In the Land of Giants

by Gabi Martinez

  Hours earlier, Marie-Louise had seen three lambs rooting around by the rubbish bags, and wondered whether one day the government was going to move to a more professional way of cleaning up street waste. She got onto the bus that connected the Madera offices with University Town. It was full, as always. She moved towards the front area reserved for women, which was overheated by the radiation of the engine. It took the usual twenty minutes to reach the neighbourhood, she walked a few metres to the house, and came in to find magazines and newspapers everywhere. Some of the pages had been cut out. Someone had eliminated the photos that showed women.

  She called for the servant.

  ‘Yes, it was me,’ said the Afghan, who was about twenty. ‘These images are not permitted.’

  The arrogance of the young servant made her feel all the more aware that she was still a-wo-man-in-Pa-ki-stan. Best not to argue. She would await reinforcements.

  When Jordi arrived, the publications had been minimally put in order, but Marie-Louise told him what had happened. Jordi leafed through a number of magazines and newspapers, overcome by an indignation that made his fingers tense into talons. The servant wasn’t in the living room. Instead of calling him, Jordi went straight to his bedroom, walking in without announcing himself. He found him stretched out on his back on the bed looking at the photos, which he had hung on the wall.

  Jordi exploded.

  ‘Where do you think you are? This is my house, arsehole! Idiot! You work for me, and you obey my laws here. My laws!’

  He began to push him, to hit him. Marie-Louise ran to the room when she heard cries. She thought he wanted to kill him. She would have wanted to intervene, but Jordi’s rage frightened her. The boy had no chance against the unstoppable pummelling from a frame that was infinitely more powerful than his own, although the blows he received, albeit strong, were careful.

  ‘Get out of here! I don’t want to see you again! You’re fired!’

  Then he sat in the hall with Marie-Louise. Each listened to the other’s breathing. Jordi took off his tie, but kept his jacket on.

  ‘Be careful with the Afghans — they’ll get back at you,’ said Marie-Louise. ‘You know that if you do something to them, two weeks later your car will disappear, or some other misfortune will happen. Be careful, Jordi. Be careful. It may seem like you’re in your own home here, but you’re not.’

  Marie-Louise spoke slowly, watching him closely. How many times had she said exactly the same to him before? But he paid no heed. Why didn’t he listen? He was a very hard guy. One of the real hard ones.

  Jordi picked up the latest issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, shut himself up in his bedroom, put the airplanes he had bought for Andrés on the little side table, threw the jacket onto a chair, and flopped onto the bed. The situation was starting to look like harassment. They mean to intimidate me. His tendency to paranoia meant he could sometimes run away with situations — sometimes making mistakes, sometimes just entirely mistaken — but he almost always had the advantage of being the first to arrive at a certain point, so when the future came along, Jordi had given it some kind of thought already and he had a response to offer. In any case, this threatened to complicate things.

  Jordi had just been confirmed as the Alliance’s director in Peshawar, but the Moroccan continued to slander him, and Lévêque was not going to hold her back.

  ‘You just try and do things as well as you can, and forget about the rumours,’ the official had told him. ‘There are a lot of people watching you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on, don’t play dumb,’ replied Lévêque, walking out without saying another word.

  Toying with the copy of the newspaper he’d thrown onto the bed beside him, Jordi could see that Lévêque was talking a lot of sense. A new director would be foolish not to realise that his position put him directly in the sights of the I.S.I., Pakistan’s secret services, who considered the Alliance to be an operation that reached far beyond mere culture. Had he not heard enough spy stories? Among those that had the greatest impact on him had been the one about that Frenchman who worked at the French embassy and had a Pakistani servant. One day, returning from the embassy, the Frenchman found his house stripped of its contents and the servant murdered in the bathroom. The man was sure it was the secret services — he kept saying that when they tried to get information from the servant about his boss, about himself, the I.S.I. guys lost it and they killed him.

  And stories of this kind were a frequent occurrence. It was common for governments in the region to launch accusations of spying against foreigners whose presence was proving inconvenient. It was the ideal excuse for their immediate expulsion.

  The cover of Le Monde Diplomatique that Jordi was holding on to while still stretched out on the bed was heralding a report on the increase in the bearded men in Pakistan. And the worst of it was that these radicals were imposing rules that diminished even further some freedoms that were already limited. How little this Islam had to do with the idea he had been enjoying in the forests with the Chitrali princes, with his friend Khalil … It was instinctive, a lightning-flash of clarity, for his thoughts to go to the Kalash, to think about the similarities between the suffocation those people were experiencing and his own. Jordi was beginning to feel fenced in, and he couldn’t find a way to evade the pressures. All he wanted was to be left in peace! But how to get it? What should he do? Where should he go? Should he leave, disappear? A sudden series of associations carried him back to 1987, and when he recalled that room bursting with drugged-up kids with the television up to maximum volume, the wretchedness of the valleys, and the impossibility of getting out of there, he had an inkling of how far impotence could lead.

