Planus (15 page)

Things went on like this until the day I took Grandfather's part, then Father turned against me and Mother became very distant. And now I shall tell you why Grandfather loved me so much, and why, when I asked for a toy boat, he bought me a real one for my birthday. You see, Grandfather always treated me as a man. I told you he was a keen horseman. When one of his sons reached the age of two, it was his habit to set the little fellow on the back of one of the horses from his stable, then get the beast going with a smart lash across the rump, and if the poor tot was unfortunate enough to fall off, Grandfather never spoke another word to him, except on great occasions such as the family reunion on the day of his death. He had meted out the same treatment to his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons. Now, I am told that amongst all these dozens of children there was only one little boy who did not fall off, and that one was myself. Naturally, I do not remember the incident, but it seems that, when Grandfather sat me astride the animal, a high- spirited chestnut, and cracked his whip, I managed to stay on the horse, clinging on, God knows how, to the beast's mane as it galloped off at full speed. Anyway, I stayed in the saddle. For a while even my father was readmitted to his father-in-law's good graces, while Mother was praised to the skies. "At last you have produced a son," said Grandfather, "and he is a man !" '

'He's certainly going to play some dirty trick on me,' I thought. ! On another night when I was alone at the wheel, I was absent- ; mindedly watching the movements of the mainmast, whose tip moved over the sky like a finger moving over a celestial globe, pointing out to me the various stars and constellations, and there came J to my mind the story of the
Foederis Area,
a tale which is very well-known in the Midi and which I heard for the first time at Longages, from my friend Marcellin Castaing, whose father was a wine- merchant in Toulouse. I had long wanted to write a short story , based on this gloomy tale, and I would have called it 'A Romance ; of the Sea', but then, the other day, I found it summarized in the ) following fashion in one of the thrilling books of Captain Louis | Lacroix, a master from the days of sailing-ships : 

A hold full of wine had the great disadvantage of affording the crew only too easy an opportunity of getting drunk, if the fancy , took them, and it was a cargo of this kind that caused one of the most terrible dramas recorded in the annals of the French merchant marine, known as the tragedy of the
Foederis Area.
This vessel, registered at the port of Nantes and commanded by a captain of the same city, had taken a cargo of wines aboard at Cette, some time during the latter part of the last century. From the moment they set sail, the crew, who had contrived a secret passage into the hold, giving them access to the cargo itself, drank to excess, were insubordinate and, finally, refused to obey either the captain or the first mate, who warned the mutinous crew that disciplinary action would be taken against them as soon as they reached their destination. It was then that, under the influence of drink, the crew tortured the two officers to death, scuttled the ship, and took to the boats with the idea of passing the whole thing off as a shipwreck. However, before reaching the shipping lanes where they were likely to be picked up by some vessel, they threw the ship's boy into the sea for fear he might betray them. A little later they were rescued by a wind-jammer, recounted their carefully prepared fable to the crew, and would have got away with it had not the apprentice, whom they had spared, been overcome by remorse and told his mother the whole story on his return to France. After many months of searching, almost all the men were caught, condemned to death and guillotined at Brest.

. . . And women, what are they doing in this world? Can one really consider them as members of the human race? There are times when it seems doubtful. And if they are human, they're a blessed variety of vermin ... a wife in every port.

A deep sigh came from the distant shore.

This was on another night. We were becalmed once more, abeam the Isle of Elba, well out,
fuero da ilha
as the old Portuguese sailors used to write in the logbook, to indicate that it was dangerous and they had not sailed into the channel between the island and the mainland, but had stood well out to sea.

The moon was full and the sea seemed more unreal than ever, the whole surface rippling and gurgling, with millions of globules of — I won't say sulphuretted hydrogen — but giving off that indefinable odour of mildew and organic putrefaction, indicating an alkaline content which characterizes certain thermal waters, those of Capvern in the Pyrenees for example, or Montecatini in Tuscany, or Chichana in Andalusia, which smell like damp washing from a distance and like dirty underclothing from close to, are nauseating to drink and are politely termed 'radio-active' — although, in fact, they smell like farts — for the great ladies of society must have a medico-legal label in which to dip their delicate bodies !

