by Steve Weiner
We studied Canadian history, arithmetic, spelling and woodworking. There were lectures on the Canadian way of life. It was like the larva and the butterfly, they said. One day we would fly to distant mulberry bushes.
One night the British lads gathered at the windows staring out and whispered.
‘There it goes – ’
I turned.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Going – ’
I rose to my feet, blinking.
‘What’s going?’
‘Going – ’
‘What?’
‘Gone-’
‘What?’
‘THE FRENCH EMPIRE!’
I dreamed. I walked to a house by a railroad track. It was midnight. I was looking for Roger, but he wasn’t home. I went in and it suddenly rained inside. The light inside the house was extraordinary, like thousands of candles. Suddenly two Antoinette Hartmanns, both in navy blue dresses with crimson pockets, came down the stairs. I couldn’t figure out which was the real one.
I woke. The odour of mud, horse blankets and sweat disgusted me. James Raley, a British boy, had caught puritus and was sleepless. I salved him and he took quinine but in his sheets he shuddered. He took me into his bunk.
‘What did you do?’ he asked.
‘I burned down my school.’
‘Why?’
‘In memory of a friend.’
The dormitory guard came up the hall, casting shadows from moonlight.
‘You better go,’ James Raley said.
I received a letter from Etienne Bastide. I read it by the dustbins.
Jean –
Trouble follows us like dogs. Emilia Street exploded. Methane stinks all over town. Prisoners work but they say the town is in trouble.
A terrible thing has happened. Maurice Richard was pulled out of the line-up. Impossible? Nothing is impossible in hockey. Not in the present political climate. So. No scoring record for The Rocket. The French went wild. Riots dismantled half of Montreal. British have been hammered stupid. Here in St Croix your father beat up Albert Wilkins, the television repairman. But his (your father’s) troubles do not end: James Barrault, the Jamaican, is dead. The court ordered him (your father) to stay in St Croix.
Antoinette grows prettier every day. She is dating a college boy from Rutherford.
Why don’t you write? Aren’t old friends, first friends, the best friends? I think so.
Je t’attend
Etienne
I got sick and spent the afternoons on the latrine. The guard Mr Harold read to me.
‘You must bring my armoir into the bedroom,’ Lady Hartnell said. ‘I cannot lift it myself
‘I should be glad to,’ William Buck replied. ‘But it has been devilish hot today and I have carried your armoire all the way from the quay. May I avail myself of clear water?’
‘Certainly, there is wine on the desk,’ Lady Hartnell said. ‘You may also wash yourself with rosewater.’
William Buck did so. When he was refreshed he came back into the boudoir. He found that Lady Hartnell had loosened her laces. ‘How now,’ he said. ‘Is it so warm for you as well?’
‘I die of being overheated,’ she said.
He approached her more closely, eyeing the swelling globes rising and falling like tides under the satin. ‘One can die of being overheated,’ he said. ‘But you will not, I ween.’
‘You yourself must prove it so,’ she said.
He came still closer. He detected French perfume like the wines of Armagnac exuding off her white and heaving bosom, until his own trembled with desire. ‘What does Madam wish of me?’ he asked.
‘I should test your workman’s skills,’ Lady Hartnell replied, ‘and of what timber you are.’
‘You will find me composed of the straightest and the stiffest, my lady.’
She lay back on the triple pillows and from the vantage of the canopied bed detected the tautness of his breeches which foresaw to her a pleasure of great power. She saw by his reddened face that she had well and truly embarked him on that journey from which no man returns unaided.
‘I desire you therefore to work, and let your tools probe, and your aim be true,’ Lady Hartnell commanded.
‘I warn you, Lady Hartnell,’ he said. ‘That which will cure your present affliction will cause others. For my tool as you shall presently see is of no ordinary dimensions. Indeed, there are ladies, even of high degree, from Highgate to Kentish Town, who have been sorely caught short.’
‘Let me see.’
William Buck the seaman and lost carpenter of the Atlantic unfastened his breeches. When he did so she bolted upright, crossed herself and exclaimed, ‘Father of God, I would be ruined.’
