The Conspiracy (9 page)

Simon at first endured with extreme impatience the obligation to act as the sentimental messenger and intermediary of a non-commissioned officer who was basically nothing but a pimp. He then told himself, recalling certain sergeants he had known at Clignancourt, that a procurer is at least better than an invert or a brute, and that this complicity would give him the right to demand of the Sergeant-Major, with the proper degree of insolence, certain favours and the right to lie low when he felt like it. Besides, Giudici had a kind of lazy affability which his smile, his Bastia accent and his colonial lies endowed with considerable charm. Simon ended by taking pleasure in his brief passages through a frivolous, turbulent and lax universe, of which he had hitherto had no suspicion and which never yielded up to him its true secrets. He would have been no intellectual if he had not been sensitive to all changes of scene and capable of romanticizing them: he was naively astonished to find himself in Rue Pascal, just as he would have marvelled to see himself in China or Peru.

So Simon would go into some bar, which would usually be painted in melancholy colours, and would ask at the counter whether Madame Jeanne or Madame Lucie was there: when she was absent, he would say that he would call again; when she was there, he would deliver a message from Giudici. The Sergeant-Major's lady friends would welcome him with the mechanical familiarity common to whores and soldiers.

— You're Sergeant-Major Giudici's orderly? he would be asked.

— Not exactly, Simon would reply. Just one of his men.

— You won't leave without a little drop of something . . .

He would sip drinks that filled him with the greatest mistrust while Madame Jeanne, or Madame Lucie, read the letter. Sometimes the recipient would exclaim:

— Oh, the swine! the swine! You can go and tell your sarge from me that he can just bugger off, and he'd better not set foot in here again! Not ever!

Some days, everything would go off peacefully and Simon would sit down and listen patiently, overcome by the paralysis that affects you when you are having a shoeshine or a haircut, to the rambling confidences of the Luxemburger girl from Rue Saint-Jacques or the mulatto girl from Rue des Feuillantines, as if these stories had been a kind of sweet, purring message. The women had tangled lives and an extraordinarily pernickety concern for their dignity, their
amour propre
, for absurd points of honour, like points of honour in the days of the Hundred Years War.

One evening, a young woman brought Simon back in a taxi to the barrack gates, all the way from the café in the 12th opposite the 46th Infantry barracks where he had gone to meet her. It was April, night was beginning to fall, the air was sharp and blue, it was pretty cold for the time of year. Simon, who was growing numb in that spring coolness, said nothing because those exuberant women intimidated him sufficiently for him to be convinced he was not attracted by them. Suddenly he felt a burning hand alight on his thigh and fumble at the buttons of his uniform breeches; he made to push it away, but a rather husky voice said:

— Just relax, my darling . . . It'll warm you up. The driver can't see a thing – as you see, he's got no rear-view mirror . . .

Simon released the wrist he was grasping and surrendered himself, till he was shaken by a pleasure whose violence shattered him and gave him ideas about the skill of whores that he had always regarded as mythical. In the darkness, he then kissed an invisible mouth filled with flowing, silvery saliva; he touched the tip of a flattened breast, a shaven sex of horrifying but fiery nakedness. The taxi steered a lengthy course over the icy waters of the evening to the winking lights of Lourcine. When he climbed out, the young woman, whose name it seemed was Gladys, told him to wipe the lipstick from his mouth.

Simon saw her again. When he left her, on the threshold of her room full of calendars, with its velvet clown cushions on the bed, Gladys would put packets of cigarettes into his greatcoat pockets and tell him that she loved him, using expressions of disgusting obscenity from which he derived a kind of pride.

These dealings no doubt degraded him, but everything seemed to him justified by the freedom he had to roam aimlessly through the streets of the Left Bank; to go and have a lie down in town, in a lonely hotel room inhabited in the morning by a whore who left in it her aroma of heliotrope and soap, sunk in a private sleep that no bugle tone, no second call, was likely to disturb. He was living in a half-dream that bore no relation to his former or his future life; and when he thought about his Chartes dissertation on Charles V, he mostly felt like laughing.

