to beings. He is always lying, quietly deceitful, spitefully craven. In the big room, he used to perform occult missions for Stein, who made his living extorting hush money from obscure sources, and shined Jerry's shoes. He carries my bundles, under the pretext that he has nothing to carry himself, that it makes him feel good to carry something, and that I have no right to put on airs with him “just because he has no education.” Embarrassed, he is chewing on the wide, flat nails of his chubby hand. And I think I can guess, from an indefinable timbre in his voice, that he has found a way of taking revenge.

“I haven't been to Buenos Aires in a long time, that's true,” he concedes. “I used to live part of the time in Levallois, and part of the time
at Châlons. Do you know Châlons, Monsieur Edouard? I was back there during the war, when the Front was passing that way …”

Monsieur Edouard has the look of a cunning vintner. The uniform goes well with his corpulence. His blotchy face easily loses all trace of joviality. He has the piercing sidewise glance and the disquieting voice, (barely concealing legalized brutality under a self-assured reserve), that are necessary when asking people for their papers. It is in that voice that he carelessly drops these words between two puffs of smoke:

“And what did you happen to be doing in Châlons during the fighting?”

The Argentinean puts on his most innocent air, the air of a complete idiot whose face you'd love to slap but who looks at you with the disarming eyes of a young heifer.

“I stopped to kiss my Aunt Eulalie. But I'll never forget what I saw there, Monsieur Edouard. There was a butcher about a hundred yards from my aunt's place, see? Well just imagine: some poilus—the savages, think of it!—had hung up two gendarmes in uniform, by the chin, in the butcher-shop window, with their hands tied behind their backs and their pants pulled down. Oh! It wasn't a pretty sight to see, you can believe me! There was a fat one …”

Is Monsieur Edouard going to burst? The blood rushes to his hardened face. His eyelids narrow over a pointed stare with which he fixes us, each in turn: me, impassible; the Argentinean, paternal. He crushes out his cigar with rage in the ashtray.

The grim, graveled street is lined with white, one-story houses. Led by Monsieur Edouard, we go to our lodging for the night. We won't arrive at the suspects' detention camp at Trécy until tomorrow. The gendarme hurries his step, in silence, with his uniform cap pulled down over his eyes and his heavy jaw protruding, which gives him the profile of a classical Pandarus. The sly Argentinean persists in exasperating him. It is to me that he addresses himself, telling out his entire rosary of dirty and stupid stories all of which take place in Châlons. His mouth is full of that name; he savors it, underlines it, plays on it like a bugle; and, if there's a story about a cuckold, it's always the butcher of Châlons. The gendarme feigns a haughty detachment, but he hears very well. His neck is red as a brick.

We are to sleep in a cellar, a sort of low kennel between a stable in which you can hear the horses snorting and the shed where they keep the fire pumps. A wide stall full of straw fills this nook. The dormer
window gives out onto a courtyard: the shafts of a cart are visible there, rising over a dung heap. A barrel stinks of urine; a gardener's watering can is full of delectable water. We soon discover that a man is sleeping under the straw: a sorry railroad worker of whom only a pair of pink feet with widely spaced toes emerge. The Argentinean is indignant over this treatment. “The convicts at St.-Martin-de-Ré are kept better than this! Are we free, yes or no? When I think of my dignity …” Happily, he doesn't think of it often. Is he trying to put me on? This kennel is as good as another, and a kennel is just as good as a hole in the mud, a cell in a model prison, or the soft bed of a profiteer or a gendarme! The sun is going down; I hurry over to the dormer window to spread out some newspapers bought on the way; I haven't seen a paper since my arrest. What is this? “… it is generally believed that the German agents will be unable to hold power for more than a few weeks …” A R
ADIO-TELEGRAM FROM THE
P
EOPLE
'
S
C
OMMISSARS
… “latest details on the taking of the Winter Palace …” “The Soviets' peace offer …” A thick slime of words—“treason, infamy, barbarism, bloody anarchy, in the pay of Germany, the dregs and scum of the population,” of course!—clings to these dispatches. One might imagine them clipped at random, by a child, out of some big history book—the history of future times? These waves of opprobrium poured over men and events, this bubbling lava is what enlightens me the most. I am better able to see the white pebbles shining on the bottom of the flood through these muddy waves. I am able to see that at last
we
had taken, in the world, cities: prisons—prisons?—general staff headquarters, and what else? God knows. What would we have taken, what would we have done, Dario, if we had taken that city toward which we were stretching out our hands from the other end of Europe? I question myself and I am astonished to find myself so ill-prepared for victory, unable to see beyond it, and yet feeling so clearly that it is we, we (myself as well, even though I am in this kennel) who have taken, conquered, thousands of miles from here, I don't know what …

The night is now total: it is raining. A lantern projects a feeble yellowish glow on the courtyard wall opposite. Thanks to the reflection which comes into our kennel, we are able to see each other dimly: black, with ghostly heads pierced by dark gaps. The railroad worker stirs ponderously in the straw, like an animal.

“Good news?” asks the Argentinean. “What's happening out in the world?”

“Let me sleep, Nounés.”

I stretch out in the straw. I can hear Nounés stirring; and then I hear him laughing; in the darkness he hands me something: a flat bottle. How in the hell had he been able to get hold of it?

The wine pours its warmth through our veins. This straw is not really disagreeable. I should like to think through the ideas which these newspaper dispatches have dragged out of the limbo where they were dormant in my brain. History is irreversible. This victory is already definitive, as fragile and uncertain as it may be. And then it is the victory of millions upon millions of men. How does one imagine millions of men? The bounds of the imagination are easily reached. The basic theory is very clear: when the peasants have taken over the land, no power in the world will be able to pry it away from them. Streams of blood will only serve to fertilize it. I know the old slogans by heart: Miner, take the mine; peasant, take the land; worker, take the machine. But this is merely an algebra. What is behind these symbols, these words? What has happened? What are we going to do?