William Buck came closer and in an excess of delirium stroked her ringleted hair, curled by the coiffeurs of Bournemouth, smelled its talcum perfume, made in Bristol, and toyed with her double gold earrings, handcrafted in Izmir.
‘We must therefore find other means to abate our pressures,’ he said, ‘or we shall die.’
‘What is it you would have me do?’ replied the querulous aristocrat, her eyes fixed on the pulsating proof of his imminent intentions.
‘Woman has other chambers than that which have heretofore contained your most private gifts.’
‘Do I take it that you require of me to be used in the Turkish manner?’
‘No. The Egyptian.’
‘And should I not drown?’ Lady Hartnell recoiled with panic.
‘And that immediately, Lady Hartnell, for I am violent with desire.’
So saying he embraced her and exercised therein the explosive heat and wonderment which nature mates in man and woman. She too, primed to the very abyss of ecstasy by his skill and ardour, fainted in wave upon wave of gold light, soared, soared, like a wild hawk unleashed through golden meadows, to the far and uncharted shores of ecstasy.
‘What happened?’ Mr Harold asked.
‘He came in her mouth,’ I said.
‘Why didn’t it say so?’
‘It’s literature.’
We boxed.
Benches were drawn up around a grey tarpaulin on the gymnasium floor. Mr Harold put me in the ring with Danny Pacon, who was also French. We lost control and slipped into French box. Savate it was, foot-fighting, and kicks with the punches. I knocked his teeth in. He danced to his corner and shrieked. Mr Harold yanked out his mouthpiece in a drool of blood. I thought to myself, I am the king of beasts.
Colonel Canale, from the French Foreign Legion to recruit French boys, stayed to watch. Mr Fredericks, the governor, invited the Espanola Elks Club. High-school clubs came in to watch. I became intensely conscious of Colonel Canale.
Mr Fredericks put me in the ring with Brad Gillman. I bobbed and gave him kidney punches. He failed to get off his stool at the third round. Mr Fredericks put me in the ring with Harold Youngblood, a Menominee. My legs dragged like concrete. I couldn’t raise my arms. I slapped him and accidentally struck him in the eye. So I beat him, too.
I fainted in the shower and Mr Fredericks wrapped me in a white sheet. Mr Harold took me back to the dressing bench. My eye was swollen shut. I must have broken my thumb because when I came to it was in a splint. I couldn’t move. They could have done anything to me, anything at all. Suddenly Colonel Canale was looking down with a green glass eye.
‘You must have put your head directly under the cold water,’ he said. ‘There’s a hole in your skull. That’s where the nerves are. The cold water hit the nerves and you passed out.’
‘I never touched the water, sir. I was choking on mucus in the corner.’
Mr Warner, the infirmary technician, knelt at my bench. He looked into my eyes. He felt my pulse. He pressed my groin, felt my balls, gingerly bent and unbent my prick. He stretched both my legs, pressed for my liver in my red stomach.
‘Tu es de St Croix?’ Colonel Canale asked.
I couldn’t even nod.
‘A hard child,’ Mr Fredericks said.
‘Hmmmmmm. Interesting.’
They watched me looking up from my white sheets.
‘Look how his facial expression keeps changing,’ Mr Fredericks said.
‘Milk in his diet might help.’
They let me sleep right there. Midnight I got up to pee, couldn’t find the stalls, and pissed in the shower. I looked back at my wet sheet crumpled like a shroud. The dirty walls, the long corridor leading nowhere, into darkness, the pebble window in the door, made me so lonely I went back to the dormitory.
The British lads caught me and dragged me to the potato bin. They stuck a pillow case over my head and jammed a crucifix of crossed carrots in my fists.
‘Do you have anything to say,’ one asked, ‘concerning free Quebec?’
‘Fuck off, gits.’
‘Oh ho. So small and so full of shit.’
‘Eat the queen’s shit.’
They fit a rope around my neck. Brad Wilkins lost his temper, ripped off the pillow case and with bulging forearms mashed me into the wall.
