The Centurions (27 page)

“Hallo.”

“Pretty girl, isn't she? She might have been born in a Florentine palace in the Quattrocento. You can see her fingering her jewels. Her page comes in and kneels at her feet, bringing back the dagger with which he has killed her unfaithful lover. She kisses him, keeps him all night in her bed and gives orders for him to be hanged in the morning. She has taken so much out of him that the page doesn't even have the final orgasm which all men who are hanged are said to have . . . I've just been reading the Chronicle of the Cenci, I'm so bored here!”

“Why don't you go away then?”

“You may well ask, Captain. I've got a month's holiday, not a penny to spend, and an old aunt who's putting me up at Grasse. She is extremely well-born and extremely deaf . . . Do you live in these parts?”

“My father does.”

“Don't you miss Indo-China?”

“I was born in China, so it's China I should miss if anywhere.”

“I believe you know my cousin, Yves Marindelle?”

“Extremely well, we were prisoners together in Camp One.”

“For four years all he had to eat was rice. Now that he's back in France, he only takes his wife out to Vietnamese restaurants. He wants to teach her Annamite. Are you free for lunch, Captain?”

Julien had no wish to go back to his father wandering about in his old dressing-gown among the flower-beds, leaving a smell of corpses and pharmacy behind him.

“Why not?”

“We could go up to Cabris. You're sure to have a car. An Aronde or a Vedette, or maybe a Frégate? All the officers back from Indo-China have cars.”

“I don't.”

“That's odd. Let's take mine, then, if she can manage the climb, she's an old rattletrap. Are you building yourself a house? The few officers who haven't bought cars are building themselves houses.”

“I'm not.”

During the meal the journalist never stopped drinking and kept ordering bottle after bottle. At one point he even clutched his glass so tightly that it broke in his hand.

“Are you feeling restless?” Boisfeuras asked him. “Bored with your long holiday?”

“You've got an ugly face like myself, Captain, a mug that's enough to turn the milk sour, as the peasants say, and your voice is as grating as a rusty hinge. As for me, I've got about as much grace as an elephant, and when I sweat I stink like an old billy-goat. A girl must be either off her head or completely blind to fall for me. Have you ever been in love?”

“It's never happened to me. I believe in carnal passion, not in love . . . and since I've got an ugly face, as you've just reminded me, I pay for my pleasure, which doesn't in any way detract from carnal passion, rather the reverse in fact.”

“I was madly in love with a girl once. I don't know if she ever loved me in return, but at least she was used to me. I brought her husband back for her from Indo-China after stuffing him with hormones and vitamins, beefsteaks and caviar; then I came down to Grasse to get over it.”

“Marindelle's wife, I suppose?”

“Yes, Jeanine Marindelle. They hadn't got a flat, so they took mine. They insinuated themselves into my life like a couple of tapeworms.”

“Yet you took advantage of the wife when her husband was a prisoner.”

“I behaved badly, I realize that, and yet . . . Have a brandy with your coffee, won't you? Do you know Ussel—that's right, in Corrèze? You ought to see that town in the rain: a long black road, flanked as far as the eye can see by horrible middle-class houses with blank façades concealing mysteries which couldn't be anything but sordid. A creeping sense of despair grips your guts and you feel like slipping some arsenic into grandma's cup just for the sake of a laugh.

“Three months after their marriage, Yves Marindelle flew out to Indo-China and Jeanine went to stay with little Yves's parents at Ussel, in one of the dreariest houses on that road. The father made a packet in hardware, wholesale groceries or something of that sort—a radical-socialist, a freemason, though he sends his wife to Mass, and a member of the Rotary Club. The Rotary Club of Ussel! The aunts, a couple of ugly old maids. All of them hated her. Jeanine was young and pretty and when she laughed a dimple appeared in her cheek. She came from a good family, but her parents had lost all their money. To her middle-class in-laws she was the adventuress who had stolen the heart of poor little Yves.

“Come on, have some brandy, Captain Boisfeuras. You were born in China, you wouldn't understand how cruel and narrow-minded the French provincial middle class can be.

