Memories of Richard Trigaux: 3 Bechar 1964-67

Historical context

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

Algerian independence came in 1962, putting an end to the war and all its associated atrocities. However, secret negotiations with the FLN had led to the Evian agreements, which allowed France to keep the bases at Béchar (the CIEES) and Hamaguir (the rocket launch pads) for some more years. This explains why my military father was transferred to Béchar in 1963, when almost all the other Frenchmen had left.

Looking for «Colomb-Béchar» on youtube tells what it looked like when I arrived. By the time, many people still referred to the area as Colomb-Béchar, but as soon as Algeria gained independence, they ditched the «colomb», definitively unwelcome in their new country. I always was careful to respect their wishes, since at the age of 11 I already understood that they were right to demand their country's independence. Indeed, at the Jean Moulin school I had been taught that the French had been right to claim theirs, just some years earlier, in 1944. I also no longer use the expression «Algérie Française» (French Algeria), but «Algérie coloniale» (Colonial Algeria), which better describes what was really going on: no effort was ever made to integrate the Algerians into France. Well, depending on where you look, some French people did make some effort.

I found out long afterwards, from a former legionnaire friend who had worked there, that several other French bases continued to operate in secret, many years later, notably the infamous B2-Namous, east of Béchar, for chemical weapons testing.

The war was not completely over, however: Morocco tried to reclaim Béchar, resulting in the «war of the sands» until 1963. I saw the rows of barbed wire set up by the Algerians to counter them, when we went to Ouakda (a small oasis north of Béchar). They seem to have disappeared today. Morocco won the military victory, but was overruled by the colonial law not to change the borders resulting from colonization. This colonial law is still in force today, 2016. I find it extremely curious that countries which rejected colonization still refer to a law born of colonization. Perhaps this is to avoid further wars, linked to the realignment of the colonial borders with the real peoples.

This paragraph added in February 2025: Actually, with the revival of the Berber culture, we learned that People in Béchar are not Arabs, but Berbers. In more, there are many member of the Moroccan Chleuh (Shilha) tribe living in Béchar. Today they no longer do war, but an interesting cultural expression.

Béchar was born of French colonization. The name comes from a local tribe, or from the Ksar Béchar, or from the Oued Béchar, as do other neighboring names such as Abadla. Old photos of Béchar still show the hamada (stony surface) soil between the houses, and it was still visible in places when I visited. Today, the entire town center is tarred and landscaped.

The town was built around the Ksar of Béchar from 1903 (entrance here: 21°36'51"39N, 2°12'51"45W, then the courtyard to the east), and what we called the «camel’s place» (31°36'58"N, 2°12'51"W), originally a simple stopping place for caravans. When we arrived, it was still a vast square of earth, entirely surrounded by typically Arab arcades made of white-painted mud bricks. Probably the last real dromedary caravans arrived while we were there, but we missed this. Today it is the Place de l'Indépendance, tiled, with trees and a basin in the middle. But many of the arcades are gone, replaced by modern buildings.

When we arrived, in 1964, Béchar was already a big city, and it did not owe it to the French soldiers who still lived there: it was a big Algerian city, and it is still growing today.

The CIEES and Hamaguir

(Permalink) Written in January 2017.

The French bases of the CIEES and Hamaguir had no nuclear activities. Reganne is much further south, on the road to Adrar, and was no longer active when we arrived. In Ecker is much further east, but it was still active while we were there. The secret B2-Namous chemical weapons testing base remained active until around 1990, and we only learned of its existence afterward. Pollution from past or ongoing tests could have reached Béchar, via the many sandstorms. But at the time we lived in a blissful ignorance of all these things.

The Algerian government had to fence off the remains of Reganne and In Ecker, because the locals were collecting scrap metal to make tools, or even jewelry, which were then brought to France, without realizing that all this was radioactive.

Today the anti-French government of Algeria speaks a lot of the radioactive pollution, but without publishing any map or measurement. So that it is impossible to know if we were irradiated or not.

The two bases of CIEES and Hamaguir had two different, though related, functions:

-Testing anti-aircraft missiles. Béchar’s CIEES launched CT20 target planes, while Hamaguir fired at them with experimental missiles. All this was of course entirely military, even if the technicians probably came from civilian companies. I saw such «Matra» missiles at Mont de Marsan in 1968, a year after we left. The kind of things that were tested, then.

-Testing the first French space rockets, in line with De Gaulle’s desire to make France an autonomous space power. This activity was intrinsically civilian, but the army was in charge of all the logistics and all the means. The launch pads were at Hamaguir, with CIEES providing logistical support and telemetry.

These activities continued after the end of the war and the independence of Algeria, thanks to the Evian Accords, negotiated in secret with the FLN during the last year of the war. This period ended in May 1967, giving France time to build the Kourou base in Guyana for rockets, and the Centre d'Essai des Landes for missiles, without interrupting these activities. The presence of French soldiers in Algeria at that time can therefore be explained by the Evian Accords. It was these agreements which conditioned our lives, us the families of the said soldiers.

The legion was also very present, with among other things a police function: they noted the cars entering the desert road, to intervene if they did not return within the expected time. Their presence continued well after the Evian Accords, under conditions that I am unaware of. The old legion post which did this was here at 30°58'36.36"N, 2°46'29.64"W, with an isolated mountain to the south separating the road to Adrar from the one to Hamaguir. At a moment, only the foundations of the Fillod prefabricated buildings remained, but the Algerians have since rebuilt something, probably for a similar use.

Béchar had a large airport, mostly military, but also receiving flights for the use of French civilian residents. Today this airport is Algerian, with a military section and a new section for civil aviation.

Béchar was also a large Algerian city, with its palm grove, restaurants, a market, and everything you need to live there. The French had their own city for families, a school and a high school, a kind of small supermarket in a hangar (probably run by the army), etc. But we went freely in and out of town, with the exception of the Ksar and a few other places strictly reserved for Muslims.

On the other hand, Hamaguir was an isolated base in the middle of the desert (as I had first imagined Béchar), populated only by soldiers and (most likely) civilian technicians. There were no families, few women, and no Algerian civilians in the vicinity. However, the base camp (which I visited once) was a rather pleasant place, a small city nestled in an orange valley, with green trees, leisure activities, etc.

According to some accounts I have read, the beginnings of French rocketry were more like an adventure novel than rocket science as we imagine it. Thus the first French rocket EA-41 with liquid propellants was tested by a SAP enthusiast, Jean-Jacques Barré, on the Larzac plateau, under the noses of the nazi occupiers. At Hamaguir, bringing in liquid oxygen cooled to -180°C was a challenge: driving a truck over dozens of kilometers of rutted tracks, in the infernal heat of the desert, in the middle of the Algerian war. The first attempt was a failure, the truck having broken down: they had to let go the precious cargo, rather than risking an accident with it. The engineers then understood that they absolutely had to prepare the liquid oxygen on site, instead of trying to bring it. But at this price, France had its rockets, admittedly smaller than their prestigious American or Soviet parents, but a deserved pride, for all those who were involved closely or remotely in the adventure. Thus the first French satellite, typically called Asterix, was prepared in a few weeks by a team of about ten persons! An unthinkable thing today that satellites are complex and exquisitely detailed machines.

We only saw a rocket launch once, and even then, from far away, that is to say from Béchar, or 80kms. So we only saw an orange point of light climbing the night sky, without any sound. I no longer remember which rocket it was, probably Diamant, but others match the date or description. If you want to identify it, it was at nightfall, and it was heading west or northwest. This rocket had a special feature: since the Topaze powder second stage had four nozzles, the exhaust formed a cross in the night sky. This cross even had a name, I think the Korolev cross, but I don't remember the word my father said. Models can be seen on Wikipedia and at the Air and Space Museum in Le Bourget.

We observed from a rather curious place: 31°36'43.67"N 2°14'54.12"W, which still exists today, although it seems that the Algerians have modified it. It was a relay station for the «hertzian beam» which allowed the Béchar base to communicate with Paris. It could be recognized from afar, by the presence of two metal pylons carrying two large dishes. Others were visible on the road to Oran. Since my father was a warrant officer in communications, he was able to get us into the technical building. Two soldier technicians were there on guard, in a mysterious semi-light, in front of a wall covered with an interlacing of waveguides and other strange devices. I was already familiar with electronic circuits, but these were completely unknown to me, extraterrestrial.

As children of soldiers, we had access to the CIEES compound (under certain conditions of course). So my father took me several times to his workplace, 31°37'09.4"N 2°14'45.6"W, a large room with about ten technicians, each at a table, handling various devices. One of them had an oscilloscope, and I was fascinated by the luminous lines on the screen. One of the most striking memories was the smell of cold tobacco (no hygiene at the time) and often someone whistling a boring refrain.

In the corridor there was a CT20 fuselage, partly dismantled. The CT20 was a small, unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft intended for missile testing. As these tests could damage it, the plane was designed to be easily dismantled, and the fuselage that lay there was actually disassembled into short sections, with a diameter of about 80cm. I remember a section in the shape of a hollow cylinder, for the passage of air to the reactor. Another section had a hole, due to a fragment of the test missile.

