The Mysteries of Algiers (10 page)

They are perplexed and suspicious. These desert Arabs are a primitive lot with a primitive attitude to the land they occupy. As Marx says, ‘Among nomadic pastoral tribes the earth, like all other conditions of nature, appears in its elementary boundlessness.’ They belong to a pre-feudal mode of production. When the revolution comes these nomadic anachronisms will be swept away. Their lawlessness purged, they will be forced to settle. I have no sentiment to spare for the noble bedouin.

For a while they argue noisily among themselves. Since I spoke to them in French, they assume I know no Arabic. I pick up bits of it. They might be intercepted by Legion helicopters before reaching the fellagha … I might be an infiltrator … someone put out on the sands to trap them … In any case the fellagha are not in the direction they are going. They turn back to me.

‘We are peaceful bedu. We want no trouble. French a good thing. The Legion a good thing. We are loyal citizens of General de Ghool –’

‘We do not know you, we have not seen you,’ one of them cuts in.

‘Yes, you can see me,’ I protest.

‘We have not seen you.’

‘Some water please.’ I point at the flask hanging on the edge of Hamid’s camel. The flask is thrown at my feet.

‘You take the water. We do not give it you.’ (I understand that this means that they will not take me under their protection.)

They return to talking among themselves. There is a rather silly argument about whether I am likely to be carrying sugar or cigarettes on my person. One of them, a real idiot, seems to believe that I am a rich American tourist who has somehow got lost in the desert. The fucking idiot! There haven’t been any tourists down here since the war started. Hamid, their leader, vetoes a proposal to slit my throat and see what I am carrying on me. I learn with a sinking heart that they are on their way to Fort Tiberias, where they hope to persuade the
képis bleus
to sell them some kerosene and some, medicines. Hamid offers to load me on to a camel and save my life by taking me back to Fort Tiberias. I produce my gun and point it at them. I would like them to come my way. North. It is no use. They just edge away. And with no formal farewells they ride off in what must be the direction of Fort Tiberias. I watch them flicker away in the haze on the horizon.

I sometimes wonder about nomads, whether they can read minds, whether in this case they could read my contempt for their primitive way of life from small inflexions in my voice. Desert Arabs are supposed to be experts in detection. From a little heap of camel dung they can tell you the sex, age and state of health of the beast, which tribe it belonged to, when and on what pasture it last ate and which direction it was travelling in. Yes, it’s impressive but it is an anachronistic skill. They and their medieval crafts have been artificially preserved under the protection of the Legion and in the interests of capitalistic tourism. When we go, they go too. The irritating thing is I am pretty sure from my own dossiers that Hamid is a link man for the
FLN
with the tribes – and one of al-Hadi’s contacts, what’s more. It is unfortunate that I have never had any direct dealings with him. It’s bloody ironical.

I find myself thinking again of that lush time in Normandy. It was nothing to do with me. It was experienced by another man, the one who occupied my body then. As for myself, I was born in Indochina. Perhaps I would like to be that other man safe in his walled garden. I should have got out of the army in ’53. There wouldn’t have been any problem for a Saint-Cyr graduate in getting a job. At the very least I could have got work as something like an international salesman for a Grenoble-based pharmaceuticals firm. The odd thing is that even now I still think (and I hope that I am thinking lucidly) that it would have taken more courage to become that salesman than to follow the course I have actually pursued. When I think of the difficulties and aggravations of business correspondence and meetings, of the concomitant responsibilities that come with the inevitable marriage and children and loans from the bank to buy a house, a pit of fear forms in my stomach, just from thinking about it. There is the courage one needs to bullshit and sell a new product one really knows nothing about, the courage needed to fire an incompetent subordinate, the courage needed to attend the deathbed of an aged parent and perhaps also the courage needed to watch one’s oldest son drifting into surly unemployment and then hopeless alcoholism. When I think of the immense courage needed to face the futility of a lifetime’s bourgeois domesticity. I quail. Army life on the other hand has a pleasing simplicity, and as for the risks taken by operating as a communist traitor within that army, well, they are only risks of a certain sort.

