The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Chapter 15

  Never was a September in Paris more glorious than the one that greeted me when I returned from Asia. I was supposed to leave the city almost as soon as I arrived: Castor and Sartre were waiting for me in Capri, eager to see me, hungry for stories of my trip. It had been arranged that we would extend our holiday in Italy until the beginning of October. But I couldn’t leave; something held me there, I needed to be alone, to stroll around Paris on a whim, to enjoy the new-found strength I felt coursing through me, the new and strange sense of freedom. I was not the same man, the fabulous day I had spent with Kim Kum-sun had profoundly changed me, something I only fully realized in the atelier on the rue Schœlcher. In Capri, Castor was fretting, less than convinced by the excuses I invented to defer my departure. I had brutally cancelled a first arrival date by telegram on the pretext that I had to do an interview about China. The truth was that I had just fallen head over heels for an aristocratic woman with a double-barrel name, younger than Castor, although not as young as she claimed. When I finally got to Capri, I tried to allay suspicion, giving an account of my trip to China and Korea, but saying nothing about Kim Kum-sun. Together, the three of us explored the Amalfi coast all the way to Ravello, pushing on as far as Paestum beyond Salerno, experiencing very happy days.

  The break-up with Castor was long and painful; it took almost a year before we separated, because she was so compassionate, so understanding; she had always foreseen what she considered to be an inevitability. Back in Paris, I had not ended my relationship with the beautiful aristocrat, I saw her often and began to arrive home at the rue Schoelcher increasingly late. One night, having quietly crept up to the low-ceilinged mezzanine that was our bedroom, I found Castor awake, sitting up straight in bed, a sullen pout across her unhappy face. ‘I want to know,’ she said. To go on lying was out of the question. I sat down next to her, took her in my arms and confessed everything. An immense relief spread over her features; truth was her business – in fact, lying to her had been absurd and criminal on my part – and immediately her optimism and sense of action took over. She began by interrogating me about ‘the other woman’, perfectly prepared to accept that she was in love with me and I with her; Castor wanted to meet her and concur with all the good things I said about her. ‘There’s no reason for her to suffer,’ she went on, ‘there’s no reason you should cut short your nights together,’ and she suggested sharing me: I would spend three days and nights with one, four days and four nights with the other and the reverse the following week. I was overwhelmed, transfixed with love and admiration; I was little more than a virgin, I knew nothing about women, I thought the aristocrat would jump for joy at the prospect of such an arrangement. But an ‘arrangement’ was exactly what she would not agree to, she wanted to win, to triumph, she wanted to deliver a death blow, especially if her rival’s name was Simone de Beauvoir. Her face contorted with mute fury and pain when I told her the plan. Still, she had no choice but to accept, yet every time I insisted that she meet Castor as agreed, she evaded the issue, something Castor rightly interpreted as a sign of open hostility. So began for me an agonizing period of being torn apart. Because sharing requires punctuality and discipline. If Castor, having spent the evening with Sartre, was expecting me at the rue Schoelcher at midnight, I could not turn up at one o’clock, something her rival did her best to make happen. The moment I was about to leave, already running late, the moment I reached her door, marshalling all the charms at her disposal, she’d say, ‘Surely you can stay five more minutes?’, hoping I would give in, which I did. Such games of love are familiar and I won’t dwell on them.

  It took more than a year before I summoned the courage to put an end to this double life with a savage break and at the cost, both for the beautiful aristocrat and for me, of terrible heartache. At that point, I left the rue Schoelcher and did not see Castor again until the following September, when we had to begin to build a friendship. The situation at Les Temps modernes, harried by lawsuits, censorship, threatened with distraint, actual seizure of goods, the escalating violence of the war in Algeria and, in France, the mounting climate of suspicion, of civil unrest, the impossibility of deciphering the intentions behind the hysterical, contradictory statements of Général de Gaulle; all this forced personal matters into the background. There was never the least trace of bitterness or resentment between Castor and me, we ran the publication just as we always had, we worked together, campaigned together. In the early months I rented a room from an elderly lady on the first floor of a vast mansion above the Café de Flore. Life was hard there: night after night, I barely slept a wink. Eventually, I found an apartment nearby, on the rue des Saints-Pères, which belonged to an actor, Peter van Eyck, a tall, well-built man with piercing blue eyes and a great shock of silver-white hair who had a fine and honourable career chiefly playing Prussian officers. He was a peaceable man and the most accommodating of landlords; cancer took him far too young.

