“The maid hasn’t come,” said the half-caste apologetically.
She was barefoot and wearing an old dressing-gown, but her smooth slender body exuded a faint perfume of vanilla. Contemptuous and disgusted by all this mess, a white tabby cat had taken refuge on a shelf. She yawned, opening her pink throat, and stretched one paw above her ear.
Boisfeuras cleared an arm-chair for himself. Florence came and sat down on his lap; her thick black hair was pressed against his cheek.
“Haven’t you paid the maid?”
“She doesn’t like me, no one likes me in France.”
Florence unbuttoned the captain’s jacket, then his shirt, and with her long hand and hard nails began stroking his chest. The unmade bed, which still retained the smell of woman and love-making, soon beckoned them; and with his lovely whore Julien Boisfeuras once again experienced the intense sort of pleasure which she alone knew how to produce.
“Real pleasure is painful and degrading,” his father, taipan Boisfeuras, used to say. “Otherwise it’s little more than an organic function. It must defy all constraint and taboo to be what the Christians call a sin. When you make war, you risk your skin; when you make love, you must risk your soul.”
With Florence, the little half-caste who, with parted lips, was now lovingly stroking her stomach and breasts, Julien played with his soul in the same way as a bullfighter manipulates his cape.
“Shall we go out and eat?”
“No.”
“I want to go to Alex’s. We’ll have Chinese soup, fried nemes and abalones that come from Hong Kong already tinned; they’re very expensive. Then you’ll buy me some dresses and we’ll go to the cinema and tonight I’ll be . . .”
She ran the tip of her tongue over her full, fleshy lips:
“. . . very . . . very . . . sweet to you.”
He slapped her in the face, deliberately, without anger, and she clung to him, limp and chastened; sobs, which were succeeded by pleasure, made her firm stomach expand and contract.
He thrust her aside and lit a cigarette.
“I’m behaving like a pimp in a film,” he said to himself, “but that’s the only way to avoid being relegated by Florence to a mere accessory. She spent last night with another man; then, when he went off, shortly before I arrived, she stroked her stomach and breasts in the same manner to thank them for the pleasure they had just given her. And she’s already forgotten the accessory which served her purpose. A cruel, selfish, soulless little strumpet! But I’m only interested in her body and my degradation.”
Florence took his hand, rubbed it gently against her lips and kissed it. He reacted to this with complete indifference, while the cat with her red-brown eyes stared down at them from her shelf.
Julien heaved the half-caste out of bed:
“Turn off that music and go out and buy something to eat.”
Florence looked at herself in the wardrobe glass and twisted round to catch the reflection of her lightly arched loins. She would have liked to be a man so as to adore her body and make love to herself. In a science-fiction novel she had read about a creature which reproduced itself in order to go out and kill people, the fool, instead of giving itself pleasure. There was a faint mark near her eye where Julien had slapped her.
“You’ve given me a bruise.”
She said this simply as a statement of fact. When she saw Maguy, she would tell him that her captain had come back from the war and that for the time being it would be better for her not to do the round of the bars too regularly. Florence was happy that Julien was back, for she was tired of her freedom. The half-caste was bored in Marseilles and missed Saigon, the Dakao quarter and its seething life, its little bars, its “compartments” thronged with amoral, sexual families. Old fathers there sold their daughters, assuming the haughty air of hidalgos. Brothers got a rake-off for introducing their sisters to “friends.” The whole quarter wallowed in a warm miasma of sex, nuoc mam, and dried shrimps. Then came the war, as fiery as red peppers, which lent an unexpected zest to each fresh embrace. Florence had experienced passion as furtive and brutal as that of wild beasts, pursuits, fights, and murders. One day she had fallen into the hands of the Binh-Xuyens and Julien had saved her. The chief of the arroyo pirates who ran all the gambling-dens in Cholon could not afford to fall out with Captain Boisfeuras who knew the name of the coolie whom he had once killed in order to steal two piastres from him. That was ten years before he became a colonel and a friend of the Emperor.
