Pranav Behari is a writer living in New York City. He has just completed his first novel.

Asterix and the Battle of Algiers

posted Jul 13, 2010

I.

The sky is falling,

And Gauls everywhere go mad from options. Gallic philosophy dins throughout the tiny village of Armorica: to be a glutton or to rape with abandon—which is better? They have put their best minds to work. The Gauls have watched “The Battle of Algiers” at least fifty times. They will watch the sky intently.

II.

To eat what you rape, that is best. And vice-versa, the Romans have conquered philosophy. They are staunch adherents of the pragmatic. The garrisons Totorum, Aquarium, Laudanum, and Compendium have been skirmished to a boil. This is what brings them to the sylvan heart of Gaul.

On heavy praetorian rotation: “Alien,” “Aliens,” “Alien 3,” and “Independence Day.” They’re ready to come down.

III.

Spears clash, blood hatches ripe into the air. The scent flushes through the ranks in a Bacchic contagion. Chariots volley and maneuver, bodies collide into dirt, and limbs of variety flail in a grisly toast to battle. The fray, bird’s-eye, shines red as a ruby. Enter Asterix, in tow his companion, a behemoth called Obelix.

The tiny Gaul scans for top praetorian brass and hacks through the fracas, yielding nada. Then, paydirt: the coxcomb of a Proquaestor jostling in the distance. He loads up a glass stem, lights, and sucks. A grey ghost clouds the chamber of the pipe, his red eyes never once straying from his target.

The oaf, “a recovering crackbaby,” declines a hit. Now they are closing the gap, clutching their hilts...

IV.

That evening before battle he ate a modest three boars, only to purge them later that night in his limestone quarry. The rest of the night he laid sleepless, weighing preference for insomnia over the dread of his night-terrors.

Now while Asterix wages battle with the consul Incitatus, the wunderkind Obelix sways in the field like some edged, totemic dervish. Though a butchering savant, he is contrary to his reputation. The story goes that as an infant he had crawled into a potent batch of the druid’s magic freebase, falling into a coma for one year. From thereafter he was raised by the druid Panoramix, reared on wild boar, and tutored in the craft of menhir-making for those spare moments between dinner and battle. Obelix is lovable though unloved, prized instead by the village as some promiscuous WMD, common property. He is abundant, roomy. He enjoys swapping jokes and new recipes for boar, though most give him a wide berth for his sheer physical intensity. On the battlefield, on the hunt, he matters. Though in the absence of his friend Asterix, he is now bored by the glories of grounding men into the black Gallic earth. It is only friendship that brings Obelix to the battlefield, a buddy excursion. Like fishing, or hunting boar, though lately he has begun to weary of slaughter. The idea that a boar is no better than a Roman has profoundly disturbed his appetite; the likewise pouring forth of bountiful red, the expert hacking, have now spoiled his taste for once beloved swine. A great chasm of hunger is now opening up inside of him.

V.

Predictably, the end is a feast of silhouettes. A colicky bard pilloried in the distance. Wild boar and fire. Blondes. No druids.

In the cauldron is a zero sum game. As witnessed in Algeria, in Japan, soon no place will be safe for a druid. Omen-bound suzerains are being overrun by merchants, clouding the rustic vision. Casualties have been heavy and now Obelix, a staple contribution to village security, is undergoing an inevitable but untimely moral puberty. The village will soon turn on him like a hungry dog. Only a fool trusts farmers.

Panoramix, like many druids, is hardened by libel. Were the bogs to overflow with the dead, he ponders, that would be ungrateful.

VI.

A conch, sounding off in the distance. Asterix has commandeered a chariot, now jiving hither thither in a coquettish dance of tank warfare with the consul Incitatus.

-As you can see, I have problems.

A shadow races across the earth and the Gaul scrams left, narrowly avoiding the flock of arrows.

-Do you love him, Consul, or do you just miss saying “I love you?”

-That’s interesting that you should say that. The sands of Africa are far from here, and nor would I doubt that my love affair is with those sands, even more so than the king himself!

-Ha, verily. So you take it out on us Gauls then?

-You jest! You know as well as I that the security of the Roman people demands its borders, and borders of borders, to be secure and benign.

