Where I Left My Soul Read online

  He observes firmly to the colonel, as the latter takes his leave, noisily ebullient with the success of his press conference, that he will not touch a hair of Tahar’s head.

  “No-one requires you to do so, Degorce,” the colonel says drily.

  “There would be no point, sir. There’s no-one above him he could lead us to. It would really be quite pointless …”

  “Very well. Do what you think best, Degorce. And keep me out of it. It’s not my problem.”

  (What a pathetic idiot. Pathetic, and a disgusting poseur.)

  Once the colonel has gone, he goes to see Tahar in his cell.

  “I’m really sorry,” Capitaine Degorce says. “It’s too bad you had to go through all that. The press. The colonel.”

  Tahar starts to laugh.

  “Yes,” the capitaine says, laughing as well. “The colonel, especially, don’t you think?”

  He sits down facing Tahar.

  “We won’t touch you, you know.”

  “I ask no favours, capitaine. I’m ready to receive the same treatment as my comrades.”

  “It’s not a favour. It’s nothing to do with favours. It’s a matter … a simple matter of logic, you see. You can’t denounce yourself, can you?”

  “I understand.”

  Capitaine Degorce remains silent for a long while. He feels curiously at peace and has no desire to leave.

  “I have lived with you for long weeks, you know. I have your photograph in my office. I’ve been looking at you every day. It’s strange to think it is all finished.”

  Tahar looks at the capitaine quizzically.

  “But nothing is finished, capitaine. Nothing at all.”

  “How so? It’s only a question of time now. You know that as well as I do.”

  “You’re talking like your colonel,” Tahar says softly. “The rebellion has been dealt a mortal blow, and all the rest of it. But that is not the truth.”

  “What is the truth?” the capitaine asks.

  “The truth is simpler, capitaine,” Tahar says, leaning towards him. “The truth is that I am finished, only me. And that is of no consequence. I count for nothing.”

  There is no element of drama in his voice, no inflexion hinting at any kind of vanity or the smallest craving for admiration. He has simply stated a fact and now he stretches out on the straw-filled mattress and closes his eyes with a sigh, as if preparing to sleep. The capitaine cannot help continuing to ponder on the mystery of his smile. He gets up.

  “I’ll come and see you tomorrow. If there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

  “I need my freedom,” Tahar says lightly.

  “I meant anything that is within my power to give you.”

  *

  “André, my child, my dear, we think about you such a lot. Our little Claudie never stops asking me if you could be with us for her birthday. Do you think you could? I know you’ll do your best. It would make her so happy. And me, too. Write and tell me what I’m to say to her. It’s a lovely day today and their uncle, Jean-Baptiste, has taken the children to the beach to eat sea urchins. So I’ve stayed at home with Maman and have found nothing to distract me from thinking about you, my dear. André, my child …”

  Jeanne-Marie’s words produce a totally disproportionate emotion in him, as if everybody he loves had died a thousand years ago and he had just discovered the last traces of their presence on earth. The future has been swept away and swallowed up, his wife is nothing but dust and from the depths of the grave she refers, with incredible cruelty, to the birthday of a little girl long since dead. Capitaine Degorce breaks off from reading. He glances distractedly through a letter from his parents, then another, from his brother-in-law Marcel, who, from his base on the banks of the hated river Niger, seems to have chosen him as the repository for his hypochondriac ravings, stubbornly deluging him with desperate missives, that seethe with abominable fauna, which he describes in disturbingly minute detail, parasites upon the eyes and liver, man-eating grubs, monsters lying in wait in the tropical humidity, Negroes possessed by spirits, and he unceasingly bewails his imminent death and the son he will never see. In each fresh letter Marcel explains how he has miraculously survived some disease, even though it was a killer, but the very same day has just identified the symptoms of yet another that really will carry him off, as a consequence of which, Capitaine Degorce has almost come to wish he would snuff it once and for all.

  “André, my child, you cannot imagine how much I miss you. I often dream that this terrible business is over and done with and you’re coming back home to us. I’m sure that day will come, soon perhaps. André, don’t forget that your life is precious and …”

  “Andreani’s men are here, mon capitaine.”

  “I’ll come at once. How many are they taking from us this evening?”

