The Centurions (25 page)

“No,” he abruptly replied. “I haven't got much book learning and I don't express myself very well, but I feel old Uncle Boisfeuras is right even though he has never set foot in Africa before. Your little flare-up in the Aurès isn't going to be snuffed out just like that.”

“I've been out here fifteen years, Colonel, I speak Arabic . . .”

“Maybe you might have done better if you'd gone to Indo-China. Out there they were already
talking
about the next war.”

Raspéguy repeated this sentence for his own benefit. He found it striking, but it didn't seem to have much effect on that old sod Esclavier who was reading the paper over Merle's shoulder. He must be doing it on purpose.

Merle did not give a damn about this business in Algeria. It was all over; he was a civilian and he was glancing through the paper to see if there was anything that might interest a genuine civilian like him.

The Socialists had replied to Mendès-France. Herriot had been invited to Moscow. So he was still alive, that old Republican gasbag! Dany Robin liked Picasso. But who the hell was Dany Robin? Hold-up in the Rue d'Avron, a million francs stolen from a cashier. A million wasn't much . . . Floods in Morocco; twenty-three dead. Hossein Fatimi, the former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Iran, had been shot. After the execution, by way of a funeral oration, General Teimour Baktyar had stated that he had more blood than a bull. Another tender-hearted chap! One hundred and eighty eighteenth-century court costumes at the Musée Carnevalet. In the entertainments column Robert Dhery and the Branquignols claimed it was the audience that amused them; and on the book page Kléber Haedens was reviewing the memoirs of a writer who signed himself de Gaulle.

De Gaulle—there was a chap who had soon been forgotten, even by those who wore his insignia, the Free French cross: the Esclaviers and Boisfeurases of the world. In camp no one had so much as mentioned his name.

“General de Gaulle's book is infinitely superior to the works that are usually written by war leaders and statesmen . . . Men in power, once their strength begins to decline . . .”

The siren of the
Edouard Branly
announced their departure. The docks of Algiers were deserted. One by one the officers went below. It was cold out on deck.

Two days later, at eight o'clock in the morning, a loud-speaker announced that the coast of France was in sight. Still half asleep, they went up on deck. Under the overcast sky the coast looked black. Gulls flew to and fro above the boat, giving their piercing cries.

They were all there, pressed close together, leaning over the rail. The paradise they had dreamt about so often in the prison camps was slowly approaching and already it was losing its appeal.

They were dreaming of another paradise: Indo-China—that was what was uppermost in the thoughts of all of them. They were not sorrowful sons coming home to lick their wounds, they were strangers. Bitterness welled up in them.

In
1950
, at Orange, a train full of Far East wounded had been stopped by the Communists who had insulted and struck the men lying on the stretchers. A Paris hospital advertising for blood donors had specified that their contribution would not be used for the wounded from Indo-China. At Marseilles, which could now be seen looming over the horizon, they had refused to disembark the coffins of the dead.

They had been abandoned, like those mercenaries for whom there was suddenly no further use and whom Carthage had therefore massacred so as to avoid having to pay them their due. Cut off from their own country, they had re-created an artificial motherland for themselves in the friendship of the Vietnamese and in the arms of their slant-eyed women.

They were almost horrified to realize that they now had more in common with the Vietminh whom they had hated, with the Voice and his mysterious smile, with the oafish
bo-dois
, than with these people who were waiting for them on the quayside with a wretched little military band and a detachment of soldiers sloppily presenting arms.

“If the war had gone on,” Esclavier pensively observed, “if an honourable peace had been made, a real fusion might have come about between us and the Vietnamese and the world might have seen the birth of the first Eurasian race . . .”

Which of them would the child of Souen and Esclavier have taken after?

But he went on furiously:

“No peace is ever honourable for the vanquished.”

They had all picked up an insidious infection, the yellow infection. They were bringing it back to France with them and it was a crowd of contaminated men that disembarked on the quayside at Marseilles and kissed their wives, their mothers and their children whom they no longer recognized.

Even the morning air smelled alien to them.