It suddenly smelled of death that night, and the deck with its wine-casks strewn about, and their white labels bearing Papadakis' trade-mark

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like an inscription on a tombstone, and the perpendicular shadows like cypresses, evoked a little Mussulman cemetery in the moonlight, the mainsail swelling like the dome of an emir's tomb or the cupola of a Marabout shrine. And, as if abandoned in the midst of the ruins, the Bulgar, stretched out like a bloated corpse; the rigging threw a tracery of knots, cords and lattice-work over his body, and the shadow of the mast-truck fell directly across his puffy face in the shape of a triangular mask, reaching from his arched eyebrows to the point of his chin, but revealing his swollen cheeks, glazed by the moonlight. I could not take my eyes off that black triangle which seemed to have been stamped on to his face and which reminded me of the hole in the face of the leper who had caused me such terrors, the old King of la Salita, whom I killed at the age of nine, and whose horribly ravaged features and doom-laden look will probably never be effaced from my memory.

And then this drunken corpse moved, turned over, turned again, sat up, sneezed and sneezed, sniffed the night air, looked about him snivelling, rose painfully to his feet, and seeing that no one came to his aid, limped forward like the bound and hampered Lazarus hobbling from his grave, came right up to me, stood there trying to maintain his balance, his legs flabby but finding some support by leaning against the water-tank behind him, subsided, slithered down, and suddenly collapsed. I truly believe that if the lunatic had tried to strangle me I would have surrendered helplessly, so macabre was his advent. He looked so nightmarish as he took those few lurching steps across the deck and folded up into a sitting position against the tank that it was as if he had come from some other world, mechanically contrived, where the strings were jerked by the Grand Guignol, and the ship had become a stage-set, the flapping sails a curtain and the brilliance of the moon turned to limelight, as false and as disturbing as the premeditated words this alarming character now pronounced in a gruff voice :

'Iebi, iebi,'
he said, 'come here and let me kill you,
iebi. . .'

No, it was not an attack of delirium tremens, for, dropping down on all fours, he crawled still nearer to me and lifted his head, not to howl at the moon like a werewolf, as I expected, but to recite a role learned by heart and told in stuttering tones of desolation and conspiracy :

'Iebi,
you didn't know the handsome Boris, my master, or Oleg his best friend, did you? During the day, Boris and his friend Oleg were lieutenants in the same regiment, but at night they were poets and they went arm in arm to the Club de la Noblesse and there, sitting on opposite sides of a table for two, they wrote long love poems which I had to take to the newspaper, for, although I was coachman to Boris, my master, I had orders to keep the carriage at the disposal of his friend, Oleg, and the poems appeared next morning in two rival papers in the town, and the whole population made fun of them, because the two poems were addressed to the same woman, a heartless creature, Jasmine the dancer, with whom both friends were equally and desperately in love, and, as with politics, the town split into two factions; there were the partisans of Boris and the partisans of Oleg, and bets were laid as to which of the two inseparable friends would win and carry off the beauty.

'But Jasmine laughed at the two lieutenants. This went on for months and, one fine morning, the two friends met on the duelling- ground, having decided to fight it out to the death, each spurred on by his seconds. They took off their uniform jackets in the meadow and fought, first with cavalry swords and then with a parabellum, which is a war weapon. Neither was killed. My master had his nose slashed off by a sabre and I took his friend home in the carriage with a bullet in his groin. With my master disfigured but fit again, his friend convalescing in the provinces and Jasmine forbidden by the authorities to reside in the capital, nobody thought any more about this old farce, for the supporters of the two friends had had a good laugh at their expense and now they turned to other entertainments. The two friends had had a reconciliation at the scene of the duel and the rival papers had given up publishing their love-poems.

