by Alexis Jenni
Josselin de Trambassac followed the progress of his chart with the same obsessiveness as a maréchal d’Empire might a map studded with pins. He arrived in the morning to see it being filled in, but first and foremost he asked all the men emerging from the basement to show him their hands. Those whose hands were still stained from the night’s work were summarily dismissed and sent to the washbasins in the office, where they were to carefully wash and dry them. Only clean hands could touch the organogram and contribute to its progress. Josselin de Trambassac could not allow it to be sullied. If it were, it would have to be completely recopied.
The villa was surrounded by dusty gardens planted with palm trees. Any shadows were sketchy and shifting. No one spent time there; no one collected the dead palm fronds that littered the pathways. The openwork shutters were permanently half-closed, like the eyes of a cat. Eyes that saw little of Algiers, beyond the glare outside, stray shafts of sunlight and the swaying of the palms. They never opened. Inside, the villa stank in a variety of ways. It reeked of sweat, cigarettes and third-rate cooking, of latrines and of something else besides. Sometimes a faint breeze came off the sea far below. They could hear cicadas chitter, but without the scent of pine. They were in the city; they were working.
It was Mariani who first came up with the idea of putting on music, of playing the huge record player at full volume, while they were working in the basement. Beyond the walls of the villa gardens was a road; people passed by and could hear work going on in the basement. It was a constant nuisance. Music was played at certain times, the volume cranked up as if it were a party. People passing the villa would hear songs, a whole record by some hip girl singer. At full volume. But scarcely perceptible sounds, when combined with music, can create discords that are barely audible, although they register because of the inexplicable dissonance they cause. Anyone passing the Moorish villa found that the Franco-Mediterranean easy-listening music they could hear triggered a strange unease.
When Capitaine Mariani steps into his office with his gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, the suspect in the chair instinctively presses his legs together.
A smiling Mariani perches one buttock on a desk that has not a scrap of paper, not a single pencil. The work carried out here is manto-man. Around him are his goons, his bloodhounds, who obey his every command. On a chair in front of him a young Arab in torn clothes is strapped down by his wrists. The bruises on his face give him a faintly ridiculous expression.
‘What have you been up to?’
‘I did not do anything, monsieur l’officier.’
‘Don’t give me that shit. What have you been up to?’
‘I am a medical student. I did not do anything.’
‘A medical student? You’re happy to take advantage of France, but you won’t help her.’
‘I did not do anything, monsieur l’officier.’
‘Your brother has disappeared.’
‘I know this.’
‘You know where he is.’
‘I do not know.’
‘You’re all brothers, aren’t you?’
‘No, I have only one brother.’
‘So, where is he?’
‘I do not know.’
‘You brother has run off to the bush, to the maquis.’
‘I do not know. He disappear one night. I know nothing. They come and take him.’
‘How can I trust a man whose brother is with the maquis?’
‘I am not my brother.’
‘Oh, but you are your brother. You look like him. There is some of him in you, and he is with the maquis. So how can I trust you? We need you to tell us where he is. Who contacted him? We need to know how people get to the maquis.’
‘I know nothing about these things. I am a medical student.’
‘You should tell us where your brother is. You look just like him. It is written in your face. It would be easy to superimpose your brother’s face on yours. How can you not know?’
The man shook his head. He was weeping from helplessness, rather than from pain and fear.
‘I know nothing. I am a medical student. I know only my studies.’
‘Yes, but you are your brother’s brother. And he is with the maquis. You know a little, the part of him in you knows where he is. And you refuse to tell us. You should tell us.’
Mariani sits down, spreads his hands and gestures to his dogs. They grab the man under the arms and drag him away. Mariani remains sitting at the table, poker-faced; he never takes off the gold-rimmed sunglasses. The louvered shutters cast bars of light across the empty desk. He waits for them to come back, waits for the next one, and all the others that come through his office. They will tell what they know. They will tell everything. This is work.