The CT20 was to be launched from a ramp, with two powder booster rockets. My father recounted that once, only one of the two rockets had ignited, sending the machine spinning above the heads of the technicians, who we imagine running to the shelters.

The CT20 was so practical in its role, that it was still in use until around 1997: I was then working at EREMS, and one of our orders was a remote control box for anti-missile decoys, to be mounted on this machine. At the time I had asked my boss not to make me work on a military project, which he had accepted. Then I realized that it was for a childhood memory...

The ancestor of the CT20 was the CT10, which used a pulse jet, directly inspired by the nazi V1. There was one on display at the airport stopover (here 31°37'32.3"N 2°15'13.5"W). But the Algerians built a real civilian airport terminal further on the Hamada (here 31°39'05.8"N 2°15'09"W">), abandoning the Fillod prefabricated buildings used for this purpose at the time. (traces of the two Fillod here 31°37'33.4"N 2°15'15.4"W)

See this section, in the thread on wars ▶️

Why did these three Algerian years remain
three beautiful years, apart of the others?

(Permalink) Written in December 2016.

These three years spent in Algeria remain among the most beautiful of my life, and a moving memory. The main reason of course is that Algeria is a cheerful and sunny country, of a fantastic beauty. The Sahara has long haunted my dreams, and the further south I went, the stranger and more purple the landscape was. Today I still dream of being able to return to Béchar. I probably would not find everything I had known there at the time, but I could visit a whole bunch of magnificent or strange places in the surrounding desert, of which my father's fear had deprived us, such as for example the strange Djebel Oreid, where one would expect to see a djinn from the Thousand and One Nights emerge. In any case I explored everything with Google Earth, more than a hundred kilometers around!

The other remarkable point is that I received very little mockery from my high school friends in Algeria (Almost all French, because we lived apart from the Algerians). These sociopathic attitudes were almost absent, allowing me to normally have friends and group activities, all things I was deprived of in the previous years in Saint Dizier and in the following years in Mont de Marsan, where I was the regular target of abnormal sociopathic attitudes ruining any collective life.

I could not say why things happened this way in Béchar especially. Was it our situation in a kind of golden ghetto, in a country which was theoretically hostile? I do not think so. There certainly was racism and distrust towards the Algerians, but against all the warnings, things always went well with them. I even find fantastic that a people to whom we did an atrocious war were not angry after us in the end: the Arab hospitality and kindness had immediately taken over.

Another explanation would be that adults who agreed to come and work in Algeria at that time were subject to a positive selection. This could be true for high school teachers, who were volunteers, or technical cooperation workers, and therefore already altruistic or willing to help the Third World. However, most of my classmates were the sons of military men. I do not think that the sons of soldiers are particularly better than others; on the contrary, my worst experience of social perversity was with them (at the Naval College in Brest).

Another explanation would be that sociopaths did not attack other French people, because they considered them as «friends», in front of a common «enemy», the Algerians. I do not think that this is the right explanation either: sociopaths have very recognizable behavioral tics, even when they want to be our friends. These tics being unconscious, they have difficulty hiding them. Even today that I know these tics, my memories do not show any. Even racism was not very visible in our ordinary life. In addition, some of us had relations with Algerians, due to their situation as technical cooperation workers. For example, one of my brothers had made a friend of the son of the director of the power plant, whose employees were Algerians. I once visited this place, which still exists today (2025), an astonishing garden in the middle of a dark factory in the style of the 1930s: 31°35'2.91"N, 2°13'54.97"W. We ourselves interacted several times with the Algerians: shopkeepers, restaurants, street vendors, etc. and there too, things always went well. Those who did not like Algerians did not dare to mention it in front of them anyway, because of the very unfavorable balance of power: in Béchar, the immigrants were us, ha ha ha!

In fact, I have no explanation: there simply was no organized sociopathy in Béchar, neither among the French children, nor among the adults, nor among the Algerians we met. There were certainly individual incidents, but they remained isolated, without spoiling the general atmosphere.

Added in October 2021: In fact, yes, there is one thing which correlates very well with mockery and other abnormal behavior: the absence of girls. Apparently sociopaths and other sick people find in girls their «natural inferiors», and therefore they would not feel the need to inferiorize other men. But if there are no girls, then their unhealthy compulsion to make someone inferior pushes them to «feminize» selected men. What is remarkable is that they all choose the same targets instantly, sometimes in a fraction of a second. This points to clues which are significant to them, but that normal people do not deem important, or which they even not notice. I speak more about these diseases in connection with the Lycée Victor Duruy. In Béchar, there were girls, although at the time I did not paid more attention to them than to male friends.

Added in November 2025: another very known cause is complacency by the authorities in charge of keeping the social peace. Either the agree with the sociopaths, or they are cowards, or they just think those disorders are normal.

I am definitivement not the only one to keep a moved memory of Béchar. Search for «Colomb-Béchar» on youtube, there are a lot of nostalgic videos, showing it nearby as it was when I was there.

So these three normal years make a clearing of light, between the dreary years of Saint Dizier of the past, and the dark years of backward Mont de Marsan. That said, I would most likely not find this atmosphere again if I returned to Béchar today. Moreover, the Algerians have violated several of the fantastic landscapes that had enchanted me, and that no one will ever see again.

See this section, in the thread on wars ▶️

Our first plane trip

(Permalink) Written in September 2016.

We stayed in Saint Dizier for the whole school year 1963-64, without my father, who was transferred to the CIEES in Béchar. This year was generally felt to be positive. At the time I could not know why, but I talked about it with my mother: in order not to create an open conflict, she was often forced to comply with my father's decisions. But alone, she was freer to do things her way, which was better for everyone. My memories lack dates, but it was probably that year that she read to us in the evening, etc. In any case, we did not feel the distance from our father as a problem. Not a week went by without an exchange of letters.

However, we could not miss going to see my father in Algeria. Which was done for the Easter holidays of 1964.

The trip was extraordinary for us. We flew to Orly, a legendary and prestigious temple of air travel, so new for the time, with the sophisticated and distinctive voices of the hostesses in the loudspeakers.

At the time, at the age of eleven, I already had an idea of how an airplane worked. In particular, that the Caravelle we were going to take was pressurized, and equipped with pressure-resistant doors. Well, at eleven years old, you are still very impressionable, and to tell the truth, I was not very reassured, seeing these famous doors: as the Caravelle has a staircase under the tail, you go through the rear pressurized wall, and the technical details are much more visible.

However, I had another very specific reason for not being reassured: only ten years earlier had occurred the two strange accidents of the De Haviland Comet, the first real pressurized jet airliner. Due to the inexperience of the manufacturers, two of these planes had suffered explosive decompressions in mid-flight. There was a ghostly feel to these elusive disasters, without any warning, and it had taken years of costly research to understand what had happened. I had read the whole story a short time before in Reader's Digest Selection. Hence the concern. And I still did not knew that the Caravelle had inherited several parts of the Comet, especially the nose. Today the whole story is on YouTube!

This Caravelle was not just any: it was «De Gaulle's Caravelle», the plane he used for his official trips. But its interior appearance was quite ordinary, with just the two seats rows at the front arranged as a lounge. In this case, it was a military flight, for Béchar. However, there were no uniforms to be seen, because people were not on duty.

From the gray Orly, we entered the clouds as soon as we took off. I only remember a few houses, before being swallowed up in the mist. I felt for the first time this exhilarating sensation of seeing our usual world suddenly reduced to a sort of model!

Then it was the bright sun, above a strange landscape of immaterial and luminous cotton. The ground only became visible above the Pyrenees, still snow-covered at that time of the year. It probably was the Canigou. Then we passed over the Mediterranean. I perfectly remember the Balearic Islands (probably Ibiza and Formentera), which seemed like little jewels seen from such a height.

The world seen from high altitudes is different: the sky is indigo, and it is always sunny. Everything shines with a strange light, the world is entirely pastel, the clouds are below, and even the ground is blurred, also pastel.

At this moment is a memory that would seem extraordinary today: as we were the only children on board, the pilots invited us into the cockpit! Yes, at the time there were not yet all these imbecilities of hijackings and attacks, so things happened in a much more family-friendly manner on board. This kind of good-naturedness is also part of the military atmosphere, and was not possible on commercial flights.

Seeing the world from the pilot's point of view is different: we see where the plane is going. Since we were over the Mediterranean, there were no landmarks on the ground. But at that moment we were crossing a bank of cirrus clouds which offered visual clues to estimate our movement.

And the pilots did not made fun of us: one of them invited me to turn a knob, telling me that he would make the plane turn. And indeed, I could see through the cockpit windows that we had changed course, relative to the cirrus clouds.

Many years later, with the Internet, I was able to check views of the dashboard of the Caravelle, and I recognized the famous button, which effectively controls the bearing of the autopilot. In fact, we had arrived at a navigation checkpoint, off the coast of Oran. This maneuver was therefore part of the flight plan.

