The Influence Peddlers Read online

  And then there was high drama when Maude Delmont, the first accuser, changed her testimony. She admitted that she had drunk a dozen whiskeys and that Virginia Rappe had gone into the room alone. And that, said Neil, was a problem for the newspapers that had depicted Fatty carrying away a girl who was fighting him off!

  Kathryn had made a face that seemed to say that was a detail that didn’t detract from Fatty’s perversions. Neil was silently having fun while observing his wife. Kathryn had a difficult role. She would have liked to have hanged Fatty, tell about what happened in his troupe, but she would have also had to tell about what she had done while she was with them. Raouf didn’t understand anything about that tension between the husband and wife, but he tried to seem as if he did, which then prevented him from asking questions of Gabrielle or Ganthier. And he didn’t dare ask Kathryn, either.

  Cavarro continued: The Delmont girl confirmed that she had put Virginia into the bathtub with pieces of ice on her stomach to ease her pain, and Semnacher, Virginia’s agent, had testified that he had heard the actress say, “He hurt me,” but only on Tuesday morning . . . “On Monday I thought she was just drunk,” said Semnacher, “That’s why I had gone home, yes, to Los Angeles, with one or two of Virginia’s torn clothes. I was planning to use them as rags . . . for my car.”

  Cavarro was acting as if he wasn’t taking sides, while bringing up only the worst of each episode. To me, Ganthier told Gabrielle, he looks like someone who is watching a shipwreck which he is almost certain to have escaped, but since he is constantly returning to it he could be carried away on a wave, and Neil with him. Gabrielle was intrigued by the director/actress couple: “They work together,” she said, “They live together, but you get the feeling that if we weren’t here they would be at each other’s throats.”

  They kept bringing up the gas chamber, but Zey Prevon, the other key witness for the prosecution, let Brady down. She refused to confirm the victim’s “I’m dying, he killed me.” It was on the police statement, but she hadn’t signed it, in spite of threats by Brady, who said he would charge her as a conspirator in the murder! Brady had only one main witness left, Maude Delmont, who said different things depending on the jury she was talking to; there was also Semnacher, who contradicted himself. It didn’t carry weight, so Zey Prevon was brought back to the stand, and she confirmed what Maude Delmont had said.

  In the streets, the Women’s Vigilant Committee demanded Fatty Arbuckle’s head. They rarely called him by his nickname, Fatty, which they considered to be too friendly. They are called Vigilantes, Kathryn said, they defend the rights of women and the morality of the old, Neil adding that with Prohibition they had killed taverns, and now they wanted to ruin the film industry: “They can’t attack us for what we show and what we say, because of freedom of expression, so they take aim at our lifestyle, in the name of virtue, and that spreads vice! For alcohol they have succeeded in turning us from a country of boozers to a country of criminals. There have never been so many bottles of milk sold in the States ever since bottles have been painted white and contain a mixture of caramel and woodgrain alcohol, and cost five times more than the real whiskey they took away, a ‘milk’ that paralyzes legs.”

  At the beginning of the trial the Vigilantes had sat in the first row of the gallery, wearing all black. They were confident: Fatty was going to end up like a snowball in Satan’s hands.

  9

  AT A NICE SCHOOL

  Kathryn knew the contents of her Baedeker and Guide Bleu by heart. She was proud to show off her knowledge to Raouf: “That’s a madrassa!” she had said to him while squeezing his arm. In front of them, a dozen or so boys were chanting in a shed. Behind the teacher, hanging from the wall, was a large stick with a length of rope attached to each of its ends.

  “And that’s what he hits them with when they don’t know their lesson!”

  Raouf laughed:

  “He better not! It would kill them!”

  Kathryn fell silent. She was disturbed by Raouf’s laugh. She didn’t want to hear any more details, Raouf continuing:

  “But it’s still used for discipline, in a certain sense.” He was waiting for a question from Kathryn, which wasn’t coming. She changed the subject:

  “Did you get hit at school?”

  “Which one?”

