The Mysteries of Algiers Read Online Free PDF Page A

creature, but at the same instant that I marvel at her body I find it revolts me. The big breasts, the flesh round the hips, superfluous flesh everywhere, the big eyes which out of the context of her carefully made-up face might be mistaken for jelly fish, smells that allure and repel. I have seen so much flesh in other contexts, electrocuted, charred, drowned, dismembered and smelling, that my response to any human body cannot be unambivalent. It must be the same for all of us serving in Algeria.
    Temperamentally and politically too there was a great divide between Chantal and myself. It is enough now to remark that Chantal’s politics are the politics of the shoulder-blades. So she herself has described it to me. The shiver that travels up the spine, between the shoulder-blades, and tingles at the nape of her neck and brings tears to her eyes, this shiver is her political master. The manifestations of the political shiver are rare and not announced in advance, but they are crucial. The singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ in a night-club, the Spahis cantering by on full-dress parade, a child, miraculously still alive, dragged from the rubble of an FLN bomb outrage, suchlike stuff. My view of politics is more logical.
    And there is her class. I am not of her class. Who is? In Algeria, only members of ‘the hundred families’. The de Serkissians own vineyards, olive groves, tobacco plantations, a bauxite mine and a casino. And despite that frivolous champagne and Jaguars look, she is an intellectual and a reader of books. I am not fond of all that. It’s the negation of action. It is after all the intellectuals, the academics and the journalists who are paralysing the military offensive now. The French are going to surrender Algeria after losing a series of debates in a coffee bar. And a lot of men on both sides have got killed, while the intellectuals maundered on. Killed for nothing. I am serious about this.
    In Chantal’s favour it has to be conceded that the books she likes best are about or by men of action – Saint-Exupéry’s Voyage through the Night, Junger’s Storm of Steel, Ouida’s Under Two Flags. Most endearingly of all, she is devoted to The Three Musketeers. She knows all their adventures by heart and she has told me that on the day of her first communion she took a secret vow before the altar to live her life exactly as D’Artagnan would have lived it – if D’Artagnan had been a woman living in French Algeria.
    I lie silent for a while thinking of the case that could be put to the colonel that the traitor has only just arrived at Fort Tiberias and that Chantal is that traitor. She has had access to most desert operation files for over a year now. She met Mercier. The family estates were vulnerable to an FLN protection racket …
    We continue idly discussing the shortlist of suspects, though really shortlist is a misnomer. A full-blown traitor in the army, as opposed to some liberal intellectual officer with a queasy conscience, a full-blown military traitor is so rare in this war that internal security procedures have become very sloppy here at the fort, and at Laghouat and Tizi-Ouzo. Almost every officer knew or could have known about al-Hadi’s trip to Algiers and the tail that was being put on him. Most of them knew about the planned swoop on the Bani Fadl, and again could have known about the July pipeline patrol arrangements. Most disturbing of all from a security point of view, almost every man, commissioned or other ranks, in Fort Tiberias has a pretty good idea what was going on thirty miles to the south at Reganne and how the nuclear test could be disrupted by the FLN . Even if fears of a full-blown traitor are judged to be without foundation, still desertions from the Legion are a common enough occurrence, and escaped legionnaires often like to make a new start in civilian life by selling their story to the papers. I at first assumed that the three civilians and the para major who were