Well, Today, such things are strictly forbidden. There have been disasters caused by non-staff persons in the cockpit. We think of the famous sociopathic Polish president harassing the pilot to land «anyway» in the fog... the ability of politicians to live outside of reality seems limitless, even when their own lives are at stake. In another case, on a Russian plane, a child was frankly invited to sit in the pilot's seat! And to manipulate the stick «lightly»... But he did not knew what «lightly» was: his action disengaged the autopilot. The situation then degenerated in an as strange as implacable way: the plane entered a such a brutal turn that the centrifugal force pinned everybody down, preventing the pilots from regaining control. They crashed within the next minute.

We arrived in Algeria above Oran. The most striking memory at that time was the Sebkha of Oran, a vast, smooth beige expanse, which had intrigued me, because I could not see what it was. In fact it is a temporary lake, with a smooth and flat bottom, which appears on all the maps. Its shallowness explains its color, unless it was empty at that time.

But quickly appeared the orange ground of the desert, folded with brown mountains, this fantastic Sahara that I had heard so much about in Tout L'Univers, and that I was so curious to see! One of the things that intrigued me the most was a series of spots on the flat ground, sometimes regularly spaced. There are some in several places, particularly north of the Anti-Atlas, for example 33°18'N, 1°37'W. I wondered for a long time what they were, and only understood it much later: slightly damp hollows, with a sort of sparse vegetation. When it rains, these plants bloom, covering the desert with a great multi-colored beauty. One of the rare times we went out, on the road to Beni Abbès, I was able to see these plants up close. Some are surprisingly adapted to the desert: ball-shaped cacti, without thorns but curled up under a thick skin, the same color as the surrounding stones. These plants look like the lithops, the mythical «living stones». But Wikipedia says that the latter only live in South Africa. My memory is not precise enough to identify them more precisely.

Then, after the brown and purplish folds of the Anti-Atlas, the fantastic vision of the Béchar plateau was revealed, with the surrounding mountains.

Béchar is in the middle of a vast, smooth plateau, ochre-orange in color. We reach it and pass over the last folds of the anti-Atlas, the Djebel Antar and the Djebel Oreid, to the north. To the east stretches a long and narrow winding mountain range, purplish-brown in color, the Djebel Béchar. To the west, very visible from the air, stands a spectacular little isolated mountain, like an Arizonan mesa, which appeared on the CIEES badge. We called it the Château de Bou Hamama. An improper name, because it celebrates a «victory» of the occupiers in the Algerian war. Its real name is Om Sbaa. Surprise, I expected to find just an airport surrounded by a few hangars, but we were flying over a whole light-colored city, with a wadi and a long palm grove. Oddly enough, we were treated to this grandiose view only at this time. All the other times there was an issue preventing us from seeing.

When the plane doors opened, I was the first to get out... to be immediately overwhelmed by the brutal heat of the desert! It was so strong that I thought it was the engines which were still running (a faint noise was still audible) but I quickly realized that it was indeed the heat of the sun! That feeling of entering an oven, typical of the Sahara... And yet, it was only Easter.

The heat of the desert is certainly higher, in degrees, and if we do not protect ourselves from it, it quickly makes us sweat, or even feel bad (sunstroke). However, it is less unpleasant than the «canicule» heat waves that we have in France, especially in the Toulouse region. The cause would be that the desert air is drier, and therefore does not produce all the discomforts of the canicule. On the other hand, our nasal mucous membranes suffered from irritation during this first stay. They got used to it later, but I kept gray, lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands and elbows for all those three years, as if I had not washed for months. Apart from that, the pure air of the desert is much more alive and invigorating than the polluted air of our cities!

From the airport we went to the city in one of those old dark green military buses with rounded shapes. Our first contact with the city was so naive that the other passengers laughed a lot, especially when we saw the first veiled Arab woman, it was a concert of ecstatic exclamations!

Let us specify that, at the time, and despite a certain racism, there were not yet these imbecilities of niqab hunt. In public, Algerian women almost all wore a loose white garment, with a scarf covering their hair and face, leaving only the two eyes visible, sometimes only one. However, what we saw in the souk showed that in private they dressed very nicely, in translucent dresses with multi-colored sequins!

We spent the two weeks of Easter vacation in a villa that we called «chez Bazin» 31°36'59.05"N 2°13'19.88"W. I never knew who this Bazin was, probably a colleague of my father. This villa was empty of furniture, and I do not remember how we ate or slept, my father probably had planned something. In fact we spent almost all this time playing in the courtyard, which was enough for us since it was already «the desert», with rocks, sand, and trees, including an orange tree. In fact this courtyard was limited either by walls or by fences in front of rocks, which meant that we could not see the neighbors.

We still went out several times, on foot, especially to the open-air cinema. It was on this occasion that we were able to best admire the desert sky: a fantastic landscape of thousands of stars, of which we have no idea in France. We did not just see isolated stars, but a whole dusting, especially in the Milky Way, impossible to see in France, with our humid air and light pollution. I have never felt so immersed in our universe!

These night outings also allowed us to see several beautiful shooting stars. I even remember one producing a sound, a sort of brief «wosh». This seemingly impossible sound of some shooting stars is still an unsolved mystery today. I think for a neurological explanation: the brain would make a sound, this also happens sometimes when we are startled while drowsy. But some scientists propose an explanation based on microwaves.

Our first outings in town were to the market: we discovered ripe, sweet and fragrant oranges, so different from the sour things that bear this name today in France! They were grown in walled gardens, north of Béchar, along the wadi which allowed them for irrigation.

Plus the Arab kindness: one of the merchants actually gave us oranges, to us children!

Then the souk, 31°36'50.4"N 2°12'53.0"W, with its inventories of beautifully colored sequined dresses that women wear at home, in private. But the most spectacular was indeed the multicolored spices stands, presented in heaps without packaging, which perfumes filled the souk.

On the other hand, the meat with flies did not tempted us... The beauty of the displays did not concealed the poverty and filth which were still the lot of many Béchariens at that time.

Other plane trips

Written on June 13, 2019

We had nine plane trips in total, mostly for the summer holidays when we returned to France. Most often it was in a Caravelle, DC6 or DC8. The most unpleasant was the earache, upon landing. It is hard to imagine how intense this pain can be, to the point of completely monopolizing attention and spoiling the admiration of the landscapes. Fortunately it dissipates within minutes of landing on the ground. I have taken other planes later in my life, but happily better planes do not do that anymore. On the other hand, I sometimes feel pressure in my ears... in a car! during a steep descent.

But one of these trips stood out radically from the others: in a DC3 «Dakota»! a real military plane, with a bare metal interior! We left Paris Villacoublay, and this journey was extremely long, in the incessant noise of the engines and propellers. Arriving above the Balearic Islands, the effect was entirely different, instead of seeing a jewel floating on the Sea, we saw an entire country, with villages and fields. Once above Algeria, the desert was also much closer, giving the impression that we were going to touch the mountains.

The boat and car trip

(Permalink) Written in January 2017.

After these two weeks of testing, permanent installation was needed.

This time we had to bring our car, the famous dark green Aronde, and as many things as we could.

So, this trip was not made by plane, but by boat, aboard the El Djezair, which was what was called at the time a cruise ship (second of the name, built in 1951 and recycled in 1973). We embarked in Marseille, and I remember our car rising into the air, carried by a powerful crane, to land in a hold.

I also remember my father warning us that the harbour was notoriously bad. And he was right: we did indeed come across a group of people who looked us up and down with disdain, as if to assess the interest of a bad coup. Around 1978, my future partner had 200 kilos of organic hazelnuts stolen in this same port, in a van that was clearly not capitalist. This is why I say that these gangs are fascists.

The night on board the boat was bad, with a storm, a terrible wind, rolling, ropes stretched in all the corridors, and skating on vomit. The El Djézair was known for being too heavy in the heights, which made it roll more than the others.

Then, as if by magic, after the Balearic Islands, the weather became pleasant and sunny. I remember the Balearic coasts, passing by on each side. A completely different impression than seen from the plane: the Balearic Islands are real lands, not stones.

We arrived in Oran at nightfall, and so we were not able to admire the city. Here is an incident that could have had annoying consequences: for the Algerian authorities, we were «immigrants», and therefore we had to comply with their rules. One of these rules was that they would hold the car's registration document while they checked it. My father refused, which also blocked the other passengers. I do not know how it ended, but he managed to get out of it and that evening we set off by car towards Béchar!

I do not know how my father did that, but he drove all night, almost seven hundred kilometres, with only one break! He was used to long journey legs, but this time he outdid himself. He probably feared above all having to sleep in an Algerian hotel!

The night did not let us see much of the plains between the two Atlas mountains, and my only memory was of huge fires, probably lit by the farmers for some purpose. Although in this arid climate, these practices are not recommended, and these fires were perhaps accidental. And in any case it was a very beautiful sight, a little surreal, as if we were passing on a carpet of orange light...