With this, the Consul decapitates the chauffeur of his opponent’s vehicle. The Roman seems contented by this, as if he desires no battle at all, but is simply indulging the Gaul in pastime. Like a patient father he waits for the little man to tire.

-Then why tax?

-Haha. Listen, why not render unto Caesar what is his, and Caesar shall render unto cunning little Gaul what is his in return?

With this, Asterix, invigorated to superhuman capacity by freebase, flings a boulder at the consul, jarring his carriage and dizzying the Roman honcho.

-Consul, do you know what they do to collaborators in the afterlife?

Indignant, he gives chase while the consul is still reeling, but Asterix is not skilled enough to out-maneuver the Roman. He hears the plaintive yawn of wood, the axle and spokes of his chariot giving way to the awkward momentum of the cart. His vehicle is finished, collapsed into the dirt.

-Funny barbarian, there is no afterlife but empire! With what I offer, you’ll have enough sestertii to create your own afterlife, here in the present.

The consul steps out of his vehicle and approaches Asterix cheerily, bow drawn as wide as his grin.

-So this is the design of the empire.

-This is Empire’s design.

-I’ll hack you up into bits.

VII.

The behemoth, grieving, has retreated from battle. He is hungry. Like a rag doll he drags along the steaming corpse of a freshly felled boar. Eventually he leaves the thing, and its foul odor. He knows not what to eat. Without boarmeat there is a vacuum in his life, a piece of his identity gone, without which all the other pieces now seem to collapse.

Long ago he had fallen into a deep sleep, and awoke to find his mother absent. This is the story. He remembers little, if anything, of a time before this. The only trace of the fabled Ma is a boar-tusk talisman, rustic bling hanging from his neck. He compares in his head that awakening to this, this longing to that, and now, how he starves. He thinks about the abandoned boar, still hot in the mud. It was a waste, and in his mind he is unable to escape the disgrace of it: a hairy pig sifting peacefully in the brush one minute, and then frantic the next as Obelix sprang towards it—not it, him—pursuing him into every corner of copse and scree before he exhausted his last squealing breath and was struck with a large stone, the skull cracking with a dull sound and a red parting, a vertical fissure, hind hocks aquiver as his convulsions shake out the last drops of his soul in the manner of feces. Obelix can still smell the blood drying on his hands, in between his fingers, which he anxiously rolls into tiny balls and flicks to the dirt. The smell, like battery acid, like an exotic salt, revolts him. He comes to the realization that as soon as the heart ceases to beat, all meat becomes rancid.

"All meat becomes Roman."

Now he is chewing at the twin braids dangling against his face, unbinding his hair into two shocks of red cud as he repeats his mantra.

“All meat becomes Roman.”

VIII.

The druid scries in his cauldron “The Battle of Algiers.”

Spoiler alert: Ali la Pointe is dead. How does that bode for a druid?

IX.

The two are now casual, conversing by the collapsed wagon as they exchange bumps of fish-scaled cocaine, chain-smoking Parliaments at the expense of the consul Incitatus. Asterix clutches his pouch of freebase greedily.

-It’s like this, Gaul, we live in a world of dualities. This consists of the one, and the many. The one represents unity, order, stability, from which other things may grow as a healthy, lush garden. Rome is the soil of this garden.

-The many?

-The many is utter chaos, the turf of Gauls and Goths. There is a false sense of variety, though the proposition as a whole is fecundity-mad. There is no accessibility, a spiritually unhygienic way of living. Your people and others of their kind represent the many.

-But in Armorica we enjoy art and music, fine cuisine!

-In your village, yes. And perhaps in many other Gallic villages. But there is no progression, you see. You develop as perennial shrubs, unlike Rome, a magnificent evergreen! Pine up, friend. Without federation there can be no growth, inwardly nor out. How can the rest of Gaul—correction, the rest of the world—benefit from the splendors of your brilliant Armorica? Come, friend. The whole of Gaul has submitted to the will of empire, and soon, the world.

-Impossible. You have not the manpower to govern over many seas. After a few devastations they will submit. But soon there will be rebellion, rioting and factionalism, and not enough troops to withstand it.

