The resting place for the dead ‘as worthy as the mind of man’, it sounds like a response to the Minister, says Morel, happy to have found this question to ask when his wife stopped talking, he is cross with himself for not knowing the work of Malraux as well as the rest of the company, but basically he doesn’t think much of The Human Condition, he’s a historian, he never got beyond what one of his teachers said of it, ‘Chinese news items stewed in adjectives’, exactly the kind of history that Morel loathes, fiction culled from newspapers, the instant seductive come-on, just like the Ambassador sitting opposite his wife, it’s as plain as a pikestaff that he wants to lose no time in seducing her with that big mouth of his.
‘That’s right,’ says Malraux, ‘it was a response to Benda, he’d accused intellectuals of betraying the mind by opposing fascism, he was wrong, but anyway that passage is very oral, I wanted a voice to be heard, to release the novel from the silence of the page, I turned the thing almost into a canticle.’
Max:
‘Good God! A song of praise, death of the knight, end of the hero, but in the novel I offered another canticle, struck a discordant note, the note that banjaxes emotion, canticles are complicated chaps, especially when they come with discordant notes!’
‘What other canticle?’ Morel asks Max.
‘The Pieds-Nickelés-type canticle, the one he makes me tell before the death of Kyo,’ says Max, ‘when I manage to get on the boat leaving Shanghai, absolutely, while the others are imitating roast meat in the boilers of railway engines, I shake the dust of Shanghai from my feet with a dexterity worthy of the Pieds Nickelés, you must watch out for those Pieds Nickelés, the Master stuck a patch over my eye, said it was like Filochard’s in the Pieds Nickelés, true, but not very nice, whereas I was hoping to be promoted to at least a Lear-type fool or maybe Scapin, a real out-and-out knave, but the Master has always been able to wind me round his little finger, he put one over on me first time we met in Indochina more than forty years ago, I helped to get him out of jail, and then he used my articles about Shanghai for his novel, and so that no one would notice he put me in it, he made me older, turned me into a dealer in antiquities and saddled me with the name Clappique, I had to kick up a stink to make him cut a scene he’d put me in, can you imagine it, a hotel, I’m in the dark, with a large naked woman, surrounded by men breathing heavily, a voyeurs’ orgy.
‘I act canny, he makes me run away, down corridors I go, trousers flapping, I would have none of it, I’m not sure if the incident of the voyeurs was something that happened to him, in the end he cut it, and the attack on the police station in the novel, a bravura passage, a triumph, it was actually I who first reported it in Le Soir, I was there with a colleague, Andrée Viollis, and Albert Londres, which, Monsieur Poirgade, explains my “Good God!” even though it pains you, I’ll say it whenever I want, and especially when I feel low because my author made me a Pied Nickelé, not a fool like Lear’s, not even permitted to read the future though I was born to be a prophet, oh I know, nowadays I’d be allowed to say whatever I like, but there’s nothing left to say.’
Suddenly Max has the feeling that no one round the table is listening to him, or that they are pretending to listen because no one wants to be rude and interrupt, they’re just waiting for him to stop, he could say absolutely anything, don’t tell the story of the canticle, he could be somewhere else, leave Singapore, don’t go to Vietnam, still saying the same thing, I’ll end up begging in the street, I should have been a beggar from the start, Max-the-beggar, beggar and madman, later the Japanese sacked Shanghai, rats in gutters don’t distinguish between a baby and a dog, the baby doesn’t move as much, the magnificent Samurai have stopped laughing, and these people sitting here smiling around the table while the moon comes up over the garden all take me for a beggar, the kids with their rain maidens, no more kids, all they’d found were Riffian dolls on dung-heaps, the little piles of pebbles, the rain maidens, the Riff and its tales of jackals, the songs sung by the harvesters in the fields, songs that promised ‘for you I will screen the grain, I will riddle the grain, I will fetch wood, I will paint your cheeks, fold me in your arms, give me drink that the wicked may gnash their teeth’, report submitted by Armengaud, chief of French airborne forces in Morocco, I have the honour to respectfully draw to your attention the results obtained by the systematic, intensive bombing of the souks, over a period of a few days five bombing raids left a minimum of five hundred victims, I have given instructions for the tallies to give only the number of victims, without specifying age or sex, the impression produced has been very great.
Terror reigns among the natives who actually have a tendency to exaggerate their losses, on 15 September 1925, several squadrons, one hundred and sixty-nine single-engine planes in the skies over the small settlement of Beni Zeroual, the heavy bombers, the Breguets and Farman Goliaths, have been reserved for Chefchaouen, an undefended town, they carry as markings the Shereef’s star with a hand of fatma at its centre, the planes of the 1st Squadron had a swastika instead of the hand of fatma, the state to which the town was reduced by the bombing even impressed the Spaniards.
Bombing in waves over the town, it lasts three days, no fire returned, the warriors are about a hundred kilometres away, strafing of anything that moves in the streets, by lighter aircraft, on the left at the entrance to the town half a dead bull in the middle of the road, the gunners also used donkeys as targets to see them jerk their heads back like mad things when they were hit.
Fierce conflagrations, one woman finds herself with a breast full in the face, half a child between her feet, birds from hell, children and women throw stones at the Breguets, three days of bombing, the real number of civilian casualties at Chefchaouen is difficult to assess because the French pilots are reluctant to give exact estimates of the losses inflicted, Max and the agent for Native Affairs traversing what was once a small village, ochre dust, leaden sky, very grey, the greyness is everywhere.
Max saying you were telling me the other day about an enemy with two faces, one fierce one noble, very well, but how many faces do we have? Max putting the question a different way, your paladin upright in the stirrups, blue kepi, red cloak, how does he manage to defend widows and orphans if the widow and the orphan also start to disappear? When I say disappear it’s because I don’t want to talk about guts, stuffing your guts back inside you with your hands, smashed abdomens, skulls with strange stuff oozing out from inside, mouths gasping for air, air that doesn’t come.
A loud Bang! and a man is no more than the sum of his nerves, flayed raw, especially when his skin has disappeared, let’s be euphemistic and say disappeared, even if you still have in your nose a stench which only very slowly disappears from your surroundings, I experienced it at Douaumont, when you realise that an eye is only one organ among many, and the blast from a bomb can eviscerate a body in just one second, we used to say it was all about defending women and children back home, but here the only thing left untouched by some miracle is a dungheap, with one of those doll things sticking out of the top, among the smells of dung, dust, rotting flesh, cordite, it’s all that’s left, a doll and the smells that hang on the air which grows hotter, more oppressive, not a breath of air, smells layered in the air.