Olura

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘What had passed between Livetti and Mlle Manoli we cannot know. But there it is! She appears to have plunged him into an abyss of sentimentality.’

  Vigny shrugged his shoulders and offered no further comment. He made it clear that he was reporting with proper military accuracy what Duyker had told him, and that he himself believed it to be somewhere near reality.

  At the time I could not make head or tail of it. All this highfalutin stuff about beauty and innocence sounded to me like the jabberings of some noble and bearded pre-Raphaelite waving an empty bottle. Only after my brief meeting with Olura could I guess at an explanation. Livetti had been damnably ashamed of himself. But he was not capable of privately retching with remorse like the rest of us and telling Duyker to go to the devil. Shame was not an admissible word in his vocabulary. It couldn’t be. The moment it entered his conscious mind he would have to confess to himself what a degenerate little horror he was. So his Italian imagination invented all this pseudo-aesthetic fantasy which had in fact just enough truth in it to serve as an excuse.

  ‘Duyker of course made nothing of all this excitement, but he is easily shocked,’ Vigny went on. ‘I do not know if he ever has a woman. The thought appals me. I feel that he would carefully cover her up and say grace. It is perhaps understandable. He has shown me snaps of his family and female friends. That he should associate women with bovine backsides does not surprise me.

  ‘Livetti must have seen right through our good old Duyker and deliberately provoked him, playing like a cruel little cat with all Duyker’s suppressions, and phobias. He had a mind like a dagger when it came to twisting the point about in anyone’s faults but his own. He seems to have told him that male Negroes were far more beautiful and affectionate than whites. When Duyker whispered that to me, I could see that he had taken it in a heterosexual sense which horrified him quite enough anyway.

  ‘Then Duyker hit him. He says that Livetti hit back. I dare say he did, but what could the poor devil do? Duyker got him by the throat, forced his head out of the window of the car and thumped it up and down on the sill.

  ‘Finding to his surprise—they must have remarkable skulls in South Africa—that Livetti was dead, he acted with the daring that one expects from a colonial. He carried out the whole plan with Livetti dead instead of Livetti alive. He drove quietly into the garage under the hotel, drew up along the door into the shaft and hoisted Livetti up the ladder which this Araña had left in position. He took out the screws which I had loosened and shoved the corpse through the window.

  ‘In five minutes Duyker was away and in forty minutes more he had joined us here. When that night he told me the whole story, I was alarmed but considered he might have done worse. He had never been seen with Livetti and there was no connection between the two. He had been driving from Madrid to Zarauz and would appear to have taken a normal time for the journey. Over the plateau he propels that car of his as if he were the only man on the road. His departure and arrival were both witnessed, and he wasted only half an hour in picking up Livetti and disposing of him. His alibi, though not so unbreakable as our own, is good enough.’

  Sauche’s air of melancholy increased. Clearly enough he disapproved of his brilliant subordinate and that intolerable ally, Duyker. But what could he do? I had the impression of a man deprived of hope and compelled to accept violence. What was his futile Alliance des Blancs against the Napoleonic splendour of the ruler of France with his patriotism, right or wrong, and his fearless search for a modern cadre within which that patriotism might be expressed? While still in France or Algeria Sauche may have deluded himself that he was an equal and alternative. After a year of exile, only an effort of will could persuade him that he was anything of the sort.

  By a similar effort he put aside all the disgraceful implications of the story which Vigny had told with such ironical detachment—by God, his hand sketching in the air had almost illustrated it too!—and turned to a subject which might excuse his intended treatment of me.

  ‘I ask you again,’ he said, ‘what do you know of Bozec?’

  ‘What everyone knows—that he had no business to be where he was or he would not have been driven into Lequeito by the gale.’

  ‘Why was he there?’

  ‘I had thought for fishing. It is only your insistence, my general, which makes me suspect there may have been other reasons.’

  ‘The problem posed by this gentleman is very difficult,’ he sighed to Vigny.