Florence disappeared into the bath-room and came out again wearing close-fitting leopard-skin trousers, a chunky black sweater and a canary-yellow scarf. She looked common and provocative. Her dull skin and slanting eyes, the sinuous movement of her limbs, gave her the additional tang of some exotic fruit. Boisfeuras lit another cigarette. He surrendered to the clammy but beguiling self-disgust in which his energy and resolution melted away. He had to plumb the depths of this disgust so as to have the necessary purchase for his foot which, with a kick, would send him rising to the surface again.
The captain spent a week with his lovely whore, took her out to the cinema once or twice, ran through several detective novels and smoked enough cigarettes to sear the roof of his mouth.
At the most unusual hours Florence produced a number of meals in which Vietnamese dishes which she cooked herself were supplemented by poor quality cold cuts from the neighbouring butcher’s shop. To drink she bought nothing but sugary aperitifs tasting of chemicals which cloyed palate and stomach alike.
When his disgust almost swept him off his feet like a wave, Julien went out on to the balcony and watched the cats.
At the back of the building there was an empty plot of ground enclosed by a high wooden fence. Hundreds of cats, grey, white and black, romped about in this playground among the bits of corrugated iron, piles of rubble, broken bottles, clumps of nettles and carcasses of old trucks. The darkness sparkled with countless gold and emerald-green eyes.
They reminded Julien of his big game hunts by night in Burma, of the eyes of the animals caught in the headlights, which the rifle shots extinguished like so many candles.
Burton in his sentimental way used to say:
“One gets the feeling one’s killing eyes. It’s far nastier than shooting animals whose head, limbs and body are visible. Putting out their eyes in the dark is like killing life itself.”
Men’s eyes do not shine in the dark. During a hunt in the Naga hills they ran into some Japanese and Burton was shot dead.
The cats, Julien noticed, had a recognized leader, a gaunt, lean-ribbed grey beast. Whenever any refuse wrapped up in a piece of newspaper was thrown down from one of the balconies of the building, they all pounced on it, fur bristling, claws bared, and formed a circle round the packet, not daring to advance for fear of being attacked by the others.
At this point the grey cat intervened. He would pick the packet up in his jaws and make off with it. But the newspaper, dragging along the ground, would fall apart, spilling out the old bones, crusts of bread and kitchen refuse, which were snatched up by his pursuers, and the grey cat would find himself on the discarded dustbin which served as his throne with an empty piece of torn paper between his teeth.
The cats disappeared in the afternoon, but in the evening, when the lights began to come on in all the villas scattered over the hill, they would suddenly reappear and embark on their saraband. They clawed and nibbled, squealed with passion, made love and killed one another. The white tabby cat would start trembling, brushing up against the captain’s legs and mewing. One night he opened the door for her and she scuttled off to join the free world of cats covered with scabs and mange, ruled by a stupid and short-sighted tyrant.
On the following day Julien Boisfeuras gave Florence her freedom. She too needed to scamper about the wastelands of Marseilles and resume her adventurous love-life; he left her enough money to live on for t
hree months; she pretended to be grieved.
When he left, she cursed him up hill and down dale, burst out laughing when the door closed behind him, shed a few tears shortly afterwards because she was already beginning to miss him, and consoled herself by promptly spending some of the money he had left her on a television set. That evening she went out and met Maguy and her old bar cronies, while the white tabby in the empty plot of ground squalled with love as she let herself be mounted by the stupid king, the big gaunt grey.
Julien Boisfeuras had cured himself of Florence as of a fever which is suddenly brought down. He had needed her out in Indo-China in order not to think about the war. This war had begun to lose its appeal when the flavour of exotic and unusual adventure that it had at the beginning began to fade. By 1952 it was already nothing more than a useless dissipation of heroism, suffering, endeavour and human life, while corruption, the black market and chair-borne warriors were all on the increase.
Boisfeuras had been forced to make false promises to his partisans in the Baie d’Along and on the Chinese border. When he came down to Saigon to ask for arms, rice and money, more often than not he met with a refusal. The money had been spent in the capital to swell the coffers of some political party or other; the arms had been issued to some parade-ground Vietnamese units who neither knew nor wished to learn how to use them. Then, so as to have the courage to deceive his partisans with further lies, he used to go and see Florence in her “compartment” at Dakao and expend all his strength and fury on that smooth, eager, selfish body. There were times when Julien felt he would like to alter the course of history all by himself, to be as puerile as a Don Quixote, who, armed with a spear and encased in a suit of armour, attempts to halt a heavy tank attack. Heroic, stupid, play-acting!
Because he thought the conflict was pointless, he had needed the heady drug which was secreted between his mistress’s thighs. Eroticism was the answer to despair.
When Julien thought about that war, all he remembered was a series of disconnected adventures, adventures of the kind that Esclavier called “hare-brained schemes.” A big junk prowled up the Chinese coast in the darkness; the wind rose and filled the sails which were reinforced with slivers of bamboo; the tiller creaked at every movement of the vessel. Julien was lying out on deck next to his batman Min. When Vong, the owner of the junk, drew on his water-pipe and made the embers right next to them come to life, his face emerged out of the darkness like a ghost. It was a wrinkled old face with cruel little eyes. Vong may well have betrayed them—but not for political reasons or out of self-interest; he was above anything of that sort. The gamble was all that could make his deadened nerves tingle any longer.
The sea was like a millpond and the stifling salty air seemed to be glued to its surface. Min rolled over to shift his revolver from his hip to his waist; like that he would be able to fire more quickly while lying flat on the deck. He believed in Vong’s treachery but had never mentioned it to his captain who had known about it for some time; for Min trod warily, bristling like a cat on guard against dogs.
Vong’s head emerged out of the darkness again. He spoke softly:
“The junk’s arriving.”
The sound of flapping sails and rippling water grew louder. A pin-point of light flashed on and off in the distance. So Vong had not betrayed them. Why not? He hardly knew himself—maybe because this time the stakes were so much higher. He was gambling with the lives of the whole of his family left behind in China.
Min went down into the hold to rouse the dozen men of the commando. They came up on deck barefoot and fully armed. Boisfeuras made them lie down along the scuppers. A machine-gun had been set up in the bows, concealed behind some sacks of rice.
Vong put down his water-pipe and began signalling with an old hurricane lamp.
The little Corsican sergeant in command of the Nung partisans sidled up to Boisfeuras.
“What do you think it’s going to be, sir, opium, girls . . . ?”
He might equally well have said gold, rum, spices or pearls. Andréani and Boisfeuras savoured the deep, savage joy of piracy; this war had granted them an adventure of some bygone age: a boarding on the China seas.
The junk from Hainan drew closer; there was a sound of voices. How many were there on board? Were they armed?
Vong embarked on a palaver with the other owner. The wind had dropped completely and the two vessels now lay side by side. The machine-gun loosed off three bursts and the dozen men of the commando sprang to their feet with a yell.
The Chinese put up no defence, but the crew had to be pitched overboard just the same, for there was nothing else to be done with them. The junk was loaded with arms and medical supplies for the Vietminh.
No, for all his money, taipan Boisfeuras could never have offered his son sensations of such power and intensity.
Then one day Julien grew tired of these stereotyped romantics and tried to find some purpose in this fighting. Since there was none that he could discover, he took to Florence who proved to be a much more potent drug than anything else.
At Dien-Bien-Phu he met officers who claimed to be fighting simply because they had been ordered to do so. It had needed the defeat to make them subsequently seek a more or less valid reason for their having fought and to dismiss from their minds the myth of discipline which the defeat of 1940, the Resistance and the liberation had deprived of all its content.