There are many such thoughts as I continue to meander over the sands. The emptiness and abstraction of the desert encourages such generalizings and musings. As evening comes on, the featureless white sands of noonday are shaped in reds, purples and blues. I look out on it from what feels like a skull of caked salt. Yesterday it was difficult to see for the salt sweat streaming down into my eyes. Today there is less sweat and it is ominously pure. Tomorrow, I guess the cramps will set in. A lot of the time now my attention is devoted to simply moving my arms and legs in the right way, and negotiating my passage over the next small stretch of sand, but still odd thoughts and memories come unbidden.

Those sodding Arabs – I should have started shooting them the moment they turned their backs on me. Have I been lying, killing and torturing so that men like that may be free? Sod them. Fuck them. Up the revolution, down with Arabs! One thing I do hope for his sake alone is that Saint-Exupéry’s goddamn Little Prince doesn’t turn up in my part of the desert. The way I feel now I would put a pistol shot through his brains as soon as look at the little fellow. What was it like to kill Joinville? Like nothing really. It’s like the torturing of al-Hadi, it’s so long since I killed my first man or tortured my first man, that I really can’t remember what it was like. One gets used to anything, and it’s no use the Little Prince turning up now and telling me in shocked tones that nothing can justify murder and torture. It just isn’t true. That’s just a pious catchphrase. For myself, I believe that one must live absolutely according to one’s beliefs and judge by one’s own values or else abandon them.

Anyway did I really kill the colonel? My enemies hardly seem alive to me. The officers at Fort Tiberias are men who have been constructed according to the rules, doing what they have been told is their duty and looking down the line all the time to look and see if they all are doing their duty in the same way that their neighbours are. Chantal on the other hand is an evil woman, but she is at least alive. I remember when she first arrived at Fort Tiberias on a tour of duty, Joinville, who like most of his fellow officers is suspicious of pushy emancipated women, called her into his office to give her a lecture on how she should comport herself. Chantal listened to it all and gave him the sweetest of her smiles. She told him that she had no time for pushy emancipated women either.

‘I too believe that women are inherently inferior to men, Colonel. It is just that I haven’t found a man to be inferior to yet.’

She made the colonel very nervous. When I think of her account of that meeting I sit down and start laughing. I spread myself out on the sands and laugh like anything.

This morning – is it the second or third? I forget – I find it difficult to stand at all. But I do and recommence shuffling. The heat drops a little. There is an unpleasant vitality in the air. My skin starts to prickle and I look down and see that beads of sweat have begun to pop out of the pores of my body. I am astonished. I could not have guessed that I had any moisture left inside me. The brilliant white of noonday has mysteriously dulled to yellow. Wraith-like coils of sand begin to whip around my ankles. There is a rumbling and a crackling at my back. Although I know what it is that is coming up behind me, nevertheless I turn to face it. Thick billowing brown clouds of sand are rolling towards me and, at the heart of the dust storm, electric rods of lightning intermittently travel between heaven and earth. I turn away and keep walking. The sand begins to sting at my face. It is not at all pleasant. One might be flayed alive in such a sand storm. Once I saw all the paint on a jeep stripped off in a storm like this. I tie the greasy mechanic’s rag round my eyes and keep on walking.

A blind man walking among the columns of fire in the desert, surely I am the seal of prophecy, the culmination of both Marx and Muhammad? Though I hear the lightning crackle to the left and right of me, I have no fear, for, in all respects that matter, I am a dead man already. A spectre is haunting the Algerian desert. It is the spectre of communism. I am carrying the contagion of revolution towards the Mediterranean. At the salons, at the race meetings, at the opera, I shall be there with my parcel of bombs, the vengeance of the poor.

