The Mandarins

‘Let’s go on just a little farther,’ Henri said.

In Marseilles, Naples, Piraeus, in Chinatowns of many cities, he had spent hours wandering through these same squalid streets. Of course, then as now, he wished that all this misery could be done away with. But the wish remained an abstract thing. He had never felt like running away, and the overpowering human odour of these streets went to his head. From the top of the hill to the bottom, the same swarming multitudes, the same blue sky burning above the roof tops. It seemed to Henri that from one moment to the next he would rediscover his old joy in all its intensity. That was what he sought from street to street. But it wouldn’t come back. Barefooted women – everyone here went barefooted – were squatting before their doors frying sardines over charcoal fires, and the stench of stale fish mingled in the air with the smell of hot oil. In cellar apartments opening on to the street, not a bed, not a piece of furniture, not a picture; nothing but straw mats, children covered with rashes, and from time to time a goat. Outside, no happy voices, no laughter; only sombre dead eyes. Was misery more hopeless here than in the other cities? Or instead of becoming hardened to misfortune, does one grow more sensitive to it? The blue of the sky seemed cruel above the unhealthy shadows; he began to share Nadine’s silent dismay. They passed a haggard-looking woman dressed in black rags who was scurrying through the street with a child clinging to her bare breast, and Henri said abruptly, ‘You’re right; let’s get out.’

But the next day, at a cocktail party given at the French Consulate, Henri found that it was useless to have tried to flee from that wretched hill. The table was laden with sandwiches and rich cakes, the women were wearing dresses in colours he had long ago forgotten, every face was smiling, all were speaking French, and the Hill of Grace, for a time, seemed far off, in a completely foreign country whose misfortunes were no concern of his. He was laughing politely with the others when old Mendoz das Viernas came and led him off to a corner of the drawing-room. He was wearing a stiff collar and a black tie; before Salazar’s dictatorship, he had been a cabinet minister. He looked at Henri suspiciously.

‘What is your impression of Lisbon?’ he asked.

‘It’s a very beautiful city,’ Henri answered. He saw das Viernas’ face darken and he hastily added with a smile, ‘I must say, though, I haven’t seen very much of it.’

‘Usually, the French who come here somehow manage to see nothing at all,’ das Viernas said bitterly. ‘Your Valéry, for example. He admired the sea, the gardens, but for the rest – a blind man.’ The old man paused a moment. ‘And you? Do you also intend to blindfold yourself?’

‘On the contrary!’ Henri said. ‘I intend to keep my eyes as wide open as I can.’

‘Ah! From what they have told me of you, that is what I had hoped,’ das Viernas said, his voice gentler now. ‘We shall make an appointment for tomorrow and I shall then show you Lisbon. A beautiful façade, isn’t it? But you will see what is behind it!’

‘I’ve already taken a walk on the Hill of Grace,’ Henri said.

‘But you did not go into the houses! I want you to see for yourself what the people eat, how they live. You would not believe me if I told you.’ Das Viernas shrugged his shoulders. ‘All that writing about the melancholy of the Portuguese and how mysterious it is. Actually it’s ridiculously simple: of seven million Portuguese, there are only seventy thousand who have enough to eat.’

It was impossible to get out of it. Henri spent the following morning visiting a series of wretched hovels. At the end of the afternoon, the former cabinet minister gathered his friends for the sole purpose of having them meet him. It was impossible to refuse. All of them were wearing dark suits, stiff collars, and bowlers; they spoke ceremoniously but every now and then a look of hatred crossed their sensitive faces. They were mostly former cabinet members, former journalists, former professors who had been crushed because of their obstinate refusal to rally to the new régime. All of them were poor and trapped, many had relatives in France who had been deported. Those who stubbornly continued to take what action they could knew that the Island of Hell awaited them. A doctor who treated poverty-stricken people without remuneration, who tried to open a clinic or introduce a little hygiene into the hospitals, was immediately suspect. Whosoever dared organize an evening course, whosoever made a generous gesture, or simply a charitable one, was branded enemy of both Church and State. And yet they doggedly persisted. They wanted to believe that the destruction of Nazism would somehow bring to an end this hypocritical fascism, and they dreamed constantly of overthrowing Salazar and creating a National Front like the one which had been formed in France. But they knew they were alone: the English capitalists had large interests in Portugal and the Americans were negotiating with the government for the purchase of air bases in the Azores. ‘France is our only hope,’ they repeated over and over. ‘Tell the people of France the truth,’ they begged. ‘They do not know; if they knew they would come to our rescue.’