  When he was a boy Raouf had attended two schools at the same time, a French school during the day and what Kathryn called the madrassa in the afternoon. The madrassa wasn’t too difficult. You just had to learn verses from the Koran by heart. His only problem was that he chanted rather badly. The teacher, Si Allal, scolded him for wanting to first understand the meaning of what he was supposed to chant, and Raouf didn’t like bending to the established rhythm. It was a sin to do otherwise. The teacher said, “It is while chanting that one makes the suras enter into the soul, don’t you have a soul?” Raouf ended up having two texts in his head, the one he was asked to chant and the one he tried to understand.

  For those who didn’t have a good memory, Si Allal used not a stick but a large, solid, yet supple switch. It caused the most pain and blood that could be inflicted without breaking a bone. The stick with the rope attached to the ends was only its complement, and on a first, somewhat serious mistake, at a sign from the teacher, two students quickly approached the guilty one. They put him on his back, put his feet through the rope on the stick, then slowly turned the stick to pull the rope around the well-bound feet, and then lifted the stick horizontally up to their chests. The guilty one found himself hanging by his feet, offering his bare soles up to Si Allal, who, before striking, said, The teacher’s switch comes from paradise. The two students in charge of the victim were usually large and strong. It was a sought-after task, because one couldn’t be a victim and a torturer at the same time. They rarely laughed, except when the victim, upside down, pissed on himself.

  Other times, for more venial sins, on another sign from Si Allal, the guilty one brought the tips of his fingers together, turned them upward, and presented them to the teacher: quick blows, and double punishment if you pulled your hands away before the strike. You were then forced to present not just your fingers but both palms, which promised even worse blows. The times when Si Allal gave proof of great inventiveness was with students who let their hair grow when poverty, scabies, or lice didn’t force them to have their heads permanently shaved. The teacher would pinch a lock of hair in a break at the end of the switch, and he slowly rolled the hair until the student began to cry. He would pause, allow the victim to find the words that he was unable to recite, then start turning again, until there was true crying, from pain, another pause, the saccharine voice of Si Allal: “Do you remember now?” and he slowly raised the switch higher, like a fishing rod. The student stood up, trying to add to his pleas the words to be recited that his friends were whispering to him, until he found himself on tiptoe. Si Allal then stopped pulling the switch higher; the guilty one became the artisan of his own pain; and as soon as he couldn’t stand on tiptoe any longer, his pleas started up again. Si Allal was careful not to bend his switch too much—it rarely broke—and the guilty parties themselves were careful not to cause that catastrophe; they always stayed one step ahead of the pain; they played with it. It was not as bad as their cries indicated, but there was always the moment when it got the better of them and their ability to breathe, and those who had proven the most resilient at the beginning would start to beg.

  When Raouf would say: “It’s bad form to beg,” his friends responded that he could say that because the teacher never tortured him. No student could ever remember seeing Si Allal raise a hand or a switch to Raouf, whereas that immunity was a blemish on the way in which Si Allal exercised his profession. No one would dare mention it, of course. A student would never have dared to say: “You hit me, but not him . . .”

  He was happy that the caïd’s son was a good student, and there was no one like him to recite the suras the teacher ordered him to recite without mistakes in front o
f officials; but that lack of common punishment was a bad sign for the community. No, it wasn’t because the caïd was a powerful figure that the teacher refrained from punishing Raouf. Other students were sons of figures who were almost as powerful as the caïd and they were still taken by their hair or beaten bloody. If the teacher didn’t touch Raouf, it’s because the caïd hadn’t said to him, as all other fathers did when they brought their sons to him: dbah wa ana neslakh, cut his throat, I’ll skin him! The caïd had said something more complicated, about dignity, about men who only become worthy if they are treated with dignity, and dignity doesn’t need to be beaten in. The teacher didn’t agree—his switch had created dozens and dozens of believers—but the caïd had had a cold tone when he had spoken, and above all he hadn’t repeated himself.

  “So, if I understand you, you would have liked to have been beaten,” Kathryn had said.

