The Praetorians (28 page)

Now and then, when he felt he had his audience well in hand, the captain told them in a confidential tone:

“Our last struggle is about to begin; soon we shall have
independence. But instead of fighting against the French, they are the ones who will grant it and they will continue to help us, as they have helped the Moroccans and Tunisia. How could we live if our sons were no longer able to travel across the sea and find work? One cannot divorce France as though she was a woman, simply by saying: ‘I disown you.'”

Aicha, on her side, spoke to the women and young girls:

“You married women are nothing but a man's chattels. When you grow old, or he no longer finds you attractive, he ‘breaks the card' and sends you packing. And what about you young girls? Your parents continue to sell you off like carpets or crockery and you haven't the right to love the man you want. All of you come to the Forum tomorrow and tear off your veils. They tell you that you're French: do Frenchwomen wear the veil? Do their husbands have the right to throw them out in the street or to take a second wife?”

The
chibani
said:

“My son was a strong, handsome lad. One day, because he was smoking a cigarette, they cut off his nose and his lips. So he hung himself. The man who did that was living on women and took a rake-off from every
basga
-player. He, too, smoked. What man has the right to condemn another for what he does himself? Never have the French cut off anyone's nose, tongue or lips.”

As they went by, men crouching against the walls whistled softly through their teeth to warn the others of their arrival. They said of them: “They're Arabs, but at the same time they're with the French,” and that did not appear irreconcilable.

But when Mahmoudi, Aicha or the old sergeant-major asked a specific question like “Will you come tomorrow?” the inhabitants of the Kasbah grew suddenly suspicious and merely repeated:

“
Manarf
, if it is God's will.”

In the darkness old gramophones blared out love songs that were fashionable five years before in Cairo or Beirut. The moonlight played on the washing hanging from the windows.

“They won't come,” said Mahmoudi.

But more than twenty thousand of them had come and the captain felt himself being swept forward by them towards the
Forum, where, for the last three days, the Europeans had been celebrating a new cult alone.

Glatigny appeared on the terrace of the Government General, slim and elegant, wearing no decorations on his light-coloured summer uniform. Esclavier arrived behind him, his battledress blouse wide open, his cap in his pocket, his waist confined in a webbing belt. He was accompanied by a gigantic Negro officer, who wore his badges of rank on the red background of the Army Medical Corps. Captain Pinières, with his arm in a sling, jumped over the window-sill without supporting himself and almost fell into the sand. His red hair gleamed like flames in the sunshine.

“The whole of the
10
th Regiment is here,” said Françoise. “Only Raspéguy is missing. I have a feeling they're up to one of their tricks again. They say that last night a company commanded by Boisfeuras surrounded the Commander-in-Chief's residence. The captain is reported to have said to the Tojun: ‘A bazooka at fifty yards may miss its target, but a sub-machine-gun at one yard, never!'”

“That surprises me,” said Pasfeuro, “for Boisfeuras has a certain fellow-feeling for Salan. He's a Chinaman, like himself!”

Generals Salan and Massu appeared on the balcony, greeted by a great cry of delight from the crowd below. The cry reverberated and was amplified in this huge ancient theatre, hemmed in on one side by the tall buildings overlooking the Government General and offering on the other an unbroken view of the sea, now empty of shipping, where the sun sparkled like toy mirrors on the deep-blue, almost black, water.

“From Dunkirk to Tamanrasset fifty-five million Frenchmen and ten million Algerians forming a single entity.”

Françoise started weeping.

“What's wrong?” Malistair asked her.

“You can't understand. It's extraordinary what's happening to us. Here we are at last rid of that solitude complex which made us so unbearable. Fifty-five million Frenchmen from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset—and no longer one million Europeans against nine million Arabs and forty-five million from Metropolitan France.”

“Am I hearing right?” asked Pasfeuro. “It's integration that has just been proclaimed? And by Frenchmen who only a week ago rejected the idea of mixed schools!”