-Haha. Indeed, I have not enough manpower, but the empire is limitless little Gaul. It is greater than you or I. Rome is a mere midwife in these birth-pangs of the new world. The empire is for all to drink, the final activity. Don’t you see? Your many seas will become as empire soup. It doesn’t all end with The Battle of Algiers, you know. Wake up and smell the funk. En route are factions from Japan, China, India, Maoists and Taoists, Naxalites, student groups, and rakshasas alike, coming to serve the cause in Gaul. I am offering you a more peaceful, profitable solution. Submission is polite.

-Yikes!

X.

The hunger strike continues, underneath an ancient oak. The clanging of arms and hard grind of dirt- the very thought of these things- pain his stomach. The stench of boar’s blood and wet steel is too much to bear. His belly sings in agony. He scoops up clumps of dirt into his mouth. It is fullness he desires. He so wishes to swallow a menhir whole. He feeds on more dirt. He can hear the others calling out for him in the distance, their voices, echoing tummywise. By clutching his considerable gut he hopes to muffle the noise of the world. This does not work. He sets out in search of the druid.

XI.

Panoramix the druid is playing GTA: Vice City. He is trying to discern a sign—for Armorica, for himself.

Then other things, clarity. A magnificent seduction is taking place. This is first realized as the perilometer goes through the roof.

The perilometer: an invention of Panoramix the druid, of Armorica. Based on the idea that animals can sense danger well in advance of humans, this device requires one ant farm, a wall hanger, a nail. Danger is measured through any disruption in colony life.

The ants, gone helter-skelter, probe further investigation. In the cauldron he sees the wily Gaul Asterix, disporting in the fuzzy rhetoric of a handsome Roman consul, a horse named Incitatus.

Enter Obelix. The man-child is flushed, de-braided. This arouses falconry, and other forgotten charms.

XII.

A cooler of beer sweats between the two adversaries.

-Womanly, I am dearth.

-You jest!

-Regrettably no, I do not.

-I find this hardly plausible, that you of the golden brow, a maestro of spree rape and plunder, should not be knee-deep in fleshy larks.

-Indeed! Consider that I am the plenipotentiary head of this prefecture, in surrogate of a dummy-chief—

-With a moustache as copious as any…

-And it is downright criminal, Consul.

-That a Gaul considers anything criminal: now you jest!

The two share a chuckle. They are good friends now, though Asterix hardly knows it.

-It is unfortunate, that a slayer such as yourself should go unnoticed by the other sex. But not surprising, for in many bucolic principalities as yours I have seen the best of men—warriors, veritable kings-in-wait—relegated to the gutters and gaols of their society.

-Our bulls are sane and our gutters clean, but if there is one plague to sweep the provinces, it is small-mindedness.

-Agreed. A man of your fortitude is better suited to a place such as Rome, or to wetting his nose in the dark-wine east. No matter. With enough sestertii you become the metropolis, so I’m sure a fair and lovely maiden would then be more game, more attuned to your finer qualities.

-Perhaps. I always wondered, Consul, the prudence of mingling commerce with love.

-Cheeky Gaul, you endeavor to pimp!

-If only to circumvent the sexual rat-race, consul, the genetic roller-derby beset upon us by evolution. In seeking out options, often, one only finds neuroses.

-And as circumstance would have it, too many options may also lead to neuroses.

-True as the saying goes: it is better to have had neuroses and loved, than to have never had neuroses at all.

-A wassail!

At this salutation Asterix doubles over, wretches, and looses sour beer onto the sandaled Roman hoof.

XIII.

On heavy rotation, in chronological increments of three years from ages 3-18: “Birth of A Nation,” “Victory of Faith,” “The Blue Light,” “Predator,” “Red Dawn,” “Commando,” “The Accused,” “Klute,” “Not Without My Daughter,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Halloween,” “Halloween 3: Season of The Witch,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Chushingura: Tale of the 47 Ronin,” “The Wild Bunch.”

Obelix was, during the time of his youth, the common burden of Armorica. While living under the loose aegis of the druid he found the sundry comforts of family in assorted hearths of the village. It was with the use of programs like “Webster” and “Different Strokes,” that the villagers soon found themselves allured by their own charitable vanity, and able to accept the odd child Obelix into their presence. The druid had seen the technique work elsewhere, partially engineered by George H.W. Bush, who formally coined “A Thousand Points of Light” to refer to those beneficent millionaires, the Papadopolouses and Drummonds across the land who would provide for the welfare of their unfortunate lessers. The villagers began to regard Obelix as the same as the little girl from “Small Wonder” (were social welfare to apply to androids, as well).