Boisfeuras had parted from his comrades in Marseilles. On a grey November morning, with a catch in their throats, they had seen his slim figure disappear. With his old cardboard suitcase whose handle was reinforced with string, and his cape which was too long for him and hung down to his heels, he was the perfect picture of the poor soldier back from the wars who has no idea where to go and who will shortly be a human wreck destined for the workhouse.

He had given Florence's address to the taxi which drove him off. The driver had a more pronounced accent than most Marseillais, which made him sound like a stage comedian deliberately overacting:

“So the war's over at last, Captain, eh?”

“Yes, it's over.”

“Personally, mind you, I respect everyone's opinion—but Indo-China, we couldn't very well hang on to it since the people who lived out there wanted to see the last of us.”

The taxi stopped outside a large modern block of flats in pink stucco built at the foot of Notre-Dame de la Garde. Boisfeuras felt the slight tremor that came over him each time he went to see Florence.

“There we are, sir, home again, with your little wife waiting for you inside. That's better than war now, isn't it? That'll be three hundred and eighty francs. The tip's not included. No offence meant, but some people, after being overseas so long, tend to forget the customs of our fair land of France . . .”

The driver laid particular stress on the last words. Feeling ill at ease, Boisfeuras said to himself:

“Our fair land of France is enough to make one sick.”

He paid off the taxi, gave the driver a tip and asked the concierge:

“Miss Florence Mercardier's, please?”

“Third on the left. You can't go wrong, there's always music and a lot of noise.”

She spoke in a dry, disagreeable tone; Florence was obviously up to the same old tricks. He went upstairs, dragging the suitcase whose handle had broken yet again, rang the bell and Florence was in his arms, against a background of sugary, insipid music dripping from the radio; the chairs, the tables, the floor itself, were littered with empty bottles, saucers of cigarette-ends and the remnants of a cold supper.

“The maid hasn't come,” said the half-caste apologetically.

She was barefoot and wearing an old dressing-gown, but her smooth slender body exuded a faint perfume of vanilla. Contemptuous and disgusted by all this mess, a white tabby cat had taken refuge on a shelf. She yawned, opening her pink throat, and stretched one paw above her ear.

Boisfeuras cleared an arm-chair for himself. Florence came and sat down on his lap; her thick black hair was pressed against his cheek.

“Haven't you paid the maid?”

“She doesn't like me, no one likes me in France.”

Florence unbuttoned the captain's jacket, then his shirt, and with her long hand and hard nails began stroking his chest. The unmade bed, which still retained the smell of woman and love-making, soon beckoned them; and with his lovely whore Julien Boisfeuras once again experienced the intense sort of pleasure which she alone knew how to produce.

“Real pleasure is painful and degrading,” his father,
taipan
Boisfeuras, used to say. “Otherwise it's little more than an organic function. It must defy all constraint and taboo to be what the Christians call a sin. When you make war, you risk your skin; when you make love, you must risk your soul.”

With Florence, the little half-caste who, with parted lips, was now lovingly stroking her stomach and breasts, Julien played with his soul in the same way as a bullfighter manipulates his cape.

“Shall we go out and eat?”

“No.”

“I want to go to Alex's. We'll have Chinese soup, fried
nemes
and abalones that come from Hong Kong already tinned; they're very expensive. Then you'll buy me some dresses and we'll go to the cinema and tonight I'll be . . .”

She ran the tip of her tongue over her full, fleshy lips:

“. . . very . . . very . . . sweet to you.”

He slapped her in the face, deliberately, without anger, and she clung to him, limp and chastened; sobs, which were succeeded by pleasure, made her firm stomach expand and contract.

He thrust her aside and lit a cigarette.

“I'm behaving like a pimp in a film,” he said to himself, “but that's the only way to avoid being relegated by Florence to a mere accessory. She spent last night with another man; then, when he went off, shortly before I arrived, she stroked her stomach and breasts in the same manner to thank them for the pleasure they had just given her. And she's already forgotten the accessory which served her purpose. A cruel, selfish, soulless little strumpet! But I'm only interested in her body and my degradation.”