“Just listen to them shouting and clapping! In Algeria we're not reasonable creatures like you; sentiment always gets the better of reason.”

“Think what this means, Françoise,” Pasfeuro went on. “It means raising eight million Arabs to the same standard of life as the French and giving them full citizenship, though most of them can't read or write and are polygamous.”

“The French are also polygamous,” Malistair chipped in.

“No, I can't believe it. It's just another trick of our little pals behind us. They're trying to impress Metropolitan France; France could not in all decency fight against an Algeria in which French and Moslems have come to an agreement. If the military succeed in giving this impression Paris will capitulate. Integration's just a word, a psychological-warfare tactic, or else plain madness. . . .”

“In any case, the word is launched,” Glatigny observed. “Look what's become of your word, Boisfeuras. It's been taken up by a thousand voices. We shall never be masters of it again.”

“Si Mellial told me: ‘In the face of a word like
Istiqlal
, Independence, you'll need one that is just as strong.' Can you tell me what other word than ‘Integration' we had to bite on?”

“I sleep with a Moslem girl, yet I can't accept it.”

“Maybe because sleeping with a Moslem leads to too many problems?”

“I recognize the same rights for the Moslems as for us. They are our equals, but they're still different, and to try to assimilate them would be to force them to betray their own civilization and ours as well.”

“What have Ferhat Abbas and the nationalists who gave birth to the F.L.N. been demanding for the last thirty years? Integration. That's what we're proclaiming today.”

“They wanted it yesterday, today they're demanding something else.”

Esclavier came over to them:

“What a face Uncle de Gaulle's going to pull! To him an Arab
will always be an Arab, and a Frenchman a Frenchman. The Frenchman's a Christian, the Arab's a Moslem. One is clear-minded, he's the son of Descartes, the other has a jumble of baroque ideas and dreams in his head. And de Gaulle's the one who is going to be asked to make this bewildering synthesis!”

Boisfeuras buried his fingers in Dia's shoulder:

“Mahmoudi has won; the Moslems are arriving with their banners and flags. They're coming up the Boulevard Lafarrière.”

On the balcony a man suddenly announced in a ringing voice:

“I have great news for you. Our Moslem brothers are coming to join us.”

Pasfeuro was kicking the wall in fury:

“They're first-rate stage-managers, our little pals. With the help of the S.A.U.
*
officers, who have found their customers from among the people they administer, they have put on a gigantic show.”

Now the flood of Moslems began to stream in. There were five thousand at first, then ten thousand, then thirty thousand; men, women, boys and girls, singing the “Marseillaise” and waving flags. After a moment's hesitation the two crowds mingled and fused together.

“This is more than stage-management,” the journalist said to himself. “This time there's really something afoot. . . .”

“Well, do you still think all these people are just dummies?” Françoise shouted to him.

The man standing behind the microphone demanded in the same ringing voice:

“Stand back there to make room for our Moslem brothers!”

Here was the fusion of the iron and the bronze, in the heat of this oven in which two hundred thousand people were kissing and embracing one another and laughing.

The Moslems at first made as though to withdraw; then they looked, smiled, and with a great sigh of relief they in their turn shook hands and kissed.

“Join hands,” shouted the loudspeaker. “Make a chain of friendship.”

All hands stretched out, clasped their neighbours'. They were stiff and tense at first, then slackened in one another's grasp.

“Tear off your veils,” Aicha ordered a small group of young Moslem girls, “you're free now.”

A few
haiks
were doffed. A young girl next to Aicha, with dark, damp eyes, looked at her uncertainly, so Aicha tore her veil off with her own hands. The young girl made as though to draw away, then her face beamed and, with an automatic reaction, she patted her hair into place.

An old French labourer had seized Mahmoudi's hand in his. He grasped it violently, almost until it hurt, and two tears coursed down his weatherbeaten cheeks.

“Why have we waited so long?” he asked. “It was so simple.”

“Yes, why indeed?”