‘You know, we tolerate you French, but our patience is growing short.’
Colonel Canale visited my room. He wore khaki and a red beret. His face was heavily lined and rugged. His glass eye was dead.
‘You would like to join the Legion?’ he asked.
‘It is all I ever wanted.’
‘You have strong legs,’ he said.
‘I am an ice skater.’
‘You limp?’ he asked.
‘Not so bad.’
He had a blue-green good eye that examined my bare leg. To be possessed by him would be like falling into the sun. He touched my foot, along the bottom of the tender sole.
‘How is it for you here?’ he asked.
‘Tender.’
‘And here?’
‘Ticklish.’
He laughed and held my knee.
‘I know it is difficult for you, Jean-Michel Verhaeren of St Croix.’
‘But you have seen so much.’
‘I have.’
‘Have you tortured?’
‘I have.’
‘When?’
‘As often as necessary.’
‘Is that often?’
‘In Madagascar it was not often. In Algeria it was required.’
‘And the Vietminh?’
Colonel Canale let go of my leg.
‘Exercise your leg,’ he said. ‘Or you will be stunted.’
Colonel Canale took me to the gymnasium. He showed me the stretching of the ankle tendons, the lengthening of the ligament. He left the gymnasium. It was around twilight. I sat on the sit-up bench and listened to Colonel Canale and Mr Fredericks discuss my dossier in the hall. Colonel Canale came back alone into the gymnasium. I stood, put his hand to my mouth, and kissed it.
‘You may torture me,’ I said.
He looked at me closely. He was troubled.
‘Perhaps you had the wrong notion, Jean-Michel.’
‘Had I?’
‘Everything is in torment,’ he told me. ‘In the Empire, everywhere.’
‘Is it?’
‘And yet you want to join the Legion?’ he asked.
‘With you.’
‘Well, it’s a problem with your stunted leg.’
‘Tell me. Tell me your adventures in the Legion.’
‘If you insist.’
Colonel Canale lit a cigar and sat on the folded brown gym mat. We were deep in darkness. Nobody turned the lights on. His face was illumined only by his cigar.
‘My first post was Madagascar in 1946,’ he said. ‘I was stationed among those who practised the cult of the dead. They built luxurious tomb-houses, part underground, with elaborate staircases and gates above ground. This was near Tananarive.
‘Riots began. Two policemen had their throats slit. French farmers armed themselves and the French Catholic missionaries barricaded themselves in their churches. We conducted patrols. Refugees from forced labour leaped at us with machetes.’
It was now night. Colonel Canale looked to see if I was listening.
‘Continuez, mon colonel.’
‘Corpses floated in swamps. We threw the rebels to the courts and executed hundreds.
‘Then, as I remember, I was sent to Algeria. The seasons had not been kind to that country. One saw mud huts, vacant fields, stones – that was all. We worked with the Vigilance Africaine, a vigilante group. At Philipville we dug graves open and found Europeans with their throats slit.’
Colonel Canale shivered.
‘Bombs were thrown into cinemas,’ he said. ‘I was sent to the Aures Mountains. We burned farms. We shot their cows. Yes, we used the manière forte. We stuck them with electrodes, crushed their testicles. And it made a roaring in the blood. Perhaps you are familiar with it?’
‘A little.’
‘We shot chaouia tribesmen. Bleus de chauffe- Muslims – we shot down three at the Palais d’Eté itself. I woke informants from the marchands de sommeil, those tenements where they sleep in shifts, and beat them until their blood ran, but nobody knew anything. Where were the rebels? Where was Europe? Did anyone care?
‘In the desert we heard the melhoun, in the cities, rai. To this day if I hear a darbouka I go mad.’
Colonel Canale fell silent. I watched the end of his cigar. He did not speak for a long time. He had gone far, far away.
‘I was sent to Indochine,’ he finally said.
‘Oui, mon colonel.’
‘Ah. What can you know of Indochine?’
‘Dienbienphu.’
‘But what does one know? Eh? What does one really know?’
‘What do you know, Colonel Canale?’
