The Praetorians (10 page)

Later on she had put it to the test for herself with a singer with a lovely deep contralto voice who had made advances to her. The experience had seemed interesting, without danger, and she had had occasion to repeat it.

Her relationship with Philippe was now more simple and straightforward. She had given herself to him; in exchange, she was entitled to his secrets.

But she had not accounted for the strong healthy pleasure she had derived from him and which she had not known for quite some time. Like the majority of independent women of her age, she not only wanted to be on an equal footing with men but demanded, in addition, various privileges without opposition.

Irène thought for a moment of her companions and bed-companions, of their unhealthy scanty pleasure which they considered sophisticated.

“With two, it's boring,” Jeanne de Villaret used to say, “with four, it's a public meeting, three's the perfect number. . . .”

She had just experienced in the open countryside the over-powering desire and gratification that Lady Chatterley sought with her gamekeeper. That was how she would describe her adventure, if she ever had to talk about it.

Jeanne, with her throaty voice, would reply with one of her usual stock phrases:

“Are you abandoning the Directoire for the rustic?”

 * * * * 

With their arms round each other's waists they made their way back to Saint-Gilles. Irène slipped her hand under Philippe's shirt to stroke his skin and rubbed her head against his shoulder, without realizing that these were the age-old gestures of a woman in love.

They stopped to drink some water at a spring. The young girl crushed some mint in her hands and rubbed it on the man's chest.

“I love that smell,” she said. “I imagine that's how Pan must have smelt; I'll smell it again on you this evening. You look very absorbed. What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

He was lying. He had just remembered that in Algeria his
comrades were sweating in the heat or dying of cold, feeding on tinned food, drinking nothing but water, exhausting themselves, getting wounded or killed for the sake of a cause which everyone here considered lost. Meanwhile he was bathing, wallowing in the sun, making love, and presently he would partake of old Donadieu's tasty cooking. But he envied his comrades and he would have liked to be back with the men of his clan instead of lying under an olive-tree beside this beautiful stranger who rubbed his chest with mint.

Philippe stopped at his house to change his clothes, leaving Irène to make her way home alone.

Urbain Donadieu was waiting for her in the arbour, drinking his pastis which he made himself. He did not sweeten it, in order to have the pleasure of dripping iced water into it through a piece of sugar and savouring the fresh fragrance rising from the glass.

“Well?” he asked his daughter.

“We went for a bathe in the Siagne; the water was icy.”

Urbain made a trumpeting noise with his lips.

“All right,” she said. “I can see you know, I can't hide anything from you. Tonight I'm going to sleep at Philippe's.”

He concealed his surprise, so as to appear more shrewd and informed than he was. But his daughter's cynicism, which shocked him as a father, could only entrance the disillusioned sneering character he had assumed so as not to suffer too much from others, and which had gradually melted into his own.

“Is it to make him talk that you did that, like a spy of the good old days? But Mata Hari preferred the bedrooms of luxury hotels to the grass on the banks of the Siagne.”

“No, I wanted to. I like him, and since I want him to give me an account of his life, I granted him what he wanted in exchange.”

She closed her eyes; she had just caught herself out cheating.

She was the one who had provoked Philippe's desire so that she might have this excuse, but afterwards it had gone very well. Somewhat too well, in fact.

Philippe arrived, with his jacket thrown over his shoulders. Urbain Donadieu told him what there was for dinner, ticking
the items off on his fingers: basil soup, frogs, grilled haunch of kid with salsify, vin rosé, of course, and then a bottle of champagne, Lanson
1942
, an exceptional year.

Throughout the meal he watched his daughter and Philippe closely, trying to discern from their behaviour any sign, gesture, attitude or secret understanding which might have indicated that they were lovers and that their bodies, wakened against each other, still desired each other. Nothing. They might have been an old married couple or brother and sister. They addressed each other by the familiar
tu
, but without the slightest embarrassment, without their words appearing to betray the slightest trace of affection or desire.

“How deceptive the young are today,” thought Urbain, who had been a great lover. “It's only natural they're bored, they no longer respect the ritual of love, or war, or politics.”

He tasted his champagne: a little too iced.

“What prompted you to make the
13
th of May attempt?” he asked the officer.

“I took part with some comrades in one of the May
13
th plots; it was the most important one, I believe, because without it the others would have come to nothing.”

Philippe was sitting in the shadows, and only his hands, which were playing with a pellet of bread, were in the light. They were long, nervous, hard, but could also be caressing. Irène knew. In a short while they would be stroking her stomach and running through her hair.

“It was partly because of the torturing that we brought off the
13
th of May.”

Irène felt as though she were choking.

Those hands, whose caresses and brutality she had enjoyed, may perhaps have inflicted torture. There was nothing she hated more in the world than torture. It was not to defend the Republic that she had marched behind the banners, but to protest against torture.

Philippe went on:

“We went very far in this war—far enough to be damned, a Christian might say, because we could not lose it.”

Urbain Donadieu had settled down in his armchair and was holding his breath.

Of all the explanations he had heard to account for the
13
th of May, none had struck him as convincing. No one had thought of mentioning torture, that disease which the Middle Ages had transmitted to our age, which the fanatical monks of the Inquisition had bequeathed to the revolutions of the twentieth century. At the bottom of it all there was always this desperate, sincere desire to make man happy by plucking his contradictions from him like rank weeds.

In Algeria the army, in order to win or convince, had gone so far as to use the same methods as the inquisitors and the commissars. But, because it had scruples, it had not reduced torture to a system, nor displayed the discretion which must surround this sort of practice and which at the same time confers on it an almost sacred horror.