Salagnon would always hold his breath while going downstairs, then, at the bottom, take a breath, feel his stomach lurch, and become accustomed. Bad smells never last long, a few breaths at most; we cease to smell anything that lingers. Confused noises came from the closed doors, echoing around the vaults, merging to become the vast cacophony of a railway station compressed into the space of a cellar. Wine had been stored here. They had emptied out what remained, installed electric cables, hung bare bulbs from the vaulted ceiling, lugged metal tables and bathtubs down the narrow staircase. The uniforms of the paratroopers working down here were filthy, their jackets open to the waist, their sleeves and trouser legs were soaked. They moved through the corridor, always careful to close the door behind them, faces haggard, eyes bulging from their sockets, their dilated pupils like bottomless wells. Trambassac could not bear to see them like this. He insisted his men were spotless, clean-shaven and full of energy; one pack of detergent per uniform, he recommended. In his presence their words were clearly enunciated, their movements economical; they knew precisely what to do at every moment. Before the press, he paraded impeccably dressed men who were lithe, dangerous, their all-seeing eyes capable of peering through the walls of Algiers, of flushing out the enemy behind the faces, of tracking them through the catacombs of the body. But some men spent days wandering around the carceri beneath the Moorish villa. They terrified everyone, even the parachute officers who stayed on the surface, who managed the fleet of jeeps, picking up suspects, filling in the vast, synoptic chart. These were men that Trambassac never saw; nor did he ever ask to see them.
Some of the men in handcuffs pushed or dragged here by armed paratroopers turned to jelly as soon as they smelled the dank stench of the basement, as soon as they saw themselves reflected in the lemur eyes of those they passed in the corridor, covered with oily sweat, their khaki shirts open to the waist and soaked down the front. Others held their heads high and the door was carefully closed behind them. They would find themselves in a tiny cell with a number of men. A bare bulb, an officer with a notepad asking questions – very few questions – and two or three others, filthy and close-mouthed, who looked like tired car mechanics. The clamour of the basement, broken now and then by screams, trickled down the walls. In the centre of the cell were the tools: a basin, cables and electrodes, and a full bathtub, which some found surprising. What filled the bath was no longer water but a viscous liquid that glistened darkly in the glare of the bare bulb hanging from the vault. The process began. Questions were asked. All this took place in French. Those brought back upstairs sometimes had to be carried. They were not sent home.
When Salagnon came upstairs with the pad on which names were noted, he was vaguely thinking that if they worked quickly enough to arrest those making the bombs, those planting them, they might prevent a bomb going off on a bus. All the paratroopers thought much the same thing, except for the lemurs in the basement, and there was no one now who knew what they were thinking, as they repeated the same questions endlessly to the drowning, who could not answer for spewing water, to the electrocuted, whose clenched jaws blocked off all sound. Trambassac was very clear in his statements to the press. ‘We must act, quickly and without scruple. When a man is brought to us having just set twe
nty bombs that might explode at any moment and will not talk, when he refuses to tell us where they are and when they are set to explode, exceptional measures are required to compel him to do so. If we capture a terrorist we know has planted a bomb and we interrogate him quickly, we avoid further victims. We need to get such information rapidly. By any means necessary. It is the person who rejects those means who is the criminal; his hands are stained with the blood of dozens of victims whose deaths could be avoided.’
Put like this, it was above reproach. The argument was flawless, it should be said. Arguments are always flawless – except in the hands of the inept – because they are designed to be so. It is true that if a terrorist is captured who is known to have planted bombs, he should be bombarded with questions. Bombarded, barraged, blitzed, shelled, it does not matter. It has to happen quickly. Put this way, it is unanswerable. Except that they never arrested anyone that they knew had planted twenty bombs. They arrested 24,000 men without knowing what a single one of them had done. What they had done was determined by the interrogation.