  “Two, mon capitaine. The Kabylian and the Telemly girl.”

  Capitaine Degorce’s prisoners are only transitory. After a few days or a few hours they make way for new ones coming in. They are taken away. They are removed to a transit camp. Or handed over to the public prosecutor. Or passed on to Lieutenant Andreani. Degorce does not know the rules that govern this selection. Perhaps there are no rules. There are so many prisoners it is impossible to deal with each one’s case individually. It may be the work of a blind mechanism, as random and irremediable as fate. A canvas-topped lorry is parked in the empty street. It is very cold and the waning moon has a ring of mist around it. Andreani’s men are chatting with Adjudant-chef Moreau. Capitaine Degorce recognizes the harki Belkacem and the little seminarist with a face like a weasel who acts as assistant to the lieutenant. They salute the capitaine, who responds with a vague nod of his head. They take Abdelkrim and the girl. Abdelkrim is shivering, with lowered eyes. The girl looks at the capitaine with an impenetrable expression. The lorry disappears into the darkness.

  “That girl, mon capitaine,x” the adjudant-chef asks. “Do you think she’s in for a good time over at Andreani’s?”

  “I’ve no idea, Moreau, and it’s beside the point. What happens at Andreani’s I can do nothing about.”

  *

  “Don’t forget, André, that your life is precious and we love you more than anything. Don’t take pointless risks. Think of me. Think of us. And, please don’t take this as any kind of reproach, but if you can find time to do so, please try to write us letters that are a bit longer and more detailed. Everything you do is of interest to us and the children especially would love …”

  The capitaine can no longer concentrate on what he is reading. He is no longer upset. His mind finds it difficult to grasp the sense of the words and in the end he gives up. He puts the letter in a drawer with the one from his parents and tosses the one from Marcel into the waste paper basket. It seems to him that if he went to bed now he would be able to sleep, but he knows this is simply an illusion. He picks up a sheet of paper and begins to write. He tries to find words of tenderness but they elude him.

  (There are no words left for God anymore. None for my loved ones.)

  He opens the window and smokes a cigarette, gazing at the moon. He hopes Tahar is sleeping peacefully. And indeed does not doubt it for a second, thinking about his prisoner with vaguely envious resentment. He returns to his desk and, without even sitting down, he writes: “My darling, my adored children, I’m afraid it’s inconceivable that I could get leave for Claudie’s birthday. There’s no special news here. Everything’s going well. Fondest love.” He scribbles Jeanne-Marie’s address hastily on an envelope and throws it onto the pile of outgoing mail. In his bedroom he does not even take the trouble to kneel for his evening prayer. Sitting on the bed he opens his Bible. He reads: “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” He leafs through it for a moment more and then closes it. He prepares to let himself drift between wakefulness and dreams he does not want.

