Blame It on the Bossa Nova (20 page)

I joined the end of the procession which was making its way to the church. Everything had come to a halt in the village. People joined those of us behind the coffin as we passed them. Old ladies sat on hard chairs put out for them on the pavement. Those that remained watching had the look of active participants in grief, or at least sorrow. Idle curiosity was not in evidence.

At the front a woman’s voice sang out sentences of requiem, which were answered by everyone present except me, who in ignorance of the words remained silent. At the church the coffin was carried inside and the crowd fanned out to fill the small square in front of the entrance. I found myself again close to Pascale who was holding her mother by one arm, Marie had the other. They were clutching rosaries and praying, mouthing the supplications.

The cemetery was a car ride away. Louis organized a place for me with some relatives whom I hadn’t yet met and I climbed into the back of an old Peugeot. At the cemetery I stood at the back as the final words were spoken and the coffin was eventually placed into the fifth floor of a great wall of high-rise graves. It was half way up, the wall actually went up to a height of nine compartments. There were gaps for persons as yet unknown or as yet living. The marble fronts to the occupied ones were well tended with artificial flowers and electrically lit candles and photographs of the deceased in the style of the photograph of Pascale’s uncle. It was beginning to get dark as we made our way back to the cars.

At the house a wiry woman cousin rapidly supervised the pouring of brandy into tiny glasses, I wondered whether these were especially for funerals, and we tossed them back in a single gulp. People quickly dispersed from Pascale’s flat, leaving her and her mother alone. I chatted downstairs in the yard to a guy from Poitiers who had come up by car. He wasn’t sufficiently upset by the business to prevent us from having a typically boring, polite conversation. Jeanne, the wife of the dead man’s brother came up and sat with Pascale’s mother. After Pascale’s years away she was closer to her than Pascale, maybe she would have been closer anyway. Pascale and I stood outside on the balcony, it was freezing cold now that night had set in but it didn’t discomfort us. I asked her what they made in the factory and she told me that they’d used to make parts for motorcar engines but that since she’d left the owners had gone broke and now she didn’t know what they did there. I asked her other questions about the village, which she answered. We heard sounds of movement inside and Jeanne came to the door and said that she and Pascale’s mother were going to sleep together in the big bed in the back room. She told Pascale to come out of the cold and after we’d heard them go into the bedroom we went back inside. I glanced at my watch, it was just gone ten. We sat down at the table. After a silence Pascale volunteered a statement.

“It could have been a big funeral.”

“I thought it was pretty big. The biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

“I mean really big... He didn’t want it. My mother told me, he’d said to her a couple of years ago, he didn’t want a big funeral....” She got up and went to close the shutters and the window, then she came back and sat down. “... He was sentenced to death, twice. First in 1917 by Petain, then by the Germans in the last war... In 1917 he was just a kid but he helped organize the mutiny in his regiment. It wasn’t political, they were being wiped out... He got away, my mother didn’t see him ‘til two years after the war, he was working in Brussels, in a factory... The last war he was in the maquis, he wasn’t a leader, he was older than most of them..... He was stupid, he never did know when to keep his head down. In war that’s called bravery. They talked him into running the escape route in these parts, the Germans found out but he got away... he was lucky like that. It was near the end so he wasn’t away long... he was a Comrade. My mother didn’t agree with him about things, so he told me all about it when I was a little girl, all about the twenties and the thirties, and the wars. He couldn’t argue, not intellectually. He had it all in his gut - The best place.” She reached across to a drawer and took out an envelope containing photographs - one a young man in an oval haze, the other an older man. “.... That one’s going on the stone.” She tapped the picture of the older man then passed me the other photograph. “... That one was taken just before he went away in 1915.”

I looked at the impish, innocent face that had cheated death fifty years before. “... The other one was taken about ten years ago.”

It was a different man, resigned, wry. It was only something about the eyes that told you it was the same person - before and after life’s magical mystery tour.

“Thanks Pascale,” I said and handed them back. She carefully put them in the envelope and slid them into a drawer in the table.

“We’ll want them tomorrow,” she said. “... They’ll be printing the cards.”

We chatted about a few silly things, then she asked me to help her get the divan set up. We shifted the table back and she yanked the thing open, revealing an unpromising looking mattress. From behind a small curtain in a niche she got out some sheets and blankets and we made the bed together. Once made it seemed logical to get into it and I stripped down to my vest and pants, Pascale to her slip. I put off the light at the switch next to the ancient door with its huge locks and bolts, and then groped my way back to the side of the bed in the dark, feeling the dust from the crumbling clay tiles insinuating itself between my toes and powdering the underside of my feet. When we finally stopped moving, the sounds of the house began to reassert themselves, the slow heavy breathing from next door.