IX

A few days after 1 May, Rosenthal, who was trembling with anger at the thought of the four thousand five hundred preventive arrests which the commissioner of police had organized that year, sent Simon an express letter asking him to come and see him, as though he were in a hurry to retaliate against the forcible measures of the police. André went to put on some civilian clothes he had entrusted to Gladys, then made his way to Avenue Mozart. He would have been ashamed to show himself in the uniform of a colonial regiment anywhere except between the Observatory and the Jardin des Plantes.

Bernard asked Simon how things were going with him and – since it almost always happens that young men lie rather less to their friends than to their parents and are prone to boast to them about things they would hide from their fathers – Simon told him. It had been understood between them for years that they told each other everything. Or almost everything.

It made a lengthy recital – the two barracks, the sergeant-majors, the whores, and the story of Gladys and the taxi from the 12th. These confidences, imparted in Rosenthal's bedroom in front of the Lenin, the Chirico and the Descartes, suddenly appeared remarkable. Bernard grew annoyed: he had a moralistic side to him and found it hard to endure any of his friends enjoying a relaxed existence. Valuing nothing more highly than fullness and tension, he held the opinion that a man must be uneasy. Finally he upbraided Simon for seeming not to realize the baseness of his life, and told him that this indifference was worse than the enjoyment itself. Simon replied that he realized it perfectly well, but could not care less:

— My only pleasure consists in casting off all restraint, he said. This military life turns my very bones to jelly. I feel myself dissolving altogether. Luckily, I've discovered how to turn an idiotic bondage, from which I could get relief only by dint of constant guile and an extremely wearisome presence of mind, into a slightly dreary long vacation . . . My lack of restraint will be only temporary.

— No, said Rosenthal, whose one pleasure was giving advice and warnings to distraught or heedless people, writing
MENE TEKEL PERES
on every wall. No, this situation can't continue. It's high time to steel yourself. Do you want some tea?

Simon replied that he was thirsty and Rosenthal rang. A chambermaid knocked at the door and came in. Bernard gave her instructions with an embarrassed politeness: few practical problems struck him as harder to resolve than his relations with his parents' servants, whom he did not know what to call. Simon, who no longer doubted himself since the adventure with Gladys, looked at the chambermaid. During this brief scene, Rosenthal had time to tell himself that the moral neglect to which Simon had surrendered might perhaps favour his plans, and that an abandoned man must in fact wish to take a hold on himself. The chambermaid went out.

— Have you ever wondered, said Rosenthal, why I insisted on your going to Port-Royal?

— Not at all, answered Simon. I regarded your insistence as a favour, for which I'm grateful to you. I'd put in a request, but you know me, I'd have done nothing more about it.

— I never do favours, said Bernard.

— Sometimes, said Simon gently. In spite of yourself.

Rosenthal explained to Simon the metaphysical causes, the significance and the mechanics of the Conspiracy. Simon listened, and found all this audacity exceedingly futile. So when Bernard declared that he was reserving him a role in the very heart of the affair – and was, in effect, charging him with inaugurating the Conspiracy – André felt that he had no desire to act alone for a revolution which, as described by Rosenthal, appeared quite mythical and did not excite him. He answered that he did not want to get mixed up in the venture. Rosenthal then resorted to feminine arguments, which appealed to friendship, loyalty and memories and defied Simon to refuse. Simon continued to jib, adding that the whole business struck him as childish and utterly absurd; but after an hour he gave in, when Rosenthal had shifted the debate onto the plane of insult:

— If you don't want to follow us for the sake of either principle or friendship, that means you're afraid. Are you a coward then?

Telling himself that he could not bear the idea of being discredited in Bernard's eyes, Simon took the plunge. Rosenthal, who was delighted less by seeing his Idea start to be achieved and propel someone into real actions than by having once again imposed one of his wishes, reassured his friend:

— In any case, he said, what can happen to you? The risks are infinitesimal.