On the other hand, the day coming revealed the fantastic landscapes of the Anti-Atlas! Arid and beige-orange landscape, with steep brown mountains, sometimes tending towards purplish! We only made one stop, and for the first time we tasted the silence of the mineral desert! Although three chatterboxes kids were enough to fill it for kilometers. Despite this, the feeling was very different from France, where there always are birds, wind in the trees, etc. And there was indeed nobody. Except for two tanker trucks which passed. From a distance they looked like skulls, hence a certain worry when seeing them arrive. The most impressive passage was a little further, a gorge near Moghrar, south of Aïn Sefra. This magic is only found in certain films like Aladdin. If you see these films, know that reality is even more magical than fiction.

Béchar, our villa

Written on June 13, 2019

Once we arrived in Béchar, we stayed some weeks in a building, 31°36'45.11"N 2°13'24.04"W, before getting a villa: 31°36'45.15"N 2°13'22.11"W with a front yard and a back yard.

It was a small residential area with square streets. The villas formed bars, with a garden on each side. On the southeast side, it was shaded by oleanders, with a sort of pergola. On the northwest side, it was emptier, but shaded by a large tree that we called a tamari (tamarisks), and several small ones. The house itself was faded yellow, entirely on one level. The interior was organized around a living room giving access to three bedrooms. For my part, I had a room to myself, which was a great change from Saint Dizier. I think that for a child, learning autonomy involves having a place of his own, where he can do what he wants, without interference from necessarily limiting or invading brothers.

For us kids, the villa had immense advantages: we could tinker under the pergola, garden, dig, play with sand, and even with water. This clayey sand hardened once dry, and was therefore much better suited to modeling than beach sand. All children should have this opportunity, and it is not surprising that the «city districts» provide so many delinquents, if the children grow up there without ever touching earth or plants.

This place still exists today, but the fences have been replaced by walls. Indeed, in the Muslim culture, the courtyard is a private place, while in European culture it does not occur to anyone to hide it, or it can even be ostentatious. Thus, at the time, the villas were surrounded by a simple fence, and we could move freely between the blocks. Since then, the Algerians have built walls everywhere, which makes the places more intimate. Unfortunately, in the process, they also cut down many trees which marked the boundaries between the courtyards. This makes that these villas are less green today than in our time.

Our neighborhood: La Barga.

(Permalink) Written in January 2017.

La «Barga» is the cliff which is located immediately to the west of our place of residence, and which gave its name to the entire neighborhood, and even to the school group. One of the two bargas (cliffs) ended near the villa of Bazin,31°36'59,06"N, 2"13'19,7"O (the rocks that we had there), and passed to the west, behind the buildings where we lived. It continued practically in a straight line to Djorf Torba, site of the dam of the same name. A second Barga followed it parallel, about a kilometer further north, delimiting the plateau where the CIEES and the airport were located.

The neighborhood itself was delimited to the east by a small valley, an old bed of the wadi, partially filled in to build ochre residential towers. A configuration which had caused a catastrophe: one of the hollows, called the Chaaba (31°36'50"N 2°13'8"W), was inhabited by some of the poorest Arab families, in mud houses. One day, during a flood of the wadi, the water had filled the Chaaba, and the mud houses collapsed on the inhabitants, killing about ten. Since then, the Algerians have forbidden building there, preferring to arrange it into a park and sports area.

With the exception of a small market (with the grocer and baker Miloud where we went, and whom we liked), the entire neighborhood was populated by French people, and built in the French style. They were mostly blocks and houses, with the «economat» (small improvised supermarket in a hangar, likely ran by the French army) to the east (31°36'42.43"N, 2°13'12.37"W) and the school group to the south (the courtyard of the «Lycée de la Barga», 31°36'42.52"N 2°13'17.24"W). Apart from the gardens and streets, the ground was still hamada. The gardens were quite green, due to the abundance of water for watering. Although we had only a very limited choice of plants: oleanders, tamarisks as the only trees, and instead of lawns, «fairy fingers» (Carpobrotus edulis, or ficoïde, with mauve flowers). In the summer the neighborhood buzzed with «frivaps», air conditioners based on the evaporation of water. But in the winter we had to heat, and we had an oil stove. Yes, we do not realise, but the Sahara can be cold in winter, in some places it freezes every night, and there was even snow on Bechar recently.

Among the animals, there were many stray dogs, three kinds of ants, one of which was quite large, easily fifteen millimeters long. I once found a huge queen ant, yellow, more than two centimeters long, but I don't know of which breed. There were also some kind of geckos that we called margouillats. Plus huge cockroaches, fortunately few in number. We once found a deadly yellow scorpion, crushed by the wheel of the car. There was also talk of black scorpions and «horned vipers», but I never saw any. Some sources mention tarantulas, but I think this is a confusion with black scorpions. The surrounding desert had gazelles and fennecs, a kind of small fox. Not to mention beetles, lizards, etc.

Shameful stories were told of French soldiers using army helicopters to hunt gazelles with machine guns! It must have been true, because one day we were offered gazelle meat. No wonder, with such a state of mind, that France was finally driven out of Algeria.

Le «Lycée de la Barga»

(Permalink) Written in January 2017.

I entered sixth grade at Lycée de la Barga in Béchar. It was a small high school, where we were probably no more than two hundred. It was near our house, at 31°36'42.38"N 2°13'17.51"W. It was a small ochre-yellow building with one floor served by a central staircase and an open-air gallery. On each side, small buildings served as housing for teachers, with gardens.

My parents had warned me that high school introduced many changes, compared to primary school, requiring me to be more resourceful, autonomous and organized. Indeed, I had to change room for each class, according to a weekly schedule. Actually this aspect of things did not pose a problem for me, with in addition a state of mind of general benevolence which quickly smoothed out the rough edges. Only one teacher was a bit crazy. I would have forgiven her if she had not stolen one of my paintings that I really liked.

The French, math and history classes were not really different from primary school. Science brought interesting new things. I don't remember what I studied in sixth and fifth grade, but in fourth grade it was geology, which I absorbed like desert sand absorbs water. Which earned me an average of 18 and a first prize.

On the other hand, the total novelty was the English class! At the time, I had already understood the enormous advantage of knowing several languages. But, in the backward world of the 1950s, such knowledge was totally hidden, and I had no idea what I was getting into. Not even Yes or no. It was as if I was going to learn some strange magic!!

In fact, during the first lesson, we were instructed to go «with Mr. Chaix», without knowing what he was going to teach us. It was a surprise lesson! Mr. Chaix was a man of gentle manners, with short hair slicked back on his head, very light blond, which even made him look British! At the time it was still customary to stand up when the teacher entered. So we were all standing. He stood in front of us without saying hello, and motioned for us to sit down, saying something we did not understand. Then he motioned for us to stand up, saying something else. Fortunately the repeaters knew, and I quickly understood: «sitdown» «getup» he said, several times. I was excited at the idea of starting to learn English! Another time, same thing again, he came in without saying anything, stood in front of us, ostentatiously running his tongue over his incisors, making «ve ve ve». For some seconds, we wondered if it was him or us. Then he told us to do the same. This is how we learned to make «the» from the first time, without lisping «ze» like many French people do. I have had many other English classes since then, and other private or professional discussions, but that annoying «ze» always came back. Even the Americans who want to look peasants say «da», never «ze». I even wonder if the English understand this gibberish.

So thank you Mr. Chaix, for giving me such a good start, in what was certainly one of the most useful things I learned at school! Today I express myself mainly in English with all my virtual friends, and I translate my novels myself, or even write them directly in English. But it was not always easy, and the bad years at Mont de Marsan did not allowed me to learn much.

The three school years spent at Béchar ended with the award ceremony. Well, today it is unthinkable, and considered competitive or other unacceptable defects in education. But I have a good memory of the thing, which served as a sort of end-of-year party. And not a single year went by without me having at least one prize and one accessit, if not several. The last one was the first prize in science, more precisely in geology, at the end of the fourth grade. Our teacher had offered beautiful boxes of geological samples, which I kept for a long time. It had to stay at the Faitg, with some other souvenirs from Béchar. The heavy military canteen «from Béchar» which contained them did not find a place in the emergency move, and I never had the heart to go back to get them from this place of suffering.

Sports, the judo

(Permalink) Written in May 2019.

Having a normal social atmosphere at school allowed a much more positive approach to sports. Not that it interested me more, but at least I was allowed to participate in team sports lessons, mainly handball. So I was able to learn this game, and to get to it. But the playground at the Lycée de la Barga was not big enough for football, so we went to the only football field in Béchar, 31°36'19.26"N, 2°13'2.60"W. At the time it was a simple flat field, of compacted sand, without grass or stands. The Algerians have since made of it a real stadium. However, I preferred handball to football, because it does not require so much running. Running has never been my strong point, especially under the Sahara sun, which quickly leads to sunstroke.