“Your mama’s sleeping,” I said.

“I knew she’d sleep, it’s the first time for four days. She won’t sleep tomorrow I bet.”

Rain or sleet lashed the wooden shutters. I propped the pillow against the wall behind my head and lay wide-awake.

“D’you want a fag?” said Pascale. She was wide-awake too.

“.............................He wrecked my life........ I love him, but he wrecked my life... He had no one else to talk to. His brothers didn’t care, they probably didn’t even vote communist... When I was a little girl he explained the world to me - His world. And of course I believed every word of it... That’s why I went to Algeria... He wrecked my fucking life.”

Things were stirring deep inside her, things about her, not her father. I didn’t move. To move might have deflected that fragile train of thought. “... Frank was right, I was in Algeria...... Do you know anything about it?”

“Not much.”

She laughed: “No. No one knows much about it. The only ones who know anything about it are the ones that were there doing the fighting, on both sides. And they don’t talk about it much... Did you know there are good wars, wars where people fire guns at each other and some of them drop down dead. They’re the nice wars. Algeria wasn’t like that...” She was silent for a long time. I was trying to think of the most subtle way of prompting her when she continued. “You remember that time when I told you about myself. It wasn’t all lies, there was quite a lot of truth mixed up in it. I really did want to be a P.T. Instructor, I really have got a weak left eye. It’s just that it didn’t break my heart when they turned me down. That was probably my last chance to be ‘normal’. I went to Paris, I was looking for trouble. I got picked up by the police once or twice..... stupid things. Luckily I was with the sort of set they don’t prosecute - It’s called high spirits if you’ve got rich parents or useful friends.... My father got so fucked up by what De Gaulle did in ‘44 and ‘45; for him that was the end of the world. He could only see everything black, no hope. I had no respect for anything. Contempt, that’s what he gave me... It’s a dangerous thing when it doesn’t come with experience...... I told you I was living with a journalist - He wasn’t like a real journalist. A rich kid, he wrote for Left magazines. He was intelligent, his trouble was he was bourgeois deep down. A liberal, safe with it. Camus was his great hero. It was a good set, we had a great time. Then we met this Pied Noire kid at the Sorbonne. He came from a ‘good family’ in Algiers. He was what you might call charismatic, we all loved him... superficially. The kind of love that gives no pain, only pleasure. He started fucking me immediately, I think that Guy, the boy I was with, half knew. This Algerian kid was called Jean, he was more radical, he supported the FLN. That was quite something for a Pied Noire - That’s a white Algerian.

It was 1956. A week before the summer holidays he invited us to go back, and we went... I was twenty one a week after we got out there and Jean threw a party on the beach. I got drunk and ended up in bed with an old school teacher of Jean’s. He was beautiful....... Jean didn’t care, that’s why I liked him so much. Guy had begun to get possessive.

Things started to hot up in Algeria that summer. They guillotined two FLN men in June and that was the final straw that brought the war into Algiers. The week before we arrived the FLN shot forty nine civilians in Algiers - That was the first time the FLN had done anything inside the city.... Jean had Arab friends, a mixed bunch. All middle class types - some of them merchants, others students, one or two Arab politicians. They were suspicious of me of course. Suspicious of Jean too, but after a while they let me go into the Casbah... We used to talk all night. I was in the Casbah the night the Ultras blew up the house in Rue de Thebes, in retaliation for the reprisals after the executions. They killed seventy people with that bomb - mainly women and kids. After that there was no going back. They decided to attack everything after that. I said I wanted to help. They gave me little jobs to test me - lookout, decoy. I did a few things I’m not proud of, things I don’t think I could do now….. After a while they accepted me. Guy went back to Paris in the September and so did Jean. I hadn’t seen either of them for a month by then... I was living in the Casbah by now..... Have you ever heard of Yacef Saadi?.... He was in charge of the Algiers network - operations. We were always being moved round, there were always raids... There were five girls, I was one. Near the end of September Yacef called us in and told us we were going to bomb the Europeans. Not the soldiers or the police, but anyone. My bomb was for a cafe near the beach. It was a tiny bomb. The other girls got dressed up as Europeans so that they wouldn’t get noticed in the Pied Noire areas. Yacef told us again about the Rue de Thebes, he told us we were avenging it. We were in a way... I was meant to leave my bomb in a bag under the table and walk out. I couldn’t do it. ...... I left it in a disused warehouse round the corner – there was no one anywhere near it when it went off...... I couldn’t fucking do it Alex...... So fucking bourgeois, so fucking soft.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being soft,” I said quietly.

