The Praetorians (17 page)

“Yes, I'm fine. What about you? Not too bored? No, you're
never bored, of course. Yves is very well. What's he up to? I think he's starting a revolution, like every other soldier and civilian in Algiers. . . . Villèle has been bothering you? I'm not surprised. He always tries to go to bed with his colleagues' wives. Then he looks at himself in the mirror and in delight says to his reflection: ‘A dirty cad like you deserves to go down to posterity.'

“Is there anyone with me? Yes, Captain Esclavier. He wants to educate himself and after three years of war he's trying to find out what's going on in this country.”

Either through Marindelle or through Boisfeuras, Esclavier had been able to arrange for Pasfeuro to be introduced to all the little activist leaders in the town. To give themselves an air of importance they liked to show off their contacts with the paratroops.

In the blue shade of some café or other, and in the fresh smell of anis, the journalist and the officer met some astonishing people: technical-school teachers, pimps, dock labourers, life-long veterans with their buttonholes stuffed with decoration ribbons, young students with their heads crammed with extreme right-wing ideas.

All of them kept saying that Algeria was France and that every right-minded Moslem was on their side, the others being bastards who would have to be dealt with and the sooner the better. The army, they said, was not doing its job. It was there to protect citizens of French origin and not to hand out lollipops to brats in the Kasbah. Françoise Baguèras occasionally accompanied them. She could talk to these French Algerians in their own language, and since she knew any amount of secrets her presence prevented them from putting on too obvious an act.

On Françoise's advice Pasfeuro had met Adruguez without Captain Esclavier being present. He was a medical student who was not lacking in common sense and who knew the Moslem
petite bourgeoisie
extremely well. Françoise would say to him, assuming the accent of the low quarters of the town:

“Now then, pal, you're not going to tell us that you and your little band of Rue Michelet hotheads are going to seize Algiers
single-handed! If a couple of C.R.S.
*
open fire the whole lot of you take to your heels. With the army, certainly, anyone can seize Algiers, even Arcinade and his gang. Yes, even Paul Pélissier!”

This was hitting below the belt.

Algiers is a town in which politics and love affairs are public property, the only well-kept secrets are financial ones.

For the last three months Adruguez had been the lover of Paul Pélissier's wife, Isabelle, that lovely, thoughtless, selfish girl who had been transformed by the killing of her father into a sort of Passionaria of French Algeria. She it was who had led the student to take greater and greater risks and to forget some of his ideas in exchange for an outrageous and aggressive form of Nationalism.

“Algeria is France,” he kept saying, although he was far too intelligent to beieve it.

Françoise reminded him:

“A year ago you used to say: ‘Algeria isn't France, nor is it the Maghreb, it's something very strange: oil and wine in the same jar. The oil is the Europeans; the wine, the Moslems. It has to be stirred hard before it will mix, and it doesn't last long: oil bubbles rise to the surface and fuse together again so as to form a sheet, but the oil stops the wine from going sour, and it's the wine that keeps the oil on the surface.'”

“I was wrong,” said Adruguez, hanging his head. “I've learnt a lot since then.”

“No, Algeria isn't France,” said Monsieur Arcinade a little later in his piping voice, rubbing his plump little hands together, “but it must become so and then our problem will be solved.”

“
Our
problem, Monsieur Arcinade? But you don't come from here!”

Françoise stubbed her cigarette out in an ashtray and went on:

“You're living in the shelter of the army Intelligence services;
you're Colonel Puysanges's right-hand man, and that's someone I don't like at all.”

“My dear Françoise,” Arcinade retorted, raising his little finger, “you're extremely rash in word as well as in behaviour. You were seen yesterday with Arnis and Cohen, who have contacts, maybe even direct relations, with the F.L.N.”

“So what? I've known them both for fifteen years. Cohen's a Zionist and Arnis's father had his throat cut by the F.L.N. I prefer a flatfoot to you any day, Monsieur Arcinade, at least he's got an official card.”

