The Centurions (26 page)

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
kakemo
no
.

“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.