On the other hand, one sport that I deliberately chose was judo. We had already had a demonstration at the Jean Moulin school in Saint Dizier. All these things were so new that in our ignorance we had wondered what this «jus d’eau» («water juice»!!) could be! But the demonstration by professionals dispelled all doubt: Judo is a prestigious combat sport. And frankly strange for a totally virgin French eye in 1963.

In Béchar I was offered Judo. The children of military men were entitled to various activities, including this one, and through the base or between parents we were informed of this possibility. The place was a prefabricated Fillod, which was located within the CIEES compound 31°37'16.89"N, 2°14'38.86"W. This Fillod was still visible until around 2010 on Google Earth, but the Algerians built solid buildings instead, for other uses.

One of the reasons I accepted was that I knew I could be physically attacked at any time. I needed a way to defend myself, especially knowing that I was physically inferior. In fact, the only time I had the opportunity to use something resembling Judo was in Bordeaux, to rear lock a guy much stronger than me (a nutcase who wanted to «buy» us a female friend!) The affair ended in negotiation, without violence fortunately (and by protecting the girl). I was threatened on other occasions, but that was settled by fleeing, or by not responding to provocative signals. Violence is a matter between monkeys, and I am a human. Monkeys probably know instinctively that they should not mess with humans, even if they are of inferior strength. (In fact, I even tried later with real monkeys, in Swayambunath near Kathmandu, where I tried to make friends with one of the many monkeys. His threatening gestures quickly made me understand that it was not a good idea. But all it took was breaking eye contact to defuse the situation.)

Well, I did not have any extraordinary results, and I even thought I was worthless, when I was finally granted a yellow belt. So I could have continued and obtained decent results, but we stumbled upon our departure from Béchar. And impossible to do anything like that in Mont de Marsan! Too backward at the time to accept a judo club. So that was the end of my sporting activities, except for a bit of caving and mountain hiking later.

One of the interests of a judo session is that you start with half an hour of gymnastics. This allowed me to develop some muscles, and no longer be «last in sports» (the penultimate, lol). Especially, I was able to do abs. Well, if I did not continue with sports, I did, however, regularly dig, build, walk, etc. whether at our property in Mont de Marsan, or later in the Faitg. Which produces the same effect on the body, but it also is more useful than sports. My main problem with judo is that I was told that I was «too stiff», but without being explained what that meant. A bit like a few years earlier at Nancy, a reproach without explanation. Which earned me to remain a white belt (the lowest level) at the end of the first year. It took a lot of demonstrations from a very patient instructor, to finally understand and adopt a more flexible attitude. And so finally obtain a yellow belt at the end of the second year (when I should have been an orange belt). Well, if I could have continued, I could have ended up getting an interesting level, but in Mont de Marsan it was not possible. In fact, even if there had been a club in Mont de Marsan, it was too complicated, between the journey (in Béchar we had a dedicated bus) and the bad atmosphere with the high school friends.

The surroundings of Béchar.

(Permalink) Written in May 2019.

Ouakda is a place north of Béchar, with a small dam on the wadi 31°40'21.5"N 2°10'30.8"W. There is water all the time, and you can even swim. We often went there, on Sundays, with other neighboring families. I never knew what this dam was for, but it must be important, because the Algerians have since rebuilt it. At the time it was a simple straight wall.

Just to the west passed the train, the one of the failed Trans-Saharan Line, stopped at Abadla by the wrath of the desert. But the line remained active from Oran to Béchar. At the time it was a metre gauge track, where stainless steel railcars passed, which I saw. Today it has been rebuilt a little further in standard gauge, with modern and comfortable trains. If one day you visit Béchar, go there by train: the landscape is fantastic!

In three years we only went once to see the mountains of Djebel Béchar up close. These mountains of a beautiful purplish brown fascinated me, and they are part of the skyline of Béchar like the Pyrenees from Tarbes. Unfortunately we took a wrong path, and we only climbed a side hill, before being stopped by a ravine. It was a great frustration, but my father never agreed to go back there.

There were other possible excursions: Djebel Antar, Djebel Oreid, a magical place from the Thousand and One Nights with its narrow doors in the cliff, Om Sbaa, an Arizona-style mountain that we called (improperly) Chateau de Bou Hamama, then this oasis where I went with the scouts, and other places. But we had no more than four outings in three years!! A shame, given the fantastic landscapes to visit. If you ever go to the area, at least enjoy it!

The excursions

(Permalink) Written in May 2019.

We went on several excursions with my parents. Not as many as we should have, because my father was a froussard and a homebody. For him the desert was nothing but uninteresting stones, which were also populated by dangerous Tuskens hidden behind each dune, ready to emasculate him (These ignoble stories of emasculation were a constant throughout the Algerian war, and my father clearly mentioned them several times at the time, between 1964 and 1967. So it is not a later invention).

Béni Abbès was the excursion of choice from Béchar. We left very early in the morning. Some kilometers south of Béchar, the horizon in front of us began to show bars of molten gold. As we approached, we discovered the Tables of Abadla, mesas evoking an Algerian Arizona lit up in pink by the rising sun. I was fascinated by these magnificent mountains, and if one day I return to the area I will certainly make the climb. We passed Ksiksou, a mining village, which name seemed «Chinese» to us. Then Abadla, at the time a simple village, where we crossed the Guir wadi by ford. A dangerous crossing: in the event of a flood, it is a seven-meter wave, it was said, which arrives. In fact, no bridge had ever been built there, and the Trans-Saharan railway line stopped there, unfinished, unused. Today the Algerians have been able to calm the wadi, thanks to the Djorf Torba dam, and develop the old bed into rich agricultural land irrigated all year round. But the sediments are already filling the dam lake: one day or another, the wadi will reclaim its rights, carrying away fields and houses in a few minutes. This is the Sahara.

As we left Abadla, we had to register at the Legion checkpoint, for safety reasons: if we did not return on time, they had to know where to look for us.

Then the road took us to the Hamada. It was already a good tarmac road, not a track. But the Hamada is a very special place, with its own unique phenomena. First of all, it is fantastically flat, over 80 kilometres. Not even a bush, nothing, just a total void. Even a molehill would be visible from kilometres away. It must not be good to get lost here, without any landmarks, in the sun which dries everything in a few hours. The ground is yellow ochre, dotted with dark brown pebbles. Which produces a curious effect: wherever you look, with the movement of the car, these pebbles seem to rotate around the point of fixation.

Then after a while appears... sorts of purple flying saucers, floating above the horizon in front of us. These are the mountains of the Ougarta, curious sedimentary domes with even rings for two or three of them. So the flying saucer shape is real, not just in perspective. They seem to float above the horizon, by a mirage phenomenon. Everyone has had this impression of water on the road, in the distance. In the Hamada, it is so flat that the entire landscape seems drowned, and the mountains seem to float in the sky. The mirages are not... mirages!

In Beni Abbès itself are two souvenirs:

The swimming pool of Beni Abbès, the wonderful little swimming pool of Beni Abbès, of which all those who knew it keep a fond memory. Just that it is very cold, lol

The erg, the dunes, the Grand Erg occidental, all of pink-orange sand. We climbed a dune, to discover a fantastic copper horizon, endless dunes fading into the distance... It was a very intense, saturated color, that no photo or video can render. You have to have been there, and feel the powerful vibration of the desert.

On the way back, while taking the road, we came across a nomadic tribe.

Real ones.

There were about twenty of them, with dromedaries. They stood in the middle of the road, and signaled us to stop, for I don't remember what reason.

It was very impressive, because we were dealing with a real Tuareg tribe, the deep Sahara, the Blue Men. They wore loose clothes, white and blue, with ribbons fluttering in the wind. I remember the fluttering ribbons well, it was certainly done on purpose, and it gave them a magical look. These people were noble and clean-looking, unlike the poor people we saw in the slums at Béchar.

What did they want? Why did they stop us? Apparently, they were just asking if we had water. We had, my father had attached a huge transparent plastic container to the roof, in case we stranded. And...

he refused to give any.

...

Well, I'm still ashamed when I think about it.

To have experienced such a romantic scene worthy of «The Atlantis», and to have made a demonstration of selfishness.

To refuse water in the middle of the Sahara, that must be a unique case in the entire history of this desert.

Tarhit also received our visit, this time during a trip organized by «the base», in a military truck. We were able to talk with the village chief. The old village of Tarhit is special: to fight the heat, most of the alleys are covered. In front of the open door of the village chief, I felt like I was in another world. Indeed, contrary to popular prejudice, this interior was pleasant, and even a little luxurious, despite the rustic materials: copper, carpets, curtains, all with a dominant orange color giving it a warm look. The outing continued in the surroundings, where there were many rock engravings, dating from the last glaciation, when the Sahara was greener and more inhabited.

The scouts

(Permalink) Written in May 2019.