  ‘Disagreeable, yes. I should not say it was difficult.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he has no existence.’

  This time I had no trouble at all in seeing what he meant. Except for the brief meetings with Echeverría and Allarte I did in fact have no existence. All the police were ever likely to discover was that I had left the North Express at Bayonne and stayed a night there. Even if Iragui and Zubieta volunteered statements in answer to some appeal for news of a missing Englishman who spoke Euzkadi, they could only report my intentions; they could not explain why I had never arrived in Spain or been returned to France. I might have fallen over a cliff, or been shot by a frontier guard who was keeping quiet about it.

  ‘One could perhaps trust to the professor’s word of honour,’ Vigny suggested helpfully.

  ‘Normally, of course,’ the general replied with exaggerated courtesy. ‘But since his object is to clear Mlle Manoli of all suspicion …’

  ‘But you? Have you any suggestions?’ Vigny asked me.

  ‘I suggest you sacrifice Duyker. I should not say that his attitude to coloured peoples precisely reflects the ideals of the Revolution.’

  ‘I agree. It does not. But you are far from a child, professor. You know very well that the financial supporters of a political movement are always more fanatical than the front line. The treasurer of a party commands obedience; the leader’s problem is how far he can safely disobey.’

  Sauche, looking stern and unhappy as a commanding officer at a military funeral, murmured his approval. He added that it was out of the question to sacrifice Duyker; yet the alternative, so far as he could see, was that he and Vigny would be returned to France as undesirables.

  ‘There is always South America,’ Vigny said. ‘In these days of air travel it is not far.’

  I could appreciate what he was up to. He was not going to have it said afterwards that the solution was his. He was forcing the general to decide.

  ‘This damned Livetti!’ Sauche exclaimed. ‘It is humiliating to be compromised by a common murder.’

  I fear I am inclined to be provoked by sloppy thinking.

  ‘The murder of Livetti was plainly political,’ I told him. ‘It is my own which would be common. You propose to remove me merely to protect yourself.’

  ‘But at the same time I protect France,’ he answered superbly.

  ‘To which your freedom of action is really essential?’

  ‘Without doubt. I see you understand.’

  I was now very frightened indeed. I exclaimed that he couldn’t do it, that we were civilised men, that it was unthinkable.

  ‘I admit that it was once unthinkable, my friend,’ Vigny said with a weariness which I believe was sincere. ‘But we have grown accustomed to the unthinkable. Your life? My life? Do they matter so much to your units of five hundred years?’

  Inconsistently I thought that mine at least did, and that it was time to take immediate action and crash out through the window. But one cannot be expected to perceive under the façade of a most intelligent hotel acquaintance the former major of parachutists in Algeria. My arm which had just lifted the heavy vermouth bottle dangled painfully at my side. Vigny was so fast that he even caught the bottle before it hit the floor.

  ‘You seem to think we are all alone in the nest,’ he said, ‘just because we sometimes prefer to open the door ourselves to visitors. But we do not cook for ourselves and clean the house. French officers were by no means always disliked by their subordinates.’

&nb
sp; He tapped a bell. Two scoundrelly North Africans entered the room. I say scoundrelly; yet I admit that in other circumstances I should call them faithful and devoted retainers. Are we to despise the havildars of the Indian Army, the Moorish sergeants of the days of the great Lyautey? They were soldiers to the very bottom of the loyalty which they preserved instead of a soul. Loyalty for them. Obscure aesthetic values for Livetti. Learning for me. Illusions of grandeur for Sauche. Our excuse for being alive. Blessed are the simple.

  ‘This gentleman will not be dining in mess after all,’ said Vigny. ‘He will be served in the room behind the kitchen. Show him the menu and take his orders if he should desire any small alteration.’

  The two closed in on me with the cordial smile of male nurses and led me to the room behind the kitchen. At one time it must have been the summer larder. Ventilation was from gratings set high up into the thickness of the north wall. It was furnished with a washstand, camp bed, table and chair. I do not think that Sauche’s limited activity in Spain ever called for the use of a cell. More likely, this was very discreet accommodation prepared for overnight visitors who might arrive by the Isaura.