  How could I have forgotten you, mon capitaine, I who loved you so much,
who loved you far more than I despise you today, even though I despise you to the extent of admitting unashamedly how much I loved you. Oh, I loved you like a brother, a dazzlingly youthful and heroic brother and I have a clear memory of your hand resting on my shoulder in May 1954 as we all marched together in a long, spectral troop beneath the eyes of our conquerors. It was the end of the world, we were no more than pitiful relics of a ruined empire, but your hand on my shoulder saved me from my despair at not having died in battle and I was happy, I clearly remember, happy to have remained alive and to be able to walk beside a man like you, who refused to lower your eyes, as all our comrades did, passing in front of the lens directed at us by Russian cameramen, so that the whole world might witness our humiliation and laugh at our former arrogance. For there was nothing left of our arrogance, mon capitaine, as we limped along, encrusted with mud and the camera’s obscene eye made our wounds more painful and the bloody rags that had once been our battledress more repellent, there was nothing left of our courage, there was nothing left of us and, in truth, lowering our eyes was the only thing we could still do, but you, mon capitaine, as soon as we entered the camera’s field of vision, you held your head high and stared at the lens and put your hand on my shoulder and said to me, Horace, hold your head high, and take a good look at these bastards, look them in the eye, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of, and I suddenly felt so proud, so proud to be at your side, that an unfathomable surge of joy almost took my breath away. I loved you, mon capitaine, and you seemed to me even more admirable then than I had ever dared to hope for, when listening to your brother-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Antonetti who, on the day before my parachute drop, was still talking about you in a particular bar in Hanoi that my Corsican compatriots used to frequent, to share their grudges and homesickness, the bar where I had spent such long weeks of waiting, drinking the vile spirit that marinated my dreams of battle and blood, my dreams of death, mon capitaine, while Jean-Baptiste talked of you, in between a couple of slurred allusions to the pitiless land of our childhood that we could not bring ourselves to loathe, and he talked about your strength and courage, and thanked heaven for allowing his sister to meet a man like you, as if his whole family had found itself abruptly ennobled by the mere fact of your presence, as if, through the mysterious blessing of being related to you, he himself had risen forever above his condition as a non-commissioned officer with an undistinguished career in the transport corps, and he said you would not die at Dien Bien Phu, for you were one of those people who survive the worst catastrophes, and doubtless, if he had had just one more drink, he would have ended up prophesying that you would live for ever. I spent so much time waiting to join you, mon capitaine, night after night in that bar in Hanoi, as the pelting monsoon rains swept away all the dross of my bogus homesickness, I forgot my family, I shed everything that bound me to life, all that shackled me, I was making myself pure and available and I have never felt so wildly free as at that moment of climbing into the American troop transport that was at last going to carry me towards you. Your brother-in-law, Jean-Baptiste, clasped me to his heart, asking me to embrace you on his behalf and looked at me with the timid tenderness that is reserved for those who are already dead, but that did not disturb me and I settled down in the aircraft, strapped into my parachute harness, beside strangers as merry as if we had all been invited to a party. We no longer had faith in anything other than the pointless beauty of this sacrifice. The prospect of our impending deaths intoxicated us, and we were happy because we knew that this elation which made death desirable is the most blessed state men can aspire to. The first anti-aircraft salvoes shook the cabin, the door opened and we were flying so low that I smelt the sweet, humid smell of the massacre as I toppled into the liquid sky. I still recall my surprise and, I can tell you today, my disappointment, the first time I saw you, mon capitaine, I remember it clearly, Jean-Baptiste’s tales had prepared me for an encounter with a kind of classical hero, with limbs of bronze, dipped in the dark waters of the Styx and not the youthful, melancholy lieutenant you were then, who seemed so frail, and I remember you gave a sad tilt of your head as you said, what the hell are you doing here? What’s the point? It’s all over, a ludicrous fuckup, ludicrous and criminal, and I was hurt that you did not feel any gratitude towards those who had come to die with you, but then it is true that you have hurt me so many times, mon capitaine, without even being aware of it. I told you Jean-Baptiste embraced you. You replied that this message totally justified my presence and amid the hubbub and the stink you smiled at me. You called out to introduce me to the survivors in your section. This is sous-lieutenant Andreani, who’s done us the honour of coming to share our fate. A caporal with a bandaged arm gave me a vague salute while continuing to fiddle with the radio. The others did not even glance at me. Our guns were firing shells at random through the mist into the side of an invisible mountain range, an implacably steady deluge of rain and steel streamed down on us and all around