Colonel Canale’s voice became hard.
‘In Saigon, in French villas,’ he said, ‘Frenchwomen played cards, drank cognac and spoke beautiful French. Saigon suburbs were blown up, but did they care? A native girl might be raped but in the evening the Frenchwomen stepped over her and went to the glacier, to the parfumerie. Yellow sulphur lights came on, revealing corpses fallen from bicycles. Did they care? The Frenchwomen listened to chansons on French radio.
‘The war became one vast aphrodisiac. Frenchwomen lay on ornate beds, in fluttering shadows, the mosquito netting calm. Suddenly the depot goes up. Sitting in its fiery glow, turning with quivering lips, she wakes her lover, touches him, strokes him, to a new vigour, a new position. And there are so many positions.’
‘- You have seen so much, Colonel Canale – ’
‘I was sent to patrol the RC4 highway in the north. Before even Dienbienphu. From Caobang we could look into China. The Meos – born by the Great Holy Dog, the Xas – naked dwarfs who ate rotted earth, the Hunis – red-feathered long-haired horsemen – these were our allies. And Caodaists. Caodai was God, a man with ecstatic eyes and beautiful hands. Their emblem was a cogged wheel on a yellow flag. By night they rode on bicycles and speared the Vietminh.’
‘– No Catholics – ?’
‘Au contraire. Bishop Le Huu-tu’s cathedral became a fortress. He recruited virgins and tortured the Vietminh. It was Catholic terror, confession against auto-criticism.’
‘- Continuez – ’
‘We became obsessed with la belle mort. We had panache. We would defeat Communism by élan. We greased our bodies, slithered into the jungle, and committed atrocities. Executions brought laughter. We smoked opium. We ate nuoc mam- a sauce of rotted fish in little pots – and durians- lovely fruits that stank. The Vietminh circled Caobang. We guarded our roofs with machine-gun nests. But nothing stops the 308th Vietminh Division. No, one by one they brought heavy artillery. Yet we dined well, we Legionnaires. We had champagne, even caviar. I ruined many congai. Night after night, I shot hot French sperm into them.
‘Finally we blew up Caobang. We pulled down the tricolour and marched south to Luong Phai pass. But our fort at Dongkhe had been annihilated. Our colonel shot himself. We p
anicked and ran off the road into the jungle, into a green prison. Clouds of mosquitoes sucked blood from our faces.
‘Blindly crashing into Quangliet Valley we became caricatures. Moroccan Legionnaires were hacked to death. Suddenly we were a hysterical mob. I slid down lianas to the gorge. Legionnaires were blown apart with mortars jammed down their throats.
‘I found a wounded Vietminh, tied him to a rubber tree, pushed my bayonet between his teeth. I pushed and pushed, with all my weight, until his brains came through his nose. I have never come with a woman like that.
‘I got lost. I wandered deliriously. I said farewell to France, to the Empire. Bullets fell through the fronds. The vegetation smelled of wounds suppurating already. Suddenly in the phosphorous clouds I saw Napoleon’s caissons, I saw the brave Zouaves circling Paris, machine guns on the Somme. Asia could never kill us.
‘Twenty-three of us came back. Out of the whole garrison. I was insane, but my vision saved me.’
‘- You were so frightened – ’
‘Such fear cannot be described.’
‘- Even now it is difficult – ’
‘Yes. Especially after Dienbienphu.’
‘And now?’
‘Well.’
‘Yes. Well.’
‘You want to lean against me?’
‘- No. You can lean against me.’
‘Like this?’
‘-Exactly.’
‘You nearly dozed, Jean.’
‘- Strange. I had fallen asleep. I dreamed I wore a black skirt and boots like a Parisienne. My ears were pierced and I wore long gold earrings. I heard nightingales.’
‘Be quiet.’
‘-Yes.’
‘But enough. May I?’
‘- Mais tu m’ tuera, monsieur.’
‘Not so. I kill you? How could you say so?’
‘Ah-’
‘Oh!’
‘- Wait – ’
‘Agreed. I wait.’