‘I know what I’m talking about. Oh yes, I know very well. Philo —’ Philomène is his wife, to whom he’d introduced me a few days earlier, along with his three-year-old daughter, Émi — ‘she works on the check-out at the Ecomarché in Polygone, which is an even worse neighbourhood than Fontbarlettes. All the Moors in Polygone know Philo, because they look her right in the eye when they walk past the counter, right in front of her, showing her the products they’re stealing. The guys walk past loaded down with stuff and smiling at her, and what’s she supposed to do? She’s small, she’s a woman, and her boss isn’t going to defend her. She’s scared that if she objects, they’ll get her when she leaves work. The Moors steal from her every day, and the most awful part is that several times a year they hold the store up at gunpoint. She explains these things to me, and then I — well, what am I meant to do? — I say I want to kill them all, and I start shouting, and she gets scared, she says not to talk like that. But what do you expect? What am I supposed to do?
The problem is, last year there was a firefight among the Moors, and Philo saw one of them covered in blood, right there at her feet. The guy died, and now she’s a bit traumatised — apart from the constant fighting with butchers’ knives, even among the store’s own employees. And the bosses, because they’re scared of the Moors, they aren’t going to do a thing to remedy the situation. And the whole thing then has this chain reaction, you know? Because then other customers come along, and they see this rabble taking off without paying, and they say that either everyone pays or no one, and then they want to leave without paying, too. And so the store isn’t profitable, and the real bosses, the ones who don’t even come to the neighbourhood, they’ve given them three months to get back into profit, and if they don’t, they’ll close them down. Everybody kicked out onto the street. Unemployed. Philo’s really depressed.’
Andrés had been talking while he very quickly ate his soup, which he had nearly finished. Dolores went on sipping hers slowly, never looking up. She was sitting on the opposite side of the table, closer to me than her son was, and she may not have been able to follow the conversation in detail. She needed things repeated for her from time to time; her hearing was betraying her.
‘Which way are you voting?’ I asked Andrés.
‘I’m not. My vote doesn’t make any difference. I don’t believe any of those liars. But if I were voting, I’d vote for Le Pen. I’m sure Jordi would have voted for him, too. He used to sometimes talk about his ideas with Monsieur Herbouze, whom he knew when he was very young, when he was at Les Loups du Dauphiné. I’m still in touch with him. He’s studied what’s going on, and he has some solutions.’
In a previous conversation, Claire had assured me that Jordi was an ultra-traditionalist. That he supported national unity. Hunting. That he sympathised with the movements of the far right. That he would certainly have voted for Le Pen.
‘Who’s Herbouze?’
‘Monsieur Herbouze is a very good philosophy teacher who got cancer and has spent some years in a wheelchair — he can’t walk. He lives in Bollène, near Avignon. But he hasn’t stopped thinking: he says things that are completely right, and he also thinks that Le Pen is one of the least bad options.’
Philo’s story was alarming. Andrés had good reasons for building up hatred, and it was easy, almost logical, to be focusing it in that direction. I remembered that in his case powerlessness had taken on a fearsome dimension, when, after having spent years cultivating a love for airplanes, after Jordi had taught him to draw airplanes and having bought model airplanes in the Valence supermarket that Jordi had assembled for him, after using his savings, in 1990, to cover the costs of a dismantled light aircraft and asking his firm two years later to advance him the payouts for his share in the company’s profits in order finally to acquire a light aircraft that was able to fly, he’d discovered that he would never be allowed to handle it himself because of his damned left eye.
‘I’m almost blind in it, and they banned me from flying,’ Andrés had told me himself. ‘It broke me. I can’t fly, except as a co-pilot. But one time I was allowed to handle the controls up in the sky, and it was … being free up there … far from all the problems … I can’t explain it.’
I said I understood that his feelings made sense, but I didn’t think Le Pen was a solution.
‘I don’t think it’s just a race problem. I think it has more to do with money, wealth, and poverty, and that’s what needs to be rearranged,’ I said.