Florence took his hand, rubbed it gently against her lips and kissed it. He reacted to this with complete indifference, while the cat with her red-brown eyes stared down at them from her shelf.

Julien heaved the half-caste out of bed:

“Turn off that music and go out and buy something to eat.”

Florence looked at herself in the wardrobe glass and twisted round to catch the reflection of her lightly arched loins. She would have liked to be a man so as to adore her body and make love to herself. In a science-fiction novel she had read about a creature which reproduced itself in order to go out and kill people, the fool, instead of giving itself pleasure. There was a faint mark near her eye where Julien had slapped her.

“You've given me a bruise.”

She said this simply as a statement of fact. When she saw Maguy, she would tell him that her captain had come back from the war and that for the time being it would be better for her not to do the round of the bars too regularly. Florence was happy that Julien was back, for she was tired of her freedom. The half-caste was bored in Marseilles and missed Saigon, the Dakao quarter and its seething life, its little bars, its “compartments” thronged with amoral, sexual families. Old fathers there sold their daughters, assuming the haughty air of hidalgos. Brothers got a rake-off for introducing their sisters to “friends.” The whole quarter wallowed in a warm miasma of sex,
nuoc mam
, and dried shrimps. Then came the war, as fiery as red peppers, which lent an unexpected zest to each fresh embrace. Florence had experienced passion as furtive and brutal as that of wild beasts, pursuits, fights, and murders. One day she had fallen into the hands of the Binh-Xuyens and Julien had saved her. The chief of the arroyo pirates who ran all the gambling-dens in Cholon could not afford to fall out with Captain Boisfeuras who knew the name of the coolie whom he had once killed in order to steal two piastres from him. That was ten years before he became a colonel and a friend of the Emperor.

Florence disappeared into the bath-room and came out again wearing close-fitting leopard-skin trousers, a chunky black sweater and a canary-yellow scarf. She looked common and provocative. Her dull skin and slanting eyes, the sinuous movement of her limbs, gave her the additional tang of some exotic fruit. Boisfeuras lit another cigarette. He surrendered to the clammy but beguiling self-disgust in which his energy and resolution melted away. He had to plumb the depths of this disgust so as to have the necessary purchase for his foot which, with a kick, would send him rising to the surface again.

The captain spent a week with his lovely whore, took her out to the cinema once or twice, ran through several detective novels and smoked enough cigarettes to sear the roof of his mouth.

At the most unusual hours Florence produced a number of meals in which Vietnamese dishes which she cooked herself were supplemented by poor quality cold cuts from the neighbouring butcher's shop. To drink she bought nothing but sugary aperitifs tasting of chemicals which cloyed palate and stomach alike.

When his disgust almost swept him off his feet like a wave, Julien went out on to the balcony and watched the cats.

At the back of the building there was an empty plot of ground enclosed by a high wooden fence. Hundreds of cats, grey, white and black, romped about in this playground among the bits of corrugated iron, piles of rubble, broken bottles, clumps of nettles and carcasses of old trucks. The darkness sparkled with countless gold and emerald-green eyes.

They reminded Julien of his big game hunts by night in Burma, of the eyes of the animals caught in the headlights, which the rifle shots extinguished like so many candles.

Burton in his sentimental way used to say:

“One gets the feeling one's killing eyes. It's far nastier than shooting animals whose head, limbs and body are visible. Putting out their eyes in the dark is like killing life itself.”

Men's eyes do not shine in the dark. During a hunt in the Naga hills they ran into some Japanese and Burton was shot dead.

The cats, Julien noticed, had a recognized leader, a gaunt, lean-ribbed grey beast. Whenever any refuse wrapped up in a piece of newspaper was thrown down from one of the balconies of the building, they all pounced on it, fur bristling, claws bared, and formed a circle round the packet, not daring to advance for fear of being attacked by the others.