“The other bombs went off – except one. Three people were killed, a lot were injured. They never trusted me after that bomb didn’t go off in the café. After that I couldn’t trust anybody.……..Every time I started to think about the injured people I thought about the napalm the French were dropping on the Zone Interdite, or the Paras cold bloodedly executing innocent kids- I mean kids- in the country..... Then at the end of December the FLN killed a war hero and they had to call the Paras into Algiers. After that we’d had it................ It wasn’t my war, I didn’t know the whole truth about Philippeville. D’you know about that? I’ll tell you.... You see a lot of the leaders of the Wilyas - that’s a strategic area, an FLN fighting unit - were intellectuals. They’d read all the Indo-Chinese and Latin American revolutionary theory. In ‘55 the war was going badly, they decided to create a political crisis, commit a violent, shocking act that will provoke heavy repression which will alienate the previously uncommitted masses. In August ‘55 they wiped out a European village called El-Halia, near Philippeville; they butchered all the women and children they could find. They disembowelled a mother and killed her five day old baby, then put the baby back in her womb. They went berserk... That was thought up by intellectuals. The Pied Noires went crazy. In the ratissages they killed twelve thousand Muslims, nearly all of them innocent... Twelve thousand. That was in an area where previously the Muslims and the Europeans had got on well... Well you think that’s bad don’t you, you can almost say to yourself, I can understand why the Europeans kill them out of hand, only animals would do things like they did. Jacques Soustelle did. Philippeville changed him.............. A hundred years ago the French Army lit fires at the mouths of caves and deliberately suffocated fifteen hundred men, women and children. Not one person survived.......... Where does it start? Where does it end? It’s like a forest fire, you can only try to contain it, and hope there’s some of the forest left after it’s burned itself out........

I knew that after I had fucked up with their bomb I was finished with them. I began to get scared that they thought I was a double agent, they were never the same with me after that. I was sure they were going to bump me off so I got out first. I had nowhere to go, so I started sleeping rough. That must have convinced them if they had any doubts. One night I slept in the warehouse where I’d left the bomb. They probably knew where I was all the time, maybe they were waiting to see who I contacted. The Paras followed me around for days before they picked me up. They were hoping I’d lead them to Yacef. But I didn’t know where he was and he was the last person I wanted to see. It was after the Paras broke up the General Strike in January, then they found the bomb factory and we were all on the run. It was breaking up so fast.... they just tapped me on the shoulder as I was walking down the Rue Michelet one day. They took me to a villa up above the town overlooking the bay. It was a beautiful house, beautiful gardens. They let it grow wild but it was still beautiful. They’d equipped it for torture.... I wasn’t as brave as the others. One girl, Djamila, they caught her and tortured her. She knew where Yacef was, but she wouldn’t tell them. I’d have told them. I’d have told them the colour of his underpants if I’d known... By ‘57 the Paras were experts at torture. They could torture you and not leave a mark. But they wanted to mark me, so they let the new recruits practice on me. They were just young kids, my age or less. They burned me all over. I’ve seen you looking at the scars....Then they gave me over to the experts for the ‘gegene’ - electrodes. First of all just in the ear or on a finger. Then in the mouth, the tits.... everywhere. I can’t tell you what that does to you because you cease to exist when it happens...... When they weren’t doing that they put a hose in my mouth and blocked my nose so that my stomach and nose filled like a balloon. It’s like you’re dead... The unimaginative ones just use to semi-drown me in a trough of water...... And in between all this I used to look out over the Bay of Algiers and the Pied Noires in their speed boats and think of Guy and Jean back in Paris at the Sorbonne, writing their different political tracts of carefully weighted extremism, and I used to pray that two of Massu’s big, strong, healthy Paras would just pick me up and throw me through the window, because I knew that even as I fell to my beautiful simple sudden death, my soul would be flying up and outwards, and over that beautiful blue bay and the speed boats....... Eventually they got round to trying me. I got twenty years. It was only circumstantial evidence, no identifying witnesses, but it would have been the guillotine if I’d been a man. I was only in prison for two years, I got out under De Gaulle’s amnesty in ‘61. It’s funny, my papa had De Gaulle to thank for getting me back. Not that I went back. The day I got out of prison my papa wouldn’t have recognised me if I’d passed him in the street. I hadn’t seen him since I left home in ‘54. I didn’t want him to see what I’d turned into.... I never did get round to coming back..................