332
PARTISAN REVIEW
And it isn't only the S .S . and their boots. The whole man is in his
shoes. Well, let's take smugglers as an example . People sometimes
say the Basques have smuggling in their blood. What
I
say is that it
isn't in their blood that the Basques have smuggling, it's in their shoes ,
in their espadrilles. Take his espadrilles away from a Basque , make
him wear a mountaineer's heavy, nailed boots-no more smuggling!
But captivity was tough because of the lack of women . Oh,
sure, there were possibilities sometimes, when we went to work for
the locals . My pals took advantage of this . I never did. Because for
me, women, they aren't ... how can I put it. . .. They're more to be
consumed elsewhere than eaten on the premises, if you see what I
mean. Women are the atmosphere they radiate around them . That
was why the camp was terrible. It was all men, and more men . I
realized later that men could be of some use too, that they too could
have a meaning. But I hadn't got that far when I was a prisoner.
Men, I really couldn't see why they existed. So when the idea of an
escape came up, I was one of the first to be interested.
Every month a truck went from hut to hut picking up the dirty
clothes and taking them to a little factory five kilometers away to be
decontaminated . We reckoned that a couple of men could get out of
the camp by hiding in the truck . After three kilometers it had to pass
through a fairly dense forest on a lonely road. That was where we
should jump out. After that, it was merely a question of walking,
food, and luck. Fate picked on me and one of my comrades for the
first attempt. We hid in the back of the truck while it was being loaded
with the clothes from our hut. We left the camp without any prob–
lem.
It
was as easy as pie . Five minutes later, we entered the forest.
My companion jumped out of the truck, hid under the nearest trees,
and waited for me. I didn't jump. I'd fainted. I hadn't been able to
stand the sickly stench of the dirty laundry. Men's dirt, a virile stench.
And a cold smell too, maybe that was the worst. It's like a pipe: a
warm pipe, even if it's old and dirty, is a smell you can put up with.
But a cold pipe is a dead pipe, it stinks.
If
the body needs its clothes
to keep it warm, clothes too need a body to keep them warm . Clothes
that have been away from a body for too long finally die. The pile of
stuff in the truck had become dead clothes, carrion clothes.
I hadn't been able to hold out. Antoinette's little panties had
made me faint with joy when I fell onto the cobblestones . The truck
full of the prisoners' dirty linen had made me faint with horror and
disgust. When they unloaded the truck at the factory my unconscious
body rolled out in the middle of the bundles . Lucky for me I didn't