“Well, Jeanine made her escape for fear they might kill her by injecting all their poisons into her own life. I was her cousin, I used to buy her sweets when she was a little girl, gramophone records when she grew up. I was the only member of her family who went to the wedding. She was marrying her childhood friend, with whom she used to share the sweets I bought her and to whom she used to play my records.

“For the old house at Ussel, the rain of Ussel, the boredom of Ussel, had unaccountably produced the marvellous youth called Yves who resembled her so closely.

“Jeanine took refuge with me in Paris. She brought with her an entire childhood with all its strange and infinitely varied rites, and I, Captain, had never had a childhood of my own. She used to sing those silly little songs that school-children sing at round-games. She used to weep over a flower, smear her face with chocolate and talk of dying as though it was like going for a stroll round the garden.

“Now this is what I feel: love can't exist unless it's linked to that mysterious power and ritual of childhood. I fell madly in love, I stopped drinking, I found a job on the
Quotidien
.

“One day, while holding Jeanine a little too closely in my arms, I made her my mistress. It wasn't particularly convenient, but it was inevitable.

“After that I experienced both paradise and hell. My pleasure was increased by a sense of sacrilege. There was I, the coarse old dullard, admitted into the fairyland of childhood, and at the same time being granted more pleasure than mortal man can have. The dragon taking advantage of the fairy princess he has captured! The prince came back, delivered his princess, and the dragon is now eating his heart out . . .

“Unfortunately it wasn't as simple as all that: it was the fairy princess who held the dragon captive . . . she had developed a taste for his embraces . . . but it was still the poor old dragon who went off and fetched back the prince.

“I'm drunk, I'm boring you to tears with this story . . . and yet I can't talk about anything else. From the moment Jeanine saw Yves again I ceased to exist for her. Before seeing him, she wanted to leave him. Now, I could swear she doesn't even remember that she lived a whole year with me.”

“Did Yves Marindelle know?”

“He amazed me, that boy. ‘Four years is a long time,' he said, ‘and you're handing me back my wife just as she was when I left her, as though you had kept her under glass, protected from the heat and cold. She hasn't aged, she hasn't changed at all, and yet she has acquired any amount of new tastes: the music of Stravinsky and Erik Satie, the poetry of Desnos, blue jeans and pony-tails. Thank you, Herbert.' For you didn't know, Captain, did you . . .”

Pasfeuro brought his huge fist down on the table:

“My Christian name is Herbert and I'm more well-born than the whole of the Polish aristocracy put together.”

 • • • 

Julien Boisfeuras took to meeting the journalist fairly frequently. Pasfeuro proved to be a mass of contradictions, with a taste for the weird and the unusual, mad and generous, cynical and tender-hearted at one and the same time. He hated all forms of hierarchy and lumped together the Communists, with whom he was once in conflict, the Jesuits, with whom he had been brought up, the police, with whom he had often had a brush, the middle class, towards whom he felt an aristocrat's contempt, the military, whom he considered stupid, and all dried up old maids, members of the educational profession, clergy, technicians, inspectors of finances, pimps, Corsicans, people from Auvergne and infant prodigies.

Pasfeuro on his side respected the captain, his contempt for sartorial elegance, that manner he had of being at home anywhere, and his sound political and economic background. He seemed to belong to no particular country, had no national prejudice, attached no importance to money or decorations and was astonished and mystified to find himself in the army.

A slightly grudging friendship sprang up between the two of them. When Pasfeuro was posted as permanent correspondent in Algeria and had to go back to Paris, Boisfeuras decided to go with him. They took the holiday route along the Mediterranean coast as far as Montpellier and then crossed the Cevennes. This brought them one morning to the little Lozère village of Rozier on the edge of the Gorges du Tarn.

The trees had shed their last leaves and winter was beginning to assert its authority under the clear sky, among the quivering skeletons of elms, poplars and beech trees. All the gorges were bathed in a blue mist which the December sun could scarcely penetrate. The cliff of Capluc stood like a barrier at the junction between the black waters of the Joute and the green waters of the Tarn. Near a tumbledown old bridge a peasant pointed out a goat path leading up to the summit.