‘I once flew in a plane to New York next to an African American man,’ I said. ‘He asked me who I was going to vote for in the forthcoming elections, and I replied that I wasn’t going to, that I didn’t trust politicians. He got annoyed. He said that the blacks in his country had fought a long time, and thousands had died, to get that right. I’ve voted in every election since. And don’t forget your father fought in the Spanish war against someone who defended ideas like Le Pen’s.’
We argued. Andrés said that his father was defending something different, that today he would definitely have understood his position. He criticised sanctimonious do-gooders, with their hypocrisy, and their detachment from reality. Again and again, he kept using words like ‘lies’, ‘furious’, ‘shit’, ‘deception’, and ‘rage’.
‘Andrés, please, don’t shout. Don’t shout,’ said Dolores.
The request pacified him, like an instant balm. He lowered his voice, rubbing his hair. He tried to move away from the subject, and it was only as he was driving me back to my hotel that he alluded cautiously to what had just happened: ‘I like talking about those things. I need to. I had a lot of conversations like that with Jordi. It’s good for me.’
He drove through the cold, well-lit streets of Valence. The shared cabin encouraged confidences.
‘And if it turns out that Jordi was homosexual?’ I asked.
‘In this family we don’t like homosexuals. It’s something we don’t talk about much. If there turned out to be a case of homosexuality in the family, that would be an issue for us. But we would never deny that he was.’
The following morning, as though I were living in a predictable screenplay, I found an unaddressed envelope in one of Jordi’s files. Inside, under the heading ‘To be disseminated among our people’ written in pencil, were ten sheets of paper, unsigned and without any kind of logos, summarising a neo-Nazi ideology with advice for imparting the doctrine as discreetly as possible, avoiding the classic terms that would doubtless immediately alarm the media and the police. It was a whole lesson in euphemistic fascism that began by advocating for ‘the interaction of the Race and the Spirit’ and went on with pronouncements like this:
We identify certain ideal types in the heart of the European ethnic group. […] There is a large mass of people, which is neither good nor bad per se, until it has permanently acquired the values of our enemies. […] We hold with the White Europeans as the aristocracy of European ethnicity and not mixed in it. […] We start from the principle that the White Europeans have opposed the rebels in a ‘cultural war.’ It is then a global war that cannot be stopped but by the disappearance of one of the adversaries. […] Procreating a numerous family is the most revolutionary of acts. […] If we don’t take concretely, physically, materially what is in our interest, nobody will do it and we will disappear, even before the rest of the white race. […] We mustn’t condemn our people to poverty or to being downgraded in society just because they (the politicians) haven’t done their duty to their people.
It was from Andrés.
When I finished reading, I went to the kitchen, where Dolores was tidying cupboards.
‘I want to say something about Andrés.’
‘Ah, my son! I get so anxious when I see him like that. He got so worked up last night. Lately he’s taken to shouting too much, you know?’
‘I think Herbouze has something to do with it.’
‘The teache
r in Bollène? He calls him sometimes.’
‘Tell him to ignore him.’ I was shaking. ‘I know it’s none of my business, but tell him. Herbouze is a bad influence. I’ve found some letters that really don’t do Andrés any favours. Let’s see if you can persuade him to drop his correspondence with that man.’
‘Ay, ay, Andrés. That man does seem strange to me. Whenever Andrés talks to him, he’s nervous all day. Ay, ay, ay.’
XXXIX
AT the end of winter 1999, Philippe Bonhoure had travelled to the Chitral valley by jeep. As head of the A.M.I. mission in Afghanistan, he wanted to meet the man who had been recruited to lead the N.G.O.’s convoy. Bonhoure had heard of Jordi at the time when he was running the Alliance Française in Peshawar, and there were rumours he had problems with the I.S.I., which they said was why he sometimes spoke Catalan on the phone.