  On 24 March, he wrote a letter to his mother and to Andrés summarising the situation:

  A few months ago a new Afghan force was born, the Taliban. They’ve conquered a good part of Afghanistan. Nobody knows who is commanding these Taliban, ‘students of religion’. They’re men of religion, and also fundamentalists. They get their orders from Pakistan, and their weapons, their money comes from the United States. Afghanistan has been transformed into the main producer of heroin, and there are many guns besides, including strategic ones like the stinger. It’s also a centre of Muslim terrorists. […]

  To begin with, the Afghans looked favourably at the Taliban, but they have reconsidered their support having seen their excesses, and this is becoming a war between the Tajiks (who favour the rebel Massoud) and Pashtuns (pro-Taliban). […]

  Once again the Yanks are using religious Islamists to bring the civil war in Afghanistan to an end […]

  Work at the Alliance leaves no time for anything else […] I’m fed up with Peshawar, the Pathans are unpleasant brutes and Muslim fanatics. Besides, this city is overpopulated, more than Paris. It’s like we’re in a prison because Peshawar is surrounded by tribal areas where we’re not allowed to travel. To tell the truth, I miss the mountains, the purity and kindness of the people of the north.

  In the same letter, Jordi expressed his wish to find an alternative to the Alliance before the summer. ‘If I don’t manage anything, I’ll have to come back to France.’

  The heat soon arrived. Jordi’s consumption of Coca-Colas multiplied. He was also a frequenter of the office’s water cooler, and it was there, holding a cup recently rinsed with potassium permanganate, that he went back to thinking about the lack of hygiene, of protection, of means, experienced by the Kalash. Minutes later, he had gathered three colleagues in his office.

  ‘We’re going to devote an exhibition to them,’ he announced. ‘Very little is known about these people, but they’re the history of Pakistan, and they need to be reclaimed. I’ll take charge of the programme.’

  Among the activities planned for May–June, he included a lecture on the wild men and a Bashgali dance show with natives of Bumburet.

  He promoted them with all t
he vigour and the care of which he was capable, describing what he was planning to do to anyone who wanted to listen, and Marie-Louise was a perfect audience.

  ‘… and so I’ll help them to transport some crates from the mountains, because I also want to put on an exhibition. I think that with objects and images, people will get a better understanding of the Kalash,’ Jordi told her, while Marie-Louise thought he was the best Alliance director she had ever met. The employees thought highly of him, nobody worked harder than he did, and there was one big difference: it was clear that he wasn’t there just to get himself a few rungs further up the ladder.

  ‘Don’t forget you also have to prepare the party for the Alliance’s twenty-fifth anniversary.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jordi winked. ‘I’ve even thought about the cake.’

  Someone knocked twice on the office door, even as they were already opening it. Jordi looked up from his book on Nuristan.

  ‘Hello,’ said Maurice Lévêque, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Hello, Jordi,’ he said again.

  ‘What do you want?’

  He wasn’t going to be friendly. It was obvious that the bigwigs in the Alliance were consulting him far less since the rumours had started about his relationship with Shamsur, and even if they maintained their composure in his presence, they talked to the Moroccan more often than to him.

  ‘Why have you given this Pashtun secretary such an excessive pay rise?’ asked Lévêque, not beating around the bush.

  ‘There’s a lot to do, and I think he deserves it.’

  Lévêque closed his eyes as though he had fallen asleep. He was sure that by raising the Pashtun’s salary, Jordi was hoping to get himself not merely an assistant but also an ally.

  ‘Look, Jordi …’

  Why did Lévêque always have to address him by his name? It bothered him, this affectation, this way of feigning empathy.

  ‘You know that lately the cultural attaché has been talking about some changes, he wants the Alliance to change direction …’

  ‘… and I have no place in his plans.’

  ‘Well, the things they’ve been saying about you must have influenced matters somewhat, of course. In any case, it takes time …’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap, Maurice.’

  ‘Well, look, one thing is obvious: the Alliance isn’t your primary motivation, and we need people here who’re committed. And now more than ever, the way things are getting.’

  ‘So the attaché doesn’t want me to carry on.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And who will be the new director?’

  ‘I don’t know; it’s still to be decided.’

  ‘It’s going to be her, isn’t it?’ he said with a nod towards the door.

  ‘We’ll see. There are a number of possibilities — it’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘I understand. Anything else?’

  Maurice pursed his lips, sitting up.

  A few days later, the Moroccan teacher was named director of the Alliance.

  ‘She started out doing her training towards a thesis, and she has always shown herself to be very reserved and discreet in the way she expresses her criticism,’ said Lévêque to a group of guests at the event announcing her appointment.

  XVIII

  ‘HE left the Alliance because he was a free man. That place has spying going on there, too. When they asked him to collaborate, he replied he didn’t want any part of that,’ stated Esperanza Magraner at her mother’s apartment in Fontbarlettes. She was looking me in the eye, unblinking.

  ‘They asked him to spy?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘Who asked him?’

  ‘I don’t know — someone from the government, I guess. They told him he had to pass on information about what he saw, what the people he talked to were thinking, his views about each of them …’

  Erik L'Homme: It wouldn’t be so strange for the French government to have proposed that Jordi pass on information. It’s a complicated region, where the information he could have had access to was very valuable. He was a real expert in the area.