— Well, all right, Simon answered, we shall see.

They agreed upon a number of practical ways of transmitting the information that Simon would obtain: Simon was to go and mail his letters in a neighbourhood far away from Port-Royal, and to type the addresses . . . He stood up to leave.

— Now you've got an aim in life, said Rosenthal.

— Oh! an aim . . . replied Simon. Let's not exaggerate. Scarcely a pretext, at best . . .

The defence plan for Paris, Area 2, was locked up in a little deal cupboard, rather like the lockers in school dormitories in which pupils keep their shirts and brushes and the letters sent by their mothers and sisters, which they pretend have been sent by some woman. The familiar character of this grey-painted box fixed to the chocolate-coloured wall robbed of all seriousness the confidential documents which it was supposed to protect. A brass padlock with a four-letter combination was the door's sole defence: this childish fastening was fairly indicative of the nature of the military world's secrets.

After his visit to Avenue Mozart Simon waited another three days, telling himself that the exploits which Rosenthal's friendship required of him were decidedly a bit theatrical for his taste. Since he was after all his father's son, he thought modestly about his chances of success and about his future, destroyed perhaps if he were caught; about prison and about his court-martial: he saw himself arrested, interrogated, caught up in the inexplicable machinery of military justice and trials from which he would never emerge. Yet he had no doubt that this illegal undertaking was legitimate and even noble, even though it struck him as uncertain in its results and unworthy of exciting a man in the way that it did Rosenthal. ‘After all, it's only an intellectual pastime,' he told himself, to reassure himself and convince himself that nothing would happen. He was true to his years: he was unable to believe that the actions of youth might have any consequences.

On the third day in the evening, when he found himself alone at Port-Royal with his iron bed and the secrets cupboard, Simon decided it was finally time to study the padlock: it took him two minutes to find the keyword, which was Siam. In barracks like this, almost everything is ruled by words from colonial expeditions and famous Great War battles: flags, messes, squadrooms, soldiers' clubs with stencilled decorations, State secrets – all can be discovered by the same methods as the solutions to crosswords and riddles.

Next day the other secretary, who had relatives in the Pas-de-Calais, went off on leave: with Dietrich out of the way, Simon was sure of being left alone in the evening for three days. At one of those dead hours between the end of supper and the desolate notes of lights out – when the squadrooms are empty, and the men are loafing along the boulevards, outside the cafés or in the amusement halls on Avenue des Gobelins – Simon opened the cupboard. There was no chance of seeing Sergeant-Major Giudici or Major Sartre arrive on the scene.

The cupboard was half-full of files whose folders bore the title ‘Confidential' or ‘Secret' written in roundhand. Simon had no difficulty in discovering the only important item, which was the defence plan for Area 2. It was a notebook which, with extreme baldness, evoked war, revolution, civil strife. This administrative anticipation of such cataclysms was sufficiently poetic for Simon to be affected by its calligraphic presentation of the future: he dreamed for five minutes over the blazing pictures of Paris that rose from every line, and began to copy the instructions in the notebook. At the Choisy-le-Roi waterworks, so many men, he read. At Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, so many machine-guns. At the Gare de Lyon, so many troops from the 21st Colonial regiment. He saw the Army occupy the strategic points of Paris, he heard commands echo back and forth in the silence of great historical tempests, the muffled breathing of the Parisians as they peered through the slats of their shutters at the menacing streets, without cars, without lamps, at night. Lights-out checked him.

Next day Simon resumed his work, and on the third day he sent Rosenthal what he had already copied – going to the Champs-Elysées to mail the letter. On the evening of the third day, the office door opened. Simon, who had forgotten to lock himself in, pushed back his chair and stood to attention. Major Sartre, who had left his gloves behind in the office that morning, came in. Simon really did look guiltier than he ought to have: the Major, though not good at reading faces, could make no mistake. Sensing that something was going on, he looked around him and noticed the open door of the secrets cupboard.