  In the spring of 1954, in the first flush of passion, Castor and I had travelled to Algeria and Tunisia, taking a ferry from Marseille to Algiers with our car, the Simca Aronde, not knowing by which port we would return. In the end, after numerous setbacks, we came back via Tunis. The Aronde was an ordinary saloon car; it could just about cope with main roads, yet we forced it to scale huge sand dunes such as those between El Oued and Tozeur. Countless times we got stuck in the sand; to make headway across the dunes requires a technique only acquired through long practice, specially equipped vehicles and a wealth of rescue and survival equipment. But she and I were as reckless in the south of Algeria as we had been in the Swiss Alps and had it not been for the local man who agreed to be our driver – also getting stuck in the sand a number of times – we would have died of thirst, of heatstroke, or of the cold desert nights. Speaking to him and to the people he introduced us to with some difficulty, I realized that the country was on the brink of an explosion. Although I was well aware of the living conditions of the Algerian working class in France – I spent hours outside the gates of the Renault factory in Billancourt, watching spellbound as North African workers, Algerians mostly, were bussed in from distant suburbs at dawn or taken home in the dead of night when their eight-hour shifts were done; seeing the impenetrable, exhausted faces of these lonely men heading back to the shanty towns, the grim dormitories of these modern-day slaves, terrified and appalled me – I had no idea what the real Algeria was like. It was as though our innocence, our stubbornness, our tourist’s obsession with the beauty of the desert, the grandeur of the landscape, had veiled the connection between Billancourt and colonial oppression, or the massacres of Sétif and Guelma, news of which reached us only faintly, belatedly.

  Our interests were inexcusably folkloric. I was obsessed with the South and insisted that I wanted to cross the Sahara in the Aronde. Castor insisted we go to Laghouat to see the Ouled Naïl belly dancers, prostitutes who wore upon their bodies in gold and precious stones everything they had amassed in a lifetime of work. Then, pushing further south, I stopped, dazed with wonder by Ghardaïa, a key city on the deadly trans-Saharan route, capital of the M’zab, a region remarkable not only for its architecture but for its skilled, resourceful merchants who plied their trade all over Algeria. In the streets of Ghardaïa, standing before the market stalls, the shops, I was preoccupied by a single question: how could camels and dromedaries be compossible with piles of tinned sardines? Never for a moment did it occur to me that the tins might have been carried there by caravan, which was the predominant method of transportation at the time. The tinned sardines seemed illogical, their banality was incompatible with the nobility of the striding camel and the austere – meagre as it turned out – imaginative world it conjured. It took me years to let go of stereotypes, to reconcile myself to the reality, the complexity of the world.

  This was the spring of 1954. Ahmed, our guide through the dunes, knew everything and it was he who informed us, on one of our stops, that the Battle of Dien Bien Phu had begun in I
ndochina. One after another the fortified positions, each bearing a beautiful woman’s name, Éliane, Béatrice, Huguette, Dominique, and so on, were attacked and surrounded. The battle lasted from March until May and ‘Gabrielle’, which, Ahmed told us through clenched teeth, his face etched with pain, had been defended by a valiant Algerian infantry battalion, was one of the first to fall after heavy artillery fire and an extremely violent struggle. There were serious losses. Dien Bien Phu fell a month after we returned to Paris. For France, in any case, the war had long since been lost; maintaining the illusion of a colonial empire in Asia had long involved turning a criminally blind eye, entailing lies, a failure of nerve, political racketeering and corruption raised to the level of government policy. Dien Bien Phu, a strategic folly, was merely the culmination of this madness. When it fell, it marked the end of the war in Indochina, or of the French war, at least. Paratroopers were still being dropped into that hell three days before the defeat: though France could no longer win, and knew it could not win, Frenchmen still gave futile, heroic demonstrations of their willingness to die with honour.

  The contrast between the empty, bombastic declarations of prime ministers and commanders-in-chief that followed, and the sacrifices imposed on the troops, death for honour, masking colonial folly and negligence, was so intolerable to us and to our friends that when it was all over we cracked open the champagne. We put our hopes for a new kind of politics in the new Prime Minster, Pierre Mendès France, who alone was capable of accepting defeat and of negotiating peace with Ho Chi Minh. He did so in precisely thirty days in Geneva, and was never forgiven for it. For the remainder of his brief tenure, he granted Tunisia home rule. Algeria, however, was to become the real combat zone, and though during our trip Castor and I did not know when or where it might begin, we foresaw everything. The attack on 1 November 1954 in which the teacher Guy Monnerot was murdered and his wife seriously injured is generally accepted as the casus belli of the Algerian War. I sometimes said to Castor, ‘If we’d gone six months later, that could have been us.’ But we were protected by our innocence, our ignorance, by the fact that we were the epitome of naïve tourists. Perhaps, too, because Ahmed, our guide, realized that we understood him, that he had opened our eyes once and for all.

