Olura (24 page)

‘You know who I am?’ Sauche asked.

‘Yes, of course, general. In the hotel I did not. But under interrogation one learns as much as one gives away.’

‘I should hate to hand you over to the police,’ he answered reflectively, ‘after our short but most sympathetic acquaintanceship. But I am sure you will understand that in our
position Commandant Vigny and I cannot afford to be compromised. Tell me first: how did you get on to Captain Bozec?’

‘Through a certain Araña and a little imagination.’

They were both silent, not meeting my eyes or each other’s.

‘We might be able to do a deal,’ Vigny said. ‘It’s worth thinking about.’

The interview was developing along most unexpected lines. They did not know I had been released and were assuming that I had escaped from prison.

‘There is also the question of justice. Chivalry is so rare in these days that one should not have to pay for it too heavily,’ Sauche remarked with a sort of
general-at-the-breakfast-table sententiousness. ‘Since you appear to know so much, I would ask you to give me a fair hearing. What we can do for you, frankly I do not know. But I would not
like you to leave this house still thinking, as you must do now, that we are the lowest of canaille. What are your politics?’

I replied that I hadn’t got any, that as a philologist with an interest in pre-history I was accustomed to think of political development in units of five hundred years rather than units
of twenty, and was overwhelmed by a sense of the futility of the purely ephemeral.

‘You think there is never any point in resistance?’ the general asked.

‘As a historian I may think so. As an individual I support the right of any man to lose his temper with his government. One cannot stagnate.’

‘Then we can start from there. It is not only with General de Gaulle that—to adopt your phrase—I have lost my temper. It is with your government, too, and with all the
irresponsible statesmen of our time.

‘You, the British, have made the disastrous mistake of treating other races as your political equals, and you have compelled the rest of us to follow your lead. Yet never did you treat
them as social equals. The French, on the other hand, have and had no objection at all to fraternity and intermarriage. Black, white, yellow—the ideal of the Revolution still lives. All
Frenchmen are of equal value.’

‘I never understood that the Algerian and Indo-Chinese peasants had been so highly privileged,’ I said.

He begged me to spare him my irony and not to interrupt his apology.

‘In any case, you know very well,’ he went on, ‘that it is impractical to treat a distinguished lawyer and his bare-arsed second cousin with the same consideration even though
they are of the same race. It is the ideal which counts. Permit me to continue. The objectives of the Alliance des Blancs, of which you will have heard, are clear and logical. It maintains that we,
the Europeans, had no right to surrender political power to states which are not viable, which had no unity before our administrators created it, which demand the services of the United Nations
once a month. It is our duty to the future, as trustees of civilisation, to preserve supremacy until such time as we can hand over to a responsible Confederation.’

‘To a French Empire, for example?’

‘One could do worse. Or to the European Community, if you like. Or to any Great Power which is strong enough to save the people of Africa from themselves. Although I am a Catholic, I would
prefer government by Moscow to the anarchy which must come from giving to innocents, cruel and happy as children, an independence for which they are not ready.

‘Good! We now arrive at His Excellency, M. Leopold Mgwana, whose country for the moment—let us admit it—is efficiently administered. For the moment, I say. And if tomorrow he
is assassinated? What future do you see when they have shot the bananas off the trees with their pretty machine-guns and returned to the use of their excellent spears?

‘Mgwana is an exception. His success intoxicates all Africa. The world would see the inevitable future more clearly if he were out of the way. But such a solution was not even considered.
For that you have my word.’

So Gonzalez’s obsession with assassination was not so fantastic as I thought! When politicians claim that a proposal was not even considered, they invariably mean that it was—but
rejected.

‘It would not have been difficult,’ Sauche continued. ‘These dedicated liberals and pacifists accept as friends anyone who can mouth their ridiculous patter. We therefore knew
of the’—he searched for a delicate word—‘the escapade of Mlle Manoli and M. Mgwana. When we discovered the incredible—that neither of them had asked for the routine
protection of the Spanish police—the situation was not without its temptations.

