Abduction (19 page)

What was her name again, the girl who would take his penis in both hands and slide it inside her but then bite the cushion when she had her orgasm out of fear that her nosy neighbours might hear her and, through the concierge, inform her parents who had stayed in the provinces? Françoise, that was it… Joy had sparkled deep in her eyes when she understood the muddled declaration he had taken days to piece together in the loneliness of his hotel room. He had been overwhelmed with gratitude at his ability to spark such rapture in a woman. He felt that she deserved to be loved even more. The next day she had taken three days off to travel down with him to the famous docks at Port-Vendres, which at the time were buzzing with maritime traffic between France and the Algerian colony. The two lovers' promises had been even more explicit when they separated. They did not know that their kisses on that Mediterranean quayside, moist with the spray of the unknown, would be their last and that, despite the letters they exchanged for a year with their share of ardent promises and recriminations, they would never see each other again.

Mathieu shudders. It feels as if he is recalling a time several million years ago and that, like the enormous saurians of old, this Françoise of such sweet memory is no more than a fossil buried under the debris of time. Maybe she really is dead? All of a sudden, he hopes against hope that, if that were to be the case, at least his pretty Parisienne with the cheerful eyes and the then firm buttocks and breasts might have been lucky enough to glean a few moments of happiness here and there.

He sighs. The silence draws on. Aziz gives a little cough and the man takes up his tale again. He starts to tell Aziz – who occasionally nibbles his lip in alarm – how the events leading up to this cursed day fit together. But Mathieu has already vaguely decided that he will skirt whole sections of the truth. For one never tells everything, not even to oneself.

Basically, it had all begun with him playing a trick on his own destiny. He'd never envisaged enlisting in the French army again, let alone the French Algerian army. After some scratchy and shortened studies, he had done his military service in barracks in the depths of his native Brittany; then, half out of spite, half out of a desire to disappoint his father, he had stayed on in the army. His memory of it now was of a hazy period, solid boredom during the week, solid drunkenness at the weekend, surrounded by non-commissioned officers and officers doing their utmost to deserve the reputation for pig-ignorance associated with their function.

Like most of the men, he had spent a few days in the military jail following more or less drunken fights. Every time he came out again feeling that he had done his level best to become even more like any other man of his age. Although he was surprised by the fact, he didn't like himself; and not liking himself, he didn't feel the need to ‘improve' the image and social status of the imbecile doing such a bad impression of him before the eyes of the world.

The garrison commander had finally taken umbrage at this grumpy and notoriously incompetent non-commissioned officer and had decided to get rid of him as quickly as possible. By one of those odd quirks that are not uncommon in army administration, Mathieu had been summoned to Paris and then forgotten for months in an office at the ministry. He had used the time to scour Paris and meet the young woman who would occupy his heart and body for the rest of his stay.

His disciplinary posting to Algeria had, at first sight, come at the worst possible moment, but he consoled himself with the thought that his contract would expire less than six months later and that
real life
would then begin, with that Françoise, for example, or a different one, even prettier and even more in love, if fortune really swung his way. Up to that point, he hadn't had to make any real choices, having been happy to follow, at every stage in his life, the path of least resistance in his decision-making. He had found himself in Algiers the summer before the endless war against the FLN, the National Liberation Front, started.

He hated the country from the very first day. Too hot, too much cheeriness and too much chattering among the Europeans,
too many
Arabs in the streets with their dark looks and this language that was a personal attack due to his ignorance of it and whose guttural sounds conveyed something other than the apparent submissiveness. When his contract ended, driven by the very same process of self-contempt and spineless acquiescence to events that had already pushed him into the army's arms once, he span a coin in front of colleagues as tipsy as he was to decide whether he should re-enlist. The army chiefs of staff were starting to take the ‘troubles' seriously. There were whisperings among the rank-and-file that this wasn't just an umpteenth Arab uprising, but that an organised movement seemed to be coordinating actions by men whom the local newspapers would continue for a long time, seemingly to reassure themselves, to call a bunch of highwaymen.

