The Influence Peddlers Page 7

  Pushed by his friends, the merchant described his ideal wife, a true young woman, with already (he eagerly made a gesture) something to hold onto, and beautiful, but above all not a seductress, that always ends in catastrophe, it’s much worse than finding yourself eating bad meat because you wanted to buy too quickly! Belkhodja’s laugh sent to hell all those who didn’t have his lucidity, and they laughed with him because, the day before, the conversation had been interrupted to let the din of a truck loaded with two donkeys pass. “It’s Hammou’s truck,” one of the young men had said, “He is proud, he revs the motor, he’s going to the animal market.”

  “It’s pretty late for the market,” Raouf had replied (that time they remembered perfectly: it was in March, before the Americans had arrived, the last Saturday in March), “Hammou is pretending to go to the market. In reality he is going to the slaughterhouse. Tomorrow there will be people who buy veal that they’ll find a bit tough!”

  “Remember,” Belkhodja had continued, “remember the marriage of Rahal (that name had brought silence down on the group), Rahal the proud one and his so lively bride!” The merchant’s voice had turned sarcastic: an intelligent bride, who spoke well, and modern! I don’t want an idiot, Rahal kept repeating, this is the twentieth century! He settled in the capital, he had taken a girl from the capital, and he had his twentieth-century marriage on the sheets the next morning. The old servant woman had done her work, not too much chicken blood, or it would have looked like a big lie. She poured just enough to make it look real. A discreet servant. But a lot of people knew: Rahal, of course, the best placed, and then the bride’s sister, and an in-law who was also related to the husband’s family. It remained a family secret, until it reached the one who had been informed last, Rahal’s father, who then went to see the bride’s father. They talked calmly for several hours. The young modern woman, intelligent and lively, had been a virgin, of course, but she wasn’t really right for his son.

  The rest of the story was murky. Some spoke of an annulment, others of a separation, an illness, perhaps the beginning of tuberculosis. The girl admitted that she didn’t feel well. Moreover, she was pretty thin. Her family should have said something, especially a daughter to be married. She was ill, not seriously. She was going to put on weight, be cured, but she should have said so before: that could be a cause for annulment. People talked without being sure. She left to seek treatment in the mountains. In the end, no one talked about it anymore, and Rahal was free again. He had saved face, but a rumor continued: Hadn’t he been contaminated? Maybe he was free, but he wouldn’t find a good match soon.

  Belkhodja laughed in front of the young men, whom the story had made thoughtful. He liked to provoke silence and be the only one to laugh, a laugh that enlarged the bottom of his face and revealed two rows of good teeth, intact, already dyed with old ivory, which makes men look respectable.

  The merchant had continued enthusiastically to tell his anecdotes on marriage. Rahal was a successful merchant, his family was more powerful than the girl’s, he ended up free, he could have been worse off . . . Belkhodja lowered his voice, and the attraction of what could have been worse made the worried faces lean toward him. They were entering into the realm of serious indiscretions. They watched the waiter’s movements. They watched each other.

  “Worse than Rahal’s story,” the merchant added, “is when the girl’s family is more powerful than the husband’s, because that type of modern girl comes from the best families. They make a very good match. A pretty girl. She can read, write. She’s rich. Her parents are powerful. She has everything. You get her, and you triumph in front of your friends. You won out because you are the most virile!” Belkhodja’s arms had left the table, his forefinger pointing. His voice, accompanied by sharp movements of his arm and his hand, pounded his words home like nails: “And then you realize too late what that girl is capable of!”

  Then Belkhodja’s voice became less violent, talked about a young married couple in their sitting room, the husband saying that the trip to Europe . . . They were facing some expenses . . . When you’re a responsible husband and you first want a car, you say, “No,” and what you get is, “I didn’t know we were in trouble.” The voice is reedy, but the young wife doesn’t give up, returns to the subject every day. The husband tells her that to be the wife of a young entrepreneur with a brilliant future is not the same thing as being the daughter of the richest millowner in the land. His voice is hard. He will inherit one day, of course, and her father is not just anybody, but while waiting he can’t give her everything, and the wife also talks about buying furniture, a European-style sitting room, and other things, and you begin to believe that she’s asking you on purpose for things you must deny her, to make you feel like you can’t live up to the standards of the place where you went looking for your wife!”

  Here Belkhodja glanced around at the more or less threadbare jacket sleeves of his young friends. “And to the husband’s latest refusals,” added the merchant, “the response is coldness, or silence. He believes that this is the life of a couple. He begins to tolerate it less. He, himself, becomes intolerable. He starts going out at night again, finds his friends from before, enjoys himself, says that if he had stayed a bachelor he would go out less often—that makes everyone laugh. He treats his wife harshly, and she becomes contemptuous and cold, even in the bedroom!”

  Around the table jaws were clenched and eyes were glazed. Too bad for them, Belkhodja said to himself, they think they’re men because they go to the café and talk politics, when they couldn’t even manage things in their homes if they had one! As soon as they have a dark blue suit they see themselves leading the country, with a constitution, which isn’t even an Arabic word, what heresy, just like their modern women, heresy and prostitution!

  “And one day” (Belkhodja’s voice had become cold) “the modern wife has accumulated enough resentment, she goes in search of a single great pleasure to compensate for all those that she hasn’t been given . . . I repeat, all . . . and when her husband learns, he suddenly has in front of him a wife he didn’t know, who despises him, threatens him . . . He could beat her, renounce her, or even resort to the punishment of the past when a hole was dug and only the adulteress’s head could be seen . . . But he doesn’t do any of that, why? Because his wife’s father and mother are very powerful people, even more powerful than his own father, and it is up to the son-in-law to be docile and silent.” Throwing his head back, his eyes to the ceiling, Belkhodja took great delight in his conclusion: “The qualities of a good, traditional wife are now expected of the husband of a modern wife!”

  He didn’t cite anyone and began grooming his handlebar mustache. No name circulated among his audience. Everyone recalled hearing the same stories, but they didn’t want to be the ones to publicly point a finger at a family whose head could at any moment summon from some village a few dependable, obedient, and violent men.

  So don’t ever look for the perfect match, Belkhodja had concluded, what they needed was a modest and respectable wife, a wife to take care of things around the house, but careful! . . . That wife also has to be a woman . . . The merchant’s eyes had opened wide and the words came out: “who smiles!” Belkhodja was proud to have added that, a smiling wife. He had thought of it the day he had seen his sister-in-law, a woman beyond reproach, scold her husband for having gone into the sitting room with muddy shoes, the bitter voice of the housekeeper within her rights, the voice that became just loud enough to spoil the evening of a good man, the voice of a wife who made a point of not calling the servant and who herself mopped up the floor in front of their guest to show him what the inconsideration of a husband could reduce his wife to. “There’s a real scourge of respectable women,” said Belkhodja, “Good men don’t think enough about what daily life can become with a respectable woman who doesn’t smile.”

  He was happy. He had abandoned his customary role with the “little band” at La Porte du Sud, that of the man who reminded the bo
ys of all the dull virtues. This time even Raouf had listened to him attentively, his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands, a smile on his lips, seeming to say, good job! Belkhodja didn’t want to be Rahal, or the son-in-law of a powerful man, or his own brother. He would find a country girl, a good housekeeper, but above all, someone who smiled! The rug merchant was happy. It was with this type of presentation that one captivated an audience of insolent boys.

  8

  A SORT OF TACIT AGREEMENT

  They told the Fatty Arbuckle story only at the bar of the Grand Hôtel, a sort of tacit agreement among Francis, Wayne, Kathryn, Neil, Samuel, and a few others. Each person provided a fragment, was corrected, corrected someone else in turn, or fell silent in a fit of pique that forced his friends to let him talk. Sometimes one of them was seized with a mute rage, like someone who is forcing himself not to speak, said Ganthier, so as not to alert the snitch, McGhill, and so as not to cause a bomb to explode in front of us: we are their safety net!

  And so Francis Cavarro continued with the story of Fatty, a rumor of a dead woman, a secondary infection, at the Wakefield clinic, reporters on the hunt, a dead actress, Virginia Rappe, who at twenty-five years old had had to fight for the right to a few minutes on film. That in itself was enough to slander the victim, said Kathryn. And the cops talked about a suspicious death, peritonitis. They had questioned the girl who had taken Miss Rappe to the clinic on Wednesday evening. Her name was Maude Delmont. And they had questioned Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: Yes, he had returned to Los Angeles with his lawyer, a tight jacket, golf pants, low shoes. In the photo he was laughing.

  “Do you remember his cowboy film?” asked Wayne, “The Round Up, the quote on the poster: ‘Nobody likes a fat man.’”

  “Yes,” said Samuel Katz, “but under the fat he was a dancer, and could do amazing backflips.”

  “Still, not the sort of man,” replied Cavarro, “who attracts women!”

  Kathryn hadn’t reacted.

  A certain Virginia Rappe had died after a party given by Fatty Arbuckle at the Saint Francis Hotel, and many people said: “Those actors do that in broad daylight, like animals!” Fatty helped the police with their investigation, the sort of help that could lead directly to the noose, or the gas chamber, the latest technology. There was a principal witness against Fatty, Maude Delmont, Virginia Rappe’s friend. Virginia had supposedly confided in her while crying, “He hurt me,” and Delmont swore that she had seen Fatty carry Virginia off and spend a half hour with her in a bedroom with the door closed.

  Later, Ganthier had told Raouf that, according to another rumor, Daintree and Cavarro had attended the party. Daintree swore that they hadn’t, but the press hounded them. That’s why Cavarro shot Wayne an angry look when he recalled that there had been a lot of people at Fatty’s party.

  “They love big parties,” Ganthier had added, “The more people, the livelier!” Ganthier also remembered a party in Chicago, after a visit to the slaughterhouse where he accompanied the old Clemenceau. Everything was white, noisy, huge, and clean. The pigs advanced one after the other on a conveyor belt, smoothly—their squeals. A man attached one of their hind legs to a chain. The animal was raised up, its head about five feet from the ground. It writhed, squealed louder. In the next room another man opened its carotid—white tile, white walls, everything hosed down, steam, a gust of air every fifteen seconds, a regular humming. That’s what was frightening, peaceful machinery: I saw hell, it was white! The slaughterhouse manager had said to them in front of a collection of metal boxes: “Here we use the whole pig.” Ganthier still had Clemenceau’s remark in his head: “Everything but the squeal” . . . And more squealing, too, during the Franco-American party that same night, in a nightclub in Chicago, the shouting, the four-legged races, everyone naked, free beasts, each had a rider, and a band of old Gypsies in tuxedos on the mezzanine, impassive. Samuel continued: Anyway, Fatty wasn’t very refined, abandoned at thirteen, set off on his own, did cheap theater, fifteen years of that, completely broke, and if they found torn clothing, it was murder in the first degree, and death, like any other pig.

  Seeing that Raouf was lost, Wayne continued: Fatty had been accused by Maude Delmont of having raped Virginia Rappe, who later died because of it. Samuel Katz resumed: Fatty claimed he was innocent. A group had come to visit him on Monday morning. They had drunk, danced. A very drunk Miss Rappe arrived. She tore her clothing. Fatty had asked two women to look after her. They had placed Miss Rappe in a bathtub, with large pieces of ice on her stomach to ease her pain. Fatty had called a doctor, then he went to catch a boat for Los Angeles, and on Friday, September 9, Miss Rappe was dead.

  The main accuser, Maude Delmont, was joined by two other women, Nancy Blake and Zey Prevon. They confirmed that Fatty had stayed alone in a room with Virginia Rappe for a half hour, and they heard her yelling through the door. Other people maintained that she had begun to shout and throw her clothes around the living room before that. There was also a man who said Fatty had hurt Virginia Rappe, Kathryn noted, someone named Semnacher. Neil Daintree’s voice interrupted Kathryn: Semnacher, Virginia’s agent, of course! And Neil added that they had found telegrams from Maude Delmont to her lawyers: “WE HAVE ROSCOE ARBUCKLE IN A HOLE HERE. CHANCE TO MAKE SOME MONEY OUT OF HIM.” Delmont also had a criminal record for fraud and bigamy, and was going to have problems. The district attorney was Matthew Brady. A high-profile case—he wasn’t going to miss that.

