The Influence Peddlers Read online

  Raouf looking around, his gaze lingering on a roundish shape wearing a panama hat, Laganier, a high-level functionary of the contrôle civil, the head cop, Laganier acknowledging Raouf, always polite with the caïd’s son, but he was still thinking: That native is an example of the mistakes that we can no longer afford to make; opening the French school to them only created enemies, and now, in addition, this one is watching women with his mouth open. If he were watching a French woman that way it would cause quite an uproar, but that is an American woman. That will teach the Americans, friends of everyone, a high-ranking officer and the grocer Ben So-and-So; it is in fact insulting, and what’s more, they let themselves be called by their first names without monsieur in front, and the natives are getting ideas . . . Those movie people, it was like in Paris, intellectuals, and a lot of them speak French. We warned them about the natives, but they don’t care; they say they got rid of their colonizers and that it has done them a lot of good. Then we pointed out that they didn’t have a lot of negroes at their table, but they don’t care about that, either. There are even some who have started to learn Arabic, not only to give orders—French would have worked for that—no, they’re learning Arabic to understand, they said, as if the French weren’t capable of explaining things! And all of this, in the end, has come from the miserable “protectorate.” We should have turned this country into a colony pure and simple a long time ago. There is nothing to protect: we have the military, political, economic, technical strength; we have a predominance to exercise over the colonized, that’s all; remove the obstacles and move forward! Laganier also found it scandalous that Raouf had access to the set, but he was the director’s friend, he took the wife out, and he was teaching the husband Arabic, the couple’s friend!

  Farther away, auxiliary guards, clubs in hand, barred access to the site. They moved aside when they saw Raouf arrive, his thin figure, his gray, European-style suit, bare head. The soldiers saw Raouf every day; their French captain had told them that he was the factotum of the American boss and his wife. For the soldiers the American boss was “the general” because he was always giving orders and no one gave orders to him. They pretended to understand what a factoutoum was, while thinking that Raouf was too important a person to be serving a boss—he was the caïd’s son—and even if they had already seen him getting water for the actress like any servant could have done, servants never sat down to chat with bosses while laughing along, the way Raouf did with the general and his wife, the one who in front of everyone rubbed against a Christian disguised as a sheikh, factoutoum, can you imagine! Now if an American wants to rub against a Christian woman he has to be disguised as a sheikh and the caïd’s son is factoutoum!

  A sudden shout, one word: “Sand!” The noise of a motor, the smell of gas, two huge fans starting to roar, men throwing shovelfuls of sand into the blowing fans, the sand flying toward the couple, then another metallic shout through a megaphone: “Places!”

  It was Daintree who had shouted. Kathryn had placed her body very close to that of the sheikh, her head raised toward him, behind them a Bedouin tent, rugs and cushions under the tent, other tents in the background, palm trees, and dozens of Bedouins on horseback. Another shout, Daintree again, in front of the small opening of a six-foot-long funnel lying horizontally in front of him on a tripod:

  “Attention! Ready, Francis, three seconds and you kiss her,” Daintree pivoting his megaphone to the right: “And when they begin to kiss, send in the camels . . . Camera! . . . Action!” To his left a man began turning the crank of a camera, and two other men, farther away, each on a scaffolding and sheltered by a large umbrella, were doing the same with their cameras. More shouting into the megaphone: “Francis! Three, two, one, go!” The couple started kissing again, two mouths on top of each other. “Cut! Kathryn, you’re kissing him too soon, you look like a woman in heat . . . Let him kiss you first! And get those damned camels out of here! From the top . . . ready . . . action! . . . Kiss . . . camels . . . cut!” Daintree was holding his arms out to the camels: “Get the camels closer together! Make them go straight to Steve’s camera!”