  I approved the menu and hoped that the cook could perform its promise. He did. I was somewhat ashamed of consciously enjoying my dinner when it did not look as if I was going to have another; but I was hungry and one cannot change one’s tastes. Did the official reports of executions in former days ever state that the prisoner made a hearty breakfast, or is it just a comic-paper joke?

  The coffee was excellent, and the Armagnac out of this world—no doubt a present to the general from some Gascon admirer. I always knew that he and Vigny liked me. I wonder if it would have shocked them to learn that I hated the pair of them with a savage, contemptuous, bloody hatred for what they had done to Olura. But there was no object in revealing it or indulging it. When I raised between my palms the balloon of brandy I instantly suppressed the sweaty thought that Vigny’s heart in the hands of an Aztec priest would be much the same shape and size.

  About nine Duyker came in, punctiliously shook my hand and asked me to accompany him. I suppose he had been summoned from some hotel in Zarauz where he was saying. The rather blank moon-face with its deep tan and fair hair, which I had only seen in the café at Amorebieta, somehow reminded me of an albino. His manner was what I could have betted it would be—a headmasterly grief that there should be nigger-lovers in the upper forms, coupled with a hearty acceptance of unpleasant facts. We might have been off to shoot some large and unfortunate animal in each other’s company, and he exhorting me that it was the duty of a white man to follow his wounded buffalo into the bush; or it may be that I read into him thoughts which he never had because I myself shared the feelings and was not averse to the intentions of the wounded buffalo.

  In fact he was taciturn and I remained in a suitably academic calm. In view of what happened I can see he felt distaste for what he had been selected to do or to see done. But Sauche’s demand must have been unanswerable. Duyker had made the mess and could not avoid being chosen to clean it up.

  ‘I should like you,’ he invited, actually smiling, ‘to give me your solemn word of honour that you will not call out when I take you to my car.’

  I replied that I refused to give him anything of the kind.

  ‘I only wished to avoid humiliating you,’ he said.

  He let in the two North Africans and pointedly looked the other way. No gag. No injections. No scientific nonsense. Just common sense and sound colonial administration. One of them pointed a pistol at me while the other swathed my head in tight bandages so that my jaw was firmly fixed. I must have looked like an illustration in a Red Cross manual. They did not tie my hands—in case, I suppose, someone looked into the car—but hobbled my feet. When I had been installed in the back seat of Duyker’s Chrysler, my knees covered by a rug, alongside me an attentive Algerian, the whole set-up was convincing. I was recovering from, let us say, a car smash and being taken to hospital to have the dressings changed.

  Duyker took the corniche road to the west, and turned off it into the mountains when we were some miles short of Deva. He did not hesitate at the obscure corner and seemed to know where he was going. I am sure that the general did not grossly abuse Spanish hospitality until I presented him with the dilemma of either removing me or being expelled, so that it was unlikely that he had a well-reconnoitred spot for regrettable incidents. Possibly it was a quiet meeting place recommended by Bernardino. The by-road was so remote that even I had not heard of the villages at its far end.

  Duyker stopped the car and told the Algerian to unpack my head. The faithful fellow did not bother to unwind the lot but skilfully used a razor blade—which suggested that there would be no further need for the bandages.

  ‘I am sorry for the inconvenience,’ Duyker said. ‘I hoped you would be the kind of chap who wouldn’t whine.’

  I shook my ears like the hobbled pony that I was and heard a truer silence, the mountain silence. The car had been climbing slowly through oak woods on the side of a steep hill. So far as I could tell by the general lie of the land and a moon in the third quarter we were now on a saddle of fairly even ground where the trees stood more sparsely.

  ‘Beautiful country,’ I remarked conversationally—for it seemed that Duyker admired coolness, and he was my only hope. ‘I imagine that you get a view of the sea from here in daylight.’