Still, his relationship to the old soothsayer remained his north star, as factual as a mountain or a tree. Entering into the hut there is a familiar warmth: gunpowder and cracksmoke, musty sage and the subtle ripeness of guano.

He carries his belly childishly, like a defective toy, and explains himself to the druid. Panoramix considers the dilemma for a moment, stroking the stalactite length of beard on his face. In the syringe he prepares a dose of glitter, murmuring an incantation. He then cuts the fix with what looks like the tiniest droplet of dish detergent. Obelix is hastened off to battle with a Kool 100 hanging from the corner of his mouth.

-You have that special something, Obelix, says the druid. The obtuse charm of the purely functional. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

-Why thank you.

Sundering a phalanx of legionnaires he cannot tell if his brain has become faster, or the world slower. He feels to be gliding at an angelic pace, but with some greater velocity surging up through the soles of his feet, music, a high C on violin that drives him through the ranks. For the first time, the colors of battle spring to life against the dreary canvas of Gaul. In this euphoria he finds himself loving and hating all—the Romans, Asterix, the Druid Panoramix, his mother—with equal passion and facility. Conspiracy abounds in his brain, and were it not for the spazzy vicissitudes of the prescribed potion he might just slaughter the lot of them. This feeling lasts somewhere around two or three hours, followed then by another two hours of massaging his own scalp, and entreating others—Romans and Gauls, both equally horrified—to knead on his brambly skull while breathing hotly in his ear, the melody of battle now long drowned out by the bruxes din of his jaw.

“Do you guys know where my friend is?” he asks, wandering about the carnage. “Has anyone seen my friend?”

XIV.

Asterix strolls through the field blown bare of men, Romans and Gauls alike, proctoring the wreckage with a blunt smoldering from the corner of his mouth. He is coming down from battle. Night is soon. The village hags are now creeping out from the woods to strip armor from the dead and tussle over the sanguine alloys of earthed ballista-fire. In this manner, Asterix muses to himself, stoned, nature provides for its own hygiene.

The consul Incitatus has made two conditions. The first is to reveal the secret location of the druid and his lab, preventing any further proliferation of the magical-freebase in the surrounding territories. The second is a neutralization of the Gaul called Obelix. In exchange there will be “reconstruction subsidies” and a free pass to anywhere in the empire. Under these conditions, he is guaranteed that Armorica will live to see another day as a prosperous, all-inclusive resort/casino. Asterix has until dawn to reply.

Turmoil: life is not “The Battle of Algiers.” The village lacks a casbah. Asterix is not Ali la Pointe. There are no heroes.

Solution: he is re-writing “The Battle of Algiers.” In a third phase of his reformation, Ali la Pointe abandons violence and desires only to live the life of a simple merchant. A simple, prosperous merchant. He acts boldly, independently, in the interests of his people. Now there is a hero, one who embraces multicultural unity, prosperity over the fetishes of nationalism.

Asterix can smell the horse on himself, rank and sweet.

Southward he sees Obelix, ursine in the blue distance. The mammoth appears lost, grazing in a quarry of limestone. At the sight of him, Asterix considers falling on his sword and letting the buzzards nest in his entrails, then foregoes the idea. Nobility, as a rule, requires a witness.

XV.

He soon finds himself slumped up in the quarry. His menhirs, some half chiseled, some adorned with rococo engravings, stand in petrified mockery to his confusion. Most of these have yet to be claimed by their owners, and it occurs to Obelix that these people have no intention of retrieving their megaliths.

The initial idea was, exactly one year ago, to carve and customize menhirs, engraving funny, music-themed greetings to the recipient such as “Rock You Like a Hurricane” (the letters surrounded, inexplicably, by tiny tornado etchings), and “Megalithica” (designed after the Metallica brand). Until now, among this vast audience of consigned stone, he had been proud to triumph over the snickers of the loan officer and the mockery of village teens. He considered the business a wild, defiant success. Like micro-finance. Like “Erin Brockovich.”