us the battlefield heaved like an appalling ocean of mud, with its eddies and the crests of its unmoving waves awash with a debris of flesh and metal. Very close to us a wounded man was groaning softly in a way that reminded me of the owl hooting in the August nights of my childhood. I heard yelling in every language under the sun. A dark hand groped upwards out of a mound of earth, as if reaching for something inconceivable. I tried to return your smile and I was still not afraid to die, but I did murmur, this is hell, I remember, this is hell, in a shaking voice, for which I have not forgiven myself and you said to me, no, this isn’t hell, lieutenant, but it’s the only hospitality on offer to you from Colonel de Castries’ mistresses, Béatrice, Isabelle, Anne-Marie, Gabrielle, Claudine, Eliane, and all the other women who lingered in the memory of our commander to the extent that he had given their names to the positions upon which we were due to die, and what would they have thought, mon capitaine, all those women, whose faces we would never know, at the sight of their now aged lover taking his long aristocrat’s nose and stooping figure for a walk along this maze of stinking trenches amid his army of living dead? How could they have recognized the man who used to meet them in secret in a light room with windows open onto the Parisian spring and crushed the scarlet waistcoat of his cavalry officer’s uniform so boldly against their naked breasts. I thought about them so often during the incessant gunfire, I pictured their scented bodies reclining amid the warmth of their sheets, the caress of their hands and I felt as if the earth now swallowing us had retained something of them, as if the warm mud were like their arms, gently cradling the dying, before carrying them off into its voluptuous depths where nothing could reach them anymore, then it was so easy to fight, so tempting to die, and I do not understand how I can have forgotten which woman’s name designated the position I fought to defend day and night at your side, was it Eliane, mon capitaine?, or was it Huguette? or Dominique? I no longer remember, I, who remember everything, have forgotten it, just as I have forgotten the name of the Algerian bride whose throat was cut years later, beside a long desert road between Béchar and Taghit, my memory refuses to retain women’s names, that’s how it is, mon capitaine, however much I think about them, their names fade away, and I no longer know if she was called Kahina, Latifa, or Wissam, but I know it was men who resembled your friend Tahar like brothers that killed her and scattered all the items from her wedding trousseau in the dust, frightful gilded high-heeled shoes, artificial silk underwear stitched with fake pearls, dresses embroidered in garish colours, all those pieces of excessively ornate silverware that were due to turn black at the bottom of a drawer in the married couple’s home, but which the desert wind covered in sand. I read her name in the paper as I was drinking my whisky beneath the jasmine at the Hôtel Saint-George, just as I used to in the days of my merciless youth, and before summoning the taxi driver to take me to the childhood home I had invented for myself, I read her name, mon capitaine, swearing I would never forget it, but I can no longer remember it. She was not in her first youth, this I can remember clear
ly, she was a little over thirty and, as she sat there next to her husband in a brand new suit that was too tight for him, she was sweating beneath her make-up, while all the wedding guests clapped their hands and sang, I’d die for you, Sara, you are my life, Sara, she must have been blushing a little as she thought about her eagerness for her blood to flow at last, but not like that, not the way it did that night between Taghit and Béchar on that road we know so well. The world is old, mon capitaine, and we shall not escape from the stain of blood, we shall not be absolved of it, never, it is our curse and our greatness, it saddens me to have to say this to you again, for I probably first understood it on that crucial night at the age of sixteen, during the course of which what my life would be was revealed to me once and for all. It was late in the autumn of 1942, mon capitaine, I remember it clearly, and my cousin and I had found an Italian soldier wandering around the wretched patch in which my mother kept three puny chickens, he was scarcely older than us and he was shaking with fear, he was hungry, but we were so outraged that anyone should steal from us what little we had and so happy to find someone we could punish for our wretchedness, that we killed him unthinkingly with pickaxe blows, in a state of almost supernatural elation. We dragged his body as far from our house as possible, outside the village. He had on him a photograph of a girl with an unattractive face and a couple of letters which we tore up without reading them. We took his gun, his wallet, his identity disc and his hand grenades and we ran to join the maquis at Alta Rocca, we ran until we were breathless and my cousin began wailing, what have we done, Horace? What will become of us? but I did not answer him because it was of no interest to me. My hands were marked with blood and the life I had known was over. I felt neither joy nor regret. I was content to keep running and I knew I should follow this road to the end, suppressing the murmurings of my heart, and I followed it, mon capitaine, I followed it up to September 1943 on the ridge at Bacinu, where the machine guns of the S.S. Reichsführer Division mowed my cousin down, there close beside me, only allowing him to pass