0143107445 by Jean Larteguy

Author:Jean Larteguy
Language: rus
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

THE MULES OF THE COL D’URQUIAGA

Lieutenant-Colonel Raspéguy spent the first month of his ninety-day leave in his native village of les Aldudes, on the Raspéguy estate, near the Col d’Urquiaga. The first days were among the best in his life.

Walking by the banks of the Nive, clambering about the mountains drenched in mist and rain, shooting in the Hayra or Irraty forest, he was reminded of the little shepherd boy he had once been—mysterious and solitary—and of the adolescent who had become an accomplished frontier-crosser and whose blood raced through his veins like a torrent. It was during the civil war and the Republicans paid a high price for arms and ammunition.

One night Franco’s men had seized him and his father. They had beaten him to a jelly all night and had left him for dead out on the mountainside. A guardia civil had dragged the old man to the bottom of a ravine and finished him off with a musket bullet.

The Raspéguys would have worked equally well for Franco as for the Republic; they were simply smugglers who seized every opportunity to make a little money. But from that day on Pierre-Noel Raspéguy had vowed an implacable, absolute hatred against the Galician dictator.

A few days after his release from the Vietminh camps the colonel had ordered himself a car. It was waiting for him at Marseilles. It was a Régence with claret-coloured coachwork outlined in cream, masses of dazzling chromium and white-wall tires. It was equipped with a radio and with mirrors on both front fenders.

It was in rather bad taste, somewhat reminiscent of a grocer who has made his little pile, but Raspéguy did not mind that. He knew it was bound to overawe his compatriots.

The colonel had carefully calculated the time of his arrival so as to appear in front of the church just as the congregation was leaving. The men were coming down from the oak gallery by the outside staircases, their rosaries round their wrists, while the women in black mantillas emerged from the low vault, making the sign of the cross.

In a brand-new uniform, his breast adorned with all his decorations, his pipe stuck at a jaunty angle in his mouth, his bamboo swagger-stick under his arm, his red beret pulled down on one side, he stood, shoulders squared, chest thrown out, muscles flexed, in the pose which every paper in the country had popularized.

The men had hesitated an instant before recognizing him as “the great Basque condottiere.”

Jean, the youngest of the Arréguy boys, was the first to cry out:

“It’s Pierre Raspéguy of the Urquiaga estate, it’s the colonel from Indo-China, that’s him all right with an American car.”

Then they had rushed towards him. Half the village was related to him on the male or the female side and they had all insisted on kissing him, so as to make it plain to the customs officials and the police that they were his kin.

They told him that his mother and brother had come to

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