They imposed daily meetings on Henri, overwhelmed him with facts, figures, statistics, took him for walks through the starving villages surrounding Lisbon. It wasn’t exactly the kind of holiday he had dreamed of, but he had no choice. He promised that he would wage a campaign in the press in order to get the facts to the people. Political tyranny, economic exploitation, police terror, the systematic brutalization of the masses, the clergy’s shameful complicity – he would tell everything. ‘If Carmona knew that France was willing to support us, he would join our ranks,’ das Viernas said. Years ago he had known Bidault, and he was thinking of suggesting to him a kind of secret treaty: in exchange for France’s backing, the future Portuguese government would be able to offer advantageous trade concessions in connection with the African colonies. It would have been difficult to explain to him, without being brutal, how completely fantastic his project was!

‘I’ll see Tournelle, his administrative assistant,’ Henri promised on the eve of his departure for Algarve. ‘He was a friend of mine in the Resistance.’

‘I shall map out a precise path and entrust it to you when you return,’ das Viernas said.

Henri was glad to get out of Lisbon. For greater convenience in making his round of lectures, the French Consulate loaned him a car and told him to keep it as long as he wanted. At last he would have a real holiday! Unfortunately, his new-found friends were counting on his spending his last week in Portugal conspiring with them. While he was away, they were going to assemble exhaustive documentation and also arrange for meetings with certain Communists from the Zamora dockyards. Turning them down was unthinkable.

‘That means we have exactly two weeks and no more to see the country,’ Nadine said sulkily.

They dined that night at a roadside inn on the opposite bank of the Tagus. A waitress served them slices of fried codfish and a bottle of cloudy pink wine. Through the window they could see the lights of Lisbon rising tier upon tier between the water and the sky.

‘With a car, you can cover an awful lot of ground in two weeks!’ Henri said. ‘Do you realize what a stroke of luck that was?’

‘Exactly. And it’s a shame we can’t take more advantage of it.’

‘Those men are all counting on me; I’d really be a louse to disappoint them, wouldn’t I?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There’s nothing you can do for them.’

‘I can speak for them. That’s my job. If I can’t at least do that, there’s no point in my being a newspaperman.’

‘Maybe there isn’t.’

‘Don’t start thinking already about going back,’ he said soothingly. ‘Just think of the wonderful trip ahead of us. Look at those little lights along the water; they’re pretty, aren’t they?’

‘What’s so pretty about them?’ Nadine asked. It was just the sort of irritating question she enjoyed asking. ‘No, seriously,’ she added, ‘what makes you think they’re pretty?’

Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re pretty, that’s all.’

She pressed her forehead agains the window. ‘They might be pretty if you didn’t know what’s behind them. But once you know, it’s … it’s just another fraud,’ she concluded bitterly. ‘I hate that filthy city.’

It was a fraud, no doubt of it. And yet he was unable to keep from seeing a certain beauty in those lights. No longer did he fool himself about the hot stench of poverty, the colourfulness of rags and tatters, but those little flames twinkling along the edge of the dark waters moved him in spite of everything. Perhaps it was because they made him recall a time when he was unaware of the reality hiding behind appearances, or perhaps it was nothing but the memory of an illusion that made him like them. He looked at Nadine – eighteen years old and not a single illusion to remember! He at least had a past. ‘And a present, and a future,’ he said to himself. ‘Fortunately, there are still some things left in the world to like.’

