The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  I had planned to write about the trip on my return to Paris, although I don’t know where I would have published it. In Le Monde, perhaps, or Les Temps modernes. But I never wrote the piece. It rapidly became known that I had been there and I gave two lectures in praise of the Armée des frontières at 115 boulevard Saint-Michel, headquarters of the North African Students Union, which was essentially run by Algerians. Ahmed Ghozali, later Minister for Oil, was present. Afterwards, I was quickly contacted by the men from Wilayah IV, the region of Algiers, who had heard about my trip to Ghardimaou. One of them unexpectedly showed up at my apartment, a luminous, intelligent, likeable young man from the deep interior, determined to open my eyes: ‘You have to hear us out, our story is different to theirs. They deserted us for purely political reasons. They want to keep power for themselves.’ He proved uncannily accurate: in fact, barely had independence been declared than Wilayah IV led a brief, doomed revolt against the new Algerian authorities. Events moved rapidly and quickly overtook me; in the end I told myself that I had no right to take sides in this civil war, that a period of reflection was necessary. The Armée des frontières had presented a unified front, which masked the internecine struggles and savage rifts. There was nothing extraordinary about this, it was born out of the circumstances in which the FLN had formed, its violent struggle with the MTLD (Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques) to be the sole representatives of their cause, born out of the betrayals, out of French oppression. None the less, to us they seemed the most unfortunate of all, victims of racist attacks, of torture, and of the Paris massacre of 1961 – the CRS riot police had lain in wait for them at the entrances to métro stations after a peaceful demonstration in favour of Algerian independence that had included women and children; some were beaten to death with truncheons, others dragged off in police vans and thrown into the Seine. That night I witnessed a number of such atrocities. It was hardly surprising that we idealized these people, that we regarded them as our purity. But the revelation of their brutal violence, the hatred these ‘brothers’ bore each other, suddenly forced me into silence. And so I kept the story to myself and wrote nothing.

  When Fanon returned from the USSR, his health was worse. He was given little time to live, but it had been agreed that he would be admitted to Bethesda Hospital in Washington, where specialists hoped to do better than their Russian counterparts. It was easy for me to persuade Sartre to see Fanon, and it was I who organized their meeting in Rome in 1961, which coincided with a stormy, historic meeting of the CNRA (Conseil national de la révolution algérienne) in Tripoli at which the decision was being taken whether or not to continue negotiations with the French. Simone de Beauvoir and I went to meet Fanon at Rome airport; we had booked a room for him at our hotel and the three of us had dinner with Sartre on the first night. At this point something unthinkable, something unheard of happened: Sartre, who spent every morning, every afternoon writing, whatever the circumstances or the weather (he wrote in Gao in Mali in 50°C heat), who never compromised about his work schedule – he would never deviate from his schedule, nothing justified his not working – now Sartre stopped work for three days to listen to Fanon. Simone de Beauvoir did likewise. They felt as I had done in El Menzah. Fanon communicated a sense of urgency to all those he spoke to: he was literally in the grip of death and he knew it (leukaemia would take him six months later), there was a feverishness in the way he spoke, his words burned like flames. And he was also a gentle man whose delicacy and warmth were contagious. So he began to talk about the Algerian revolution, and about Africa, as he had done with me, in precisely the same terms. I will not recount it again. He was persuasive, convincing, it was impossible to raise objections, in the face of his words every objection seemed trivial. It is impossible to object to a prophet’s trance. We now know that the real Africa is not the Africa of Fanon’s dreams, that it has not managed to bypass our Middle Ages. The real Africa is Rwanda, the genocide of the Tutsis, it is the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Darfur and others. Horror seems to slowly pervade the whole continent, not sparing Algeria. The French may have become a constituent in the identity of Algerians, even as they fought against France. Once the French had left, the Algerians found themselves completely hobbled on the inside. Hobbled and lame.

  The fact remains that, for three whole days, Sartre did no work. We listened to Fanon. He talked about Angola, about Holden Roberto, the head of UNITA who was supported by the Americans and later was assumed to have been a CIA agent, a traitor, a sworn enemy of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), which rules the country today. Fanon liked Holden, they were friends. But he also talked about Aimé Césaire, Caribbean literature, and of his experiences as a doctor in the psychiatric hospital in Blida. Those three days were exhausting, physically and emotionally. I never saw Sartre as charmed, as captivated by a man. It went without saying that he would write the preface for Les Damnés de la terre, the manuscript of which Fanon had brought to give him. Then he left us, heading for Washington.