on to me, by way of farewell, a little of his blood on my cheek, I followed it to the pocket of resistance at Colmar in January 1945, and all the way to Germany, and across the seas, beneath the monsoon, I followed it all the way to you, mon capitaine, you whom I loved so well. I looked at you and I thought it would be enough for me to die here for my life to be perfect. Oh, you were admirable, mon capitaine, it is hard for me to admit it today but it is the truth, you were haloed by an aura of grace, the purest grace, in every one of your actions. The Vietnamese sappers dug circular tunnels around our positions to isolate and destroy them, one after the other, Anne-Marie, Marcelle, Eliane, and every day voices came over the radio from unknown comrades saying, it’s finished, goodbye boys, goodbye, voices filled with sadness and fury, to which we used to answer, chin up, goodbye, goodbye, as we awaited our turn, and when our turn came you simply asked, why make their task easy for them? and we crawled towards the wet sound of spades digging rhythmically into the earth gorged with water, we hurled our grenades before slithering after you into the tunnel and fought hand to hand, with our fists, with knives, with our teeth, borne along by a marvellous euphoria that I would never forget. As we caught our breath we were able to see that the ones we had just killed were no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. They lay there in the mud, thin and frail, and death made them look like little children, each face twisted in a wilful pout. We blew up the props, the clay engulfed the bodies and we withdrew. Every day we began again and each time I had the feeling that, with a pounding heart, I, too, was about to encounter an adored mistress who would soon yield. When General Giap’s headquarters granted us a respite by selecting another target, you shook our hands, again murmuring, that’s right, why make their task easy? and you went and sat down a little apart from us, with your eyes closed. No, it was not hell, and I was filled with a great love for every one of the weary men falling asleep around me in filthy, sodden blankets, and above all for you, my brother, for it was from you they derived their strength and their strange beauty, and I knew that, without you, they would fade away, like stars that have lost their heat. Do not be offended, please, I have the right to call you my brother, mon capitaine, we were sired together by the same battle under the monsoon rains, the same ghosts of loving women hovered over us, and that is how I still want to address you. Some things cannot be undone, even by contempt. I loved your solitariness and silence, my brother, I loved your gaiety, I even came to love your piety, I who knew that the vast heavens above the monsoon clouds were empty and the universe blind, yet I went to Mass with you and we listened in the rain to the crazed chaplain’s sermon, as he raised his chalice aloft behind an altar made of planks and rusty trestles, indifferent to the screaming of the 105 mm shells, and I watched the pallid backs of the officers’ necks as they all bowed forward together, as if the weight of an invisible caress were gently pressing them down towards the earth. I tried to guess what you might be praying for. What could still be granted to us? We were a stricken beast, vast and vulnerable, all of whose flesh had been torn away, piece by piece, but stubbornly they continued to parachute useless reinforcements in to us from Hanoi that descended from the heavens along with myriad medals and mentions in despatches, love letters written by unknown women, notices of promotion, bottles of champagne, the glittering star thanking Colonel de Castries for allowing his name and those of the women he had loved to remain forever associated with this slaughter, the stripes they awarded you and the second gilded medal bar by which I was granted the privilege of dying in the skin of a regular army lieutenant, and all the other trivia that lit up our death agony like fireworks. The day the order to cease fire reached us, silence fell upon us all at once in the afternoon, I clearly remember. I was not dead and had forgotten what silence was. My life suddenly lost its justification. We had destroyed our weapons and tied up a few effects in pieces of parachute fabric. The Viet Minh emerged from the mist. They assembled us on what had been the airfield, amid craters filled with dark water, and divided us up by rank. The Russians set up their cameras. A little further on Général de Castries was getting into a lorry with a group of senior officers. For weeks we marched through the jungle beneath a vault of immense trees whose crowns had been tied together with ropes, we crossed rivers, walked through villages where spittle rained down on us, passing, without stopping, wounded men seated beside the road, who looked at us with eyes already empty and cold as mirrors, and you understood well before I did, mon capitaine, that they had been abandoned there by our own comrades, you understood this at once and I saw the anguish settling into your face as you kept saying to me, take care, Horace, now more than ever, you don’t know what you’re going to have to contend with, and we went on marching all the way to the re-education camp, faster and faster, leaving our own men to die on the way. There were no barbed wire fences, only the darkness of the jungle. Little mounds of earth could be seen more or less everywhere. Skeletal French soldiers, survivors of the Route Coloniale 4 battalion, could be seen lying on a soaking tarpaulin. We formed a group of some forty junior officers