‘Professor, what we did I ask you to see as an act of war, regrettable but devoid of all personal considerations. The Alliance des Blancs serves humanity. Mlle Manoli and her Group make
the same claim. I have decidedly the right to lose my temper with them. I chose the weapons of scandal, a scurrilous press, ridicule. In fact I took a leaf out of their book and used non-violence.
It is a pity that you or Mgwana were so old-fashioned as to kill poor Livetti.’

‘But neither of us killed him !’ I exclaimed.

‘Then who did?’

‘That is what I have come here to find out.’

‘I think, my general, that we should telephone the police,’ said Vigny coldly.

Then I made a disastrous mistake. It was due to my growing fury as the general blathered away about his petty, pitiable ‘act of war’. Suppression of that hatred forced me into a sort
of contemptuous triumph. I told them that I had been acquitted of the murder of Livetti, released and asked to leave Spain. Partly led on by the interest of that monomaniac Sauche and partly to
convince them of the reality of my story, I even gave them some account of the route by which I had secretly returned.

‘Commandant Vigny,’ the general ordered, ‘this time you will tell me the truth.’

‘If you insist, my general. But I should prefer not to tell you in the presence of the professor. I have grown accustomed to him.’

He shrugged his shoulders. I did not immediately see what he meant. But comment from me was not required, for there was no stopping the general. He was on his feet and loudly demanding the
truth, determined to confront the pair of us as if he had been taking over from some incompetent Court Martial.

‘I offer you the excuse that it is the first duty of a Chief of Staff to spare his Commander unnecessary worries,’ Vigny said. ‘You had quite enough on your plate without the
added complications of Duyker’s folly; and it seemed to me unnecessary at the time that you should be bothered by the death of Livetti since the professor here had done his best to ensure
that it would never be known.

‘I feel that if he had been able to dispose of Livetti calmly and at leisure, that would have been the end of the affair. I genuinely wished to assist him, doubting if his experience could
be as extensive as my own. But communication was difficult and dangerous. Like a fool I permitted Duyker to speak to Mgwana on the telephone. His tone of voice was hardly engaging. He insisted that
he knew how to deal with natives, that Mgwana was helpless and would do whatever he was told. As usual he was wrong.

‘But let us begin at the beginning. Duyker picked up Livetti at the rendezvous. You will remember, my general, that Livetti’s instructions were to photograph His Excellency with his
girl-friend, if possible in some pose which would leave no doubt what their relations were and at the same time would be fit for publication. That was his speciality. In case there was a row, he
was to make the most of it and yell for the Liberty of the Press. The worst that could happen to him was a day or two in prison and expulsion from Spain. I admit I hoped for something of the sort
in order to gain still more publicity.

‘What happened is hard to believe,’ he went on. ‘I have done my best to disentangle it all from Duyker’s account which consisted of little more than exclamations of
indignation. And even when I have constructed a coherent story, I cannot make it fit the known character of Livetti. In my dealings with him I saw no sign of immoderate sensibility. So what you
will hear, my general, has been filtered out through Duyker’s mind and then through mine. The truth may be simpler.

‘Duyker and Livetti stopped by the roadside not far from the hotel to run through the arrangements. It was then that Livetti first heard the name of Olura Manoli. He at once launched
himself into an Italian passion. Duyker, as you know, has no great respect for Italians. For him the only white men are Dutch, Germans and the objectionable English. We, the French qualify or not
according to our political opinions.

‘Livetti said that she was too beautiful and that he would not do it. That much is certain. Duyker quoted the exact words. He has not the imagination to invent them. And Livetti, I
understand, spoke English perfectly.

‘Duyker told Livetti with his customary tact that he had been paid to undertake the job, and that it made no difference whether he was photographing a cow’s backside or a
woman’s. Livetti insisted that it was an outrage. He seems to have accused himself with tears, saying that he had no use for morality nor honour since neither existed; but he respected
beauty. He said that Olura Manoli with her clothes on was an angel, and without them a saint to whom any artist would pray.

