Olura

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by Geoffrey Household


  I told him that I lived in Fuenterrabía, which was right on the frontier and would account for my speaking French, if I had to, as well as Spanish. Then I asked him why he had not run for a French port, Hendaye or St Jean de Luz.

  ‘Because we were hove to in the gale, friend, with just the fishing jib to keep her head to it and glad to get in anywhere.’

  I am no seaman, but I thought his answer insufficient. If the sudden north-west gale had caught him fishing on the Biscay grounds it would have blown him, hove to or not, on to the French coast. He must have been very much closer than he ought to the merciless capes of Spain. It was true enough, however, that his choice of Lequeitio was forced. He would have found more efficient yards at the fishing ports of Bermeo or Santurce if he could have made either of them.

  ‘It’s the hell of an entrance with a high sea,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it was that or the cliffs. Our only chance was to start up the diesel again and run it until something gave. By God, I didn’t think I would be here more than a week! And then along came an inspector who wouldn’t let me leave because the shaft wobbled. As if I didn’t know it! But it would have taken us home.’

  I could guess what had happened. The Harbourmaster, who must have wondered as I did why he was close enough to the coast to be driven on to it by the gale, was teaching him and his fellows a courteous Spanish lesson. Fish in territorial waters, would you? Right, you’re a comrade of the sea and we do not want to be hard! But the red tape and the mañana you’ll have to put up with before we let you go will make you think twice about doing it again.

  Bozec’s troubles, however, were now over. His crew, whom he had sent home to France by train, were on their way back. The Phare de Kerdonis would sail in a couple of days.

  He seemed to find me a sympathetic listener; so I switched to French to give him more confidence still. It was a mistake.

  ‘You don’t speak like a Gascon,’ he said suspiciously.

  ‘Why should I? My native language is Basque.’

  ‘They say it resembles Breton.’

  An odd remark. Since he had been in Lequeitio for six weeks, he must have known that there was no resemblance at all. The half-smile on his face showed that he expected a reply from me. I had the feeling that there was a set answer—some sort of password admitting one to the club of contrabandists. So I made a downright deadly shot in the dark.

  ‘I have friends at Zarauz,’ I said.

  ‘Me, too,’ he answered casually, and signalled to the skipper of the Isaura who pulled himself up on to the deck of the larger boat. I noticed for the first time that the Isaura was registered at Zarauz.

  Is this man a Basque?’ Bozec asked.

  Bernardino—that was what Bozec called him. I don’t know his surname—engaged me in conversation. Where was I born? Where did I live? Whom did I know? I did not acquit myself very brilliantly, for I couldn’t play Eibar being already committed to Fuenterrabia. He reported that I was certainly a Basque, but that I did not come from the coast at all.

  Bozec, still puzzled, tried me with a remark in Breton—evidently a final chance for me to give an acceptable reply. I couldn’t give any at all. I have never studied the primitive languages of the Celts. So I just winked at him.

  ‘Can you go back to Zarauz now?’ he asked the Isaura’s skipper.

  It wouldn’t be inconvenient.’

  ‘Then we’ll all go together.’

  Five minutes later we were out of Lequeitio harbour and running eastwards along the coast. I knew what Daniel felt like; a den of lions was what I was going to get for praying to Olura three times a day. But no refusal was possible or wise. I assured myself that, after all, we were not in Algeria or Chicago.

  During the three hours which it took to reach Zarauz conversation with Bozec flowed easily, though carefully keeping off the subject of our visit. Each felt, I think, that the other might be a person whose good will was worth having, but neither was giving anything away. In answer to my compliments on his fauluess Spanish, Bozec told me that his mother was from Asturias and never spoke anything else with her children. Evidently she had the obstinate pride of many uneducated Spanish women, refusing to master French or Breton and quite content with some jargon which she spoke with her husband. He—Bozec’s father—had been mate of a coaster trading between Nantes and north Spanish ports, and had fallen in love with a young girl—I did not like to ask where he had met her—left a helpless orphan by the Asturian revolt of 1934. By that and other remarks I inferred that there was a tradition among the Bozecs of jiggery-pokery in the Bay of Biscay.

