The Centurions (49 page)

“What does that mean, sir?” Esclavier inquired.

Raspéguy put a hand on each of the captains' shoulders, leaning heavily on them.

“It means we'll be the first to enter Cairo.”

 • • • 

Two weeks later the
10
th Colonial Parachute Regiment got back to its quarters in the Camp des Pins.

Before the reservists, who had just completed their six months' stint, were demobilized, Raspéguy insisted on putting any of them who wished through a parachute course. All the reservists who had taken part in the Rahlem business volunteered.

“I don't see how we can very well do anything else,” said Bucelier.

He couldn't explain exactly why, but he felt it had to be done. Five or six soldiers who had been put off by the rigours of the training or the fear of breaking a leg just when they were on the point of going home, tried to get out of it. But their comrades did not give them a moment's peace until they too decided to jump.

One evening, at eighteen-hundred hours, during the daily Press conference at Government House, the Press Information captain of Area Ten announced that “the mutineers of Versailles” were going to do a parachute jump at the Camp des Pins a few days before being demobbed and that they had all volunteered for it. The journalists had been invited by Lieutenant-Colonel Raspéguy who was in command of the unit to which they belonged.

The spokesman who was at the meeting thereupon buttonholed Villèle, his favorite butt.

“You'll be writing this up in that rag of yours, won't you, Mr. Villèle—that some reservists, Communists, have asked to do a parachute jump before leaving Algeria?”

“I'll see,” said Villèle. “I'm going out there and if it's true I'll certainly write about it.”

He turned to Pasfeuro:

“Coming?”

They descended the broad stairs of the forum as far as the war memorial and went into a café where they ordered two anisettes.

“Had you heard about this story?” Villèle asked. “You know the whole Raspéguy outfit pretty well, don't you?”

He gave a slight sneer.

“Especially that fellow Marindelle.”

“Some day, my fine friend, I'm going to bash your face in if you don't keep off that subject. No, I hadn't heard.”

“Shall we go and have a look?”

“You said you were going anyway, do you need me as well?”

“No . . . but I think it'll be a good story. You could give me a lift . . . Let's meet outside the Aletti.”

“Why don't you hire a car like everyone else?”

“I'm never in Algiers more than a few days at a time. Please let me pay for your drink.”

Villèle could not help wondering what Pasfeuro's reaction would be if he knew that he put the cost of a car down on his expenses although the one he always used was borrowed from a friend. He had even managed to get hold of some blank Europe-Cars receipt forms.

 • • • 

In front of two or three generals, a handful of colonels and a dozen journalists, two hundred reservists led by Captain Esclavier launched themselves for the seventh time into the blue. Their parachutes floated in the air for a few moments. Pulling on their rigging-lines, they landed without mishap and received their brand-new paratrooper's badge from the hands of Colonel Raspéguy.

Then they marched back to their quarters and prepared for their departure. Bucelier, who had signed on again because he was now frightened of going back to France, watched them with a lump in his throat.

The rest of them were quits; they had done their jumps. But he wasn't yet, at least he thought not.

Colonel Raspéguy, Esclavier and Pinières went down to the docks to watch the reservists as they embarked on the
Sidi Brahim
; they remained there until the last moment when the liner cast off. While waiting for them at the bar of the Aletti, Pasfeuro, Villèle, Marindelle and Boisfeuras proceeded to get drunk.

It was after the fifth whisky that Boisfeuras mentioned the leap of Leucadia.

“I once knew an Englishman out in Burma,” he said, “a crazy sort of chap who dropped into us one morning with some containers of gasoline meant for another unit which, unlike us, did at least have one or two vehicles. He was a specialist, but on Ancient Greece. Though he didn't have a clue about the Far East, he knew a great deal about Greece and her esoteric customs. All he could do was talk and I often used to listen to him.

“One evening, while the mosquitoes were busy eating us alive and we were trying to force a stew of monkey down our throats, he asked me:

“‘Do you know the origin of the parachute? I thought not. And I don't suppose you've heard of the island of Leucadia in Greece, either, have you?'”

“He was a bit of a bore when he assumed his professional tone after whining all day:

“‘Well, it was at Leucadia that the parachute was born. At Leucadia there's a white cliff dedicated to Apollo—Leucadia from
leukos
, the Greek for “white,” as of course you know—a hundred and fifty feet high, from the top of which, in an extremely remote age, probably the proto-historical—that's to say some time between prehistory and history—they used to hurl people into the sea as a sacrifice to the Sun-god. They were either youths or young girls who had been charged with all the crimes of the community, like the scapegoat in Leviticus.

“‘At a later date the priests of Apollo used to look for volunteers among incurable invalids, criminals or victims of unrequited love, all of whom were much the same thing in the eyes of the Ancients. The unloved is a culprit, don't forget.'”

Marindelle almost upset his glass. “The unloved is a culprit!”

But Boisfeuras, punctuating his story with little sniggers, parodying the voice of the archaeologist-paratrooper, went on with his tale:

“‘They say that Sappho threw herself off the leap of Leucadia in a moment of despair. But which Sappho? There were two, one was a courtesan, the other a poetess. A woman who writes can't ever love, so it must have been the courtesan who did the leap.

“‘Whoever survived the leap of Leucadia was cleansed of his sins and was certain to obtain his heart's desire.

“‘The priests humanized the leap, posted boats down below to retrieve those who had jumped from the cliff. But there came a time when no one was willing to take such a risk any longer; in the course of its development, civilization eliminates heroism. Those who were unlucky in love were more discreet or else were made to look ridiculous.

“‘So in place of those who wanted to redeem their faults, the priests themselves volunteered to jump, for a certain fee. They trained seriously, did gymnastics, strengthed their muscles, exercised their reflexes, and learnt how to fall. To delay their drop they fastened feathers, live birds and God knows what else on to themselves . . . in other words, the parachute.

“‘I knew all this when I dropped, and that's probably why I sprained my ankle. I was always the scapegoat up at Oxford; now I'm at peace at last.'”

Boisfeuras drained his glass, ordered another round and proposed this strange toast:

“I drink to the leap of Leucadia which Esclavier's two hundred reservists performed today to cleanse themselves of a fault which they thought they had committed.”

“What fault?” Pasfeuro asked.

“Didn't you ever hear about the
mechtas
of Rahlem?”

“No,” said Villèle.

He almost asked for further details, but his instinct warned him not to; this evening he was being barely tolerated.

“By the way,” Boisfeuras went on, “I forgot to tell you what became of that English fellow. The gods felt that he had not cleansed himself sufficiently of his faults, or else those of Oxford University were too heavy by half. On his next jump he did a ‘Roman candle' and smashed himself to bits.”

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.