The two men’s vehicles passed each other on the highway. ‘Bonhoure?’ Jordi wondered. He knew the big boss was due to visit the camps, and he’d seen him in photographs and at the occasional meeting. It had to be him. He stepped on the brake, turned around at the first bend he could, and started honking his horn. The car he was chasing slowed to a stop. Jordi put his head out the window and shouted: ‘Are you Philippe Bonhoure?’
‘Yes. And I’m guessing you’re Jordi.’
Jordi smiled and pointed towards himself with his thumb.
‘Let’s talk further up ahead,’ said the barmanu-hunter. ‘We’re blocking the pass here.’
He stepped on the gas until he came to a sharp bend in the road where both vehicles were able to park.
He had a lot of things he wanted to tell Bonhoure, but he didn’t know if the man was going to give him much time. He’d have to make the most of every moment, and so, as the A.M.I. man was getting out of the jeep, Jordi started talking, a lot, and quickly. He said that he’d been expecting him, he reeled off his achievements and his plans, he listed the obstacles, if he stopped to think he surely would have lost his thread, whenever he expressed himself by developing his phrases bit by bit he always seemed hesitant and ended up saying some piece of nonsense, so the best thing would be to talk, talk, talk, everything flowed better, the ideas connected up automatically if he expressed them without thinking.
Bonhoure agreed with what he had more or less been told: Jordi knew the area well and the main political actors in the Northern Alliance, who were defending the valley against Taliban attacks. Though he had good contacts on the Taliban side, too.
All the same, there were a lot of strange things said about this guy, and the enterprise for which they had engaged him was on an ambitious scale. Despite the good first impression, the aid worker had encountered too many fiascos to get his hopes up. He would have to wait for results.
Now, months later, Bonhoure was contemplating Jordi’s work in Panjshir, which confirmed that hiring him had been the right thing to do. He had set up two bases from which the A.M.I. was able to support a majority of the dispensaries in the valley and the Salang region. And the bases worked very well, thanks to the personnel taken on by Ainullah.
Jordi alternated his time between running the bases and brief exploratory forays that brought him a necessary calm, assuaging his hunger for the wilds of nature. As he had calculated, in this life based on humanitarian aid, the reading and excursions provided a balance that also brought some comfort to his morale. All the same, people continued to whisper about his extravagances.
‘So that’s the crazy yeti guy,’ said one European, who had been sent with a group of observers, to Gyuri. Jordi’s jeep had appeared in the distance.
‘They say he’s really old-school,’ added another, ‘the kind that still gets into fights.’
‘He’s got quite some reputation.’
‘I don’t know, he seems absolutely fine to me. And stable, too,’ replied Gyuri. The cloud of dust being raised by the jeep was getting closer. ‘Maybe he’s had some problems in the past, but only a really stable person could live the kind of life he has with the Kalash … and right here, in Panjshir. The problems that the mujahedeen and Talibs sometimes cause us are no joke, and Jordi has been demonstrating a resistance and character that are more than well balanced. I doubt any of us would have the guts … and the strength. He’s never minded walking across the Hindu Kush for weeks on end. You’ve got to be very robust to undertake that kind of excursion. Give me three days of trekking across Panjshir, and I’m a mental and physical wreck.’
The jeep came to a stop a few metres away.
‘Look what I’ve found! Look! Now this is a real treasure!’ shouted Jordi, leaning over to pick something up off the passenger seat.
‘Where is he coming from?’ asked the observer. Jordi was too far away to hear them.
‘From Nangarhar province.’
‘Why there? What business has he got there?’
Gyuri shrugged. Jordi leaped out of the car with a little bag in his hand, as though it were the head of an enemy. Right in front of them, he slipped the knot of the bag open and revealed the trophy.
‘A frog,’ said Gyuri.
‘It’s a new species. Unknown! Incredible, isn’t it?’