She turned to Pasfeuro and Esclavier:

“Algeria is Byzantium. Instead of standing up against the F.L.N. we're all worrying over the sex of the angels.”

She jumped at once from the general to the particular and asked Pasfeuro:

“What sex is Arcinade? He reminds me of a frog. No, Algiers isn't Byzantium, it's a vast swamp, with any amount of frogs kicking up an infernal din. What do they want, all these frogs, Esclavier, my lad?—a king of course. You're going to bring them this king, it will be de Gaulle, and since de Gaulle doesn't like the Algerian frogs he'll gobble them up! Everyone here still sticks to Pétain, because he was a nice old boy with a reassuring face, who had made France into a province with Vichy as its main town. Algiers could then regard itself as a capital city! It cured us of our complexes.”

On another occasion they went to see Puydebois in his little farm in the Mitidja. He received them, with a rifle in his hand, in a semi-military uniform, surrounded by some of his “henchmen,” their pockets stuffed with pistols, grenades and even rosaries.

The henchmen, their foreheads wrinkled with secrets, escorted them to the living-room, which looked more like a strong-point than a salon, with its iron shutters equipped with loopholes.

In the middle was a staircase leading up to a sort of watchtower, where some sandbags, the headlamp of a car connected to a row of batteries, a signalling pistol and a tommy-gun constituted the entire armament of this makeshift observation post.

“I built it with my own hands.”

And Puydebois held out his gnarled fists. It was touching and ridiculous.

Over a glass of cloudy wine, which stained the oilcloth and attracted the flies, he unfolded his plans:

“France has gone to the dogs because she's no longer a Christian country. It all stems from the revolution, the Jews, freemasons and the rest of them. The army is likewise contaminated—Monsieur Arcinade has given me detailed information on this subject. Look at the Commander-in-Chief: a Socialist and a freemason. A pity that bazooka shell didn't get him! Yet I'm told the man who missed him made the sign of the cross before firing. We've got to save Algeria, but we've got to save France as well. When J-day comes we'll march on Algiers. Groups are being formed throughout the Mitidja. The army—part of the army, anyway—will be behind us. But we're short of weapons. . . .”

Pasfeuro asked a dangerous question:

“They say that quite a few settlers in the Mitidja pay dues to the F.L.N.?”

Puydebois stretched himself to his full height:

“That's a lie put out by our enemies to discredit us in French eyes. Name a single one and we'll execute him at once.”

“At once,” echoed the three henchmen, brandishing their pistols.

Whereupon Françoise began reciting a long list of names.

Puydebois hung his head. It was painful to see the distress of this poor fellow who had put on an act in which he believed. He loved his land. He was prepared to die defending it and he had made every settler into a fearless and gallant knight errant. Apart from three or four, the settlers' armed groups existed only in his imagination.

Françoise put her hand on his shoulder and consoled him.

“Never mind, Puydebois, we'll get away with it just the same, only don't pay too much attention to Arcinade. . . . He's a nasty bit of work!”

Then she dragged them off to another farm five miles or so further on.

“You mustn't,” she said, “think all the settlers are crackpots like Puydebois. All the same, he's a brave old crackpot with his rifle which he never puts down, his rosary in his pocket and his scapular round his neck! He's defending his vineyards . . . that occupies him so much that he hardly cultivates them any longer, and his wine is becoming undrinkable.

“This is Pierre Andériou's place. His family has owned this estate since the Conquest. The branch which had settled in Algiers is now extinct and in
1954
Pierre, who was peacefully tending his land in the neighbourhood of Auch, who was mayor of his village and a councillor general, came over here to sell this inheritance that had come to him out of the blue. He never went back.”

The settler arrived. He was thick-set and muscular, his eyes were screwed up with contentment, and he rolled his
r'
s like a torrent of pebbles.

He kissed Françoise.

