The Centurions (53 page)

The colonel got up and locked the door; he moved with dangerous deliberation, without making a sound.

“No,” she said, “the curfew . . .”

He still had not touched her and yet she felt her whole body was being caressed and ready to surrender.

He picked her up in his arms and, just as he was putting her down on the bed, she summoned up all her strength and aimed a kick at his groin. She struggled valiantly for several minutes, remembering the story she had been taught at school about Mr. Séguin's nanny-goat, but she soon realized that the nanny-goat had always wanted to be eaten by the wolf and so, like the nanny-goat, she surrendered with a sigh of relief.

Raspéguy did not bring Concha home until the following evening. The whole neighbourhood realized what had happened. Out of bravado, just as she was leaving her lover, she bent down and kissed him. She shrugged her shoulders as she saw all the familiar faces leaning out of the windows.

“Those lads smirking there, little do they know that none of them's as strong as my colonel, for all the hairs on their chest!”

For several years now, Concha had had a detailed knowledge of the sexual possibilities of men. At Bab-el-Oued these were discussed by the women with the same passion as football matches were discussed by their husbands.

To avenge the honour of the Martinezes, her mother gave her a sound drubbing with a broom-handle, though without hurting her at all, but Concha, who knew what was expected of her, promptly began screaming at the top of her voice that she was being murdered, which gave all the neighbours an excuse for gathering en masse out on the landing.

When they began to protest rather too loudly, Angelina Martinez came out and gave them to understand that her daughter was a little tart and that if she wanted to kill her she was perfectly entitled to do so.

Then she rounded on Montserrat Lopez and, since both of them were fairly articulate, there was a slam-bang brawl which echoed and re-echoed through the sonorous cul-de-sac which was Bab-el-Oued.

“Anyway my daughter needn't feel ashamed,” said Angelina, “because as least if she does go whoring, it's with a colonel, yes, a genuine colonel. My son Lucien went to check up. Colonel Raspéguy, he's called, he's in command of the ones with the funny caps; whereas your daughter goes out every night and gets tumbled by the soldiers in the guard-post and by some who aren't even sergeants!”

“My daughter! A lieutenant asked her to marry him, but she didn't want to . . .”

Meanwhile old Martinez had not even budged from his armchair; as a good Spaniard, he felt that a man worthy of the name had no business interfering in women's affairs.

He simply said to his daughter:

“Now that the damage is done, do whatever your colonel wants, anything, you understand, anything, like a
puta
, to hang on to him. That was how your mother married me.”

Then he relapsed into silence and appeared to take no more interest in the matter.

 • • • 

“How much farther is it?” Esclavier asked.

They had been driving for fifteen miles through a flat, monotonous countryside, between vines laden with grapes ready to be picked for the vintage. The sun was hot and dazzling. At rare intervals they passed vast corrugated iron sheds and huge farmhouses roofed with red tiles that looked like factories.

Several times they had to pull over to the side of the road to make room for convoys of armoured cars.

“Here we are,” said Isabelle.

She turned off to the left and through a big wooden archway which bore the freshly-printed inscription: “Domaine Pélissier.”

The car skirted some sheds and outhouses behind which a company of infantry was encamped with its tents and vehicles, crossed a sweet-scented orange-grove and drew up in front of a long, low, freshly-whitewashed house with a veranda running all round it.

An enormously tall old man appeared, walking on two sticks. He had a rubicund complexion and white whiskers growing on his chin, out of his nostrils and out of his ears.

He appeared to be in a fury of rage and began by barking:

“Where's Paul? He didn't come with you. Come here and give me a kiss.”

Esclavier saw that as the old man put his arms round the young woman, his eyes shone as though brimming with tears.

“Who's this fellow?”

He pointed at the captain with his stick.

“I've brought him here, grandfather, so that you can tell him why we want to stay on in Algeria, because he doesn't understand. He's dirty
Frangaoui
who has done a lot of fighting . . . for the Chinese . . . But he doesn't care for our war at all.”

“Come here,” said the old man. “Come on, I'm not going to eat you. You're like my other grandson, the real one who was killed in Italy, tall and lean, all bone and muscle. You've got the Légion d'Honneur, I see, but what's that, yes, the green one?”

“The Croix de la Libération.”

“So you were with de Gaulle? I was all for Pétain and Giraud myself, because they at least were gentlemen and your de Gaulle was just a politico who brought the Communists back. But you fought, which was the right thing to do.”

In the drawing-room with its tall shutters, through which the sun's rays filtered, shimmering with dust, they were given some iced rosé wine whose sharpness disguised its strength.

“I made this wine myself,” the old man told them, “the best rosé in the Mitidja. I sell it in bottles with my own trademark, I don't export it to France to strengthen our anaemic wines.

“Would you like to know why I want to stay on here in Algeria? For the sake of this wine and a number of other things. When I brought the first plants out here, it was a pale little Anjou. Look what the soil of Algeria has done for it; it has given it some of its own fire.”

“That's true,” said Esclavier, “but perhaps your wine is lacking in subtlety and tact . . .”

“We've had enough of subtlety and tact; what we need is strength and justice.

“Is he your lover?” he suddenly asked Isabelle. “No? Yet I told you to get yourself one. Our women must choose their husbands or lovers from among the men who are capable of protecting us.”

“I told you, grandfather, this one doesn't want to protect us.”

“I never said anything of the sort,” Esclavier protested.

He was beginning to like this old man for his violence, his outspokenness and absolute contempt for convention.

“Well then, what did you say?” the old man barked. “Women always understand the men they're in love with either too well or not well enough.”

Isabelle tried to fight back.

“I'm not in love with anyone.”

“Yet this is the first officer you've ever brought to see me. And I must say, you haven't made a bad choice. When the war's over he can leave the army and move in here with you.”