  Daintree wasn’t upset. A kiss and getting fifty camels to go by didn’t happen by snapping your fingers. In Hollywood, he would have had well-trained circus camels, but too tame to play true, energetic beasts of the desert, with the look of wanting at any moment to escape into the infinitude of the sands—that’s what creates dynamism! Circus camels were made to take orders and to eat, and their camel drivers to wait to be paid. That would be seen on screen. The director had said to the producers: “I don’t want a circus ring. I want real dunes, real Arabs, real camels, a real space. I want people to sense that the background could at any moment escape the control of the leads. That’s what will make the tension of Warrior of the Sands. I want a real, harsh world that will disturb the audience. They’ll love it.” And Daintree had gotten everything, or almost, because he had wanted to go to Arabia, but the producers had found that North Africa was just fine, closer, had better infrastructure, dear Neil, and just as much sand and Arabs: “You’re not going to quibble, and what’s more, they speak French like you, like Kathryn, like Francis.” Neil had agreed to the compromise, even if North Africa was a bit too policed for his taste. He had obtained his strip of desert and the possibility of filming almost his entire film while escaping the horror that everyone was going through back in Hollywood at that time, a horror, a true horror.

  He was also allowed for the first time to shoot with two extra cameras, so he wasn’t going to get upset because his real camels led by real Arabs were making a real mess. Anyway, they weren’t any more difficult to direct than the actors, than that couple who couldn’t even act out a kiss. “Kathryn, now you’re waiting too long, we won’t see anything decisive on screen, do it on two counts!” Neil knew what was going on. Kathryn and he had had a fight the night before, and she was getting back at him. He wanted to tell her, Try for once to express love without looking like you’re lying, but decided not to, and said: “He kisses you, you count one . . . two . . . while getting up on tiptoes, three . . . four . . . Then come back down on your heels, he will have to hold you tighter, whether he wants to or not, right, Francis? Be virile, damn it, give me sex!” The last word had resounded a hundred yards around. Raouf wondered why Neil dared to say such things to a pomaded actor; it was dangerous, if Cavarro took him at his word . . . Neil’s voice again: “The camels behind the flags . . . Francis, this isn’t the moment to comb your hair! Attention, ready? Action! Kiss, one, two! Camels! One, two! Good . . . Cut!” Daintree pointed at the fans with his fist, not the ones that were making the sand fly, but the other two, the ones that should have been sending wind into the palm trees. They hadn’t started up; there was sand carried by the wind with palm trees that weren’t moving. They could have filmed with real wind, but they would have had to wait, and in this country, with real wind, you can’t do anything at all.

  They started again, all fans at full power, Kathryn pressed, Cavarro leaned over, Kathryn pressed harder, Raouf suffered, muhafhafatun bayda’u gheiru mufadatine, soft, white, the stomach firm and flat . . . The camels were advancing in mass in the background, a beautiful undulation. “Good . . . like a wave arriving from the Orient . . . not too quick with the camels,” shouted Daintree into his megaphone, “. . . a large wave . . . powerful . . . Control them! Shit! One of them is getting away!” One of the camels was hesitating, suddenly ran toward a tent, fell on it, got back up, was beaten with a stick, panicked, ran toward the musicians . . . “I want musicians,” Daintree had said, “I’m not crazy, I know the film is silent, but I want everyone on set to hear oriental music. It gives rhythm, tone. You don’t interact with someone the same way if you hear oriental music during the shoot, and Cavarro is much more expressive when he hears that music. I want musicians within the camera’s range. The prince receives a young Christian woman. He’s a man of the desert, but he’s civilized. He has musicians prepared, violins and tambourines—
it’s the sign of a great soul! For sex there’s the kiss, and for the soul there’s music, and throughout the world, when the film is being shown, the pianist in the theater will start playing oriental music.”

  The camel had finished running around the musicians, who had scattered, and a little girl started to approach the camera with a basket of eggs that she was holding like a trophy, thinking it was her turn to act, starting to run toward the couple, stumbling, staggering toward Francis Cavarro, Francis having just enough time to avoid the eggs that crashed to the ground. A great professional, Francis, he saved his white burnoose—not completely, some yolk got on the bottom . . . “Cut! We’ll do it again, set that tent up quickly, the camels in place, and put some sand on the egg yolk! Keith, stop that shrew from hitting the kid! It wasn’t her fault, it was yours . . . Attention . . . Everyone ready? Send the sand!”