At this point the grey cat intervened. He would pick the packet up in his jaws and make off with it. But the newspaper, dragging along the ground, would fall apart, spilling out the old bones, crusts of bread and kitchen refuse, which were snatched up by his pursuers, and the grey cat would find himself on the discarded dustbin which served as his throne with an empty piece of torn paper between his teeth.

The cats disappeared in the afternoon, but in the evening, when the lights began to come on in all the villas scattered over the hill, they would suddenly reappear and embark on their saraband. They clawed and nibbled, squealed with passion, made love and killed one another. The white tabby cat would start trembling, brushing up against the captain's legs and mewing. One night he opened the door for her and she scuttled off to join the free world of cats covered with scabs and mange, ruled by a stupid and short-sighted tyrant.

On the following day Julien Boisfeuras gave Florence her freedom. She too needed to scamper about the wastelands of Marseilles and resume her adventurous love-life; he left her enough money to live on for three months; she pretended to be grieved.

When he left, she cursed him up hill and down dale, burst out laughing when the door closed behind him, shed a few tears shortly afterwards because she was already beginning to miss him, and consoled herself by promptly spending some of the money he had left her on a television set. That evening she went out and met Maguy and her old bar cronies, while the white tabby in the empty plot of ground squalled with love as she let herself be mounted by the stupid king, the big gaunt grey.

Julien Boisfeuras had cured himself of Florence as of a fever which is suddenly brought down. He had needed her out in Indo-China in order not to think about the war. This war had begun to lose its appeal when the flavour of exotic and unusual adventure that it had at the beginning began to fade. By
1952
it was already nothing more than a useless dissipation of heroism, suffering, endeavour and human life, while corruption, the black market and chair-borne warriors were all on the increase.

Boisfeuras had been forced to make false promises to his partisans in the Baie d'Along and on the Chinese border. When he came down to Saigon to ask for arms, rice and money, more often than not he met with a refusal. The money had been spent in the capital to swell the coffers of some political party or other; the arms had been issued to some parade-ground Vietnamese units who neither knew nor wished to learn how to use them. Then, so as to have the courage to deceive his partisans with further lies, he used to go and see Florence in her “compartment” at Dakao and expend all his strength and fury on that smooth, eager, selfish body. There were times when Julien felt he would like to alter the course of history all by himself, to be as puerile as a Don Quixote, who, armed with a spear and encased in a suit of armour, attempts to halt a heavy tank attack. Heroic, stupid, play-acting!

Because he thought the conflict was pointless, he had needed the heady drug which was secreted between his mistress's thighs. Eroticism was the answer to despair.

When Julien thought about that war, all he remembered was a series of disconnected adventures, adventures of the kind that Esclavier called “hare-brained schemes.” A big junk prowled up the Chinese coast in the darkness; the wind rose and filled the sails which were reinforced with slivers of bamboo; the tiller creaked at every movement of the vessel. Julien was lying out on deck next to his batman Min. When Vong, the owner of the junk, drew on his water-pipe and made the embers right next to them come to life, his face emerged out of the darkness like a ghost. It was a wrinkled old face with cruel little eyes. Vong may well have betrayed them—but not for political reasons or out of self-interest; he was above anything of that sort. The gamble was all that could make his deadened nerves tingle any longer.

The sea was like a millpond and the stifling salty air seemed to be glued to its surface. Min rolled over to shift his revolver from his hip to his waist; like that he would be able to fire more quickly while lying flat on the deck. He believed in Vong's treachery but had never mentioned it to his captain who had known about it for some time; for Min trod warily, bristling like a cat on guard against dogs.

Vong's head emerged out of the darkness again. He spoke softly:

“The junk's arriving.”

The sound of flapping sails and rippling water grew louder. A pin-point of light flashed on and off in the distance. So Vong had not betrayed them. Why not? He hardly knew himself—maybe because this time the stakes were so much higher. He was gambling with the lives of the whole of his family left behind in China.

Min went down into the hold to rouse the dozen men of the commando. They came up on deck barefoot and fully armed. Boisfeuras made them lie down along the scuppers. A machine-gun had been set up in the bows, concealed behind some sacks of rice.