He spent the day in a state of delight. Nature was repaying his efforts, rewarding him with animals never seen before. The frog was an indication that he had reached places that were sufficiently remote. Sufficiently unique. This discovery, added to the certainty that he was doing what he needed to be doing, gave him an uncommon security that translated into a kind of clairvoyance. He could see the world. And he understood it.
That evening, in the camps, watching the flow of the dispossessed, he thought back to life in the big cities, and he was assailed by an avalanche of reflections that he soon felt the need to express. He waited impatiently for the time when he could retire to his little table to write:
One notices that because of population settlement and the consequent accumulation of possessions, the growth in population numbers leads rather to a gregariousness than to a development of society. What is society?
Thousands of people continued to come to the bases to stock up on food and medicines, and to be vaccinated. Ragged hordes of miserable wretches stood around in long queues pleading to be dealt with, detonating thoughts in Jordi’s head, and he didn’t stop writing:
Today we think that tomorrow will bring progress and that it will be more modern, more evolved than what was good enough already. Serious mistake. Life expresses itself in very different directions. Evolution can happen, but so can counter-evolution.
Analysing the factors that had dragged the region down to disaster, he wrote:
If monotheism and politics are so closely related, it’s because monotheism is not in fact a religion but rather a political ideology that has been deified.
It was a period of intellectual apogee, perfectly combining the spiritual life with the physical, feeling useful, worthwhile, and capable.
News arrived from Chitral via a lapis lazuli caravanserai: Shamsur was going to marry. One of his brothers had died and left a widow, whom the boy was obliged to take as wife.
‘They’re saying in the valleys,’ said the caravanserai, ‘that Shamsur didn’t want to, he resisted, and that his brother Khalil gave him a hiding that dispelled his doubts.’
It was a blow for Jordi. He had never anticipated that Shamsur might be taken back in this way. He didn’t want to imagine how this marriage would affect his relationship with his protégé. Nobody would take the boy away from him. Wasn’t this wedding just a trick by the family to separate them once and for all? His sympathies for the Kalash were not welcome. Weren’t they trying to detach the boy from the foreigner? Well, then. And what does Shamsur’s marital status matter? I’ll rescue him. He wants to get out of here, he’s told me so a thousand times. I’ll take him with me to Paris.
Another piece of news: Marie Odile, his dear all-terrain pr
incess, had been having problems with Attiq, an Afghan who worked with the A.M.I. Marie Odile had been appointed co-ordinator of the N.G.O.’s Peshawar office, and the idea of taking orders from a woman hadn’t gone down well with the Afghans. Although Gyuri Fritsche insisted that they should appreciate that Marie Odile was working there out of pure solidarity, the new boss had problems with several of her employees. Some of them began to display signs of violence.
Attiq was one of those vehement Afghans. A fan of all things western, he drank whisky and could often be seen sporting his T-shirt of the movie Titanic, but he couldn’t tolerate a woman deciding how he should work. His relationship with Marie Odile became increasingly toxic, and one morning, when the Frenchwoman was parking her car close to the office, Attiq appeared there on the pavement. He started to bang on the car with a bat. Marie Odile managed to get out and get to safety. First she called some acquaintances to come and protect her. Then she got in touch with Jordi.
‘I’ll deal with it as soon as I can,’ he replied.
A fortnight passed before Jordi set off for Peshawar. He kept his foot down on the jeep’s accelerator. In those two weeks, he had asked himself just how far those Afghans’ atrocities could go. By this time, the country was reviving its old directives for the propagation of virtue and the extinction of vice, proclaimed in 1975. Jordi had reread them — as though he did not already have enough fuel for his rage — and he couldn’t get them out of his head as he took curve after curve. He couldn’t do it.
XL
ON 26 September 1975, the Islamic government of Afghanistan disseminated its directives for the propagation of virtue and the extinction of vice in a communiqué that bore the number 6,240. One of the decrees relating to women prevented them from ‘leaving the house wearing provocative clothing. If they do, they will be punished by one of the men in their family. And drivers are not permitted to take them in their vehicles.’
In the Land of Giants Page 23