What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  French workers have no great love for the Algerians, at best they are a convenient evil which saves them from les travaux pénibles. But cheap Algerian labour removed a peg from the unions’ bargaining position: and an old French expression for strike-breaker is ‘bedouin’. In times of trouble the unions mumble the formulae of International Socialism, but that does not stop their members from complaining: ‘They eat our bread.’ ‘They pay no tax.’ ‘They fill our hospitals.’ ‘They take our money abroad.’ I heard French workers protesting they would gladly do the dirty jobs if only the employers would pay properly - but somehow it didn’t ring true.

  Another source of trouble comes from the Maoist or Trotskyite Left: students and staff from the universities, who use Algerian immigrants as shock-troops in their confrontations with the Right. From time to time they pour into the Algerian quarters and smear them with revolutionary graffiti. The sex-starved boys get all worked up over the girls, and follow them to political meetings they know nothing about. But the Leftists are a broken reed when things go wrong – and it is the Algerians who get hurt.

  The vehemence of one Algerian social worker amazed me:

  ‘Cette cochonnerie de la Gauche!‘ he sneered. ‘Chile! Chile! . . . Always Chile! And when our people get killed they run like mice for their holes.’

  Last summer, on a day when the mistral was blowing, a lecturer in political science was arrested with fire-canisters in the act of setting fire to the forest between Marseilles and Aix.

  ‘You can’t arrest me,’ he said to the police, and explained that this was political propaganda by the deed.

  Algerians are victims of their own country’s anti-Zionist propaganda. We went one evening to a reunion called by the Amicale des Algériens en France at Fos-sur-Mer, the vast new industrial complex at the mouth of the Rhône. The building contractors were laying off 3,000 men, so there were great difficulties. One of the men who saw us there was a middle-aged Algerian from Barika on the high plains. He introduced himself two days later on the Algiers boat. He was a cheerful man and something of a clown. He had had enough of France, and was going home for good. His brother was a shepherd.

  ‘All the big companies in France are controlled by Jews,’ he announced. ‘And these Jews pay the pieds noirs to kill us because we are fighting with our Palestinian brothers. I am happy to say there are no Jews left in Algeria. I’d kill a Jew if I saw him in Algeria.’

  The real danger, however, comes from the pieds noirs. If the Midi is a centre for racist outbursts, there is one good reason for it. The least enterprising Algerians settle here, because the climate reminds them of home and they dread cold, austere cities like Metz or Lille. But the pieds noirs themselves have settled here for precisely the same reasons. They are not popular, and have a complex about not being entirely French. Most, it is true, are hard workers and are happy to mind their own business. But a minority acquired a taste for ratonades (Arab hunts) during the last days of the OAS, and have drifted into organisations of the Far Right, or into the underworld. Others have gone into the police. They say the Marseilles police is 50 per cent pied noir. There are bound to be problems.

  It was a shock for us to find ordinary citizens in Marseilles screwing up their faces and saying they’d like to kill Arabs. The Marseillais are an open-hearted people who enjoy coarse pleasures and are mercifully immune to art. Theirs is the one great city in France that does not advertise the grandeur of the past, or oppress you with the weight of its monuments. It is also an ethnic layer-cake which has opened its doors to all kinds of travellers and immigrants, from Spanish Anarchists to Smyrna Greeks, Armenians and African sailors – ‘la marine au charbon’. Portraits of Napoleon, after Ingres, still hang as political propaganda in the Corsican cafés of the Panier. The whole world knows Marseilles is crooked, and it used to announce the fact cheerfully. But the city of individualists is turning its back on the sea, and, caught in the new prosperity, begins to hate strangers and be secretive and suspicious.

