mincing and simpering until it drove me mad.
Whenever one of them swaggered too much for my liking, or if his mother had a way of walking that reminded me of my own, or if she wore gloves and took them off and held them gracefully in one hand, then I couldn't bear it: I went out of my mind with fury.
The minute the culprit came in I went for him. 'You don't have to parade about like that, you big ape; not with a mother dressed in last year's fashions. Mine was better looking, brighter and more distinguished than yours. Her jewels were real, not phony like your mother's. Such trash! Even a guy who knows nothing about it can see that right away.'
Naturally, most of the guys didn't even wait for me to finish before hitting me in the face. Sometimes the first swipe would go right to my head. I fought rough: butting, mule-kicking, using my elbows in the infighting; and joy welled up inside me, as though I were smashing all the mothers who dared to be as pretty and fine- looking as my mama.
I really could not control it; ever since my mother's death when I was nearly eleven, I'd had this red-hot fury inside me. You can't understand death when you are eleven: you can't accept it. The very old might die, maybe. But your mother, full of youth and beauty and health, how can she die?
It was because of a fight of this kind that my life changed completely.
The guy was a pretentious asshole, proud of being nineteen, proud of his success in math. Tall, very tall; no good at games because he studied all the time, but very strong. One day, when we were going for a walk, he lifted a massive treetrunk all by himself so that we could get at the hole where a field mouse was hiding.
And this fellow had really let himself go that particular Thursday. A tall, slim mother, in a white dress with blue polka dots. If she had been trying to imitate one of Mama's dresses she couldn't have done better. Big black eyes; a pretty little hat with a white tulle veil.
And this engineer-to-be swaggered about the courtyard the whole of that afternoon, up and down, to and fro, round and round. Often they kissed; they were almost like lovers.
As soon as he was alone I started on him. 'Well, you're the wonder of the world, all right. You're as good at putting on a circus act as you are at math. I didn't know you were such a…'
'What's wrong with you, Henri?'
'What's wrong with me is that I just have to tell you that you show your mother like they show a bear in a circus, to amaze your buddies. Well, get this: I'm not amazed. Because your mother is just nothing at all compared with mine: she takes after the showy tarts I've seen during the season at Vals-les-Bains.'
'Take that back, or I'll spoil your face for you; and you know I hit hard. You know I'm stronger than you.'
'Trying to get out of it, eh? Listen: I know you're stronger than me. So to balance things, we'll have a duel. Each with compasses. Go and fetch yours and I'll fetch mine. If you're not a shit and if you can stand up for yourself, I'll be waiting for you behind the john in five minutes.'
'I'll be there.'
A few minutes later he went down, my compass point buried deep just under his heart.
I was seventeen when my father and I saw the examining magistrate in charge of my case. He told my father that the only way to stop the proceedings was to make me join the navy. At the gendarmerie of Aubenas I signed on for three years.
My father did not really reproach me for the serious thing I had done. 'If I understand rightly, Henri,' he said-he called me Henri when he meant to be severe-'and I believe what you say, you suggested fighting with a weapon because your opponent was stronger than you?'
'Yes, Papa.'
'Well, you did wrong. That is the way ruffians fight. And you are not a ruffian, my boy.'
'No.'
'Look at the mess you have got yourself into. Think of how you must have hurt your mother.'
'I don't think I hurt her.'
'Why not, Henri?'
'It was her I was fighting for.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean I can't bear seeing other boys flaunt their mothers at me.'
'I will tell you something, Henri: it was not for your mama that this fight and all the others before it came about. It was not out of real love for her. The reason is that you are selfish; because fate took your mother from you, you would like it to be the same for all the other boys.
'If you were really a reflection of your mother's heart, you would be happy at the happiness of others. Now, see, in order to get out of this you have to join the navy: three years at least, and they are not going to be easy ones. I am going to be punished, too, since for three years my son is going to be far away from me.' And then he said something that has always remained engraved on my heart: 'You know, my dear boy, you can become an orphan at any age. Remember that all your life.'
The _Napoli's_ siren made me jump. It wiped out that remote past, those pictures of my eighteenth year, when my father and I walked out of the gendarmerie where I had just enlisted. But immediately afterward there rose up the unhappiest memory of them all, the moment when I saw him for the very last time.
It was in one of those grim visiting rooms at the Sante prison-each of us in a barred box separated by a corridor a yard wide. I was racked by shame and disgust for what my life had been and for what had brought my father here into this wild-beast cage.