‘Life is a desert and woman is the camel that helps us cross it,’ as the bedouin proverb has it. On reflection, now, I should like to live a little longer and be revenged. That flush of triumph on Chantal’s face as she rose to denounce me. The grand coup, the surprise gesture in the middle of the committee meeting, wonderfully vulgar like all her acts and beliefs. Vulgarity is the hallmark of all fascists – think of the fat little men covered in medals, orating from overblown pseudo-classical rostra, raving on about blood and fire. Fascism is not a political doctrine in the way that anarchism is, nor a scientific perception of the world which is Marxism. Fascism is a style and a vulgar one to boot. Gleaming jackboots covered in the saliva of alsatians. The curves of a black-leather boot covered in spittle, that is very much to Chantal’s taste. The curve of the whip, the curl of the lip, the moistly gleaming eye, the moistly gleaming boot.

Surely I shall live to be revenged, for, as Marx says, ‘Mankind only sets itself such tasks as it can solve.’ I should not like to die without taking Chantal with me. Marx also says, ‘If you have loved without evoking love in return, then your love is impotent and a misfortune.’ Not that I have loved of course. I shall return from the desert, sun-scorched and sandblasted, to lie with her once more, a final time. She will be gloating about my presumed slow death in the desert when I step out from behind the door … Of course, there will be nothing personal in my revenge. It will be like putting down a rabid dog. The white foam runs down her jaws on to her gleaming black boots. Chantal’s vulgarity is contagious, communicated in embraces and easily caught in crowds. I shall make her regret what she has done to me. I will have her kneeling with tears in her eyes, confessing her errors before I send her to the People’s Justice.

I can walk on forever. I have undertaken the thousand-year march of history. The further I walk the better. This is a demonstration of the labour theory of value. The more labour I put into this stumbling trek across the desert, the more valuable it becomes. Only Marxism gives man his full value. With part of my mind, I know that I am delirious. The other half however does not. It is an infernal dialectic. The contradictions do not trouble me, for they are fruitful contradictions. I am the master of the sands. The winds are directed according to my will. The man who recognizes the world he has made is free. The man who has understood the laws of history is God, the only God there is. The revolution in the kasbah awaits my coming, me, the star-crossed navigator on the tides of history, the furnaceman of revolution. History moves too slowly. I shall give it a push.

I welcome the opportunity to experience the hunger and hardship of the oppressed. Hunger and hardship of the oppressed. Hunger and hardship of the oppressed. I throw myself down to kiss the scorching sands. There is a black fist in my brain.

As the black fist withdraws I return to consciousness and heave sickly on an empty stomach. I am blind. Blind! Then after a while I remember the rag tied round my eyes and remove it. I lie where I am looking at the dune that towers before me. There is no possibility of climbing it. It is better now just to lie here and think about things. Though the sun is only a glowing brown in the dust-laden sky, the sand storm has passed, the atmosphere is less heavy and it is possible to be lucid once more.

I have been in a delirium, that is clear to me now. It is disturbing to find out just how much too little water and too much sun can alter a man’s thoughts. It takes very little to bring a psychotic delirium to the top. The matter is all the more complicated for me in that desire for revenge, death, murder, torture and the arbitrary act – yes, even delusions of grandeur – may be necessary to the revolutionary. Looking at the matter dispassionately, I am pleased to acknowledge that only his objective role in the historical process distinguishes the acts of a revolutionary from those of the psychopath. Nevertheless, the distinction is there and it is crucial.

After an hour an Arab appears over the crest of the dune. Then, after some minutes, other Arabs appear beside him. I lie there at the foot of the dune wondering what they are doing at the top of it. Then they start to step and slip sideways down the ridge, approaching me warily like crabs. Only when he is directly above me do I identify their leader as Hamid.

He speaks.

‘Peace. We have been to Fort Tiberias. What we found there, we did not like. Shall I tell you what we found there? We found the body of al-Hadi with no shroud, buried like garbage in an unmarked pit outside the fort. Why did you not say that you were a friend of al-Hadis?’

I just lie there looking up at him. There is something about this that makes no sense. Yes, surely they cannot have been to Fort Tiberias and back in this time? Or have I been walking in the desert for longer than I think? Or have I been walking in circles? Who has told them that I was al-Hadi’s friend? In any case I can say nothing. It just is not possible for me to speak.

‘We will take you to the fellagha and you will help us be revenged against the killers of al-Hadi. But it will be dangerous. Do you have a weapon?’