  The heroin business is in bad shape. In the Sixties, when business was wonderful, the Corsican milieu bosses had a tacit agreement with the Gaullist administration that heroin could be processed in or around Marseilles as long as it was exported to America and such places, and not sold on the streets of France. The bosses called in many new recruits, and these collectively seem to have lost their heads and broken all the rules. The U.S. Federal Narcotics Bureau has enjoyed several good seasons, and, for reasons of face, the present French Government has been forced to clamp down. The ‘untouchables’ remain untouched. But lower down the heroin hierarchy, casualties have been heavy: Tony the Eel, Petit Francis, Big Arm, Johnny Cigar and Benedetto Croce the Financier. Mémé Guerini is still in prison for taking his brother’s killer ‘for a ride in the country’. So is the wizened Marcel Boucan, skipper of Le Caprice des Temps, who panicked and threw himself overboard when the police made a search – they went on to find half a ton of heroin. Joseph Cesari, the biggest heroin chemist of them all, is dead: hanged by himself in prison, his body covered with acrid burns. Dead, too, are Jo Lomini, ‘the Toreador’, and Albert Bistoni, the one they called ‘The Aga Khan’. It was an April evening on the Vieux Port. Three leather boys stepped out of their car and gunned the Tanagra Bar. The Toreador was a little too slow and the Aga Khan was too old and heavy to move. They also shot dead the patronne, Carmen Ambrosio, ‘as she joked with a candidate barmaid’. It was a dangerous business, breaking the rules.

  The police are, by all accounts, corrupt. There was the case this summer of the ‘incorruptible’ Commissaire Bezart, corrupted into taking bribes by a pair of prostitution racketeers. His clients, and later accusers, were a spectacular blonde called Mireille Mesas and her ex-footballer husband. They behaved with marvellous composure and a suitable sense of outrage in court, and the policeman is now behind bars.

  Certainly, Algerians in Marseilles do not believe one word of what the police say – and the police reports on the sudden deaths of North Africans do not fill one with confidence: ‘Probable act of vengeance on the part of a co-religionary.’ ‘Skull broken from waste material falling from lorry.’ ‘Settlement of accounts within the narcotics trade.’ This is not to say Algerians are saints. They too, lie and exaggerate, but their versions of police brutality ring true, and on balance I believed them.

  I went to see a very imposing police commissioner, imposing in every sense. He was relaxed and smiling, his silvercapped teeth winking at his secretaries, and when he dismissed my suggestions as fantasy (‘A policeman’s self-respect is at stake’ etc.), I almost believed him as well. But he was too convincing. He did his act once too often, and I ended up not believing a word.

  The Algerian Vice-Consul took us one day to a strike-meeting at the shipyard at La Ciotat. Algerians are employed here to clean up after the solderers, and for the past year their lives had been made a hell by their ‘chief, a pied noir excorporal. Algerians do not have much experience of striking, and at La Ciotat it was considered a brave move. They did not want money, only the removal of the corporal. The contractor did his best to be agreeable, and the man was transferred to other work. The older Algerians could speak a little French and the young ones none, but they were all under terrible strain, the boys had deep-cut stress lines of a kind I didn’t see in Algeria. They never walked alone in La Ciotat.

  The consul took us to the bidonville where they lived. It was not pretty: the kind of sight you expect in Calcutta but not the South of France. The huts were situated in the middle of the municipal garbage tip: rickety plyboard shacks or wrecked delivery vans, patched with sheet plastic to keep out the wind. We looked out over the acres of filth, the fires that blew acrid smoke in our faces, and the whole place seething with rats in the middle of the day. ‘The French landscape is beautiful,’ said the consul. ‘La douce France if you don’t look too hard.’ There was nowhere else in La Ciotat for the men to go. Besides, they felt safer here than in the town: even though two French boys, in September
, stuck the barrel of a sub-machine-gun through the fence and fired.

  The men were brooding and listless. They put on a cheerful show for the consul, but couldn’t keep it up. One newcomer, Mebarak ben Manaa Aich, a fair-haired boy from Sétif, had injured his shoulder terracing for gas-tanks. He was plainly terrified and had taken to his bed, but we noticed he had the spirit and the Muslim love of flowers to tear a page from a bulb-merchant’s catalogue, showing two gladioli, and had pinned it to the wall. The consul pointed to a shack even more tumbledown than the others. It was the Shanghai Bar. ‘There’s always hope,’ he said melodramatically, ‘if they can call that the Shanghai Bar.’