  We wrote to each other and, realizing that his health was not improving, I decided to go over and see him one last time. I had talked with his wife Josie on the phone. He was very ill, she said, the doctors were giving him one transfusion after another but his pain was worse, there were moments when he almost succumbed to psychosis, accusing the doctors of transfusing white blood to hasten his death. I had my ticket for Washington, I was supposed to take the plane at ten the following morning when I got a call from Josie in the middle of the night to say, ‘There’s no point in your coming now; he has just died.’ It was 6 December 1961. I was in such denial about his death, I think, that I decided to go anyway. I arrived in Washington to a memorably cold winter and spent two days talking to Josie, two days walking with her along the banks of the frozen Potomac.

  Fanon’s remains were repatriated to Tunisia and, six days after his death, he was interred in a provisional grave between Ghardimaou and the Moriceline – where I had been – as an ALN squad fired a salute. Everything moved very quickly: the Évian Accords were signed shortly afterwards and it became possible, with the consent of the administration, to visit Algerian prisoners in jail. This was how I came to spend a whole afternoon in Fresnes Prison with Mohamed Boudiaf, one of the ‘historic leaders’ whose plane had been hijacked in mid-air by French forces. This exceptionally intelligent man was assassinated in Bône in 1992 when, after years of exile, he was asked to return as head of state. I spent another afternoon with Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi, a man of great charm but an intractable Islamist, future Minister for Education and later Minister for Foreign Affairs. The prisoners enjoyed considerable autonomy within Fresnes Prison. After they were freed, we took them in for several days. Taleb, as I have mentioned, stayed with my sister Évelyne; others stayed with me. Simone de Beauvoir attempted to persuade them to abandon polygamy, and they let her talk.

  The ceremony of independence took place in Rabat and I was among those invited. The whole of revolutionary Africa was in attendance: Dos Santos from Mozambique, representatives from Angola, Amílcar Cabral from Portuguese Guinea, Vergès, obviously. Ben Bella and Boumediène reviewed the troops. The former made a very short speech to the djounoud: ‘You are our blood.’ It was clear that in this fractured, complicated brotherhood, everyone was keeping a watchful eye on everyone else. Indeed, it was not long before Boumediène, the tall redhead, deposed Ben Bella. The latter was very friendly towards me, calling me ‘my brother’. But a few short weeks later, in one of his first speeches as head of state, he suddenly announced that the newly created Algerian Republic was planning to send to the Middle East, not emissaries as Abdelaziz Bouteflika had assured me, but 100,000 troops to liberate Palestine. For me, it was over: I had thought it was possible to believe both in an independent Algeria and the state of Israel. I was wrong.

  Before Ben Bella’s thunderous pronouncement, I had wanted to see Josie Fanon once more and had travelled to Algiers to do so. (I have never since set foot in
independent Algeria.) Josie gave me a warm welcome. She was living with a high-ranking official in the Algerian security services who was madly jealous but seemed to make her happy, to make her laugh. She had become his mistress during Fanon’s long stays in hospital: as I had learned in Ghardimaou, ‘sisters’ could not be left without a man. I stayed for three days, but it was impossible for me to have a private conversation with her since he never left the apartment for a moment. The weather was very hot, the sea nearby was tempting, and I suggested we go for a swim. We piled into his car and, teeth clenched and eyes spitting fire, he drove at breakneck speed. When we got to the beach and Josie started changing into her swimsuit – I took great care to turn away – I saw out of the corner of my eye that he stretched out his arms to form a windbreak, thereby shielding from view every inch of the white flesh of his concubine. Back in Paris, I recounted my brief trip to Castor, telling her that Josie Fanon was being held captive by her Algerian lover. Naturally, it was impossible for us to continue to be in touch. Later I learned that the chief of the Algerian security services had stolen Josie away from his subordinate and that she had promptly adopted the view of her new lover, that Israel had to disappear. When Maspero wanted to republish Les Damnés de la terre, she insisted that Sartre’s preface be removed because he had, at my insistence, signed a petition supporting Israel in the turbulent weeks that preceded the Six Day War in June 1967. Although Maspero largely agreed with the swing of opinion of much of the left against Israel following the Israeli army’s speedy victory and the sight of barefoot Egyptian soldiers fleeing across the Sinai, he held fast to his professional code of ethics as a publisher and did not give in to Josie Fanon’s ultimatum and so the book was not republished. At least, not then and not by him.