and it was the end of the world. Nothing bound us to one another anymore. I could not bear it. The possibility of survival had replaced the certainty of death and it was mutating into a greedy, imperious longing, an abject longing that swept away everything, courage, the dignity of hope, a shared past, and from the first day I had to listen to Capitaine Lestrade, who shaved himself carefully every morning with a fragment of a blade to preserve his honour as a French officer, advising us to agree to the proposal made by the Viet Minh that the weight of the allocations of rice should be calculated according to rank. You simply announced, almost in a murmur, that you had never had much of an appetite and that whatever decision were taken you would be satisfied with an ordinary private’s ration. I said it would be the same for me. A sous-lieutenant whose gleaming new insignia proclaimed that he had just been promoted, said, me too, a private’s ration, and, from his accent I immediately identified him
as a fellow Corsican. After a moment other voices spoke up, but I knew they would have remained comfortably silent if you had not spoken, and Capitaine Lestrade quietly lowered his eyes. I went over to see the sous-lieutenant and asked him where he came from. He was called Paul Mattei, you must remember, mon capitaine, and as you shook his hand I could see Capitaine Lestrade giving you a look filled with shame and resentment. Did he have time to think about the baseness, the futility of all that, Capitaine Lestrade, did he have time to reflect that a few extra grains of rice would have made no difference to him, did he have time, mon capitaine? before we dug his grave less than three weeks later, in driving rain, our muscles frozen from having had to use spades so often, to dig so many graves, that of Lieutenant Thomas, that of Lieutenant Maury de la Ribière, those of all the men who hoped to live, but who had allowed themselves to be so trapped by the mirages of thirst that they lapped up dirty water like dogs, which forced them to drag themselves to the latrines twenty times a day until they no longer had the strength to do it and died one after another in putrid puddles of blood and mucus, still dreaming in their fever of the day of our liberation, and as we thrust them into the ditch, one after another, you would repeat to me, mon capitaine, that such was man, stripped naked, and that his weakness was such that he did not deserve our hatred, and I admired your unfailing benevolence even if I could neither share nor understand it, for truly it was more than I could bear and without you, I should not have survived, I am not sure if I should thank you for it, but I know I should not have survived, the rage that constantly made me choke would have killed me in the end, I felt its heat overcoming me at the sight of the corpses we buried in the rain, its crimson mists obscured my vision at each of the re-education sessions, during which we had to submit to the implacable speeches of the political commissar about the meaning of history and the coming of the new man, as if the new man were not already there, in front of him, at this very moment, thin and stinking, his loose teeth awash in the sewer of his gums, as he had always been since the beginning of the world and as he will be for ever, you know as well as I do, mon capitaine, but the political commissar went on uttering the same idiocies and I was literally shaking with rage at his Jesuitical grimaces, his understanding, ruthless smile, his schoolmasterly manner, he revolted me so much I could not hold back from telling him that what the communists had instituted was no more than an international of filth, I could not hold back, and it gave me untold relief to say it to him, hoping, perhaps, that he would have me shot and that the whole intolerable charade would come to an end, but he merely looked at me with a sorrowful expression, which increased my fury, and that evening when the soldier who distributed the food got to me he threw my rice down into the mud soiled with bloody diarrhoea. You offered me half your ration, how could I forget it, mon capitaine? and I said to you, no, André, don’t do that, think of yourself, but you gave me a wink and declaimed, man does not live by bread alone, and burst out laughing, I clearly remember, I was not afraid of fasting, I dreamed of getting rid of all my organs, of hurling my intestines twisted by cramps far away from me, my heart and my liver, I dreamed of drying up the source of the fluids I persisted in secreting in spite of myself, so as to become clean and dry like dead wood, but you gave me a wink and I burst out laughing. Paul Mattei sat down beside us and all three of us shared our food while the others were sucking their balls of rice and looking the other way as they slowly rolled them around in their mouths until they dissolved. Oh, I loved you so much, mon capitaine, and if I had not been so totally blinded by love I should have died there, I should have thrown your rice back in your face and I should not have allowed myself to be persuaded to complete my self-criticism and publicly express my gratitude to Ho Chi Minh, so that the political commissar condescended to give the order for me to be fed once more, because all that I loved in you was simply the mask for inordinate pride, mon capitaine, you were not an idiot like Lestrade, you knew that your honour did not depend on shaving every day, but the lofty idea you had of yourself demanded that you should constantly act out the masquerade of fraternity and self-denial, which you had no difficulty in doing for, the truth is that you