  “Sort of, and to get used to being beaten. I made a point of fighting after school.”

  Then Raouf fell silent, ashamed at having revealed himself. Kathryn had tricked him. It was her turn to talk. It was an exchange. She started to talk about her childhood, early adolescence, very personal things: “I was chubby, I had a huge behind, large calves—my mother made a point of coming into the bathroom when I was in it. I’ve changed, haven’t I?” Raouf blushed. She also talked about her school, her dance teacher, a friend of her parents: “He was generosity itself. He knew everything, loaned me books, gave them to me. He got my father to agree to let me go out in the evening—he told him, ‘Youth must prevail.’ He was the best dance instructor in the city. He was always joking. He taught me two or three very solid things that I still remember today. He had me read Mark Twain and Dickens in a school where it was best not to admit you read books . . . His wife was in a sanatorium, which cost a lot. He had the dance school; he taught half the lessons, and in the evening he wrote ads for the neighborhood store owners; I never saw him not working. On Sunday he visited his wife on the bus, seven hours round-trip. Sometimes he bought lottery tickets, but he never won; he knew how to comfort me when I had bad grades in school, and he went over my math homework with me. I would have preferred for him to help me before I turned it in, not afterward, but I never dared ask him: he was a moral person! I owed him my strength, and when he showed me his penis I didn’t understand, except I didn’t want to, and I was stupid enough not to turn him in; I didn’t want to seem like a tattle-tale—rather, I wasn’t sure that my parents would have defended me. I was thirteen. I just managed to say that I had twisted, then retwisted my ankle. I stopped dancing,” Kathryn started to laugh, “and I was so disgusted at what he had done that I lagged behind my girlfriends who were already spending Sunday afternoons with boys watching the river flow with something in their hand, as they said . . . I didn’t lag too far, but even so . . . Then my aunt offered to let me stay with her in Hollywood, and I made a lot of progress there.”

  Kathryn knew that Raouf was shocked and she was having fun seeing him pretend not to be, someone trying to share the same sort of confidences with him. “He doesn’t know anything about women,” said Tess, who sometimes talked with her. He pretended to have a lot of mistresses back in the capital, he got tangled up in his stories, and in front of Kathryn, he quickly returned to his school memories. Kathryn interrupted him: How did Rania receive her education? A bit like I did, Raouf had responded, in a French school, and for Arabic a teacher came to her house; she told me once that he was the only pious man she respected. When she finished at the French school she didn’t continue at the lycée; she was the only “Arab” in her class, and she couldn’t stand it. She could have gone to one of the convent schools, but they only teach sewing and housekeeping, so her father brought in teachers so she could continue studying French, math, geography, natural sciences, a sort of home school, like Egyptian princesses had.

  Raouf responded to Kathryn’s questions about Rania, but he didn’t offer more information, so Kathryn brought him back to the previous subject. At the French school there were also teachers with switches, not all, but some hit, yes, everyone, even the French kids, and the Arabs, Jews, Maltese, Italians. Monsieur Desquières told all of them sternly how privileged they were to be studying under him. He had his own method: he brought his chair out from behind his desk, put it in the center of the platform where the desk was standing, facing the class, sat down, sighed, smiled, and everyone knew what was going to happen next, especially on the days when he returned homework. He proceeded in alphabetical order, deadly silence in the room because he made a point of speaking very softly. The beatings were for grades below 3 out of 10. When a student heard his name he stood, went up the row to the platform, and there he had to kneel down in front of Monsieur Desquières, put his head between the teacher’s knees, and Monsieur Desquières squeezed that head like a vise. Then he took the large iron ruler that he always kept on his desk and began to beat the victim on his buttocks, slowly and strongly, noting the shouts and the kicking by saying: “Ah! The gentleman is resisting! He is resisting!” and then beat him even harder. On some mornings, when homework was being returned, there were always one or two students who became ill on the way to school. And the punishment lasted even longer for those whose names had to be repeated because they couldn’t find the strength in their legs to stand up.