“What about Paul?”

“Paul will get what he deserves: a kick in the ass.”

As they went into lunch, Isabelle took Esclavier by the arm and held him back for a moment.

“You must forgive him, Philippe . . . The troubles have gone to his head a bit.”

The captain was dimly aware she had called him by his christian name. After the long drive in the sun in an open car, the wine had made him slightly fuddled and his reflexes were slow—“all velvety” as his mother used to say. It was not often he thought of her.

The meal consisted of fried courgettes and a highly spiced couscous, washed down by the same rosé wine which went to the head and caused a pleasant torpor in the limbs.

After venting his anger on Algiers, Paris, the Republic, the other settlers and these idiotic Moslems who were going to lose everything in their rebellion, the old man fell fast asleep at the table.

Two Arab servants came and helped him to his feet and gently guided him up to his bedroom.

“They worship him,” said Isabelle. “He curses them, tells them to go off and join the
fellaghas
and leave him alone, but they all know how much he loves them. He has built houses and an infirmary for them, and given them plots of land; he pays them much more than the other settlers, which has caused him quite a lot of trouble. At one moment they even spread the rumour that he was helping the Nationalists.”

“What's the Arabic for ‘Independence'?”

“Istiqlal.”

“That's a very strong word, like your grandfather's wine, it's stronger than gratitude . . . I say, I'm falling asleep in my chair . . .”

“There's a bed made up for you.”

“What about you?”

“I'm going to drive round the farm in the Jeep. As a child, I used to play in the orange-groves . . . with the boy who was killed in Italy. Paul used to hide behind a tree and watch us.”

Philippe lay down fully dressed on his bed in a room full of books, sporting trophies and club pennants.

On the opposite wall, in a lemon-wood frame, hung a picture of a cadet in uniform. He was twenty years old, with a dimple in his left cheek, and seemed to be contemplating him with a conspiratorial smile. Philippe dropped off to sleep and the young cadet's smile accompanied him.

When he woke up, Isabelle was sitting beside him. She handed the captain a glass of iced water.

“You've slept for two hours,” she said.

He noticed she had changed her clothes; she was no longer wearing the light printed dress in which she had started out from Algiers but a coarse linen shirt, a pair of old jeans and desert boots, and from her leather belt hung a revolver in a highly polished leather holster.

“I don't like women playing at soldiers,” he said.

“I've no wish to be raped and have my throat cut a few yards from home without being able to defend myself. What my grandfather was too upset to say is that we want to hold on to this land because we were born here and made it what it is. We've got as much right to it as the settlers of the Far West who drew up in their covered wagons on a river bank where there was nothing but a handful of Indians. They built their huts and began tilling the soil. Only the American settlers killed the Indians, whereas we've looked after the Arabs.

“It would be mad, unjust, unthinkable to drive us out of this territory which we were the first to cultivate since the Romans, out of these houses which we have built . . .

“What on earth have we ever done to you, you people from France?

“In
1943
and
1944
we came to fight for you. At that time we loved France more than you can possibly imagine, while our brothers and fiancés were being killed in the mud of Italy, the beaches of Provence and the forests of the Vosges.

“Why do you want to desert us?”

She had become very emotional, wringing her hands in front of the captain, and there were tears on her cheeks which she did not even wipe away.

Esclavier took her hand and drew her gently towards him. He was moved to see how the elegant little doll, the flirt of the Club des Pins, was transformed into a “Passionaria” of the land of Algeria.

Isabelle came and lay down beside him. He unfastened her belt and tossed it into a corner of the room together with the weapon hanging from it.

Later on, when Isabelle tried to recall in detail how it had all happened, she could not remember a thing, only a wave which came rolling in from afar, towered above her, broke over her and swamped her, dragging her under in a turmoil of sand and gold.

At another moment she saw herself as the land of Algeria. The warrior bending over her was fertilizing this land with his strength and by this union she became part of him for ever.

It was the first time she had found any pleasure in the act and when the wave receded, leaving her insert on the shore, when she saw Philippe lying beside her, naked but by no means shameless and repellent as every other man's body had seemed to her hitherto, she felt that no harm could come to her ever again, that Algeria was saved and all the dangers dispelled.

She stroked his scars and his wounds, timidly at first with the tips of her fingers, then she kissed them.

In the evening they walked hand in hand through the orange groves. Old Pélissier accompanied them in his wheelchair.

“I've managed to make Philippe understand,” she told him.

He ran his hand through his whiskers.

“It must have been quite a job, you made so much noise about it. Do you really think he understood just because you rubbed yourself up against him like a cat in heat . . . Well, anyway, he's now got something worth protecting in Algeria.”

“What?”

“You.”

Esclavier and Isabelle spent the night on the estate. The wave came and bowled Isabelle over again and Philippe no longer made any attempt to fight against this passion which was creeping over him.

In the middle of the night a servant came and woke them up. They went outside; there was a red glow in the sky; the neighbouring farm had been set on fire.

The Murcier estate was one of the oldest in the area; it had been founded a few years after the conquest by one of Bugeaud's officers who had been demobilized on the spot.

Leaning on his sticks and sniffing the air, old Pélissier went on cursing without a pause. Eventually he had a stroke and had to be put to bed. Isabelle decided to stay behind on the farm and Philippe drove back to Algiers by himself in the young woman's car. Before leaving her, he said:

“I'd like you to meet Dia.”

“Who's Dia?”

“A Negro, our medical officer. To some of us, especially to me, he's an extremely important person. If I ever had the urge to go to confession like a good Christian, Dia would be the man I'd choose as my father confessor.”

“Meaning?”

“That maybe I'm in love with you, maybe I'm genuinely in love, but I should very much like Dia to tell me so.”

 • • •