Trambassac told anyone who would listen that they arrested the guilty and interrogated them, not to establish their guilt, but to limit the damage caused by their crimes. In fact, they did not arrest guilty men: they created them by the process of arrest and interrogation. Some, by sheer chance, may have been guilty already, others were not. Many disappeared, guilty or otherwise. They cast wide nets and brought in all the fish. There was no need to establish guilt in order to act. All that was needed was a name; they took care of the rest.
On that particular day Trambassac was brilliant. What he told the reporters asking him questions, the justification he gave for what was happening in the Moorish villa, would be repeated in more or less the same words for half a century; the mark of great literary creations is that they imprint themselves on the mind; they are regularly quoted, in a slightly distorted form, without anyone knowing who first penned them – in this case, Josselin de Trambassac.
* * *
They saw Teitgen going down into the basement with another civilian who was General Secretary of the Algiers Police, the city police force that had been stripped of its powers. They were carrying sheaves of military arrest warrants, administrative papers and various forms to be signed. They were also carrying a photo album. They showed it to everyone they encountered. They showed it to Trambassac. It contained photographs of hideously mutilated bodies taken in the German camps.
‘This is something that we personally experienced, and now we see it again here.’
‘I lived through it too, Teitgen. But let me show you what is happening here.’
He waved the front page of L’Écho d’Alger, a full-page photograph, mercifully in black and white, showing the wreckage of the bar L’Otomatic, the patrons lying amid the rubble and shattered glass.
‘These are the men we’re looking for: the ones who did this. We will do anything to find them, to stop them. Anything.’
‘You cannot do anything.’
‘We have to win. If we do not win, you’re right, all this will have been useless carnage. If we bring peace, it will simply be the price that had to be paid.’
‘We have already lost something.’
‘What are you thinking of? Law and order? Don’t you find such concepts a little preposterous in times like these? They are not designed for wartime, they are intended to regulate the humdrum routine of everyday life. But I am more than happy to sign every one of your slips of paper.’
‘Whether or not what we are doing is illegal is unimportant, Trambassac, on that point I agree with you. But we have gone beyond that. We have resorted to acting anonymously and without responsibility, which can only lead to war crimes. On every one of my “slips of paper”, as you call them, I want the name of a man and a legible signature.’
‘Leave me to my work, Teitgen. Among my men, those who don’t want to do that work, don’t have to. But those who do not offload their burden on to others carry it themselves.’
‘Even those who don’t do that “work” will be sullied. All of us will be tainted. Even in France.’
‘Leave me alone, Teitgen, I’ve got work to do.’
They were constantly moving, through the stairwells, through the hallways, into the bedrooms. They smashed down doors, blasted locks, laid traps in corridors, blocked doorways, windows, roofs, courtyards. They worked day and night. The cellars of the Moorish villa were always full. They rarely saw daylight. The temperature scarcely varied, hot and muggy beneath a bare bulb. Salagnon was dead on his feet. He slept fitfully. When he came upstairs he was surprised by the shifting sunlight in the ceremonial hall. They had to work quickly, to discover names, places, collar suspects before they made a run for it. They scrawled names on the walls, crossed out those arrested in red, pinned up photographs of the leaders still in hiding; they saw them every day, lived with them, knew their faces; had they passed them in the street they would have recognized them. They could spot them hiding in a crowd. They were hiding. The enemy hid behind false ceilings, behind false walls, the enemy holed up in apartments, melted into crowds, hid behind faces. The enemy had to be torn out. The false walls demolished. The body searched. The sheltering faces destroyed. Night and day they worked. Outside the bombs went off. People they had spoken to had their throats cut. They had to work faster still. The fleet of jeeps brought a continuous stream of terrified men to the cellars of the Moorish villa. Teitgen insisted they be counted, that their names be taken on arrival. This they did. He insisted, he persisted, this little toad-like man with his thick glasses sweating in his tropical suits, a little fat, a little balding, the only civilian present, so different from the lean wolves who wrested names, who snatched men after a brief chase in a stairwell. But Teitgen was stubbornly determined. His papers had to be signed. He came every day and 24,000 slips were signed. And when a man was released, he checked. He cross-referenced lists. Some were missing. He queried. He was told they had disappeared.