Mathieu had bet a quarter of his wages that he would leave the army if it came up heads and that he would then choose, well, a career as a… or, even better, a… but, sitting in this kitchen in Algiers opposite a son-in-law who is staring at him with a mixture of animosity and fear, he can no longer remember the professions that had seemed so attractive at the time.

He lost his bet of course and without any regrets signed up for five more years, this time to serve the strange tribe of the Algerian French. It should be said that in the meantime his love for the council employee – and, indeed, for any other subject – had withered like a cut flower in the Mitidja sun. He'd had flings with a few French women. On evenings when his depression was darkest, he satisfied himself by giving an Arab prostitute a good seeing-to in a squalid room in a seedy hotel in Bab-el Oued, before drinking himself senseless in one of the bars along the coast as part of what he called his ‘minimum political programme for friendship between peoples': French cock in a
fatma
's pussy, washed down with a few patriotic
pastis
.

It was incidentally during one of these single-man's pub-crawls, as he was coming out of a little restaurant, that he came across a customer who was drunker than he was, a noisy pimp who'd been thrown out by the owner and lay face down on the ground. Moved by the drunkard's instinctive compassion for his fellows, Mathieu, who was none too steady on his feet himself, pulled the stranger onto the pavement just before a goods lorry sped past, thus saving his life. Between two fits of vomiting, the man – an Arab of around fifty in a magnificent suit – insisted on seeing him again to express his thanks. The man's conception of gratitude was fairly unusual because the next day, after a few drinks, he provided him with no more, no less, than the name and address of the head of an FLN cell in the Casbah. “If it weren't for you, brother, I'd be in the morgue, so we're friends for life now! This free piece of information is my gift to you. It'll give your captain a massive hard-on, just you wait and see! Maybe with time you'll make it to general, who knows? To make sure you get even more credit, don't say it was me who gave you the information but that you just kept your ears pricked while you were chatting to people here and there, if you see what I mean?”

Of course, Mathieu didn't tell Aziz all of this and especially not in this fashion. He just said:
I served in the French army and I was sent to an army base in eastern Algeria.

He didn't specify that his superiors had appreciated enormously the surprise tip-off about the head of one of the nationalist cells in the Casbah and had credited the Breton with it. “How did you pull it off? You don't even speak Arabic. Hmm, you sure have a way with the natives!” an officer exclaimed by way of congratulations. Following the arrest of the minor rebel leader, an officer had ordered Mathieu to take part in the interrogation, reasoning that his knowledge of Arab psychology might be invaluable to help break the prisoner and maybe even to get him to change sides. Mathieu almost retorted that he knew almost as much about the psychology of Tasmanian aborigines, and that the pimp informer (about whom he hadn't breathed a word) was in fact the first native he'd talked to since he'd been sent to bloody Algeria – apart, of course, from Arab hookers. Noting his NCO's reticence, the officer cajoled him, “Don't be modest. It's obvious you've got a knack for this kind of thing and the army needs people of your calibre!”

And thus everything –
everything!
– had been triggered by a stupid misunderstanding: his supposed knowledge of the workings of the Arab soul (often Kabyle, actually) compounded by the crude flattery of an officer short of personnel. Less than twenty months later – and with unexpected zeal on his side – Mathieu was posted to a French army base not far from Sétif, officially at first as an ordinary secretary but in a very particular unit – a DOP, one of the eighteen formidable and deliberately innocuous-sounding Operational Protection Units stationed throughout Algeria whose existence the military authorities would stubbornly deny for years.