  In the end, everything happens quickly. Six years later comes not only the publication of the Manifesto of the 121, asserting the right of conscripts to refuse to fight, but also the Jeanson trial. These things are part of objective history so I will not dwell on them. I was one of the ten signatories of the Manifesto who was prosecuted and called to give evidence at the trial, which took place in the courtroom of Cherche-Midi prison in Paris on the corner of the rue du Cherche-Midi and the boulevard Raspail, which has since been demolished and replaced by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. I was interrogated twice at length by Braunschweig, the examining magistrate, a man of impeccable courtesy and an impassive face to whom I explained my reasons for firmly supporting those who refused to serve in Algeria, doing my best to avoid any bombast. Coming out of the magistrates’ chambers, I encountered Jean Pouillon, also a member of the editorial committee of Les Temps modernes, and another of the accused, awaiting his turn. In the Jeanson trial, I was called as a witness for the defence of Jean-Claude Paupert, a member of the Jeanson network, although I barely knew him. He was a young man of few words who lived his life according to his ideals, breaking with his family and making a moral choice, one that he owed in part to my family, to my mother and to Monny. His father owned a bistro, Le Métro, on the boulevard Garibaldi on the corner of the place Cambronne. Paulette lived on the other side of the square, in the well-to-do area that was already part of the 7th arrondissement, and Monny crossed the boulevard every day to have his coffee at Paupert’s bistro. The taciturn boy was fascinated by Monny’s way with words and quickly became a regular visitor to the apartment on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel and almost a son to them. All this I discovered much later: at the time I was not living in Paris. He refused to work behind the counter of Le Métro but continued his studies and developed a visceral hatred of the war. He became a member of the Jeanson network, one of the ‘porteurs de valises’, the ‘suitcase carriers’ who delivered money and papers to the FLN, and he went underground until the arrests from which, as we know, Jeanson was one of the few to escape. I sat for hours in the witness room, and when I was finally called into court, I arrived in the middle of a violent argument between the magistrates and the lawyers. Jacques Vergès, at the head of his ‘collective’ defending the FLN, was leading the offensive, challenging the competence of the court; also involved was Roland Dumas, future Minister for Foreign Affairs and future president of the Conseil constitutionnel, of whom Vergès said, rubbing his hands together as he left the hearing, ‘He is our harki’. I was questioned by the presiding magistrate and then by the lawyers. I told them what I knew about the life of Jean-Claude Paupert and said that I entirely supported his position and his actions. I added that, as a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121, I considered that my place was in the dock with Paupert and his comrades and not on the witness stand. The legal correspondent for Le Monde, Jean-Marc Théolleyre, laid considerable emphasis on my testimony in the paper the following day.

  Sartre, who was in Brazil at the time, wrote a long letter to the tribunal that was read out, I think, by Vergès, or maybe by Roland Dumas. It was said that I had drafted Sartre’s statement together with Marcel Péju, then editor-in-chief at Les Temps modernes. In her Memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir gives credence to this version of events, but in fact it came about very differently: I managed, with great difficulty, to get a call through to Brazil and explained the situation to Sartre who, with Castor, had long since left Paris. It goes without saying that he gave us permission to speak in his name. Nonetheless, I did not write a single word of that letter, nor did I know anything about it until it was made public during the tribunal. Péju wrote the letter alone, and he did not ask me to read it, because he knew that there were several statements in it that I would never have supported. Nor indeed would Sartre, as he told me on his return, but by then there could be no question of making public this profound disagreement. In phrases marked by hollow rhetoric, Péju linked victory in the Algerian revolution with that of the impending revolution in France, which he heralded, associating the destinies of the two peoples: ‘The left is powerless, and it will remain so unless it accepts that it must unite its efforts with the only force that is today truly fighting against the common enemy of Algerian and French freedoms. That force is the FLN.’ He denounced the left ‘mired in a miserable prudence’ and emphatically concluded, ‘the ephemeral power that is preparing to judge [the accused] already represents nothing’. If he thought it just, Sartre was capable of resolutely defending a cause, but in doing so he never gave up his freedom. He was a radical but a realist; he was not naïve and he never made prophecies. Péju – and there is ample evidence for this – became, quite literally, the FLN’s man at Les Temps modernes, something so intolerable to the editorial committee that, during a particularly painful meeting attended by Sartre and Castor immediately after Algeria was granted independence, having questioned him and given him an opportunity to defend himself, we voted to dismiss him from the journal: the evidence we brought against him was damning, there is nothing more to say. He left immediately. The members of the network received long prison sentences. I met Paupert again many years later, when he had become the chief accountant at Éditions Odile Jacob and he was more taciturn than ever.

  After the trial, Péju suggested we go together to Tunis. The headquarters of the provisional government of the Algerian Republic, the newspaper El Moudjahid and the diplomatic and propaganda wings of the FLN were based there. I agreed and was immediately struck by the cheerfulness of those who welcomed us; their jokes, their extraordinary, exhaustive knowledge of the situation in France and the principal political players in France and in Algeria. I was especially struck by their optimism, their conviction th
at they had won the war, that independence was within their grasp and, after six years of bitter fighting, it would be theirs within a year or two, perhaps within a few months. They all spoke impeccable French. I remember Mohamed Yazid, a lawyer from one of the great Blida families, who had taken up the role of Minister for Information and was later the first Algerian ambassador to France, and I remember Mohammed Benyahia, later Minister for Foreign Affairs, a short, thin and frail man of powerful intelligence, who spent his time dreaming outlandish strategies worthy of a chess-player, each more daring than the last, which had him in fits of uncontrollable laughter. He died suddenly, which was a great shock to those who knew him, and a great loss for Algeria.