  Franck Charton (reporter): A spy? No. He was too much of an iconoclast, too independent, too attached to his own freedom to put himself under the orders of a secret service or any power.

  Cat Valicourt: The secret services never believed in the story of the barmanu. They saw the story as a cover for all kinds of trafficking, even though those kinds of things didn’t match Jordi’s personality. He compartmentalised his activities. He was mysterious, but not corrupt.

  Erik L'Homme: When I returned to Chitral in 1998, a friend who worked at the French embassy asked me and Jordi to listen out in case we heard anyone talk about Osama Bin Laden. Nineteen ninety-eight. When Bin Laden was not yet Bin Laden. It’s quite possible other people considered Jordi a spy. In fact, it’s one of the possible motives going around to explain his murder, though I don’t see him in that role myself. He would never have accepted. He didn’t love France enough to spy for her.

  XIX

  AT the start of spring 2009, I took a small room in the Les Négociants hotel in Valence, right by the central railway station. Every day, around ten in the morning, I would board the number two bus, get off at the Mozart stop in Fontbarlettes, and, after a short walk, ring the Magraners’ bell three or four times, because Dolores is a little hard of hearing. We’d exchange kisses, she would offer me something to drink, I would ask for water almost every time, and I would move in to Jordi’s room, where the iron suitcases awaited me. I would go through the files until late in the evening.

  On occasional days in the week, I would stay for dinner — not often, as I was trying not to tire Dolores too much, pained as she already was by my questions and the pieces of paper we had been going over. One day, Dolores opened the Lindt chocolate box in which she kept the letters Jordi had sent her from Pakistan. She read paragraphs at random. She was visibly affected but did not cry, nor did it seem likely that she would.

  ‘Since my son’s death, I haven’t been able to cry,’ she said.

  She took hold of several of the letters, looking emptily at what was left of the petit-suisse we had been mutilating over the course of I don’t know how many afternoons, neither of us eating much, at tea-time.

  Esperanza had suggested I put aside a Saturday to eat with her and her daughters. They would come from Lyon to the house of her mother, their grandmother, expressly to tell stories about Jordi. She showed up with the two of them, Isabelle and Marie, the latter’s husband, and with her granddaughter Lucie.

  Esperanza cooked quenelles — some days earlier, I’d mentioned that I still hadn’t tried this dish that was typical of Valence. She served them with affection, and uncorked a bottle of French wine. On the dining-room wall, beside the photo of Andrés posing on the wing of the Yak-11 and the shrine to Jordi on a horse, there was a striking framed image of a submarine surfacing in open sea. Ángel Federico Magraner Ibáñez, Jordi’s father, had been a submarine lieutenant during the Spanish Civil War. He fought on the Republican side.

  When the war shifted in favour of the pro-Franco side, Ángel Federico and another 2,637 fugitives boarded the overcrowded English merchant ship Stanbrook in Alicante. Its passengers describe the boat being full up to the mainmast. There were people everywhere; in the hold, on the bridge, and on the roof of the galley and the engine-room; the plimsoll line was submerged. As the anchor began to be raised, the people continued to arrive in their thousands, desperate people who didn’t stop shouting or crying.

  It was an odyssey. The ship was listing from the excess weight, they were all crammed in, they barely had food, and there was a constant fear looming of being sunk by German submarines or by the planes that were flying overhead.

  The captain sought asylum in Oran. It was denied. With no destination to aim for, the Stanbrook dropped anc
hor outside the Algerian port. When a typhus epidemic was declared on the ship, the Maghreb officials allowed them to bring the sick onto land, and later the rest of the passengers, who were sent to concentration camps by a government controlled by Germany-allied France.

  Jordi’s father was part of the shipment of condemned men building the railway line that would connect the north of Algeria to the boundaries of the Sahara, and he worked there for two years. He boiled his own clothes to kill the lice. At night, he heard the howling of the hyenas in the desert. His skill at fixing an electricity generator that had resisted the Algerian technicians allowed him to enjoy a different set of rules. Then he was sent to the labour camps of Buarfa and Colomb Béchar, on the border between Morocco and Algeria, until the end of the war.

  In Rabat, he made his living working as a mechanic on luxury cars, and it was there that a friend at the Spanish Centre introduced him to his cousin Dolores. Although the girl lived in Casablanca, she was spending a while in the city taking care of her aunt María, who was convalescing from an illness.

  ‘I’m Spanish, but I was born here,’ said Dolores the first time she met her future husband.

  ‘What do you mean, here?’

  ‘In Morocco, in Tangiers.’

  ‘You wouldn’t guess.’

  ‘Of course not, because a person’s from wherever she’s from, and I’m Spanish.’ Dolores pulled out the passport she was carrying in little purse.

  ‘Dolores Gómez Cuadrado. Tangiers,’ Ángel Federico read aloud. ‘I suppose you changed it when things got complicated.’

  Dolores gave a grunt of assent.

  ‘And what about Casablanca? How did you come to live there?’

  Dolores liked the boy’s facility with talking — he seemed very relaxed, very polite — and so she had no difficulty in explaining that several women in her family were tailors, working in a clothing store.