  Nor is Camp Colgate a pretty sight. It began life as an Allied prisoner of war camp, then it was a centre for Jewish refugees, and then it became the biggest bidonville in Marseilles, for Algerians and their families. The city authorities are pulling it down, and the inmates will get better housing: no small task when the size of the average family is 9.7 persons. But that afternoon there were the usual tired and hostile stares, and the screaming children playing over broken glass, and a party of French press-photographers clicking their shutters like visitors to a zoo. We went inside the Mosque: an old Nissen hut. There were red carpets on the floor. The walls were painted pale green and on them hung strings of rosary beads and the Name of Allah. The Imam Bashir was softly reading the suras of the Koran to a circle of worshippers, and somehow there was a notion, not lost, of all men equal in the sight of God.

  Another evening we went to an immigrant lodging near the Porte d’Aix. There were sixteen men in three small squalid rooms. One was an airless cellar. None was cheap. The men gave us coffee and Coke, and told a long drawn-out story about a North African corpse and how the police said it had fallen from a window, which it hadn’t. Then the landlord’s rent-man came in, very hysterical: a slug-fingered fellow in a shiny brown raincoat. He shrieked at us: these lodgings were for workers. Workers only! No one who wasn’t a worker had any business there. We weren’t workers and we weren’t wanted. He wasn’t a worker either and he showed us his white hands. And that was our only contact with one of the famous ‘sleep-merchants’.

  The Quartier de la Porte d’Aix is squalid. Its poverty is particularly offensive when compared to the wealth that encircles it. But it is at least alive. Algerians do not feel strange or threatened there, and it is one of the few places in France they have made their own. The Marseillais, on the other hand, cannot wait to pull it down; for in their eyes it is a future breeding ground for cholera – or, worse, insurrection. The Algerians may be an unpleasant necessity, but that is no reason why one should allow them to choke the centre of the city. One day, North African demonstrators so clogged the Rue d’Aix that weekend motorists could not get onto the Autoroute. The Gaullist Deputy and Minister, M. Joseph Comiti, said the Algerian quarter was a gangrene – and the way to combat gangrene is to cut it out.

  Responsibility for cutting out the gangrene rests with the Socialist Mayor of Marseilles, M. Gaston Defferre, who surveys from an office of Louis Quinze splendour the masts and blue awnings of the Vieux Port. He is a paradoxical man in his sixties, a Protestant, a resistance hero, a yachtsman, a fighter of duels, a ruthless administrator, an adroit politician of the Left who enjoys the active support of the Right, a rich newspaper proprietor and a lover. He has just taken a third wife, Edmonde Charles-Roux, the novelist and former editor of French Vogue. He is still ambitious for power (and would become Minister of the Interior in Mitterrand’s first cabinet). In 1965 he stood as Socialist candidate in the presidential elections. His party is at present allied to the Communists, but he will not sing the ‘Internationale’ and winces at being called ‘Comrade Defferre’. In interview he gives out virtually nothing: there is little point in repeating what he said. Behind the tough façade I had the impression of a naive man, somewhat trapped by intrigues not necessarily of his own making.

  Gaston Defferre has no great love for the Arabs. His newspaper, Le Provençal, loudly champions the State of Israel. But he is reputed to control the right-wing Le Méridional and, if so, he should have had retracted the anti-Algerian rant I quoted from that newspaper. Anyway, he has taken the first steps to pull down the Kasbah: ‘We make it known that the whole quarter of the Porte d’Aix will be demolished and rebuilt. It will not be easy, but we have promised it.’

  It will not be easy, because when the demolition begins tempers will snap. But the City will win, and there will be offices and shops, apartment blocks and underground car parks. And the Algerians will have gone home or been housed in the sterile banlieue. And there will be no more Soirees de Ramadan. No Big Leila dancing naked round a goldfishbowl. And nowhere to go for one Nigerian sailor who already senses the end: ‘I go for get wooman, but is soo expensive! One emission cost three poun! O Sir, London is a heaven place. Marseilles is finish.’

