The Praetorians (22 page)

“Then,” said Pasfeuro, “Soustelle arrives. With a firm hand to guide them, the crowd seizes the Government General, the Prefecture and a few other public buildings which won't be guarded. Immediately behind it are you paratroopers, who at once have all these buildings cleared and post a guard outside every one of them. Not a drop of blood shed. Algiers seized without a shot being fired, Oran and Constantine follow suit, then the big towns in south-western France, then Paris. . . . But if Soustelle doesn't turn up, if the police or the C.R.S. fire on
the crowd, if your men are outstripped, if Oran—just to be different from Algiers, as usual, or because Prefect Lambert shows a strong hand—if Oran holds tight and doesn't follow you, if the Front Populaire comes to life again in France and if, under the cover of some Kerensky or other—Mendès, Mitterand or le Troquer—the Communists seize power and shoot de Gaulle . . . then it's civil war. Have you thought of that?”

“It's too late,” said Marindelle, “everything's already under way. Forgive me while I put through a phone call.”

He went inside and, through the Mogador military exchange, rang up the
10
th Regiment at Z. He was put through at once to Colonel Raspéguy.

“Captain Marindelle here, sir. Yes, sir, it's for this evening or tomorrow morning. In the Gaullist group Soustelle's the favourite. Our horse, the Minister of National Defence, is losing ground every hour. Bonvillain is dropping him. What's Esclavier doing? He's sleeping—yes, of course, alone.

“Mattei has left? He didn't like the idea? Yet it's rather nice for him to be sent to command a parachute company in Bastia, his home town. What's that? He says he's bound to fall out with his relations. We couldn't have sent Orsini, he's too highly strung and he's got even more relations than Mattei. The movement order? Yes, of course it's a fake, sir. The switchboard? We're beyond that now. It's a plot, or rather ten or twenty plots wide open to the sky. General Hellion's with you? Please give him my regards and remind him that it's also in memory of his son that we're doing this. Yes, the whole regiment is standing by.”

Marindelle hung up and came back outside on to the terrace.

Françoise Baguèras sat thinking, with her chin on her fist, and on her mobile face, like clouds drifting across the moon, could be seen in quick succession astonishment, anger and also slight amusement:

“Tell me, Captain. Did you sleep here last night?”

“Yes.”

“And you weren't alone, but with my niece, with that little slut Jacqueline. She was hanging about the lobby earlier on in the evening. Was it you she was waiting for? Where is she now? Because out here it's not the same as in France, we don't like
our girls of eighteen to get off with every Tom, Dick and Harry. What's the number of your room, so that I can go and tear her eyes out? Because the revolution's one thing, the family is another. And if you don't watch your step I'll have the whole Baguèras tribe down on you.”

“She's already left,” said Marindelle, sinking into a deck-chair.

The captain had tried through this young girl to revive the memory of Jeanine, of whom she reminded him with her big eyes, heavy head of hair and plaintive voice. He had been disappointed.

“She's gone back home with ants in her pants,” said Françoise, who liked indulging in outrageous language. “She'll put on that little virginal air and say to my sister: ‘I spent the night at Aunt Françoise's, and I tidied up for her; you know how untidy she is!' Malistair, am I really untidy?”

“Yes,” the American admitted.

“And you still want to marry me?”

“I'm an old bachelor, I don't like untidiness, but what I dread more is boredom, and when I'm away from you I'm bored.”

“Captain Marindelle,” said Françoise, “for the sake of Pasfeuro, who's by way of being your brother, your brother-in-law and your cousin, I shan't make a scene. But I should be grateful to you, when you go out with my niece, if you wouldn't bring her back here, to the Hôtel Saint-Georges, where anyone might bump into her. Heavens above, what do you see in that girl? She's an idiot. She's going to fail her baccalaureate for the third time running. You might at least try and make her work. Did you do Latin at school? It's true, I'd forgotten, you're too busy; you've got a revolution on your hands. Your revolution might well go up in a puff of smoke. Instead of running after schoolgirls and compromising them you'd do better to attend to the competition. Go and have a look round the Faculties by and by. Lagaillarde is already swaggering about in his paratroop uniform. He wants to seize the Government General this evening.”