And there were, fortunately. What a joy to have a wheel in your hands again! And those roads stretching out before you as far as the eye can reach! The first day out, after all those years of not having driven, Henri felt unsure of himself. The car seemed endowed with a life of its own, and so much the more so since it was heavy, had bad springs, was noisy and rather erratic. And yet it soon began obeying him as spontaneously as his own hand.

‘It’s really got speed! It’s terrific!’ Nadine exclaimed.

‘You’ve driven in cars before, haven’t you?’

‘In Paris, in jeeps. But I never went this fast.’

That, too, was a lie – the old illusion of freedom and power. But she gave into it without a qualm. She lowered all the windows and greedily drank in the wind and dust. If Henri had listened to her they would never have got out of the car. The thing she seemed to enjoy most was driving as fast as they could towards the horizon. She hardly took any interest at all in the scenery. And yet how beautiful it was! Hillsides covered with golden mimosas; endless groves of round-topped orange trees which brought to mind calm, primitive paradises; the twisted, frenzied rocks of Battaglia, the majestic pair of stairways which rose crisscrossing to a white-and-black church, the streets of Beja through which echoed the ancient cries of a lovesick nun. In the south, with its African atmosphere, little donkeys moved in endless circles to force a trickle of water from the arid ground. At distant intervals, half-hidden among blue century plants rising from the red earth, they came across the false freshness of smooth, milky white houses. They began driving back towards the north through country in which stones and rocks seemed to have stolen their intense colours from the most brilliant flowers – reds, ochres, violets. And then, on the gentle hills of Minho, the colours once more became flowers. Yes, a beautiful setting, a setting that flashed by so rapidly that there was no time to think of what lurked behind it. Along these granite shores as on the burning roads of Algarve, the peasants they saw all went barefooted. But they did not see many of them.

The holiday ended at red Oporto, where even the filth was blood-coloured. On the walls of hovels darker and danker than those of Lisbon and teeming with naked children, notices had been pasted up, reading: ‘Unhealthy! It is forbidden to live in this house.’ Little girls of four or five, clad in torn sacks, were rummaging about in garbage pails. For lunch, Henri and Nadine sought refuge in a dark corner of a restaurant, but all through the meal they had the uneasy feeling that, outside, faces were glued to the windows. ‘I hate cities!’ Nadine said furiously. She stayed in her room the whole day, and the following day on the road she hardly unclenched her teeth enough to speak. Henri made no attempt to cheer her up.

The day they were to return to Lisbon, they stopped to eat in a little port town three hours from the city. They left the car in front of the inn and climbed one of the hills overlooking the sea. At the summit stood a white windmill with a roof shingled in green tile. Small, narrow-necked, terra-cotta jars were attached to its vanes, and the wind sang through them. Henri and Nadine ran down the hill past leafy olive trees, past blossoming almond trees, and the childish music followed them. They dropped down on the sandy beach of the cove. Boats with rust-coloured sails were moving lazily on the pale sea.

‘Let’s stay here a while; it’s pleasant,’ Henri said.

‘All right,’ Nadine replied sullenly. ‘I’m dying of hunger,’ she added.

‘Naturally. You didn’t eat a thing.’

‘I ask for soft-boiled eggs and they bring me a bowl of lukewarm water and raw eggs.’

‘Well, the cod was good, and so were the beans.’

‘Another drop of oil and I’d have been sick,’ she said, spitting angrily. ‘There’s even oil in my saliva.’

Suddenly and calmly she pulled off her blouse.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Can’t you see?’

She was wearing no brassiere. Lying on her back, she offered up to the sun the nakedness of her firm, small breasts.

‘Nadine! No! Suppose someone should come …’

‘No one’ll come.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Anyhow, I don’t give a damn. I just want to feel the sun on my body.’ Her breasts exposed to the wind and sun, her hair spread out on the sand, she looked up at the sky and said reproachfully, ‘It’s our last day; we’ve got to take advantage of it.’

Henri said nothing.