Free The Mysteries of Algiers by Robert Irwin Page B

should masturbate now? It will surely be my last orgasm. No, my bladder is full and, though the rest of my body is hot and stiff, my penis is limp and cold. Fear takes away desire, makes a man impotent. Now I can consider Chantal without the coloration of sexual desire. Look at her objectively, and I wonder how anyone so beautiful can be committed to a cause that is so evil? It is hard to get away from the notion that a beautiful face is the outward expression of a beautiful soul, a healthy body the appropriate sheath for a healthy mind. It is hard to get away from that idea, but I should. In any moment in history the oppressing class has most of the beautiful women. I wonder what Chantal thinks of me now? Strange for a professional hunter, now to be the hunted. I really ought to know all the tricks. But the right one for the present moment does not occur to me.
    I might get down from here. Go along to the barrack room of third platoon. Address the men. Appeal to the old Spanish Civil War lags. Organize a mutiny and a mass desertion. Claim that we are acting to support de Gaulle and the civil authority against a projected colonels’ putsch in Algiers. My men will follow me anywhere. Bunk. They won’t. They hardly know me. I have hardly interested myself in their welfare. I leave all that to the NCOS . They don’t particularly like me. I am the officer that busies himself with all that dirty work down in cell 2. It is hard for me to contemplate with detachment what my men would do to the officer who has been betraying their comrades to the FLN .
    I fired four shots at the security meeting. It is an eight-round magazine. Of course if it comes to it, I might have to blow my brains out. But there are a lot of other people’s brains I’d like to blow out first. If I do shoot myself, there will be nothing grand about it. I don’t want to be on the end of a rock ’n’ roll session in cell 2. And it is crucial that what I know about the command structure of the FLN should not pass into the hands of the enemy. Death then would be necessary to preserve the revolution’s secrets. Indeed it is objectively necessary that I get out of here and get what I know to the comrades in Algiers. First, the stuff about barricades week; FLN bomb squads can make good use of that. Second, the date of Operation Sunshade and details about its preliminaries. So far I have not even managed to get to my masters the information that Sunshade (code for the testing of the first French H-bomb in the desert) will take place at the beginning of next year. That is why the tribes are being cleared around Reganne. Third, Tughril in Algiers must be told how I have been blown and persuaded to do something about Chantal.
    Could the FLN organize a rescue operation to get me out? Not on. They don’t know what is going on and I have no way of contacting them.
    I detest and adore the woman, that body, those hips like a cavalry officer’s and that mind like a sewer. Simultaneously angel and pig, she rises before my vision as the flying pig: She is committed to Action Française of course. Daddy’s estates are in hock to the Jews and the Masons. De Gaulle is a crypto-communist preparing to sell us out. In her bedroom in Algiers she has a lithograph of Marshal Pétain standing on a storm-tossed hillside. The military cape on his shoulders and the tricolor above him billow in the wind of history. Chantal said that we should couple beneath him to get his blessings on our union. In her next breath, she said Pétain was the only man to have offered France a chance of moral regeneration in this century.
    And now that Pétain is dead? Order, discipline, purity, Chantal and her friends estimate that the old values can be restored, but a few heads will have to be broken first. The old values, the simple values, as little words who can quarrel with them? Chantal worships health, strength and beauty. We all worship them, don’t we? Chantal will never sleep with a man who