'And then, one evening, Boris gave me 300 levas in banknotes and a stout little revolver, a "Bulldog", and said to me : "Coachman, you will take the night train and tomorrow morning, before dawn, you will surprise that swine, Oleg, in his bed and fire the whole barrel into his head at point-blank range. Do you understand? And if by chance he is not alone, let his mistress have two or three bullets, it's a 12-shot revolver. Go on, get going you idiot, and be careful, don't show your face in this town again, you are dismissed. I have already engaged your pal, Youssip, to replace you. Don't worry about the horses. There is no need for you to come back here, understand? Dismiss!"

'I had understood perfectly. I took the train in the early hours, without anyone having seen me, and carried out to the letter the mission my master had charged me with. Let me add that Oleg, my master's faithful friend, was alone in the bed, so it was he who got the whole barrel in his skull, though one bullet would have been enough, for the first one smashed his temple.

'That's when my troubles began. What was I to do? Boris had given me 300 levas. The train had cost me only i8o-odd. I still had a 100-leva note, two silver coins, one five, the other two levas, and I don't know how many stotinki, small change in nickel and bronze. Well, I'm not a thief, so I went back to the capital to return this money to my master, and, as I didn't want to waste my master's fortune, I went all the way on foot. But when Boris saw me coming into his place he flew into a rage and, without listening to my explanations, chased me out with a whip, following me right out into the street and shouting at the top of his lungs: "Imbecile! Get out and never let me see your face again! Clear off, I tell you, go to the devil!" It's not fair, is it, eh? I can quite understand that he was exasperated because he'd lost his manly good looks, and forever, but beating me wouldn't put his nose back on his face, would it? It's just like this damned wine, it makes me ill. You wouldn't have a drop of spirits, would you? I prefer spirits. Oh well, give me a
papyrosse,
then. . .

Years and years later, whilst I was dining with Max Hyene in his flat in the avenue du Bois, I was telling this tale of my adventures on board Papadakis' boat, laden with Samos wine, when Max interrupted me to ask: 'Would you enjoy a bottle of Samos wine now, Blaise?'

'Certainly I would, Max,' I replied, 'all the more so since I have never drunk it from that day to this.'

So Max called his devoted butler, John, who had been in his service since time began and had accompanied the great engineer everywhere on his travels, even the most adventurous ones, and John was given the key to the cellar and exhorted to choose the very best bottle from such and such a rack.

'I know,' said John majestically, 'Monsieur need have no anxiety, there is no possibility of error. It is the vin du Grand Turc.'

'That's the one,' said Max.

And Max explained to us: 'As you know, I do not drink, but I am sure this wine is excellent, it comes from the cellars of Yildiz Kiozk, from the Sultan's personal reserve. I have fifty bottles of Samos wine given to me by Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan, at the time when I was building the Baghdad railway....'

And Max spoke to us about the old Padishah, careworn and stooping, with his waxy pallor, aquiline nose, long grey moustaches and blinking eyes, who was always to be seen walking in the gardens of the Old Harem huddled in a voluminous gown, for the Defender of the Faithful was sensitive to the cold. Moreover, since he was in constant fear of assassination, he carried two loaded pistols tucked into his Oriental sash. One day an ancient gardener, who was bending down working behind a clump of bushes, suddenly straightened up right in his path, and Abdul Hamid did not hesitate, he fired at the gardener and killed him like a dog! The conversation then became general and we spoke of other things, but the famous bottle had still failed to arrive.

At the end of the meal, Max said to me: 'Well, Blaise, you haven't told me what you think of my Samos wine.'

'But, Max, I'm still waiting for it. They haven't served it!'

'I beg your pardon,' said Max, 'I didn't notice. It's old age. I've got a head like a sieve.'

And he sent for his faithful servant again.

'Well, John, did you find the bottle of wine for Monsieur Cendrars?'

'I hope Monsieur will forgive me,' said John, deeply distressed, 'I am extremely sorry, but there is none left!'

'How is that, John? It's utterly impossible! I haven't touched it, and I have never offered it to guests, because I had not thought of it before.'