In Béchar there was a team of Catholic scouts. I can no longer say why I agreed to go there, after my unfortunate experience in Saint Dizier, nor why my brothers did not go. Probably a matter of age (I was the only one in high school, my two brothers were still in primary school)

The fact that they were Catholics did not arose too many problems for me, and I rather consider a privilege to have attended a mass in the old hermitage of Father De Foucault in Beni Abbès, at the time a simple building of raw earth with a sandy floor, right at the foot of the massive orange dunes of the Grand Erg Occidental. Well at the time I found it boring, but an hour for several days of adventure in an oasis in the middle of the Sahara was worth the expense. This chapel was made of earth, like all the old Algerian houses, and we were sitting on the sand dune floor. This place is still visible on Google Earth: 30° 7'28.97"N 2° 9'57.93"W. The surrounding gardens were also created by De Foucault. They are still maintained, but I don't know by whom. Today Google Earth labels this place «Eglise de Beni Abbès», and a road has been added, so this place is still alive, and recognized by Algeria.

I don't remember the scouts' premises in Béchar, probably we did not have access to them. But I remember two memorable outings.

The first was in a small oasis near Kenadza: 31°33'33.92"N 2°29'33.87"W. I never knew the name of this place, but it looked (and still does) like the idea of an oasis in the middle of the Sahara: a hundred meters of palm trees and bushes, wedged between two ochre limestone cliffs. What was remarkable about this place was the impressive number of caves, opening out at the foot of the cliffs: to the north, past the bend in the valley, they were real arcades! But we were not allowed to move far from the camp, and no one seemed interested in doing a bit of easy caving. Probably these caves did not go far, anyway. Instead, we played a silly game of spies trying to pass messages between defenders. it is crazy how some people lack imagination, and condemn themselves to a superficial life, when there is so much to do in this immense world.

The second outing was a fantastic five-day camp, during the Easter holidays of 1967, at Beni Abbès, 30° 7'12.14"N 2°10'0.88"W. These coordinates point to the exact location of the camp. At the time, the road did not exist, and so we had direct access to the rock to the northwest, which contained a small cave that we could enter on all fours.

On arrival at the camp, occurred the only incident I had in three years with an Algerian: a young man my age harangued me violently, and even hit my legs with a stick. At the time, I did not hold it against him, knowing that there had been a war just before. But I was still annoyed that he had attacked me, who had nothing to do with it. No other incident of this kind occurred during the entire camp. We went on several outings, including one to the ksar of Beni Abbès, 30° 7'23.91"N 2°10'22.31"W. It was an abandoned village, in the palm grove, fascinating to explore, with its narrow streets, its houses, and its inverted funnel wells (very dangerous). At the time we had not wondered why this village was abandoned, but I learned recently: it was the French colonial authorities who expelled the inhabitants, shortly after they had built the village. A dirty story, then.

The surroundings of the camp were an alternation of sand and palm trees, with several small streams surfacing and disappearing again in the sand. I remember, at night, we heard a curious sound: tut tut tut, several notes which repeated themselves, making like a swift melody. Asking one of the educators I did not received any answer. But I learned later: they were simply toads or other kinds of amphibians living there. These sounds made the night literally magical! These nights were wonderful and very clear thanks to our eyes accustomed to the darkness, to the point that we could discern the colors!

So we made several night outings, including one on the plateau above the village, at the time occupied only by a few buildings. The Saharan night is truly wonderful! This plateau is three-quarters surrounded by the orange dunes of the Grand Erg Occidental, which appear clear at night. Here is a curious memory: there was a small power plant on this plateau. The sound was unexpected: boom-boom boom-boom on two notes, with a period of one second. And it was indeed the power plant: the windows lit up at the same rhythm, by some flame. I was really intrigued by a power plant making such a noise, and I only understood it much later: it probably was an antique diesel engine, with a single huge cylinder like the steam engines. This would have justified a visit to the said factory, but instead we were treated with a pathetic hazing: our belongings thrown together and mixed up in the tents, totally lame when you are tired and just want to fall asleep. This is the problem I have faced my whole life: being in a wonderful world, but no one sees it, and they do stupid things like this instead of living this fantastic life together. There unfortunately also was a sociopathic fellow at this camp, who caused two fights and two injuries. At the time I did not know how to defend myself from such things.

The best moment however was a campfire with the Algerian scouts. Well, I must say, we were pretty stuck, and on both sides, because of the mutual distrust. The educators had therefore placed us in alternation, to avoid blocks: a French, an Arab, a French, an Arab, etc. Suffice to say, there was little chatter, and everyone stood up well straight, for fear of touching their neighbors! But we sang together... I consider having experienced such an evening in a wild Saharan oasis as a privilege, which probably influenced my life in a lasting way: for the first time I was with people who talked about real things, in this case against racism and for good understanding between peoples (And between religions: we were Muslims and Christians, at least in theory for me). And only five years after the war, it was not intellectual! (Remembering that the Algerian scouts experienced the first deaths of the war.) It was, let us remember, in 1967, just before the Summer of Love. The USA already had communities, Luther King and the anti-Vietnam War, but in France there was nothing, and we were not even informed about these things. Especially in Béchar, where we did not receive the radio.

Yet, if the seed was sown in my mind, there was still a long, tortuous and obscure path between theory and practice.

Our dogs

(Permalink) Written in May 2019.

Our first dog, I don't remember how we got him, but we called him Abadla, after the village on the road to Béni Abbès. And no, I never used this name to make an Internet password, neither for the secret question.

Abadla was of several breeds with the appearance of a small German shepherd. He was kind and very sociable. For us, three kids, he was our first pet. We liked him and we let him sleep in the house.

Abadla sometimes went out, and came back. But one day he did not came back. We found his body, already swollen, at the side of a road, broken by a car.

This miserable end left us sad.

There were many stray dogs, often abandoned by their owners returning to France. Touched, we talked to them and petted them. There was a huge one, a real German shepherd, but blond. I talked to him and he put his paws on the top of the gate. He was very gentle and let himself be petted. At the time I did not know it, but this behavior has a very specific meaning: he was looking for a master.

He came two or three times, putting his paws on the gate of the yard. Then one evening, he invited himself to our house, jumping over the gate and entering through the kitchen door.

My mother jokingly called him «Coquin» (Little rascal), then she gave him something to eat. So, without a word, he became «our dog», and we called him Coquin, because of the way he invited himself (in fact all dogs without a master do that)

Coquin slept under my bed. I admire the kindness of dogs: Coquin never threatened us, despite several bad pranks at his expense. Yet he was a big dog, capable of being ferocious, or of climbing a two-meter high fence. Sometimes he did that to follow us into the high school. Unfortunately his previous owners had trained him against Arabs, and he growled in their presence, which was a problem on some occasions.

We also had Boule, our neighbors' jet black spaniel, for some days, during their vacation in France. But that was the moment when she gave birth to a whole litter of puppies, also black. We witnessed, astonished, this incredible event, where a new conscious being begins to exist! Then the fantastic precision of their mother's gestures, which she could not have learned. Indeed, the puppies are born still wrapped in their amnios («under plastic», lol) and their mother must immediately bite this amnios to open it, without however hurting the puppy! A millimeter precision, which Boule accomplished without ever having learned.

Electronics

(Permalink) Written in August 2019.

My father brought back «from the base» quantities of electronic components, and even entire devices. I never knew why he did that, he had no use for them. Probably because I was interested. He said that it was obsolete equipment anyway. Whatever, these things fascinated me, even if I did not knew what to do with them either. They were various mechanical or electronic devices, complete assemblies or separate components. I examined them, noted the construction, and knew how to identify all the components. I even felt an emotional attachment to these objects, appreciating their colors, and even their smells! (Bakelite, solder, and even the characteristic smell of hot electronic tubes).

Among these electronic components were tubes of course, but recent models called miniature, cylindrical with a small diameter (19mm), instead of the big pre-war shouldered lamps. We were beginning to see sub-miniature tubes, the diameter of a pencil, but transistors prevented them from becoming established, and they were only seen for some years, only in aerospace. At the time, tubes were fascinating, as a concentrate of the most advanced electronic knowledge. Their glass walls revealed the internal electrodes, incandescent filament, grids, etc. A tube construction was a symphony of metallic grays, from shiny silver to matte black, electrodes, connections, and gray chassis iron sheets. There also was a lot of ingenuity in the construction of these components. The problem of inserting their elements into a glass tube of approximate dimensions had been solved with an unique method: the washers supporting the electrodes were cut from mica, with the edges cut into a star. Then they were forced into the tube, crushing the tips of the stars until the mica circle fit exactly in the available space, without moving. A variable slope pentode was created by winding the grid with a variable pitch! So it was a very concrete way to provide an abstract characteristic like the electrical response curve. I remember reading at the time that the flux directed tetrode was touted as the ultimate, the pinnacle, the quintessence of tube engineering... only to learn recently that it only served to circumvent the expensive patent on pentodes, without providing any technical advantages over them. The debate over which was better, the pentode or the flux directed tetrode, was never settled, dying out with the tubes.

A curious feature of tetrodes was a negative slope operating region, which circuit designers were told to avoid. This sometimes produced a cricket-like noise in audio equipment, which I remember hearing. But I have not found any mention of it recently.