“He's no right to wear uniform; he's a subaltern on the reserve.”

“He doesn't give a damn about that and I don't altogether
blame him. Good night, I'm going to bed. In a few hours from now there'll be some fine fun and games, a real Algerian showdown—a
chouchouka.
”

“And as usual,” said Malistair, “they'll break the windows of the American Information Centre. Every revolution in the world, whether it's left wing or right, begins like that. We're the victims of misfortune. And yet nothing could be kindlier than the heart of an American who lives abroad.”

“Why does it happen, then?” asked Pasfeuro.

“The American is kind-hearted, but he is not equipped for living abroad. He is too well conditioned to his own country.”

 * * * * 

Corporal Xavier Fortanelle, who was with his squadron at Bouria, had been given forty-eight hours' leave, valid for the department but excluding the town of Algiers.

He was a handsome lad, whose fair moustache lent his rather colourless face a certain air of adventurousness. A native of Clermont-Ferrand, employed as an accountant at the Michelin factory, the only son of well-to-do parents who owned a small house and a few vines on the hill of Chanturgue, he had before him the prospect of an uneventful easy-going life. But, ill-equipped for such a passion, he had fallen in love with Paulette Lopez, a little Spanish girl from Bab-el-Oued. He had got nothing out of her; his blood caught fire every time he was anywhere near her. The little hussy had noticed this and kept telling him that she was an honourable girl and wasn't going to lose this honour of hers—no, not for anything!—until she had complied with both the civil and religious formalities. He had therefore asked her to marry him.

The betrothal feast was due to be held at midday on
13
th May. The Lopezes had prepared a gigantic
paella
, to which they had invited their family and part of the neighbourhood. Paulette Lopez had wanted to show how magnanimous she was towards her former girl-friend Conchita Martinez and had asked her as well. This was much to her credit, for Conchita had behaved like an absolute whore. To the knowledge of the whole street she had spent several nights away from home with
a jeep driver who was not even young and had passed himself off as a paratroop colonel.

Moreover, Conchita still maintained, and her family likewise, that he really was a colonel, that he was even Colonel Raspéguy, the one who had his photo in the papers so often. Anyone could have seen him when he came to say good-bye to Conchita before going off to Egypt.

“He was no more real that day than on any other day,” Montserrat Lopez had declared.

And, in support of her contention, the fat old shrew had produced that morning's issue of the
Echo d' Alger
with a photograph of Colonel Raspéguy in Cyprus.

This photo business had made Conchita Martinez's honour and that of her family a subject for laughter and ribald jokes. To make amends, one of her brothers had even had to volunteer for the paratroops, like any Frenchy bumpkin from the depths of the country.

Feeling slightly uneasy because his leave was not authorized for Algiers and because he had put on civilian clothes, Xavier Fortanelle made his way to the Lopezes', hugging the walls.

It was eleven o' clock in the morning. They reproached him violently for having abandoned his uniform, “as though he was ashamed of it!.” He quietly explained, in that drawling accent of his home town, that when one got married it was for life, that it was therefore normal, at one's betrothal as on one's wedding day, to wear the clothes one was going to wear for the rest of that life. For he did not intend to make the army his career.

“And if you were a fireman?” asked one of the Lopezes, who found Xavier's argument hard to follow. “I mean, of course, if you were a professional fireman.”

“I should report to the church and the town hall in my brass helmet,” the corporal imperturbably replied.

In an unimaginable din the whole household was making ready for the feast. The men in their shirt-sleeves were scraping their chins with old cut-throat razors, the women were tending the pots and pans, dressing the children, cuffing their ears and searching
the bottoms of drawers for collar-studs, alternately cursing and giving instructions for the cooking.

On being introduced to all sorts of Lopezes, Hernandezes and Martinezes, Xavier was embraced first by the men, then by the women, and finally, half suffocating, handed back to his fiancée, who was sitting on a chair having her hair dressed by Conchita Martinez.