  Two or three years after the release of Shoah – in 1987 or 1988 – to my complete surprise, I received a long letter from Josie in Algiers in which every line seemed to be a cry for help. She said nothing about the past, but seemed to be profoundly lonely and all but destitute. She talked in friendly terms about Sartre and Castor, told me she was reading or rereading them, she said how much she regretted not having seen Shoah – in Algiers it would obviously have been impossible – and added that the few issues of Les Temps modernes she had managed to get her hands on were like an ‘iron lung’ to her, and asked me if I could arrange a free subscription for her (which of course I immediately did). She ended the letter with a postscript that was calmly informative and all the more distressing for that: ‘Did you know I made a serious attempt to commit suicide five months ago?’ How could I have known? I wrote back to her, suggesting we renew our old friendship and promising to do everything in our power to help her. I think I received two more letters in which it was clear that she was not telling me everything; they were evasive, she was obviously not free to write what she wanted.

  In 1990, barely four years after Simone de Beauvoir’s death, her unedited letters to Sartre were published by her adoptive daughter. Many of the letters included references to people who were still alive; I know that Castor would never have published them nor allowed them to be published like that. I know this because she told me so, because she states as much in her introduction to the edition of Sartre’s letters published in 1983, and because I shared her life. Although she might at times have thought ill of those closest to her, the idea of hurting them was unbearable to her: I never knew her to miss an engagement with her mother, with her sister, with interlopers if she had agreed to meet them, or with pupils she had known long ago out of loyalty to some shared idea of a past. I understand the shock, the disbelief, the revulsion some may have felt when reading these letters they were never meant to see, in which, in the arrogant competitive letter-writing of their younger days, Sartre and Castor had ripped those closest to them to shreds. This did not preclude either delicacy or courtesy. In this, I subscribe completely to the distinction made by my friend Michel Tournier between ‘effective language’ and ‘ineffective language’: to say behind someone’s back, ‘He’s a stupid bastard’, has no consequences. To say to his face, ‘Fuck off, you stupid bastard’, is something very different. In one of her letters written in 1960, which I discovered in 1990, when the two volumes of her letters to Sartre were published, Castor, idly gossiping, told him about my brief stay with Josie Fanon and her jealous lover. This became: ‘Poor Lanzmann has just got back from Algiers where he was held captive by the Fanon woman’. About this, I would make three points: 1) as I mentioned earlier, in her neurotic rush to say everything, hear everything, recount everything immediately, Castor, anxious to move onto the next point on the agenda, didn’t listen or misunderstood what was said to her. I caught her out in mishearings and misrepresentations like this a thousand times. I had said: ‘Fanon’s wife is being held captive by a jealous Arab’; this becomes: ‘Poor Lanzmann… was held captive by the Fanon woman’. 2) Is ‘poor’, referring to me, part of effective or ineffective language? I am not saying one way or the other, I am simply observing that the letter was written in 1960, that we had just broken up and that anything that could be held against me might have been considered positive. I tend to think that in this case ‘poor’ was intended as compassionate. Twenty-three years later, in 1983, she would dedicate to me the two large volumes of Sartre’s letters to her: ‘To Claude Lanzmann with all my love. Simone de Beauvoir.’ 3) The casual ‘Fanon woman’ and the confusion of roles in the captivity are much more serious. I was caught in a difficult dilemma: I knew how fragile Josie was, I knew that she read Les Temps modernes, read everything by and about Sartre and de Beauvoir. Should I stay silent, hope that she might not notice this minor reference or, on the contrary, alert her and by my words neutralize the pain an absurd letter written thirty years earlier might cause her? Aware that either course of action was a serious responsibility, I weighed the two. For too long. Some weeks later a friend, a member of the editorial committee, who had just come back from Algeria, asked me, using almost exactly the words Josie herself had used in her letter to me after her long silence: ‘Did you know Josie Fanon just committed suicide?’