But my time in Béchar was also a time of change: the grey tubes and their oiled paper capacitors (with their characteristic smell) were being replaced by transistors, and my father brought them back too. It was a new era of electronics which was starting, all in the colors of miniature plastic components, especially resistors and their pretty colored rings. While a tube required a chassis, a base and terminals, transistors became small components planted like the others on a printed circuit, allowing much smaller radios and other devices. My father had even brought back an oscilloscope, which ended up in Mont de Marsan, and a professional shortwave receiver, on which we picked up a lot of things, I even remember hearing the «Russian Woodpecker». At the time we did not know what it was: a Soviet over-the-horizon radar station located near Chernobyl, which was a real nuisance because it pirated the frequencies of other transmitters for hours. But there were also a lot of digital transmissions, already the same as today. There were several which sounded like a four-engine bomber. I was recently able to analyze the spectrum, which contains four FSK channels.

This almost sensual interest in electronics was to open me many doors later.

My father's illness.

(Permalink) Written in December 2019.

If my father was good for me, and often helped me with his technical knowledge, it was already clear at the time that he also had bad times. Especially, receiving school reports always ended in shouting, even if these reports were very correct. In addition to the reports, he sometimes had unpredictable tantrums, some of which ended with belt blows.

Such emotional and physical violence would be considered a serious misconduct today. But not at the time. it is not that we lacked references: we had plenty, on the contrary, telling us that these things were considered normal. We had even seen worse, like a father jumping out of the window (from the first floor) with his belt in his hand, to hit his son, for no apparent reason.

That my father was ill did not occur to us at the time. In fact, the very concept of sociopathy appeared publicly only much later, in the 1990s. But today I clearly see that he had something of this kind, even if it only manifested in episodes, between other good times. In fact, his victim of choice was Serge, my second brother. Which somewhat spared the other members of the family. I realize that unconsciously we were already afraid of what could go through his head. Indeed, one day, Serge had injured himself, and he had started screaming. The first thing that came to my mind was that my father had done something to him, on purpose.

Another incident, «normal» by the standards of the time, occurred at the base, where my father, a warrant officer, was director of a department with several technicians under his orders. I visited this place two or three times. But one day, he showed me a guy weeding the lawn by hand. And he explained to me very seriously, in front of him: «You see, even though he is an engineer, he has to do manual work like everyone else.» So, he had humiliated this man, simply because he was more educated than him! And worse, in the presence of a child. Despite the «normality» of these things at the time, I felt embarrassed for this guy. Besides, I imagine that if they had put an engineer under his orders, it was to do an engineer's job, not to weed the lawn.

I often spoke about these things with my mother since then, her who had realized his egocentrism since the marriage. When she finally asked for a divorce, around 1973, I asked her why she had not done it sooner. She replied that at the time it was almost impossible, a woman was always given the wrongs, and the children were severely punished, by sending them «aux enfants de troupe» (army corps for children, with a severe regime and deprived of love and education). I do not know if this last point is true, but we would certainly have had serious difficulties. When I see how my own children were made to pay in 1998, I imagine that in 1966 it would have been abominable. Indeed it was around this time that emerged scandals of children sequestered in «centers» which were in fact penal colonies for slave labor. Until 1976 I met «sortis de DDASS» (orphans sequestered, deprived of love and scotomized in centers, from which they keep serious after-effects. The DDASS is a French state organism supposed to avoid such kind of situations, normally by finding good foster families). My mother's fears were therefore only too well-founded.

My father often complained of having a headache. He had a way of saying it by emitting bad vibes, which made everybody uncomfortable. My mother told me that, shortly before the divorce, he had finally agreed to see a neurologist, who had found that his brain was only irrigated at 50%. Hence the headaches, and perhaps the sociopathy. However, he refused any treatment, fearing that people would «say he was crazy». And he never complained of headaches again! In fact, I later understood that many of the things he did were deliberately to be unpleasant. For example, in 1985, he employed me for three months in his store. At noon, we would go to eat together. But he would stay until five past twelve, then ten, then fifteen, sitting at his desk, fiddling with things, while I was stamping my feet. One day I picked up a book, instead of showing my impatience. He then immediately got up, and he never played this game again.

This is the moment I understood. There had been many incidents of this kind long before, but they were not noticed, because we do not think about such duplicity. It is the classic of all cases of violence in couples or against children, of manipulations and sects: the victims do not understand what is being done to them, do not see the source of their suffering.

One thing that has long bothered me is: what if my father had gotten treatment? What if all his behavioral problems, meanness, fascist opinions and manipulations had only been caused by the lack of irrigation in his brain? Well, probably things are more complex, but I think that in general it would relieve so much suffering if medicine could cure sociopathic disorders. Especially if we could find simple causes of this kind. Today, the only solution is to keep the sick at a distance. But the risk is then that they form dangerous political parties. Thus, during his last years in Mont de Marsan, my father had attended the meetings of the front national... (but not joined, because he had to pay!!) The refusal to recognize sociopathic disorders is very costly.

Today, psychiatrists have published a list of criterion to recognize this disorder, which is now classified in the DMS IV under the name of ASPD, AntiSocial Personality Disorder. But as usual for important things, society lags in this recognition. For instance I heard about lawyers pretending that sociopathy is a fake «psychoanalytic» condition. Or television philosophers pretending that sociopaths would be our «natural leaders».

Antoine's concert and the lying media

(Permalink) Written in November 2019.

Christmas 1966 saw a strange thing: a concert by a showbiz celebrity, Antoine, on the Béchar base!

While we were away in Béchar, France was changing very quickly, freed from the nightmare of the Algerian War and of the nostalgics of the 1940s. The had started to broadcast what was then called «pop music», a musical genre close to a soft and warm rock, with sounds which were beginning to explore the psychedelic. History has remembered the Beatles, typical of this style. But at the time there were many others. For the first time, the radio was broadcasting in color! Television was soon to follow.

However, this movement, initially well-supervised, quickly overflowed in completely unforeseen directions, with several ephemeral styles, considered «eccentric» at the time (which was fantastic progress: only some years earlier guitars had been declared «scandalous»). One of these styles was the «yéyés», probably because they repeated the American expletives «yeah» or «oh yeah» (written and pronounced «oyé» in French). But other almost extraterrestrial oddities were to emerge: singers with long hair! Men, yes, at a time when a man with long hair was considered homosexual, and homosexuals as shameful degenerates!

This breeze of sunny freedom excited the youth, and finished euthanizing the last survivors of the militia era.

Antoine was therefore the first yéyé singer with long hair in France.

As the army must offer some pleasures to the troops, for morale, they invited Antoine to a concert for Christmas 1966. But the only room big enough for a concert in Béchar was one of the airport hangars!! 31"37'37.6°N 2"15'02.2°W. They still hung parachutes on the walls and ceiling, to try to improve the acoustics. On the evening of the concert, the hangar was full, with soldiers in uniform of course, but also families with children.

It was a great concert, the crowd vibrating to this new and joyful music, with Antoine cheerful and full of enthusiasm! One of Antoine's tricks was to make people laugh at the idiotic criticisms he was the target of, for example with his cult song l«es élucubrations».

He even allowed himself to sing another of his cult songs «pourquoi ces canons» in front of the soldiers! For me, as for many others, these words made us understand that we were not alone in feeling this diffuse rejection of war, a feeling which would become an organized movement of ideas: pacifism, non-violence, which I would later discover in Pau.

There happened an incident, unimportant, but which would open my eyes to certain things. Some soldiers, probably conscripts, a little frustrated at having their hair shaved down (we understand them), showed off a huge pair of scissors in the middle of the concert! For us it was a joke, no one yet thought that hatred of long hair would lead to a fascist reaction (it had started that year, with Johnny Haliday, who was thus beginning to prepare the return of an extreme right that had been taboo since 1944).

Antoine laughed and stammered something indistinct. But some days later, on television (capturing national television in Béchar was at the time a radio amateur feat), the bulk of the report was about this incident, with Antoine cheerfully launching a nice comeback.

Well, nothing serious, nothing Orwellian. Antoine is nice, and this was only intended to neutralize the incident.

But for the first time I saw:

The media lie.

Yes, the holy radio, the divine television, and even the unsuspectable newspapers, lie.

And it was not over:

Each time I was able to be on both sides of the camera, there always was a notable difference, leading to a different interpretation. it is a generous demonstration, but the media show troublemakers (this one very well-known). it is a political speech, from which the media only show a blunder, to ridicule politics and distract us from it. It is a show about a movement, which only shows the lunatics. It is an insane echo given to a Mayan prophecy which never existed, to the point of organizing a fake «end of the world» in Bugarach. it is this distressing information which always brandishes victims of horrible accidents, economic disasters, return of fascism. This is the reason why I no longer watch TV, or even the «information» sites on the Internet, which give such a sad and false image of the world. An image that lies. An image that stinks. And I flushed the toilet a long time ago. But it was Antoine who first taught me to «be clean», without having all this false information dripping from my panties down my thighs. Thank you Antoine.