To this fiancé, who was not even a paratrooper, Conchita displayed a hint of condescension, which irritated Paulette, who forthwith gave evidence of exaggerated affection and smeared Xavier's face with her lipstick.

Then a taxi driver turned up who was wearing a white singlet over his hairy chest. He gave himself great airs and accepted an anisette . . . but “just a quick one, because don't forget the demonstration this afternoon,” and what a job it was to arrange the whole business, never in his life had he seen anything to beat it.

With his glass in his hand, perched on one buttock only so as to show what a rush he was in, he gave vent to certain disclosures.

“This time, my friends, it's a real show-down. Just you mark my words. Even Raspéguy's paratroops are turning up to lend us support.”

Conchita abandoned her friend's hair and, through clenched teeth, said:

“Then you'll see if he's a driver, Paulette.”

In spite of her desire to take revenge on the whole neighbourhood, she was frightened of seeing the big colonel again. She had not heard from him, but she knew that if he turned up and asked her to come back to him she would feel a tremor in her guts and in her legs, and she would obey him. If that happened her father would throw her out of the house. He had warned her.

Xavier Fortanelle, like many of his comrades, had resigned himself ages ago to understanding nothing more about this Algerian business, these disputes between Arabs and Frenchies, these parades, these demonstrations, all this fuss and bother punctuated by the “Marseillaise,” flags and sometimes the
explosion of bombs or grenades. He was serving his time, and nothing more, in a little town where everything appeared to be quite calm at the moment. As in civilian life, he totted up figures, filled in forms and, occasionally, drove a lorry. But he was badly paid and had to wear a uniform that was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. He had gone bathing at Tighzirt a couple of times. Not bad. However, he preferred the icy lakes of his mountains to the warm, smarting water of the sea.

Now that he was engaged he might be able to ask Paulette to grant him all that a man can demand from his wife, and then he would be perfectly happy. During the meal he thought of nothing else.

Once or twice he stroked his fiancée's thighs and she did not object: that was a good sign.

The rice, cooked in saffron and oil and mixed with fish, red peppers and chicken, had given him a thirst and he gulped down several glasses of a heavy, full-bodied la Trappe wine. Everyone round him was talking about a demonstration. But the sounds, the words, reached his ears as though from a great distance, like echoes.

At half past two processions began to assemble from every direction and move off towards the Boulevard Lafarrière. Puydebois had arrived with his old truck, in the back of which he had piled his henchmen, who had unfurled a huge tricolour flag on which was inscribed “Honour, Goodwill, Country”: the flag of the Great Day.

Behind their banners the veterans marched off, with their decorations hanging askew on their chests. The students advanced in small groups up the Rue Michelet; just as Malistair had predicted, they smashed in the windows of the American Information Centre with stones. Algiers was spewing out its inhabitants like water from a sponge being squeezed.

Boys and girls on motor-scooters, trailing flags behind them, sped off to mysterious rendezvous, happy to be young, happy that it was a fine day and that the atmosphere vibrated with that intoxicating buzz that precedes the swarming of bees or a revolution in a Latin country. Cars and scooters kept hooting
“Al-gé-rie-Fran-çaise”
in a deafening din.

“Yes,” said Françoise, “everything belongs to the young in Algiers, there's almost nothing left for the adults: even this revolution, whether it succeeds or fails, will be theirs, just you watch.”

“I'm very fond of adult countries,” said Pasfeuro, “but I'm condemned to women who will be adolescent all their lives and to countries in a perpetual state of puberty.”

“Look,” said Malistair, “they're bringing their children with them to the demonstration.”

A group of people passed them near the post office, with their snotty-nosed brats dressed up in their Sunday best, the women with baskets dangling from their arms, the girls giggling shrilly as though they were having their bottoms pinched.

The men walked ahead, heatedly discussing the latest football match.

At half past three the Lopez family and their guests decided to go to the demonstration.

They had to wake Xavier, who had fallen asleep at the table, his head resting on his arms, fuddled by the over-rich food and wine.