‘What had passed between Livetti and Mlle Manoli we cannot know. But there it is! She appears to have plunged him into an abyss of sentimentality.’

Vigny shrugged his shoulders and offered no further comment. He made it clear that he was reporting with proper military accuracy what Duyker had told him, and that he himself believed it to be
somewhere near reality.

At the time I could not make head or tail of it. All this highfalutin stuff about beauty and innocence sounded to me like the jabberings of some noble and bearded pre-Raphaelite waving an empty
bottle. Only after my brief meeting with Olura could I guess at an explanation. Livetti had been damnably ashamed of himself. But he was not capable of privately retching with remorse like the rest
of us and telling Duyker to go to the devil. Shame was not an admissible word in his vocabulary. It couldn’t be. The moment it entered his conscious mind he would have to confess to himself
what a degenerate little horror he was. So his Italian imagination invented all this pseudo-aesthetic fantasy which had in fact just enough truth in it to serve as an excuse.

‘Duyker of course made nothing of all this excitement, but he is easily shocked,’ Vigny went on. ‘I do not know if he ever has a woman. The thought appals me. I feel that he
would carefully cover her up and say grace. It is perhaps understandable. He has shown me snaps of his family and female friends. That he should associate women with bovine backsides does not
surprise me.

‘Livetti must have seen right through our good old Duyker and deliberately provoked him, playing like a cruel little cat with all Duyker’s suppressions, and phobias. He had a mind
like a dagger when it came to twisting the point about in anyone’s faults but his own. He seems to have told him that male Negroes were far more beautiful and affectionate than whites. When
Duyker whispered that to me, I could see that he had taken it in a heterosexual sense which horrified him quite enough anyway.

‘Then Duyker hit him. He says that Livetti hit back. I dare say he did, but what could the poor devil do? Duyker got him by the throat, forced his head out of the window of the car and
thumped it up and down on the sill.

‘Finding to his surprise—they must have remarkable skulls in South Africa—that Livetti was dead, he acted with the daring that one expects from a colonial. He carried out the
whole plan with Livetti dead instead of Livetti alive. He drove quietly into the garage under the hotel, drew up along the door into the shaft and hoisted Livetti up the ladder which this
Araña had left in position. He took out the screws which I had loosened and shoved the corpse through the window.

‘In five minutes Duyker was away and in forty minutes more he had joined us here. When that night he told me the whole story, I was alarmed but considered he might have done worse. He had
never been seen with Livetti and there was no connection between the two. He had been driving from Madrid to Zarauz and would appear to have taken a normal time for the journey. Over the plateau he
propels that car of his as if he were the only man on the road. His departure and arrival were both witnessed, and he wasted only half an hour in picking up Livetti and disposing of him. His alibi,
though not so unbreakable as our own, is good enough.’

Sauche’s air of melancholy increased. Clearly enough he disapproved of his brilliant subordinate and that intolerable ally, Duyker. But what could he do? I had the impression of a man
deprived of hope and compelled to accept violence. What was his futile Alliance des Blancs against the Napoleonic splendour of the ruler of France with his patriotism, right or wrong, and his
fearless search for a modern cadre within which that patriotism might be expressed? While still in France or Algeria Sauche may have deluded himself that he was an equal and alternative. After a
year of exile, only an effort of will could persuade him that he was anything of the sort.

By a similar effort he put aside all the disgraceful implications of the story which Vigny had told with such ironical detachment—by God, his hand sketching in the air had almost
illustrated it too!—and turned to a subject which might excuse his intended treatment of me.

‘I ask you again,’ he said, ‘what do you know of Bozec?’

‘What everyone knows—that he had no business to be where he was or he would not have been driven into Lequeito by the gale.’

‘Why was he there?’

‘I had thought for fishing. It is only your insistence, my general, which makes me suspect there may have been other reasons.’

‘The problem posed by this gentleman is very difficult,’ he sighed to Vigny.