Morel, followed by the pink diplomat, walks away from Max and de Vèze towards his wife.
‘They make a lovely couple,’ says Max to de Vèze, ‘I mean the husband and wife, but she must find him a bit of a bore at times, even if he does take her round all the embassies, did you know he used to be a member of the Communist Party? Actually, he’s not the only one here this evening who came up via the Party, not you, you never had the time, anyway all these young people here this evening did, yes, I’m very well informed, it’s my job, there isn’t one of these youngsters who resisted the temptation, even the bearded chap in grey, likewise his pink chum, and maybe the young woman too, but Budapest, ’56, went deep, they all jumped ship and then explained more or less why to the “bourgeois press”, yes, I was there too, Budapest, I’ve seen a bit of everything.
‘The hardest part? With those Russian tanks you’re spoiled for choice. But if you want the biggest funk I was ever in: youngsters, a bridge over the Danube, just before the Russians arrived, a gang of kids, none more than thirteen, nobody knew where they came from, looked dirt poor, I was talking to passers-by who were carrying loaves of bread home, one of them shouted laughingly to the kids: aren’t you a bit young to be playing with those? A quick burst of gunfire, the kids had sub-machine guns, the man I’d been talking to lying there in his own blood, breathing his last, the kids continue pointing their guns at us, they have the eyes of chicken-thieves.
‘The people who had loaves put them down on the ground for the kids to see and then we all backed away, very slowly, you couldn’t get to those kids, I’ve seen as much real war as you, but I never felt as scared as I did that day, so anyway, Budapest, for these young people who are here with us this evening, marked the break with their classless dreams, and today they’re all Gaullists or congregate in the centre or belong to the “wait-and-see” brigade, that’s why they think so much of this man who’s keeping us waiting, he did exactly what they did, or rather they did what he did, though without the risks and the fanfares.
‘Me? I never really felt tempted, never read Marx, I prefer Shakespeare, history always barks like a mad dog. By the way, Ambassador, were you aware that we’ve met before? Obviously you don’t remember.’
Max leaves de Vèze, zigzags his way across the lawn, the sky has cleared, now and then the wind carries a few fading drops of rain or sea-spray, in the distance a few weak attempts at rainbows, a pale look to everything, the ocean and the moist air dilute and flatten, absence of anything to catch the eye, of high ground, ars, in Morocco there was more contrast, they called it ars abu lhawa, the clouds drift away, a still damp sun, the brown land shiningly wet, a rainbow against the sky, very bright, the agent for Native Affairs had translated for Max, ars is marriage, so ‘the jackal’s wedding’, the jackal is truly their animal, their Reynard the Fox, and it also defines their politics, a jackal and a lion were sleeping on the edge of a ravine, the jackal says to the lion move over please, and the sleeping lion starts to fall over the edge, at the last moment he reaches out with his claws, pulls the jackal’s tail clean off and as he falls cries I’ll recognise you when we meet again! The jackal, minus tail, lopes off, gathers all the other jackals together, says let’s go and eat apricots, they reach the apricot-tree, how do we get at the apricots? I’ll tie all your tails to the apricot-tree, you shake it, then we’ll eat the apricots, so he ties all their tails, then goes to keep watch while they shake the tree. He races back shouting, hunters! dogs! every man for himself!
And off he runs. All the jackals pull so hard that their tails come off, the lion catches our jackal, you made me fall, I pulled your tail off, our jackal says that all jackals are tail-less, send for them, they all come, now which one will you recognise?
The pulled-off tail is a political fable, Monsieur Goffard, here, as soon as a jackal loses his tail he does everything he can to ensure that he’s not the only one it happens to, that’s how you get them exactly where you want them.
Max rejoins the young woman, takes her by the elbow with the familiarity that is allowed to men of his age, he brushes Morel to one side.
‘We must talk rags.’
He whisks her off from under de Vèze’s nose and just as de Vèze is about to say something, Max steers her towards the Consul’s wife, leaves her there, I amuse her, I’m the person she feels most at ease with this evening, I’m the oldest but I’m not that old, how old is Chaplin? The girl’s bored, we could see each other again in town, between four walls, I wouldn’t be a nuisance to have around, true, but I’m not Chaplin, this convolvulus is lovely, that blue, the faded hues of burnt sienna, you don’t often come across convolvulus in those colours, it’s unreal, in the Chefchaouen region they had a song that went something like ‘might as well try to separate me from you as to disentangle the poppy from the bindweed’, it was a war fought thicket to thicket, rock to rock, pursuits over scree hanging on to branches of juniper, at dawn along jackal trails, they know the terrain like the back of their hands, God help those who abandoned their fields and went to live in towns, magnificent clumps of oleander in the beds of wadis which hadn’t seen real rain for years, some roots would burrow down fifteen, twenty, thirty metres looking for water, Abd el-Krim’s lieutenants said that after they’d won the war they’d rebuild Al Andalûs and its fountains, but their men hated towns.
The pink diplomat walks over to de Vèze, asks him what he thinks of Monsieur Goffard who is so keen to be called Clappique, rather provocative, don’t you think? don’t you feel he’s trying to create an incident? the way he looked at the main gate saying I’ll get even, yes, he passes through here once or twice a year, the Consul cultivates him for what he knows, we don’t like him much, and tonight he seems even more out of control than usual.
De Vèze gives the impression that he’s listening to the pink diplomat though he’s really watching the historian’s wife just a few metres away who is standing in front of a bank of green leaves and convolvulus.
‘The garden is superb,’ says the pink diplomat, ‘you don’t know anything about plants? I’ll soon put that right, I won’t say anything about orchids, they’re all over the island, but have you seen the trees, the arboretum?’
De Vèze can’t see it.
‘I’ll show you, not the coconut trees nor the palms or the bamboos, look there, clove-trees, and behind them, in the distance, on the left, that strange object that looks like a tangle, at the sea-edge, it gives off a rather acrid smell, like ammonia, decomposition, you must have heard of it? A speciality of the region, the man who used to own the property insisted on having one in his garden and it did so well that we’ve never managed to get rid of it, you need to keep an eye on virtually a daily basis, or just keep it dry, too much work, so we leave it to its own devices, it’s not unpleasant to look at and it doesn’t smell unless the weather gets too hot, it’s a complete world of unlikely shapes, an underworld, larvae, transparent crabs, fish which breathe with lungs, tadpoles, globules of what looks like snot, all fermenting, sucking, roots reaching up and grabbing the air, water-spiders in the matted branches, I’m boring you, did you see? Something moved, you know sometimes you can see monkeys up in the leaves, real ones, on the lawn it’s all so very different,’ palm to the sky the hand of the pink diplomat gestures towards the croquet players only a few metres away, he gives the impression that he is sizing them up, he murmurs: ‘This is what we fought two world wars to defend!’