‘We can’t send them back like that,’ Mariani would say, nodding at those who were too badly mutilated. ‘They’re fucked one way or another.’ Salagnon drove a covered truck filled with those who would never be released. He drove at night, heading out past Zeralda. He pulled up next to a pit in a glare of spotlights. Mariani’s dogs were there. They unloaded the cargo. Their arms dangled by their sides, some holding pistols, others knives. Salagnon heard gunfire and, afterwards, the gentle sound of something soft falling on to something soft, like a sack falling on a pile of sacks. Sometimes the sound of the fall was preceded by nothing, no gunshot, just a liquid gurgle that did not even make him flinch – and that was worse, the fact that he did not feel a faint shudder.
He asked Trambassac whether he could be relieved of having to do this, having to drive the truck to Zeralda or to the port or to the helicopter that took off in the middle of the night to make brief flights over the sea.
‘OK, Salagnon. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Someone else will do it.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘But there is something I would like you to do.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘Paint my men.’
‘Is this really the time to paint them?’
‘It’s now or never. Take a little time now and then. Paint portraits of my lads, of your comrades. You paint quickly, as I understand it; they don’t need to pose. They need to see themselves. To see themselves as more handsome than they are right now. Because otherwise, with what we’re doing here, we will lose them. Give them back a little humanity. You can do that, can’t you?’
Salagnon obeyed. He did this strange thing that was painting the portraits of the paratroopers, who worked day and night until they collapsed, drunk with exhaustion, who thought as little as possible, who avoided mirrors. He painted heroic portraits of men who no longer thought beyond the plan to apprehend the next suspect.
When the feverish excitement abated around some guy covered in blood, in spittle and vomit, in the
tearful silence that followed great moments of tension, they could clearly see what was before them: an excremental body whose stench pervaded them all. ‘We can’t put this one back into circulation,’ Mariani would say. And he disposed of everything. They were among comrades. It did not matter who did this or that, who did more or less, who had acted and who had watched. They were the same; the man who had done no more than listen and watch was like the others. They contemptuously scorned those who affected to know nothing, those who pretended not to be involved. They would have liked to plunge these men into a bucket of blood, or send them back to France. They were not keen on Salagnon painting them; they preferred to be in a group or utterly alone. When they went to bed, they rolled themselves in their sheet and turned their faces to the wall. They lay beneath the sheet, unmoving, whether or not they were asleep. When together, they liked to laugh raucously, to bawl, to tell crude jokes, and to drink as much as they could until they collapsed and threw up. Salagnon asked them to remain stock still and silent in front of him. They did not like the idea, but Salagnon was one of them so, one by one, they agreed. He painted huge ink-wash portraits of them as lean, strong, taut, the consciousness of life flickering within them, the consciousness of death all around them, but holding strong, their eyes open. Though they did not tell him, they loved this dark romanticism. They agreed to pose in silence for Salagnon, who did not speak to them but simply painted them. Trambassac hung several of the portraits in his office. He met with colonels, generals, senior civil servants, representatives of the Governor-General beneath the dark gaze of his painted paratroopers. And he always mentioned them. He would gesture to them, point to them as he spoke. ‘These are the men I am talking about. The men who are defending you. Take a good look at them.’ The portraits, which radiated a dark, crazed magnetism, were part of the blackmail of heroism that took place almost every day in his office. In Algiers in 1957 the Grim Reaper was a mechanical harvester, and Salagnon’s portraits were a part of it, like the painted, metal bodywork holding it all together. It held together. ‘All of them are guilty, but they are guilty for you. So they stick together, they remain united. It doesn’t matter what they do. They do it together. That is what matters. If someone should leave? Let him go. We will not blame him, let him disappear.’