But now he recalls the extravagant orders to Persia, to Danish princes, and the most recent order—still incomplete—for five hundred menhirs to Tipu Sultan, from Michael Jackson. The order arrived coeval with his night-terrors, when the entire village awoke to a plangent wail of maternal longing, and the night after, when he had wandered into the Chief’s hut and attempted to insert himself cozily between man and wife. His appraisal was that the project would take him a lifetime, at which point the chief smiled, paid him the due sum, and trotted off in a contented swagger. Since then orders, and the chief, have been scarce. It occurs to him now that he has been had.

As his suspicions lurch forward he sees Asterix, waving to him from afar. Obelix pretends not to see him. He wonders if his friend had any part in what his brain cleverly refers to now as “the menhir ruse.” He continues to ignore Asterix, waving like a fool. Now indignation, like salt crawling over his brain, gives him a newfound courage, a desire to not cloy for friendship nor cater to the expectations of others. Asterix is not really his friend. He recounts now the hours spent in dim-lit and pissy taverns, listening to the twerp rail on against Rome, the Chief, and Women. The self-obsession of a has-been who never was, yet still hopes to be. Intimations of a sexual psychopath. Pathetic, generally speaking.

He now wonders how they became friends. Asterix, after all, is twenty-years his senior. Ever since he can remember he has been a fixed presence in his life—sometimes referred to as a cousin, other times as an uncle, but in general as “kin,” a nebulous designation that is now playing on Obelix’s mind. Could Asterix be his father? He sincerely hopes not.

XVI.

Panoramix the druid sits elated.

The story: after dispatching the collaborator Asterix, Obelix will meet his end in the hailfire of Roman ballista. He has scried the Alpine galumph of trebuchets, headed to the village for just this purpose.

He has seen this kind of treachery play out, time and again. There is guilt, but this is quickly washed away by his arrogance, that of a demiurge who gives and takes away with equal aplomb. He feels an especially deep remorse for Obelix, though a similar arrogance—hanging on the coattails of what he considers the inevitable—also softens his regret.

Now his story will play out much like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and the druid’s arrogance is succored by the notion that he has given Obelix a noble death, has prepared him for such an ending his entire life. Certainly not the death he would choose for himself, but noble, and in line with the old maxim, “the price of existence is eternal warfare, and for a Gaul vice-versa.”

XVII.

He is not so much brave as bold, given to no particular reformation, and forever damned with the faint accolade of cunning. In this story, and in all others, Asterix is cunning above all else. It is like treachery, he thinks. A mere matter of gradation.

The name “Obelix,” after all, has kept expectations eponymously low, and while he is massive, and mighty, Asterix is cunning. He now considers Obelix his natural enemy, and himself a necessary agent of evolution to subjugate, and enslave the power of this evolutionary throwback through his intellect. He regards Obelix, a red, hairy mound of flesh, like a mountain he will conquer with intellect, cunning.

And who precedes him? Ratso Rizzo? Tom Sawyer? Odysseus? No- this is a facile, tempting, but unlikely match. Unlike Asterix, Odysseus resisted the Sirens and avoided gonorrhea. Instead he finds sunny comparison for himself in the figure of Benedict Arnold. For despite all of his failings as a collaborator, Arnold lived a full life. He traveled extensively in the West Indies and earned distinction in the battles at Ticonderoga and Saratoga, prior to his failed betrayal of the colonies. He lived well, and it is the peaceful London grave he found so many years after the revolution that is appealing to Asterix the Gaul.

XVIII.

-Pal! Comrade!

And in these two words Obelix can feel charm—a piercing, sweet thing that swells inside his chest like a bee-sting of congeniality —conquering the indignation that had fermented throughout the day, a diplomacy engendered now, suddenly, by the simple idea that we are all human, that we are all flawed. He lays down his club, slumps his shoulders, and breathes easily. He is ready to forgive his friend Asterix all those unspoken grievances, all the bitter suspicion that had fed on his mind throughout the day.

-And what say you, friend? Thirsty? Tired? Hungry? Let us feast on swine, steel ourselves anew for tomorrow’s warring!

-I’m not hungry, Asterix. I don’t like boar anymore. And isn’t it weird? That “war” rhymes with “boar?”

-Nonsense! Chestnuts! Oysters! Sausages! Crab-apples, for god’s sake! We stuff the boars and then we stuff ourselves! Come now, Obelix. It’s my treat.