He was a nice old man in a black drill jacket, corduroy trousers, hobnailed boots and cloth cap. He spoke slowly with a strong accent, taking his time, happy to be alive:

“Up there at Capluc,” he said, “at one time there were Templars, as in many other places in the Causses. No one ever knew what they were up to in these parts.”

Pasfeuro and Boisfeuras embarked on the ascent. At each step the loose pebbles slipped away from under their feet. Pasfeuro admired the agility of the captain who effortlessly climbed the steepest slopes, swinging his shoulders slightly. The journalist was out of breath and, in spite of the cool breeze fanning his face, he sweated copiously. He thought to himself:

“What an unnatural life I led in Paris—the office, bars, cinemas and theatres to which Jeanine made me take her almost every night. She always seemed anxious to postpone the moment she would be alone with me. Each time we went to bed there was a minute or two of ghastly embarrassment. She would turn out the light and undress in the dark, but as soon as beauty's body and the body of the beast came into contact, she would be overcome with passion. Does she turn out the light with Yves Marindelle, I wonder?”

Pasfeuro sat down on a boulder opposite a wall. He did not notice the splendid view, the ochre-coloured ledges of rock, the pinewoods punctuating the lighter expanses of stone and, far down below, the clear green waters of the Tarn.

The captain's rasping voice broke into his unpleasant day-dream, plunging him into this bath of light and colour, and his love resumed its ludicrous dimensions.

“Come on, journalist, one last effort. There's a village behind this rock, and above that the Templars' commandery.”

Pasfeuro went on climbing and presently the ruins of a village appeared among the nettles, bushes and broom. Some of the houses were still intact with their dry-stone roofs, walls as thick as fortifications and semi-circular vaults. The Templars' commandery dominated the village; all that remained of it was a vast stretch of wall which threatened to collapse and bury the rest of the ruins.

“It's lovely,” said Boisfeuras, “this silence and solitude, these ruins and these gorges bathed in a blue mist, like some parts of the country in the north of China. It's the first time I've come across a place in France where I don't feel a stranger. What made the Templars, those strange warriors who owned most of the wealth of the western world, come and take refuge in this wilderness?”

“Not much is known of their history,” Pasfeuro told him. “The East, it's certain, provided the Templars with a certain number of rites which they introduced into their Christianity, the initiation ceremonies among others. Perhaps they came up to these commanderies in the Causses to prepare the fusion between the Islamic East and the Christian West, which was the dream of their Grand Master Simon de Montferrat and which would have been the first step towards the unification of the world.

“The Templars discovered the power of money at a time when money was despised, and in Syria the sect of the Assassins had taught them the power of a dagger wielded by a fanatic, in other words terrorism. They were ready for the conquest of the world.”

“The ancestors of the Communists?”

“Perhaps. But the Templars were burnt on the stakes of Philippe le Bel just as the Communists were shot through the head by Stalin's henchmen.”

“I'd rather like to rebuild this village and this commandery on this very spot,” said Boisfeuras, “bring a few men I know up here and re-create a new sect which might have its assassins but, above all its missionaries, who would attempt to bring about not the fusion of the religions of the East and the West, but of Marxism and what I can only call, for want of a better word, Occidentalism.”

“Do you really mean that?”

Boisfeuras gave a cynical sneer:

“Of course not. I'm in my father's hands, I'll soon be the director of an insurance company. Where would I recruit my initiates? Among the agents, clerks and typists? Initiates of that sort are only to be found among the young paratroop officers, who have a sense of brotherhood. They are still sufficiently unspoilt and disinterested to do without comfort. They are ready for any adventure and capable of laying down their lives for any high-minded cause, provided it does not conflict with certain prejudices to which they still cling.

“Can't you see them in this restored village of Capluc, quarrying stones and reading books which they can no longer possibly ignore—Karl Marx, Engels, Mao-Tse-Tung, Sorel, Proudhon . . . ?”