  Chapter 16

  The early 1960s were a critical time for me in both my personal and my professional life. Though I was working hard at Les Temps modernes, I had become something of a star journalist in the Lazareff group, the most important press group in France at the time. After my article on the Dalai Lama, Hélène Lazareff had asked me to write a monthly column for Elle, a background piece on world events, or on books, writers or actors. I was given complete freedom, I decided which articles I signed my name to and which I wrote under the pseudonym – chosen on a whim one night while putting an article to bed – in a brutal surge of Christianization: ‘Jean-Jacques Delacroix’, Jean-Jacques almost certainly after Servan-Schreiber, and Delacroix after St John of the Cross, or perhaps after the painter Eugène. But whether I was Delacroix or Lanzmann, I worked with the same meticulousness, the same conscience: I am not ashamed of any of the pieces I published under the name J-JD; in most cases, I could have swapped the names round, although some articles – typically psychosociological reports about love and sex, such as the Kinsey Report – could only have been written by Delacroix, in spite of the effort they cost me and my alter-ego. On the other hand, more than once, articles commissioned by Elle and considered a little too hard-core for the average female reader were published by France Observateur where, after I agreed to some cuts, they were given the entire back page. I’m thinking of, for example, the speech Malraux made at the Acropolis: in spite of my genuine admiration for him, I wrote a rather vicious article mocking the preposterous idea behind this son et lumière at the Parthenon, with the impatiently oracular voice of an orator seeming to unite Général de Gaulle and Piero della Francesca. It was Hélène Lazareff herself who took me to Athens in the first Caravelle that Air France put into service. I was surprised, when we arrived, to be greeted by pretty and comely young maidens, all from the upper echelons of the French aristocracy, who dragged me of
f forthwith to meet ‘the prince’, whose title was whispered with a deference worthy of the ancien régime. And prince indeed he was – it was Jean de Broglie, a rotund corpulence, clearly a political schemer, this son et lumière being but the tip of an extremely shady iceberg. Some years later, the prince was assassinated in the middle of Paris in broad daylight, which caused a terrible scandal. ‘Plus jamais Agadir’, which also appeared on the back page of France Observateur, was another example of my adherence to my one rule. At three o’clock on the night of 29 February 1960 the phone rang and the anguished voice of Hélène Lazareff woke me with a start: ‘Claude, there’s been a terrible earthquake in Agadir, they’re saying there may be tens of thousands dead, you have to get on the first plane.’ I left for Casablanca that morning – it was my first visit to Morocco – hired a car and, by following the Atlantic coast, managed to cover the 600 kilometres of unfamiliar roads to Agadir at breakneck speed. The ground was still shaking with after-shocks from the quake when I arrived. It was truly terrifying, the whole city had crumbled and dozens of the surrounding villages been reduced to rubble, which had already begun to stink in the heat of the day. I joined a patrol of French marines from the escort ship La Baise who, with grapnels and makeshift tools, were trying to free those buried from the vice-like grip of the stone. The crown prince, Hassan II, had set up a huge royal tent in the middle of a field far from the buildings and was leading a number of Moroccan army units with forceful authority, while the French colonials bewailed their fate, conflating two disasters, political and natural: the sultan’s return from his exile in Madagascar, heralding as it did the end of the good years of the French protectorate, and the earthquake. ‘Plus jamais Agadir!’ – ‘Never again Agadir’ – they raged, muttered and shouted defiantly around the prince’s tent. I spent three days there, then, heading north, I stopped on the coast some thirty kilometres outside the ruined city, stripping off, unable to bear the stench of my clothes and my body any longer, running into the sea where I tried in vain to purify myself. I was almost naked as I drove back to Casablanca where I might find a hotel room, a bath, soap, shampoo and clothes to buy. When I got back to Paris, I wrote ‘Plus jamais Agadir’ for Elle, only for it to be published by France Observateur, to the great regret of Hélène: she had given in to the pusillanimity of the editor who stupidly felt the article was too political.