Antoine’s fame was ephemeral (At the time the media denigrated the youth as fickle, so each new thing had to chase away the previous one). But with the money he earned from his songs, he bought himself a boat, and traveled for years with a first Tahician wife. Then he settled in France with another wife, participated in films on the beauty of the world, etc. A useful and fulfilling life, then. Bravo, awakener.

Added in 2020: this blatant lie about Antoine hid another, more subtle one: giving importance to a fact that had no meaning. Thus, a simple soldiers joke was presented as a movement of rejection of modern ideas, a poisoned seed which would grow slowly throughout the 70s: Johnny Haliday, then Sardoux, to end up with its monstrous fruit: the return of the extreme right, with the lepenism. This is how the media creates «popular movements» out of thin air, such as the rejection of ecology, gluten intolerance, climate denial, conspiracy theories, the return of the extreme right, racism and anti-Semitism. Even when they tell the truth, this truth has been selected among other truths, in order to stifle these others!

Not a single word of what the media says is innocent.

Even what they do not say is suspect!

The end of Béchar

(Permalink) Written in May 2019.

May 1967 saw the end of the Evian agreements which allowed our presence in Algeria. Everybody was leaving, and everything that had made our lives disappeared. Even the school year ended early for us, while we were packing up our things. All our projects, outings, model trains, all our friends, were going to move from existence to memory.

We left before my father, who stayed to pay off the accommodation, and to sell our Simca Aronde to an Algerian.

The saddest thing was for Coquin, our dog. It was impossible to take him to France. Coquin watched us sadly put our things away in canteens, and the house becoming empty. He knew very well what that was meaning, having already experienced it. Then one day it was us that he saw leaving!! The last days, my father took him to the base, when our home was closed. Coquin never left his side. Once he even jumped through a window to join him! Finally, my father gave him to a legionnaire, who was leaving for Bizerte or something like that. So he was not abandoned, but still it must have been a deep sorrow for him. This is one of the reasons why I do not have animals: it would have been hard for them, with all my moves and absences. The only exception was in the Faitg, but it was a community, with a permanent presence and a lot of nature around. So we had rabbits, guinea pigs, ducks, turtledoves.

Returning to fresh and green France had a mixed effect on us, after these three years spent in the orange and luminous desert. Of course we all love greenery, but after three years in the light and colors of the desert, this greenery had an ambiguous impression on me: at once fresh and invigorating, or cold and unpleasant. A part of me had indeed remained in the Sahara. As we are to see in the following sub-chapter:

Atlantis, the novel

(Permalink) Written in July 2021

When you lived in the Sahara for three years, it is difficult to miss this novel by Pierre Benoît. We were in the place, in a way. Of all the books I have read, few are in this case, which already makes it special.

Especially since at the time, our French teacher at the Lycée de la Barga had us to work on this novel. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the name of this man, whom I liked, and who respected me, even if spelling was not my strong point (Searching on the Internet, I found Monsieur Béninger, French teacher and director. But «mine» was someone else). He had given us two passages from the novel to work on, which I remember perfectly: the flooding of the wadi, and the escape with Tanit Zerga. It was our life in the Sahara, in a way. Even the flooding of the wadi was part of our daily experience, with those of the Oued Béchar, a grandiose and frightening spectacle.

Why had he chosen this book? Because he was passionate about the Sahara. And he told us about the mysterious Hoggar as a kind of paradise, where the Ouled Nails lived happily in hidden oases between the mountains. «Lived naked» my memory tells me, an implausible detail in a Muslim context, and therefore very intriguing. And above all creating a strong sensual desire for a free life in nature. He was also the first to tell us about the Masai, another strange, proud and fascinating people. I think he helped me feel the call of the desert, the same call that the heroes of the novel felt, as intense as amorous desire, looking south from the crossroads of Beni Abbès, on the road to Adrar, between the oranges of the Grand Erg Occidental and the purples of the Ougarta mountains floating above the mirages. A fantastic scene! And the frustration of an unfinished journey: we had to «return», when we did not went yet.

The impression is that there must have been a mysterious and magical place, with ocher and purple mountains, to be imperatively seen, further south… Those otherworldly colors make a great part of the magic of the Sahara.

But my father never wanted to go any further. There were, however, a lot of thing to see at the time, especially Adrar. Today we know other names, like Timimoun, which, as it is said, served as a model for Timbuktu.

Well, it was a day’s drive, and probably no hotels at the time. But it is the Sahara, for heaven’s sake, you don’t sleep in a hotel there.

I read the whole book later in Mont de Marsan (not at the Lycée Victor Duruy, whose who read it will understand why it was banned there, ha ha ha ha!). It was, of course, a torrid love story, and the cover suggesting Antinéa’s beauty helped to form my desire. Suggest without showing, very much in the author’s style! On the other hand, this story of kidnapping men to make them die of love, that was not really my project. So the call of the desert took a back seat. An impossible dream, in any case, for the rest of my life. Although dreams of the Sahara followed me until I was about thirty.

An interesting detail is that Pierre Benoît also lived in the Mont de Marsan region. So I met him twice!

Why did Pierre Benoît’s women helped to form my desire? it is not their erotic side, he rather avoided descriptions of this order, just that we feel them very beautiful, very sensual (A clean and pure eroticism, at the opposite of any pornography). What I liked is that they were adult women, consistent, with qualities such as intelligence, constancy, and an inner strength allowing them to be themselves. Which explains the determination of the characters in the novel to meet Antinéa, even if they know that they will die from it: it is a unique opportunity to live a real life, to meet a real woman, if only for the time she will grant them. They will never find anything comparable in the Muggle world. Especially in the militaristic and colonial world of the time... It is even very clear: the novel makes many allusions to the pettiness, the crass prosaism of the creatures without thickness who live in this world.

And this is exactly what happened to me: very few women (and men) fit such a description. They are not the kind of infantile airheads who ruin our lives every five minutes with stupid stories. Nor are they the kind of insipid ghosts submissive to the system that we see in the street or in the TV, without personality and only capable of bringing out the dominant discourse (as we imagine Annette Barbaroux, the anti-heroine of «The Leper King», who fell for a wealthy bourgeois, that we imagine totally boring and already paunchy). Light years away from those bigoted leftist chicks who were my first encounter, authoritarian with love as a weather vane, and all as submissive to their ego as the previous ones were submissive to the TV. Even with her terrible side, Antinea fascinates as an intelligent, free and strong woman. In fact, I have never met a woman of the caliber of a Maixence Webb (the real heroine of «The Leper King», beautiful and strong like Antinea but without the cruel side). So, today, when I want to evoke such women (and of course the men who go with them), I am forced to resort to fiction: Elves, other planets, etc. It is a bit annoying that we have to go light years away to find things as simple as normal people.

My interest in the novel has however been revived with the Internet, which allows us to see the places, increasing the sensation of reality, and rekindling Sahara's sensual desire. So, Google Earth gives Hassi Inifel, the borj where Saint Avit told his story to Ferrières: 29°48'21.24"N 3°45'10.48"E with even photos. I even suspect Hergé of having been inspired by a photo of the Borj, in «The Crab with the Golden Claws», ha ha ha ha! As for the palace of Antinéa, some Internet research indicates the place: «the Mountain of the Geniuses» is the Garet el Djenoun (25°04'41"N 5°'24"E) or Djebel Oudan, in the Tefedest range, which forms a point to the north of the Hoggar. Several of Pierre Benoît's period sources indicate that the Tuaregs actually considered the Garet to be disturbing, one even mentions «a witch» who lived there! This gives the idea that there would be «something true» in the story. Enough to make you want to go and have a look. Whatever it is, the Garet is a fantastic place anyway, worth the trip. Another place mentioned in the novel is the group of volcanic craters just to the North East of Tefedest, well visible on Google Earth.

Memories of Richard Trigaux:
Algeria, Béchar, 1964-1967

Historical context

The CIEES and Hamaguir

Why did these three Algerian years remain
three beautiful years, apart of the others?

Our first plane trip

Other plane trips

The boat and car trip

Béchar, our villa

Our neighborhood: La Barga.

Le «Lycée de la Barga»

Sports, the judo

The surroundings of Béchar.

The excursions

The scouts

Our dogs

Electronics

My father's illness.

Antoine's concert and the lying media

The end of Béchar

Atlantis, the novel

The end of the Sahara?

Memories of Richard Trigaux:Algeria, Béchar, 1964-1967

Historical context

The CIEES and Hamaguir

Why did these three Algerian years remainthree beautiful years, apart of the others?

Our first plane trip

Other plane trips

The boat and car trip

Béchar, our villa

Our neighborhood: La Barga.

Le «Lycée de la Barga»

Sports, the judo

The surroundings of Béchar.

The excursions

The scouts

Our dogs

Electronics

My father's illness.

Antoine's concert and the lying media

The end of Béchar

Atlantis, the novel

The end of the Sahara?

Memories of Richard Trigaux:
Algeria, Béchar, 1964-1967

Why did these three Algerian years remain
three beautiful years, apart of the others?