were as if on your home ground in that camp, you acted out the role you were born to play there and at which you excelled, it must be admitted, because you had been preparing for it all your life, and if you could hold forth on the subject of man stripped naked over the bodies of Lestrade, Maury de la Ribière and Thomas, who had been finished off by the repellent spectacle of their own nakedness more surely than by dysentery, it was because you yourself felt secure within the comforting armour plating of your pride. I do not doubt for a second that you would have died rather than stoop to the most insignificant pettiness, and God knows I loved you for that, mon capitaine, although in the end it is so easy to die, it is a task everyone invariably achieves, which should cause no great wonder, everyone knows how to die, torturers and martyrs, heroes and cowards, naive young brides and little nine-year-old bridesmaids, oh, no, I don’t doubt that you would have known how to die with panache and dignity, but nothing disgusts me more than men self-obsessed to the point of worrying about how to die with dignity, men like you, mon capitaine, who devote all their efforts to the staging of their own lives right up to the final apotheosis, I imagine the bride from Taghit must have wept and lamented in vain in the desert, my little seminarist may have called out for his mother and begged the God he no longer believed in to come to his aid, your friend Tahar himself would certainly have disappointed you if you could have been present at his end, they all died horribly, as men die, and this is totally unimportant, we have never needed men who know how to die, we need men who know how to conquer, men capable of unhesitatingly sacrificing all that is most precious to them, their own hearts, their souls, to victory, mon capitaine, yet while you have never feared death, the prospect of victory has filled you with indescribable terror and finally stripped you naked, in your turn, for the first time in your life, in those dank cellars in Algeria where the trembling nakedness of your prisoners reflected your own image back at you, without your being able to shield yourself from it. You are wrong, mon capitaine, I know this now, weakness well deserves our hatred, above all when it must be paid for at the exorbitant price of a further defeat and I cannot forgive you, not even in the name of the love I bore you, which blinded me for so long it is impossible for me to forget it, for I so loved you that I was happy at first, when they started giving me my rice again, that you no longer had to deprive yourself of food on my account. In the end the Viet Minh added scraps of meat and pieces of fruit to our rations, which we ate with relish, without even trying to understand what had earned us this privilege. Paul Mattei said, they’re going to release us, they’re trying to plump us up a bit, they’re going to release us. I realized that for a long time I had no longer been thinking about release. I had gradually settled down into a world whose limits did not extend beyond those of the present moment. I sat close to you on the floor of the lorry that was taking us back towards our people, towards a world so vast that it had totally forgotten us. In the villages no-one spat at us anymore. Before handing us over to the French soldiers, the political commissar came and shook us by the hand and none of us refused. Military doctors took charge of us and it was only when I saw their looks that I grasped the extent of my physical deterioration. From our group there were twenty-seven survivors. We shared out between us the task of writing to the families of the dead and it fell to me to bear witness to the death of Capitaine Lestrade and those of Lieutenants Thomas and Maury de la Ribière. You asked me, I clearly recall, Horace, do you feel yourself capable of writing these letters as they should be written? I replied that I would do it and I did it, remember, I always knew there was something in loyalty that was infinitely superior to truth. We found your brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste again, in the bar in Hanoi he never seemed to have stirred from as he waited to greet you, and we drank without raising our glasses to anything, the spirit burned me, I allowed myself to
succumb to hopeless drunkenness, like the end of the world, and whores vibrant with patriotism wound their incredibly fleshy arms about our necks, Paul Mattei buried his face in the breasts of a laughing girl and I could hear your voice saying timidly, forgive me, don’t be offended, while Jean-Baptiste was assuring you that he would not breathe a word to his sister and you kept saying, no, that’s not the point, and I stopped thinking about you, mon capitaine, I hugged the girl to me and asked her her name which she murmured as she slid the tip of her tongue from my ear to the corner of my mouth, but I did not want to kiss her, the continuous bleeding of my gums left a taste of metal in my mouth that I was ashamed of, I touched her buttocks through her dress and inhaled her perfume, in the depths of which the sugary scent of corpses still lingered, and then she took me into a room where I had to learn the taste of living flesh again. For a long time I rested my head against her belly which was as pliant as mud, lost amid the mists of the alcohol, I managed to catch hold of her ankle, and when my fingers brushed against her foot I heard her suppressing a little amused laugh. I asked her her name again and she repeated it in loud, clear tones which echoed in the darkness, she repeated it, but, you see, mon capitaine, I cannot recall it.