“We haven't been friends for long,” she said. “When Pierre first came out to Algeria I wrote an article about him. We haven't many victories of this sort to our credit: business men often come out to us from France, but settlers never. This one was a mayor and a councillor general in the Gers. In Algeria that would be a sign of power, for out here the only people who get elected are the ones with money or influence, and the French Algerians think the same thing happens in France. Pierre couldn't understand why there was this publicity about him.”

Andériou took Françoise by the elbow:

“I realized later what a great girl you are, but at the time I was furious.”

“Why?” Pasfeuro asked him.

“Come inside first.”

The room was furnished with a sideboard, a dresser equipped with simple-patterned plates, a big farm table, carefully scrubbed, and benches. Without the blinding light streaming through the drawn shutters one could have imagined oneself in some corner of the French countryside. A faint smell of wax and jam hung in the air. A young Arab boy brought in some biscuits and wine; he introduced the only note of exoticism into the picture and his
presence here was out of place; an old housekeeper would have been more in keeping.

Andériou ceremoniously raised his glass.

“Your health. You asked me why I stayed on. Maybe because I was sick of the uneventful life in my part of the country, shooting parties, huge rich meals, nice girls who at the end of dinner come and sit on your lap. . . .

“I had reached the age of thirty without ever having done anything in life apart from a little extremely comfortable Resistance activity. My farmers all addressed me by the familiar
tu
and I played bowls with them. I had a pretty garden, one of those presbytery gardens in which the bees are drunk with the sugar from the fruit. My siestas were deep and lasted all afternoon; I was putting on weight and began to have liver trouble. My cellars were full of old brandy maturing and my stillrooms stacked with hams rubbed in salt and armagnac, and with
pâtés de foie gras.

“As soon as I got out here, in this ugly country, among the rough and often uncouth people, with the vineyards stretching in serried rows into the distance, under this shattering light, I felt a deep joy at being a new man.

“The farm only served to make money, and it made a lot, because five hundred acres of vineyards and citrus fruit in the Mitidja bring in a packet. But nothing had been done for the Arabs, simple agricultural labourers who were paid by the day and housed in shacks.

“I felt uncomfortable not knowing their names and not being able to talk to them. It's not like that in Périgord. I invested my first year's profits in building a little village next to the farmhouse and I gave each of my labourers a small allotment. I subsequently discovered that they rented it out to others who were even more hard up than they were. But instead of this making me angry it gave me a good laugh.

“At first my neighbours jeered at me, then they accused me of spoiling the natives and making prices go up. They called me a dirty skinflint and cast aspersions on my parentage: they at least knew how to use their dough.

“Françoise stood up for me with her customary violence and
warm-heartedness. I was on good terms with the military round the corner. I had them in to meals and we would talk about that easy-going France to which we all belonged.

“More often than not, settlers are tactless with the soldiers. They want to be liked, and therefore not to be discussed; they're out to make money and they're not always honest. That's what they call being crafty. One day I discovered that the Arabs called my property the Frenchman's farm, as though the others weren't just as French as myself! One of my barns was burnt to the ground and some of my vineyards destroyed.

“That wretched man Puydebois was behind it all, but acting on behalf of the ‘big families.' They had led him to believe that I was a Socialist and a freemason.

“A man can't live alone, especially if he has got worries. Six months after I arrived I married a little schoolmistress from Cahors who was dying of boredom in this ungodly country. She had come here to spread the gospel to the Moslems. There were several missionaries in her family. . . . She's now in France with our two children and I like to think of her in our garden, but, for her as much as for me, our real home is here. When the big families saw there was nothing doing they packed up and went back to France. All the little settlers then rallied round me—not so much because I had been right to treat my labourers well, but because I was the richest of those who still clung to their farms. My millions gave me the right to command them.

“They're nice fellows, but it has taken this desertion of their usual leaders, this outbreak of violence and bloodshed, to open their eyes at last.

“Some
fellaghas
also came to see me. They told me I was a good white man, that I should never have anything to worry about, but that I would have to help them ‘in their war effort.' Those were their very words.