  Cutting out the gangrene will please a group of three gentlemen I visited before leaving, the self-appointed Committee for the Defence of Marseilles, which was founded on the evening of Monsieur Gerlache’s death. They had a small room off the Canebière, bare but for posters with a red fist and the title ‘Halte a l’Immigration sauvage!’ All three had fleshy noses and disagreeable mouths. They looked quite impressive sitting down, but when they stood up they had very short legs. They did at least speak their minds. But I thought of the bright new offices in Algiers, and the smart young executives, and the eyes of the Third World narrowing on Europe if the racists continue. Wasn’t it time, I asked, to bury the hatchet?

  ‘Monsieur, you are suggesting we take our pants down?’

  ‘Not that,’ I said.

  1974

  DONALD EVANS

  The World of Donald Evans by Willy Eisenhart (Harlin Quist Books, 1981)

  On the night of 29 April 1977, a fire, sweeping through a house on the Stadhouderskade in Amsterdam, caught the American artist Donald Evans on the staircase and burned him to death. He left behind him, scattered among collections on both sides of the Atlantic, several thousand miniature watercolours in the form of postage stamps. These stamps were ‘issued’ in sets by forty-two countries, each corresponding to a phase, a friendship, a mood, or a preoccupation in the artist’s life. In style, they more or less resemble ‘colonial’ stamps of the late nineteenth century. The sets were then mounted on the black album pages of professional philatelists, a background that showed up the singularity of each stamp as a work of art in its own right while, at the same time, allowing the artist to play games of pattern and colour on a grid.

  In Muslim, theology, God first created the reed pen and used it to write the world. Less ambitious, Donald Evans used the same sable brush, a Grumbacher No 2, to paint a limpid, luminous world – a kind of Baudelairean pays de Cocagne – that would, nevertheless, mirror his own life and the life of his times. The result is a painted autobiographical novel of forty-two chapters, whose original pages, like the pages of some illuminated manuscript, have wandered abroad: indeed, the chances of reassembling them are as remote as the chances of realising the peaceable world they portray.

  Fortunately, Donald Evans kept a meticulous record of all his work and entered each set of stamps in a catalogue, which grew as his work grew and which he called Catalogue of the World. The master copy – and several Xerox copies - survived him.4

  Whether by accident or design, his life was short, circular, and symmetrical; his one obsession - the painting of postage stamps. He painted them during two five-year periods: as an introverted schoolboy from the ages of ten to fifteen; then as an adult, from twenty-six to thirty-one. The fact that he believed he had ‘peaked’ at sixteen or seventeen; that he had, by thirty, relived his childhood; that there are reasons for supposing that, in his eyes, the Catalogue was complete; that, having worked on the tropical zones of his world, he should have been painting the stamps of an icebound, polar country when he himself was consumed by fire — all go to reinforce the impression of symmetry.

  When his friend
s recovered from the horror of his death, they began to celebrate his exemplary life, and to puzzle over the pieces. Because Donald Evans was so secretive, and because of his habit of slotting friendships into compartments, the autobiographical complexity of his work might well have escaped notice, or at least lain dormant, were it not for the detective work of Willy Eisenhart, who has prepared a key towards the elucidation of his subject in a cool, tranquil text that reminds one of the best American reporter style of the 1920s. It is also a very beautiful book.

  Donald Evans was born on 28 August 1945, the only son of a real estate appraiser in Morristown, New Jersey. His mother kept a neat green lawn and was a member of the local gardening club. As a boy, he built sandcastles, and cardboard villages and palaces. He pored over maps and encyclopaedias and dreamed the geography of a world that would be better than the one in which he lived. He also collected stamps – and, at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, drew his own commemorative issue for the coronation of his own imaginary queen.

  By ten, this precocious autodidact was hard at work on his own private philately. At first, to quote Eisenhart, the stamps ‘were crudely drawn and crudely perforated with his mother’s pinking shears, but he quickly became more accomplished. He began to outline the stamps in pencil and then fill them in with his pen and brush, and he solved the technical problem of the perforations by pounding out rows of periods on an old typewriter.’