-Thanks, cousin, but I can’t. I’ve decided to become a vegetarian. Relatedly, I’m no longer big on war anymore, either.

At this, Asterix begins to panic. His plan was indeed simple, but time-tested and sound. He would roofie the boarmeat and then, once the mammoth was down, would call forth his Roman patrons. He could have done this a thousand other times. This, to Asterix, was simply not fair.

-What could you possibly do without war? You, a fat, clumsy virgin!

Obelix ignores this last barb. He naively perceives that Asterix, his close friend, is now threatened by this new lifestyle choice, can see no place for himself in it, and is therefore bitterly opposed to it. This idea gives Obelix great comfort.

-I’ll eat dirt, and tend to my menhirs.

-Menhirs he says! Ha! His menhirs! Listen to me. A vegetarian Gaul simply will not do, I tell you. Blood, after all, is the spice of adventure. What adventures could possibly await a Gaul with peace in his heart?

-Well, since you’ve asked, I’ll tell you. I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother.

-Your mother?

-I’ve decided that I want to find out who she was, where I came from, and who my real father is.

-Your father?

-Yup.

This would not do, thought the Gaul, his frustration gone sour. What business did Obelix have, thinking such grand thoughts? He, a fatso with small purpose in life -to kill and to eat- was now meditating on his origins? To each his own place, thought Asterix, the bastard’s gotten too big for his britches. And what’s worse, it was now blocking his path to the dark-haired damsels and dames, the bounty of Rome, a parlor life reclining and orgiastic. No, this would not do at all.

-You’ve gone batty, right? This is surely some kind of joke, yes?

-I understand this is a lot for you, cousin. But I want to assure you that you will continue to have a place in all of this. I thought this was something we could do together!

-Listen to me, fatso. You have but one purpose, in life and in this village, and that is to do as you are told. How do you think the others will receive this gentleness, this self-reflection and passivity? Do you think a feast awaits your bloom of conscience? Do you think anyone cares about your silly origins?

Obelix can feel the pressure building behind his eyes, the tensing of his sinuses, now giving way to salty tears. Asterix takes note, finding leverage, and continues his assault.

-Very well. Let me save you the trouble. Let me tell you of your origins.

As Asterix the Gaul lays it all bare, Obelix at once recalls the horrors of his birth, the tusk on his chest, a matricidal freak-show giving rise to his Oedipal lust for all things boar-flavored. As soon as he came to the brutal realization of his birth, he was at once freed of it, like a roost of bats being shaken from the tree of his memory. Contrary to the expectations of Asterix, a miracle has occurred within Obelix. And by the time he can see this miracle, shining in the eyes of his erstwhile companion, it is too late for the hero Asterix.

The man-child Obelix rides away from Armorica, astride the handsome flanks of the Consul, a horse called Incitatus. He has a renewed taste for boar, for happiness. His is a life post-memory.

XIX.

In the end, only the buzzards feast. The village is undone. There will be no casinos, no tourists in Armorica. Asterix the Gaul lays stranded among rocks, sans freebase, sans woman, sans any great fortune except the bounty of his own entrails, which he now tries to read in a final, desperate act of superstition. They tell him nothing of the future, only the ill-begotten past. And how simple, how utterly avoidable it all seems now, as the insides ooze astray!

XX.

In a cage, on an ox-driven cart to Rome, Panoramix the Druid wonders how else things could have ended, and if there ever were any human element in the laws of kismet that determined things like the great wars, the great loves, and the fortunes of great men. It seemed to him that on one hand these events lie in wait for the body of a man to come and fulfill them, as if somewhere in the earliest, bleakest winters of time a chronicle of future history was inscribed like a drama that awaited its actors like a snare; yet on the other hand he felt, despite his ancient learning, and like every other foolish man, some strange and wondrous thing coursing through his veins that was more profound than blood or lightning, which was the most faithful determinant of history, that the world was a blank book without a clear beginning and with an end of our own obscure and unknown choosing. But in his final, muddy moments, being dragged through the tatters of a village he once presided over with what authority, he saw the error in this, that any attempt to controvert fate would be dealt with a condign and sneering brutality, and would be a defiance unmentioned save for the most contemptuous and vituperative slogans, uttered only by the blackest of tongues.