What most troubled Simon's officers was not perceiving the reasons which could have impelled him to copy secret documents. The Major had lodged Simon in prison the same evening, and this decision gave his commanding officers time for reflection. A worker would at once have been suspected of espionage and romantic links with Germany or with Moscow. But Simon? Lieutenant-Colonel de Lesmaes, who had learned of his former secretary's escapade, asked the Major:

— Well, can you please explain to me then, Major, what a young man from Simon's background, a former student at the Ecole des Chartes who, as we know, has never bothered himself with politics, could find interesting about the Paris defence plan!

The battalion commander raised his arms and said:

— This business is quite beyond me, Sir. I don't have the faintest idea.

Simon in his regimental prison was waiting to be interrogated: he felt as though he had reverted to school age, saw himself being questioned by a colonel/headmaster, a major/deputy-head, flabbergasted that so good a pupil should have provoked a scandal. He was thinking how people have very primitive ideas about a man, and how his action must seem obscure to them because it did not fit in with any notion a career officer could form of a well-bred soldier. At last he was interrogated: the Colonel appeared much more embarrassed than he. When he was asked:

— Come now, Simon, tell us whether there was anybody behind you. Bad influences? A woman?

Simon understood that he could say no and would be believed. Military equality is a façade, in the name of which a person initially forgives the excesses of discipline in the belief that he is at least in the same boat as all the others – but such illusions do not withstand three months in barracks. Simon sensed from the tone of his officers that social complicities were capable of keeping all the Army's written laws at bay. He divined that they would reason like confessors, or like readers of detective stories, and that he could doubtless trick them.

Silence struck him as a manifest duty: there was no question of betraying Rosenthal. He did not feel noble: he was still at school, where you never tell on anybody. He was rather afraid his former friendship with Rosenthal would be discovered, and in this way a connection made with some revolutionary group: he was wrong to be worried, the inquiry carried out by military means had come up with nothing; it had been learned only that he did not meddle in politics, had no suspicious relationships or financial needs. Sergeant-Major Giudici had said nothing about the dubious associations in which he had himself involved Simon. The information reaching the barracks spoke only of his virtues.

Simon finally took a risk, telling himself that his version was going to seem a bit crude. He explained to the Colonel that his curiosity about military matters was keen, and that he had not been able to resist the temptation to cast a glance at the plans it was his mission to protect; the proximity of these documents had suggested to him the idea of composing a futuristic novel, for which he was taking notes at the moment when the major had surprised him; he was desperately sorry about this childishness, upon whose consequences he had not reckoned.

— But in that case, exclaimed the Colonel, why didn't you speak earlier? Your silence allowed every kind of conjecture!

Simon, who had just caught the look which Major Sartre had exchanged with the Colonel, told himself the battle was won. This explanation, which would have seemed absurd from a soldier of any other background, actually struck them as acceptable.

— I was afraid of seeming ridiculous, Sir, said Simon, and I thought you wouldn't believe me. It seemed to me I could defend myself only by keeping quiet.

This yarn corresponded pretty closely to the idea the officers had of the man. The invention of a novel seemed to them to fit in well with the daydreams they associated with all intellectuals, in their conviction that they were themselves men of action. They breathed again, now that they were presented with a version of the incident that contradicted none of their values. It made them smile, and the Colonel told Simon that he had behaved like a child and that one cannot hide one's head in the sand. He was asked to give his word of honour that nothing had left the barracks: he gave this forthwith, and added that he had only just begun taking notes when the Major came in. He considered that his friendship with Bernard was worth any lie. Honour played so natural a role in the moral habits of Simon's officers that it never crossed their minds that a lad like him could perjure himself. They would perhaps not have taken the word of a worker's son, but Simon deceived them with the greatest of ease.

Since it was not possible for his indiscretion to go unpunished, he was sentenced to a fortnight's imprisonment with a week in solitary, which on passing upwards to the higher echelons of the military hierarchy became a month's imprisonment with a fortnight in solitary. He concluded that he was getting off lightly and that Gladys would not have long to weep over him.