  “If you want the audience to feel the sand, you have to have eaten pounds of it while we’re shooting,” the director had told his crew. But suddenly they couldn’t hear the fans. “We’re out of gas for the fans? Holy shit! Are you kidding? Too many takes? Who said that? Does someone want to direct instead of me? Too many assistants, you mean! Too much dead weight that isn’t doing shit!” Daintree walked up to the little girl with the basket. He wanted to pat her on the head. The girl trembled when she saw Daintree’s hand reaching out to her. He stopped. “Okay! Fill up the tanks, we’ll take a break! Twenty minutes! Francis, don’t wander off!” Then Daintree turned toward Raouf, his voice softer, friendly: “Raouf, my fellow, can you keep an eye on Kathryn? I don’t want her to disappear! Assistants and cameramen, to the truck with me!”

  Kathryn had left Cavarro’s arms. He had gone to sit in front of another woman who was putting powder on his nose. It reassured Raouf that the man took pleasure in having his nose powdered. Kathryn had asked Raouf to get her some cold water. She could have asked her black maid, Tess, or one of the women who had been assigned to her, but with Raouf she was sure that the water would be uncontaminated—he was obsessed with cleanliness, even more than an American. Once she had said to him:

  “It’s amazing, your obsession with cleanliness, a puritan in this country . . .”

  “So if you’re an Arab you must be dirty?” Raouf had asked. Kathryn didn’t like when he talked like that; she didn’t want Raouf to think she was prejudiced. Raouf was a puritan, and that was rare here. Raouf didn’t need to act like a bitter old man. What she wanted was someone who was always nice, someone attentive; that’s what certain men in France were like, in the old days. Raouf could make a very presentable gallant, someone who admires you and whom you don’t care that much about. Kathryn thought she was being harsh to think that. She liked Raouf, but he was ungraspable. He spent the day trying to sort out his thoughts: “I belong to a defeated country. They say I’m the future, but I belong to a defeated country.”

  They were sitting under an umbrella, Raouf had brought something better than water, lemonade. She told him that he was the perfect gallant. The first time she said that word, she had asked him if he knew what it meant. Raouf’s eyes had shone. He was proud to be able to say, “preciousness, seventeenth century.” He interrupted himself: I’m going to sound like I’m reciting my lines, he thought. He had also been afraid that he would blush while talking about Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s La Carte de Tendre. Every time Kathryn called him “gallant” it made him both happy and unhappy. She pretended not to see; she never went too far, just enough to know he was suffering a little.

  She drank half the glass, set it down saying, “Now that is pleasure itself . . .” The word made Raouf blush. She had said it on purpose, because he was pouting. She knew why, but continued to talk, provoking Raouf, “That’s what’s most difficult, you know, to pretend to feel what you don’t feel, a false feeling, but which is supposed to provoke real emotion.” Raouf didn’t say anything, stared off into the dunes. She continued: “It’s like when you played war in the olive grove with your friends, you played a warrior without being one!” She was getting annoyed at Raouf’s silent pouting:

  “I’m doing the same thing, I’m playing, and what’s more, they pay me!”

  “It’s been quite some time since I played in the olive grove,” Raouf had responded, “and maybe what you’re doing is false, but it’s a real man’s mouth!” She laughed loudly when he said that. She was seven years older than Raouf.

  Silence between them, they noticed the poodle, the trotting shape of the poodle that followed Daintree all day long, never more than six feet away. The “poodle” was the nickname they had given Wayne, twenty-two, red-headed, who still sounded like a boy, a recent graduate from a film school in New York. His work on the set consisted mainly of running around with Daintree’s canvas chair so that it would be available whenever the director wanted to sit down. Wayne could have been an assistant, not on this project, of course—this was the highest level of film-making—but elsewhere, supervising a camera with a lesser-known director, he would have learned things like everyone else. But no, Wayne, with a great deal of professional awareness, folded, unfolded, refolded, lugged around all day long a canvas chair on which the name of Neil Daintree was printed in bold letters, the task of a grunt. All the assistants laughed when they saw Wayne trotting behind the director: Can you imagine a student of the film academy, reduced to that! Even the local workers looked down their noses at him, an American who does that job? It can only be because he likes doing it.

  Raouf watched Wayne, then, turning to Kathryn: “Now that’s a gallant, a real gallant.” Kathryn’s voice turned hard: “Do you want to learn something today, Raouf? What person here knows better than Wayne, at any moment, everything that Neil is doing? Framing, directing the actors, tricks, regrets, strokes of genius . . . Wayne is learning the profession alongside one of the greats, just by soaking him up . . . I know a lot of people who would pay to carry around that chair . . .” Kathryn sighing, adding that Wayne had only one fault, he was shy, didn’t have a girlfriend, but good for him, if he wanted beautiful women he would have to become someone very strong . . . not like the sons of notables who wait around for someone to bring them a docile virgin on a platter, in exchange for a nice dowry . . . because here the man provides the dowry, right? Unless a rich widow . . . Kathryn was talking the way she had when she had met Raouf for the first time. He was worried. By putting some distance between them, he had wanted to show he wasn’t happy, and now she was widening the gap, with contempt. He had to make peace.

  Ganthier’s arrival diffused the tension. He was accompanied by Gabrielle Conti wearing a Saharan jacket and a long skirt, a pen on a chain. As soon as she was in the shadow of an umbrella she took off her khaki-colored cotton hat to air her abundant brown hair, shining with red highlights. Ganthier had fallen in love with her at first sight. He had discovered what he had never encountered before, a powerful woman. He had said to Raouf: “She frightens President Poincaré! Each of her articles has more than two million readers!”

  Gabrielle Conti’s boss in Paris, the owner of L’Avenir, was crazy about her: “She writes like Maupassant, can you imagine, a woman who writes like Maupassant!” He paid her very well, agreed that she could also publish articles in L’Illustration, and it was through her that he had his instructions and threats sent to the ministers. “She’s playing an interesting game,” Marfaing, the contrôleur civil, had said to Ganthier, “What she can’t publish in her newspaper she sends to her Bolshevik or socialist friends, and in exchange they tell her a bit about what is going on in Russia or in their parties. She feeds her articles with that and discusses it with the ministers.” She and Ganthier didn’t agree on anything, and she liked to provoke him: “One day history will tumble ass backwards, and you’ll find yourself on the other side of the sea.” But she had discovered that the colonist spoke and read Arabic fluently, and she used him shamelessly. And she didn’t hide from him the fact that men were of little interest to her. That had not discouraged Ganthier.


  Neil’s voice called everyone back to work.

  5

  A QUINTAL AND A HALF

  There was something a bit bizarre about the parties at the Grand Hôtel. Ever since the Yankees had landed, the inhabitants of Nahbès were on the alert: Yankees are really wild when they drink, twenty of them, thirty—then, after midnight it is a complete free-for-all! After a week they’d seen everything, Neil, Kathryn, Wayne, Francis, Samuel, the entire crew. They were holding up amazingly well. They drank, laughed, danced. They touched each other when they danced, but it wasn’t a bacchanal, which everyone expected, and there was someone called McGhill who kept saying: “We should present a redemptive image,” a big, jolly, red-faced man, with cauliflower ears, ready to laugh at anything. Well, when he entered the room at the Grand Hôtel, around close to midnight, everyone was laughing as much as usual, but without missing a beat, they began to gather their things, still laughing and joking. “Present a redemptive image . . .” That didn’t make sense. They were the most beautiful, the richest, the most famous people in the world. What did they need to redeem?