  ‘You do,’ he replied, turning round in the driving seat and apparently glad that there was no ill feeling. ‘You’re some kind of university lecturer, aren’t you?’

  I agreed that I was.

  ‘We don’t know your name as being active against us.’

  ‘I am not. I have no interest. I think you have a case for your apartheid if you don’t grab too much. But economically and politically it won’t work. One can’t just stand on historical rights.’

  ‘Then what in hell were you up to with that black swine, Mgwana?’

  ‘Getting him out of the jam you put him in. I might have done the same for you.’

  ‘And that criminal decadent, the Manoli woman,’ he said with a shudder of disgust.

  I reminded myself that my love for Olura was no business of his and unseasonable, so I merely remarked that I maintained her right to sleep with anyone she pleased.

  Hardly tactful, perhaps. But it brought him to the point without more ado.

  ‘I am going to beat you and let you go,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to what?’ I asked, amazed.

  ‘Beat you.’

  ‘But what good does that do?’

  ‘I consider it sufficient punishment for what you have done and approved.’

  He reached under the seat and drew out a sjambok. I believe they are made of rhinoceros hide. The lash of the blasted thing was a good three-quarters of an inch thick, and the handle much thicker. It added to the African atmosphere already expressed in his car by two leopard skin cushions and other small pieces of animal debris.

  ‘I should have thought that, would have been quite enough for Livetti,’ I said, feeling my way.

  He replied that it was for punishment, not man-to-man fighting. So that was how he excused murder to himself. Poor, little Livetti!

  ‘But I take it you don’t find many punishable citizens in Spain?’

  ‘I keep it as a symbol,’ he said. ‘When you go abroad, don’t you carry something with you from your home?’

  ‘Not a damned thing,’ I told him. ‘But then I never feel abroad.’

  It was no good arguing. From the point of view of any intelligent European, Duyker was as mad as a hatter. One wonders if a Boer psychiatrist would agree. Vigny at least I could understand, but I could not get this. If he turned me loose, I should be on the telephone to Gonzalez next morning.

  ‘And when you have beaten me you will let me go?’ I asked as if I were eager to have it over.

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘That has nothing to
do with me. I shall let you go.’

  There was some kind of echo in the back of my mind. Pilate washing his hands? Or the Holy Office? Hand over the culprit and look the other way while they burn him? It couldn’t be. But it was. That was what he was going to do. If he just delivered me to the Algerian to be murdered, it was sin. But if he punished me first for his own account, he was no longer responsible and the score was even and his conscience was clear.

  The hypocrisy of it was unbelievable. I remembered, however, that Duyker was active, according to Gonzalez, in affairs of the Reformed Church. No wonder he had to invent a convenient angel with whom he could do some sinewy Calvinist wrestling. The solidity of Christianity continually astounds me. It seems to have no difficulty in shrugging off the eccentricities of South African pietists or a Prebendary Flanders or the comic vicars dragged from under the stones into daylight by the Deighton-Flaggs of the popular press.

  ‘I will not be beaten with the native looking on,’ I said, boldly entering through the Looking Glass.

  ‘That stands to reason.’

  ‘Well, where will he be?’

  ‘He will stay in the car.’

  The Algerian who spoke no English, listened stolidly to this conversation. He must have had orders to obey Duyker absolutely. No doubt his past career had familiarised him with many different preliminaries to execution. He lit a cigarette and showed no particular interest as I hobbled off between the trees, closely followed by Duyker running the lash of the sjambok through his fat fingers.

  On this fairly level ridge where we had halted the timber was old and in control of the ground, clear of the saplings and shrubs which compete for every pocket of soil on steeper slopes. It was a place made for rest and contemplation which, if I had to die, I would prefer; one could end with dignity, conscious of being a part of that nature which is continually dying. What I resented was that I should be a torn thing, unfit for death. I do not think that I was particularly afraid of the coming pain, but very much aware that, mad and irrelevant though it was, it would hinder my communion with that Divinity which included Olura and the hills.