From some incomprehensible sense of shame, however, those officers still would not admit, as he did, that their war had become a mere game for desperate dilettanti.
Boisfeuras had no feeling of nationalism; he was therefore unable to invoke the defence of his country, of “mother France.” He needed a more universal cause; like many of his comrades, he believed he had found it in the struggle against Communism. Communism as he had known it in Camp One, deprived of all human substance by the Vietminh, could only result in a universe of sexless insects without contradictions and therefore without genius, without any extension in the infinite and therefore without hope.
Man in his diversity and richness was suddenly menaced, but were not those who wished to take up his defence bound to find themselves harnessed to this mass of rubble which was all that was left of the West, its myths and its beliefs?
Boisfeuras felt it was his duty to take part in this defence of the individual. But he refused to confuse this new form of crusade with the guard mounted by a motionless sentry over the walls of a deserted citadel, the porch of an empty church, or the bars of a museum or library in which no one set foot any longer.
As he made his way towards the Saint-Charles station in his civilian suit which made him look like a workman in his Sunday best, Julien Boisfeuras recalled the hordes of cats in the empty plot of ground, their cruel habits and their king who was as stupid and brutal as an American gang leader.
Still carrying his battered old suitcase, he got into the train for Cannes. Someone had left yesterday’s paper behind in the compartment; he glanced through it. The insurrection was spreading through the whole of Algeria. Fresh troops were being sent out. G.H.Q. announced that it would all be over in a matter of weeks.
He thought of Mahmoudi. What would he have done in his place? The finest role is always that of the rebel; books, films and men of goodwill are always on his side. But defending rubble is an ungrateful and demeaning pastime.
What passed through the minds of the Roman centurions who were left behind in Africa and who, with a few veterans, a few barbarian auxiliaries ever ready to turn traitor, tried to maintain the outposts of the Empire while the people back in Rome were sinking into Christianity, and the Caesars into debauchery?
At Cannes Julien Boisfeuras took the bus which dropped him off at La Serbalière, his father’s estate. It stretched all the way from Grasse up the hill towards Cabris and was hidden from the public eye by thick smooth walls like those of a prison. He rang the bell at the gate; a
n old Chinaman opened a peep-hole and curtly inquired through the grille:
“What you want?”
Then suddenly he recognized him and a broad smile came over his grumpy face:
“Ong Julien, me velly happy . . .”
He threw the gate wide open to allow Julien’s car to drive through, but there was only the young master with his battered suitcase standing there. He snatched the suitcase out of his hand and scrutinized him closely. Ong Julien was mad; perhaps it was the fault of that Vietnamese nurse who had brought him up and used to take him with her every day to burn incense in the pagodas of the Buddha. He had inhaled too much incense, which must have disturbed his mind. He, Lung, was a good Christian, a good Protestant, who preferred the smell of soap. Ong Julien had not changed, he was still dressed like a tramp. Neither large cars, nor fine clothes, nor opium, nor good food, nor, like the old master, pretty little girls—nothing interested him but war and politics . . .
A man appeared outside on the veranda of the house. He had a long narrow head culminating in a mouth that was more like a sucker. His lips were so red that they looked made up; his skin so pale as to be transparent, revealing a blue network of veins and arteries. His emaciated frame was swathed in a sort of monk’s cowl.
All round this creature who had just emerged from the dark and was blinking his eyes, splendid beds of flowers blazed in the late autumn light. The breeze brought with it all the scents which are those of Provence, sunshine and life: the scent of thyme, mother-of-thyme, fennel, sweet marjoram and the pungent smell of pine-trees. But the man looked like a corpse in this magnificent garden.
“Ah, there you are at last, Julien!”
“Yes, Father.”
“I sent you out an air ticket to the bank at Saigon.”
“I preferred to come back by boat with my friends.”
The Centurions Page 24