As members of the “Defence of Man” committee, Urbain Donadieu and Paul Esclavier had formed part of the commission of enquiry responsible for assembling all the statements of evidence on this subject: on the Nazi concentration camps as well as the massacres at Katyn, on the methods of the Gestapo as well as those of the Communist secret-police forces. Leaning over this abyss, they had felt quite giddy, and one day Paul Esclavier had said to him:

“I don't know what can be done to cure man of this evil. Some people claim that a great faith, a great aim, can, in the very long run, serve as extenuating circumstances to such crimes. I don't think so.”

Urbain shared his old friend's view; moreover, he had always been convinced that Algeria was a cause that was lost in advance.

“Did you ever torture anyone, Philippe?” Irène asked.

“I have been tortured myself, and yet I once had to torture others.”

She got up, came over to him and seized him by the shoulders.

“I've a right to know.”

“What right?”

Irène felt herself blushing. For the first time she felt she had acquired the right over a man for having given herself to him.

“She's going to fall in love with him,” Donadieu thought to himself, feeling surprised, intrigued and disappointed at one and the same time.

“After the battle of Algiers,” Philippe went on, “my regiment went upcountry again. Our colonel, Pierre-Noël Raspéguy, moved us out of that town, which we had begun to hate and love passionately, the town of our crimes and our victories. . . .

“He sent us slogging along the tracks again, in the belief that only exhaustion, hardship, danger and death could purify us. In his own way Raspéguy is a Christian; he believes in the remission of sins through suffering.”

“That's the big colonel with the film-actor's manner?” Irène asked.

“Yes, he enjoys playing a starring rôle.

“We hunted down rebel bands in the burning
jebel
of the Saharan Atlas, in the gorges, in dried-up river-beds infested with mosquitoes, among vine stumps, once even in some drains.

“We each had a summons in our pocket from the examining magistrate on account of what we had done in Algiers. We had been summoned, of course, as material witnesses. We felt that the one who had the most to answer for was Captain Julien Boisfeuras. On his own authority he had wiped out a prisoner, Si Mellial, one of the foremost leaders of the rebellion.

“We were revolted. On orders from the Government we had embarked on this battle, but only with the greatest reluctance. We had not been trained as policemen and we had to act quickly, otherwise Algeria was lost. There was therefore a certain amount of ugly business, it was inevitable. Now we were being held responsible for it.

“One day an officer from the Judge Advocate General's branch came and informed us that the case had been dropped, that we had heard the last of it.

“Paris may perhaps have been frightened of our anger? We resumed our operations. Then we were asked to undertake the same job at Z that we had done at Algiers.

“Z is a small town hemmed in between the mountains and
the sea. It was held up as a model of tranquillity. One fine day a band turned up and massacred the people bathing on the beach: twenty dead and among them Alexandra—Jacquier's daughter! That was four months before the
13
th of May.”

 * * * * 

“Well?” Raspéguy asked Boisfeuras, who had just arrived from Z.

The colonel had left him behind in Algiers to gather as much information as he could on this business.

Boisfeuras gave his rasping laugh.

“We're up against it again, sir. The whole district is rotten; it even serves as a rear base for Willaya
3
. The chief of the Willaya, Si Lharba, hasn't, of course, made a written agreement with the sub-prefect and colonel in command of the sector to declare Z an open city! But the result's the same: no outrages in the town, no farms burnt down in the surrounding countryside, but no patrols at night, either, and the O.P.A.
*
has been allowed to spread like a cancer. The shopkeepers have dealings with the rebels and most of the settlers just sit back and watch.”

“Then why this shooting?”

“Marindelle explained it all to me. He's a bright lad, our little Marindelle; he's now one of the best-informed officers on the rebellion.

“Ziad, the chief of Willaya
4
, who's trying to extend his zone in this direction and finds himself hampered by Si Lharba, wanted to play him a dirty trick.

“So he sent over his band of killers, who were responsible for the massacre on the beach. The result: Colonel Raspéguy has succeeded Colonel de Saint-Marcel and the sub-prefect is weeping in his reinforced-concrete residence while waiting for his replacement.

“They had both declared that the district was completely pacified. The sub-prefect had actually just been decorated by the colonel with the Croix de la Valeur Militaire.”

Raspéguy ran his eyes round the room they were in:

“He certainly did himself proud, Monsieur de Saint-Marcel. . . .”

It might have been a London club: mahogany furniture, lamps which gave a golden glow and, in the big fireplace, a blazing log-fire which cast dancing shadows on the walls adorned with hunting prints.

“You who know about these things, Boisfeuras. How much would a room like this cost?”

“The English furniture isn't genuine period stuff, but it had to be brought all the way out here. I'd say four or five million.”

“How many
harkis
*
could have been employed on that amount of money?”

“There aren't any
harkis
at Z.”

Captains Esclavier and Leroy came in and gave a whistle of admiration.

“We've just done a tour of the town,” said Leroy. “The shop-keepers are all smiles and kept offering us drinks; the natives are as nice as can be. They put their hands on their hearts and ask: ‘Well, how are you, Captain? And your wife and children?' They seem to look on us like old relations.

“What brotherly love there is in this spot!”

“Where's your pistol,” Raspéguy suddenly asked him, “and yours, Esclavier?”

Leroy squared his shoulders in astonishment, then he noticed the colonel's grim expression—“his no-nonsense look,” as they called it.

“But in such a peaceful little place, sir . . .”

“I want everyone to go about with his personal weapon, even the duty corporal. Curfew at eight o'clock. Patrols out all night, with orders to shoot on sight without challenging.

“Oh, the bastards!”

“Have some of our chaps fallen into an ambush?”

“We've all fallen into one, Leroy.”

In the corner of the room there was a mahogany sideboard laden with crystal decanters. Esclavier opened them one after another, then sniffed.

“Whisky . . . and damn good whisky at that.”