In the group of journalists Françoise Baguèras was weeping and laughing:

“We've come out of the nightmare: the war, the outrages, the torture, the farms burnt down and the women raped! And you wanted me to follow you to America, Malistair, to leave a country like this! There are no more miracles in the world except in Algiers. That's why I shall stay here for the rest of my life. Give me your handkerchief . . . and a cigarette.”

Malistair hung his head, for he did not believe in this miracle.

Among the officers Dia had started dancing on the spot. His body swayed imperceptibly, his eyes were closed, his nostrils distended; he was inhaling this crowd, its enthusiasm and its joy.

“It's wonderful, men and women embracing in their thousands after hating each other's guts and throwing in each other's face their religion, their past, their country.

“They have been released from the fear they had of each other and are surprised to see how easy it was.

“Glatigny, Esclavier, Pinières and even you, Boisfeuras, do you realize we've been forgiven, that all these people kissing one another have come to give us their absolution?

“We've been forgiven for the
mechtas
of Rahlem and the battle of Algiers, forgiven for Si Mellial and Ben Mohadi, for
the
fells
smoked to death in their caves and those shot at first light on wood-gathering duty.

“We're as new as children who have just been baptized. Here He is, back again, that great warm-hearted merry God who seemed to have abandoned us. When we felt we had suffered sufficiently He laughed that great full-bellied laugh of His, and suddenly there's this crowd in one another's arms.

“You've got tears in your eyes, Esclavier, because you have just found Souen again; and you, Pinières, because My Oi, whom the Viets strangled to death at Dalat, is once again by your side, with our little pal Merle. You, Glatigny, you're forgiven for the bombs on the Meo Pass, which you have never forgotten, and you know you now have the right to love your little Aicha.

“There's nothing to be seen in your expression, Boisfeuras, but of all of us you're the most deeply moved; your laugh won't grate on our ears any more.

“I, Dia, am happy, I have found you all again, and also Lescure and his flute and the sacred rhythms of the great forest of the Guerzés. I've lost my Negro colour. After Indo-China I was a Negro among you white men, and I suffered from that. Today I haven't any colour, race and colour no longer exist, but only a love which is going to clean up everything in the world!”

“Have you seen the darkie?” Plumet of Radio Europe asked a reporter on
Match
. “He's gone barmy. I don't know what he's talking about, but he's stamping and pawing the ground. His little pals ought to take him home. He's got a touch of the sun.”

“What a life!” said Sergeant Molintard to Péladon and Videban, who were with him on guard in front of the railings. “This is the eighth bit of skirt I've had to tumble. All of them old and fat, not a single attractive one. And now all the young
bints
are joining in the fun!”

“I saw a little
bint
who'd just taken off her veil,” said Péladon. “She wasn't half bad. Why is it we can't get married to these
bints
? They tell me they're pretty hot stuff in bed.”

“Not bad,” Molintard confirmed condescendingly. “It must be something to do with religion that stops us marrying them. But now, with this integration lark, it ought to be all right.”

“I'm going to try and find that little one I saw just now,” Péladon concluded.

Colonel Puysanges caught hold of Arcinade's arm.

“The colonel's gone mad,” the tubby little man thought to himself. “He's going to tear my sleeve.”

“Arcinade, I want the men who organized this show in the Forum.”

“But will they want you, Colonel?”

“Have they been in touch with Restignes again?”

“No, but it won't be long before they are. You realize, don't you, Colonel, that all this show of fraternization is faked?”

“Everything's faked: love, war, politics.

“If you have any news of Restignes let me know at once. It's astounding what they've done here, these prætorians of ours. Now they can choose the Caesars they want.”

 * * * * 

Comrade Lamentin was also at the Forum. He had found a place on the balcony of a building and was watching the spectacle through the binoculars of his host, a school-teacher like himself. His reflections were those of a conscientious and efficient crowd-technician:

“The guiding element behind the crowd has not held firm. It was too fluid and those who were responsible for it must have lacked specific instructions. And now this crowd has been left to its own devices, swollen into a vast, dangerous mob which no one is controlling any longer.