  Yet even Bozec could not have openly sailed the Phare de Kerdonis into a Spanish harbour, nor could he have launched and sent in a dinghy on the night of July 10th; indeed he would have hesitated on any night, considering the deep-sea swell breaking on that rock-bound coast. It was a job for a local man who knew the inlets and the few coves which were both remote and sheltered. Almost certainly he had a rendezvous with a Spanish fishing boat, to which he transferred his passengers at sea.

  Could it be the Isaura, whose owner was plainly on intimate terms with Bozec? Bernardino was not communicative, prepared to join occasionally in our conversation, but reluctant to speak Euzkadi with me alone.

  At last I caught him out with a casual aside, quite unknown to Bozec, as a calm, green, seventh wave lifted us ten feet and dropped us again. I remarked that it must be a change to have two French passengers who were not seasick.

  ‘The poor devil!’ he muttered.

  Vigny’s collapse on that night of July 10th must have been memorable and alarming.

  The two of us left the Isaura at the fishing quay and strolled off along the front. I assumed that we were going to find our friends on some neat terrace above the beach umbrellas where there could be no uncivilised behaviour. But Bozec walked away from the fashionable hotels and villas, through the old town and out to the edge of open country. We stopped at a square house, dating from the last century when thick stone walls and heavy timbering were fashionable, and standing in a small garden behind half a dozen thick-stemmed palmettos, ragged with age and neglect.

  Bozec rang the bell. The door was opened by Vigny himself.

  ‘I have brought this type along because he claimed to be a friend of ours,’ Bozec said.

  Vigny took a second look at me. His speed of reaction was astonishing.

  ‘Why, of course!’ he exclaimed, warmly shaking my hand. ‘How are you, professor? I am most grateful to you, my dear Bozec.’

  ‘Good! That’s all I wanted to know,’ said Bozec bluntly. ‘We came over in the Isaura, but I’ll have to go back by taxi.’

  Vigny pulled out a 500-peseta note and gave it to him.

  ‘Take a taxi down in the town,’ he advised. ‘Our friend will stop and dine with us.’

  I played his game, too, for want of a better, and said a warm and grateful good-bye to Bozec. He left convinced that we were all on excellent terms. Vigny’s acting was so good that I myself felt he was genuinely glad to see me and that my suspicions might be wildly exaggerated.

  He led me, chatting most amicably, through the hall into the dining-room. It was full of great chunks of local carpentry in light-coloured wood. Evidently Sauche had rented the house, furnished, from some family of local gentry. It had been built not as a summer residence but to live in all the year round. The small windows and massive walls were intended to keep out the chill damp of winter. It was a melancholy place, and the scarecrow palmettos made it even darker than it need have been.

  The general sat in a tall leather chair, with a tray of drinks at his side. The two were living en garçon a little gloomily but in decided comfort. Slightly-built and inconspicuous, the pair of them: one grey and clean-shaven, one dark and moustached. But the major’s slimness was that of an athlete.

  ‘A friend to see us,’ Vigny announced.

  Sauche also was most cordial.

  ‘From your appearance one would hazard a guess that you
are on the run,’ he said.

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘The professor did not come of his own accord,’ Vigny explained. ‘Captain Bozec brought him.’

  ‘Bozec?’ the general repeated with a military snort in which there was some alarm. ‘Why?’

  ‘That is what the professor will tell us. Meanwhile I thought it best that Bozec should think we were delighted to see an old friend—as indeed we are. Did you perhaps wish to compare the grammar of Breton with that of Basque and Berber?’

  Feeling an inelegant clot in front of these two well-bred masters of finesse, I pointed out that in the Basque country everybody knew—discreetly—a little of everyone else’s business, and so I had reason to believe that Bozec might lead me to them.

  Vigny let that pass, and poured me a whisky.

  ‘I don’t think the moustache suits you,’ he said. ‘One is no longer struck by the resemblance to Voltaire. But all the rest is admirable without being exaggerated. I am experienced in security, yet I should pass you in the street without a second glance.’

  ‘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 expe
rience 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.

 

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