He had not come to reproach me for being suspect number one in a dirty underworld job. He had the same ravaged face I had seen the day he told me of my mother's death, and he had come into this prison of his own accord to see his boy for half an hour, not to condemn his bad behavior or to make him understand what this business meant for his family's honor and peace of mind, or to say, 'You are a bad son,' but to beg my forgiveness for not having succeeded in bringing me up properly. What he said was the last thing I should ever have expected, the one thing that could touch my heart more deeply than all the reproaches in the world: 'I believe, Riri, that it is through my fault that you are here. Forgive me for having spoiled you too much.'
Nothing could have been more hostile than the iron discipline of the navy in 1923. The ratings were classed in six categories, according to their level of education. I was in the top, the sixth. And this seventeen-year-old boy, just out of the class preparing for the _Arts et Metiers_, could not understand or adapt himself to blind, instant obedience to orders given by quartermasters belonging to the lowest intellectual level.
I was in trouble right away. I could not obey orders that had no rhyme or reason. I refused to go on any specialized course, the normal thing for a man with my education, and I was at once classed among the estrasses, the undisciplined, the no-good 'unspecialized' types.
We were the ones who had all the nastiest, dullest, stupidest jobs. Potato peeling, head cleaning, brass polishing all day long, coal shoveling, deck swabbing: all for us.
'What the hell are you doing there, hiding behind the smokestack?'
'We have finished swabbing the deck, quartermaster.'
'Is that right? Well, just you start again, and this time swab it from aft forward. And if it's not cleaner this time, you'll hear from me.'
A sailor is a fine sight, with his pompom, his jersey with its wide blue collar, his slightly tilted cap as flat as a pancake and his uniform made to fit properly. But we good-for-nothings were not allowed to have our things recut. The worse we were dressed and the drearier we looked, the better the quartermasters were pleased. In an atmosphere like this a rebel never stops thinking up offenses. Every time we were alongside a quay, for example, we stole ashore and spent the night in the town. Where did we go? To the brothels, of course. With a friend or two I would fix things in no time at all. Right away each of us had our whore; and we not only made love for free but would also get a bill or two for a drink or a meal from our women.
The punishments became more frequent. Fifteen days' detention; then thirty. To get back at a cook who refused us a bit of meat and a crust after the potato- peeling detail, we stole a whole leg of mutton, done to a turn, fishing it out with a hook we slid down a ventilator over the stove when he had his back turned; we ate it in the coal bunker. Result: forty-five days in the naval prison; in the middle of winter I was stark naked in the Toulon prison yard, opposite a washhouse with its huge tub of icy water, into which we had to plunge.
It was a seaman's cap not worth ten francs that brought me up before the disciplinary board. Charge: destruction of naval property.
In the navy, everybody changed the shape of his cap. Not destructively-it was a question of being well turned out. You first wetted it, and then three of you would pull as hard as possible, so that when you put a piece of whalebone around inside, it was as flat as a pancake. 'It's terrific, a regular flat cap,' said the girls. Particularly a cap with a pretty carrot-colored pompom on it, carefully trimmed with scissors. All the girls in the town knew it brought good luck to touch a pompom, and that you had to pay for touching it with a kiss.
The master-at-arms was a thickheaded brute-I became his pet aversion. He never left me in peace; he kept after me night and day. So much so that three times I went awol. Never more than five days and twenty-three hours, though, because at six days you were put down as a deserter. And a deserter I very nearly was at Nice. I'd spent the night with a terrific girl and woke up late. One more hour and I should have been on the list. I scrambled into my clothes and left at a run, looking for a cop to get myself arrested. I caught sight of one, hurried over to him and asked him to arrest me. He was a fat, kindly old soul. 'Come now, boy, don't fly into a panic. Just you go back quietly to your ship and tell them all about it. We've all been young once.'
I told him one hour more and I was a deserter; but it was no good, he wouldn't listen. So I picked up a stone, turned to a shop window and said to the cop, 'If you don't arrest me, I'll smash this window in one second flat.'
'The boy's crazy. Come along, young fellow; the station for you.'
But it was for having stretched a cap to make it prettier that they sent me to the disciplinary sections at Calvi, in Corsica. No one can doubt that this was my first step toward the penal settlement.
They called the disciplinary section _la cam ise_, and you had a special uniform. As soon as you got there you went in front of a reception committee, and they decided whether you were to be rated a genuine cam isard. You had to prove you were a man by fighting two or three seniors one after another. With my training at the Crest high school, I did pretty well. During the second fight, when my lip was split and my nose a bleeding mess, the seniors stopped the test. I was rated genuine _cam isard_.
_La camise_. I worked in a Corsican senator's vineyards from sunrise to sunset: no break, no little favors; the difficult sort had to be brought to heel. We weren't even sailors anymore: we belonged to the 173 Infantry Regiment at Bastia. I can still see that citadel at Calvi, our three-mile walk, pick or shovel on our shoulder, to