  “Could Kathryn have participated in such things?” Rania asked later, and Gabrielle responded with a smile: “People are innocent until they are proven guilty!”

  “Here, women are considered inherently guilty,” said Rania.

  “Even in the cities?”

  “Especially in the cities! The most modern of men want to marry girls from the countryside, and when they don’t find one, their mothers do it for them, misfortune to those who have abandoned the virtues of the country for the darkness of the city.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “The virtues of the country are only one more example of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of jailers.” Rania thinking that to escape the jailers one had only to close one’s eyes, or to be alone, among the rustling grass, on the path where she could talk to herself out loud, nazala l’hub manzilan fi fou’adi, love has taken a place in my heart . . . to speak to the other voice that rose up in her own, a desire . . . The figure came to meet her . . . Everything became faster when I saw him . . . What is a flame if it remains in the flint? I left his hand on my stomach and morality to everyone else . . . The figure disappeared under the white disc of the sun. Rania came to herself, lifted her head to Gabrielle, who had respected her silence while looking at her wide eyebrows that a razor had transformed into pure and distinct curves.

  And in San Francisco all of that had ultimately turned into a maelstrom of stories and substories of a jury, a grand jury, perjury, defamation, questioning, retractions, the testimony of the coroner . . . Fatty found himself in front of the grand jury, the police chief saying that he had looked under all the rocks and that the death of Virginia Rappe was rape and murder in the first degree, adding: “There is no way an Arbuckle is going to come to San Francisco to do such things and escape scot-free.”

  “In San Francisco,” Neil pointed out, “people don’t like Hollywood. They say, ‘This is the North!’”

  “You have to explain,” said Kathryn, “They mean the South is full of ‘darkies.’”

  The prosecution’s strongest ammunition was the testimony of the three women: Delmont, Blake, and Prevost. With Semnacher, Virginia’s agent, D.A. Brady had his four aces. And there was also Lehrman, the victim’s boyfriend, Neil continued. Virginia was at that point, the years go by, the weight is gained, but no real roles. And Samuel added: Lehrman had a wide forehead, the eyes of a rat, and a droopy mustache. His sweetie had left him in New York to go party on the other side of the country. When he learned that she was in the hospital, he was happy to send a
get-well-soon telegram, but after she died, he called the undertaker to ask him to whisper in the dead girl’s ear, “Henry loves you.” Afterward he began to play the role of avenger, and newspapers ran headlines: “Virginia’s fiancé wants to kill Arbuckle.” He said that in the beginning Fatty cleaned out spittoons; a cleaner of spittoons had been turned into an idol. That tub o’ lard took my fiancée into a room to rape her: she tried to fight him off!

  When Gabrielle told Rania about Fatty’s youth, Rania commented: “At six years old my husband, to survive, had begun by sweeping out the school in his village. It was either that or become a petty thief . . . One day the teacher had surprised him writing numbers on the blackboard. He didn’t understand them, but he liked numbers. That had charmed the teacher, and my husband quickly advanced . . . He was on his way to becoming the best financial lawyer in the capital. He did it all by himself, but I never understood his love of weapons and fighting: it wasn’t his world. He wanted to imitate the lords who in any case are gone . . .”

  “Do you think of him a lot?”

  “I’m angry at him for going off and getting killed for a country that despises us.”

  Throughout the United States Fatty’s films were removed from theaters. The grand jury deliberated very quickly.

  “Back home,” said Samuel Katz to Raouf, “the grand jury is the one that decides which cases will go before a judge.”

  Maude Delmont gave the damning testimony: Fatty holed up for a half hour in a bedroom with Virginia. Then there were doctors, peritonitis following a rupture of her bladder, and for the district attorney the proof of a violent struggle were the torn clothes, thus rape and murder. But others noted that the body didn’t show any proof of violence.