Mathieu can't remember which clever thinker it was who asserted that history was an abattoir in which individuals and whole peoples were sacrificed. In his case, he knows it was his
soul
(he sniggers at the solemn word his memory has had the nerve to use) that he deliberately murdered while serving in that damn DOP. When his feet first trod Algerian soil, he was nothing more than a poorly rated, lazy and boozy soldier. His dishonour was not yet sealed. A part of him hoped that some day, for no particular reason, the beautiful butterfly within him would extricate itself and fly away fast from the disgusting caterpillar he'd resigned himself to being up to that point.

He had once been a child himself and so excitable in his admiration for the great privateers of Saint-Malo that he had secretly nicknamed himself ‘Li'l Robert' after the illustrious Robert Surcouf. This little Breton would revisit him, ticking him off in his sleep, utterly exasperated but not yet despairing:
Hey, arsehole, drunkard, you shitty little wino, when are you going to
really
look out for me?
Mathieu sometimes dreamt that he shouted back across time at his alter ego for using such totally inappropriate language for his age, only to wake up on the verge of tears and realise that it was actually him who was the embodiment of obscenity compared to the innocence of the boy he'd once been.

In that god-awful DOP, the poisonous miracle of abjection that lies in wait for all men had taken hold of him; if opportunity makes the thief, it also produces swine by the cartload. Mathieu had become an efficient and reasonably respected NCO, whose drunken weekend binges were forgiven because he achieved his objectives of making the captured
fells
talk at any cost, combining persuasion, insults and, naturally, torture with the single-minded goal of filling in the local rebel organisation's chain of command. The screams – every one atrociously
individual
– of each broken man (another ‘box' ticked…) could only be forgotten by substituting them with others, like glasses of alcohol replaced by new glasses of alcohol.

How had he come to this? He'd never totally understood, and even today, years later, he wouldn't have known how to explain, not to this Algerian, crushed by grief, – it was impossible, he would rather tell him barefaced lies – but at least to himself (dear God,
to himself
!) how he had graduated so quickly – in two or three weeks – from insults and punches in the back to his first real beating, then kicks in the stomach, water-boarding and electric shocks. He couldn't even cite greed as an excuse – the wages were terrible; nor conviction – like a
pied noir
, for example, losing control at the thought that these subhuman Arab rats who were so dirty, so ignorant and until now so submissive should have the cheek to contest the ownership of this land that his parents and grandparents had seized in fierce fighting in 1830 and brought to fruition ever since.

Sometimes, after
work
, in a moment of alcoholic abandon, he would catch a glimpse in the eyes of his colleagues, even the worst ones, those who abused female prisoners before torturing them, of a similar stunned question:
Hey, my Man, ruling everything from Your immaculate paradise, is
this
all I was born for? To be worth less than a mangy dog's turd? When exactly did I become ‘unhinged'?

No one would have put it that baldly: he would have been called a sentimental chicken happy to offer up his Vaseline-free anus to a Muslim prick or, worse, sent to a different unit for defeatism and aiding the enemy through such Communist propaganda. Of course, most of the time they were only too happy to cling to the general clamour surrounding the ‘question': patriotic oompah-pah about defending France and Christendom, fighting Bolshevism and Nasserism, the barbarity of their rat-like adversary who massacred one hostile village after another without a second thought, drawing ear-to-ear ‘Kabyle smiles' as a matter of course or chopping off French squaddies' dicks and stuffing them in their mouths… When they felt like it, they believed so firmly in these self-protecting justifications that they would enjoy the sleep of the just for weeks until the yelps of pain of a new suspect – even if this one wasn't tortured much more than his brothers before him – pierced the bottom of the raft that kept them from sinking into their own filth.

Sergeant Mathieu had fought off drowning by repeating that there would be an end to all this – either the end of the war against the
fells
or at least the end of his contract with the army. He could imagine returning to his native Brittany and getting absolutely blind-drunk for a week, no, more like a month or, better still, taking a year's sabbatical dedicated exclusively to getting plastered in settlement of Algeria, before making a fresh start, memory purged and mind purified, to take care of that damn kid, the admirer of privateers who once dreamed of glory and honour.