  Once Raouf had had the courage to say to him: “Sir . . .” It was the day when Desquières had set upon David Chemla. Chemla was the son of a tailor. No one really understood the reason for this beating. Chemla was a very good student. The first blows were understood, because Chemla had laughed when the map attached to the blackboard had fallen: Monsieur Desquières didn’t like laughter in his classroom. Chemla had laughed so it was normal that he be beaten, but Monsieur Desquières had beaten him in an unusual way, not on his buttocks. He hadn’t put Chemla in the usual vise: he had come directly in front of him, and he had beaten the boy’s head with his hands while calling him a dolichocephalic, a word that the class had just learned in natural science class. He hit him harder and harder, sought the right angle to really hurt him, sometimes closed his hand into a fist while shortening his trajectory. His blows were spread apart. It was as if he tried each time to experience with his body the pleasure of inflicting punishment, to avenge something he wasn’t saying. Raouf had said Sir . . . trying not to shout out, not to provoke the teacher, not to create an obstacle. He would have been incapable of saying what he had wanted to put into his voice, not begging, not an appeal. Raouf hadn’t liked the sound of his own voice when he had said Sir . . . a sort of plaint, but not indignant. He couldn’t seem to want to interrupt Monsieur Desquières. That would have made him furious. No, he wasn’t furious yet. He wasn’t furious, he was methodical.

  Chemla took the blows without saying anything, without making the slightest noise. He didn’t beg. The others were afraid, at least those who were sitting next to Chemla. Those who were farther away endured the spectacle while enjoying it. Some laughed each time Monsieur Desquières said, do . . . blow with the left hand, licho . . . blow with the right hand, . . . cephalic, and the back of the right hand hard enough to surprise even Chemla. Raouf had said, Sir . . . and another student, Walther, Guy Walther, the son of the police commissioner in Nahbès, had also said, even more softly, Sir . . . and that had calmed Monsieur Desquières. He hadn’t looked at Raouf, or Walther. He continued to hit, not as hard, fewer and fewer blows, like a runner who keeps running slowly after the finish line in order not to abruptly stop the movement of his muscles. Later, many years later, while thinking about that scene, Raouf wondered why Monsieur Desquières had given in to their discreet appeal. Perhaps he had realized that blows to the head could have been more dangerous than those of a ruler to the buttocks. Raouf and Walther had enabled him to save face. He had ended by saying: “You hear, your friends are begging me to spare you, they are better than you, they know true solidarity, you dirty . . .” He had hesitated—everyone expected a final dolichocephalic—but he spit
out, “You dirty . . . money-grubbing Commie!”

  The map whose fall had made Chemla laugh was that of the colonial French empire, a map of the world with its large spots, red for colonies, yellow for protectorates, over Africa, Asia, and the oceans. And much later Raouf would learn what had been behind all that. Chemla’s family was communist, not the father, a gentle tailor, but the uncle, the one who worked for the railroad and called for the destruction of empires. He was a dolichocephalic, too. Monsieur Desquières knew all that.

  During his walks, conversations, and confidences with Kathryn, Raouf felt less and less prey to amorous suffering. He even started to worry about it, to wonder with fear, Are we only friends? But he also found peace in this new state, which to him seemed at least to be sheltered from upsets and breaks. Ganthier had even said to him: “Bravo! The journey has been completed! From the gallant to falling in love, and from being in love to being a true friend in record time!”

  10

  A WELL-PLANNED MARRIAGE

  In the discussions he led with his young friends at La Porte du Sud, Belkhodja had always been very self-assured—marriage was within his realm of expertise—but the more time that went by, the more anxious he became. It was almost the end of spring, and he didn’t have anything specific in the works yet. He was going to lose face. Some of the young fellows would notice, and that’s also why he brought up the cow of Satan, a term that was meaner than strictly necessary, when Raouf had begun to strut around with his American woman: he wanted to make the first move.

  They were now sitting on the terrace under umbrellas, and one day one of the young men, Karim, said to Belkhodja: