为魔鬼辩护的人

“SALAUD” was a good word. It hissed through the air and landed smack on the face, like a gob of mud. Plenty of people called Jacques Vergès a bastard, and he didn’t care. Perhaps he really was one, his date of birth obscured by his father to hide an adulterous affair. He wasn’t bothered. Nothing touched him, including the bullets he knew were sent his way by the French secret service. Teeth clamped round a Cuban cigar, he would lean back and give any questioner his cool, quizzical, oriental stare.The blinds in his book-stuffed office were kept drawn, and out of the dim lightloomed a legion of carved figures given by the African dictators he had defended. A crystal snake on his desk opened its jaws to strike; it reminded him of the snake of Amazonian myth, studded with the eyes of the men it had swallowed.

“SALAUD(杂种)”是一个好词。像一团烂泥一样，呼啸着穿过空气，一把砸在你脸上。许多人管雅克•韦尔热斯叫“杂种”，但他毫不介意。或许他真的就是个杂种——为了隐瞒一桩奸情，父亲对他的生日讳莫如深。他也毫不困扰。没有东西能伤害他，就连他知道是法国特工射向他的子弹也是如此。若有质问者上门，他会咬着一支古巴雪茄，身子后靠，用他冷酷、戏谑和东方式的眼睛盯着他。他堆满书的办公室的窗帘一直拉着，昏暗的光线里隐约显现出他的雕塑大军，。他桌上有一只水晶蛇，大口张开，作袭击状；这让他想起亚马逊神话里的一种蛇，身上镶嵌着它吞噬的人类的眼睛。

All his clients, too, he said, were indelibly embedded in him. Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon”, an SS captain charged with 341 counts of killing or deportation; Carlos the Jackal, accused of multiple terrorist acts against France and Israel; Khieu Samphan, titularhead of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which killed perhaps 2m people; members of the Baader Meinhof gang. Anyone could apply. He offered his services to Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator of Serbia, and made ready to defend Saddam Hussein. Hitler? Sure. He would even—a dry smile—defend George W. Bush, as long as he pleaded guilty.

他说，自己的客户也全都如此，他身上镶嵌着他们的印记，无法磨灭。这句话对他们中任何人都适用。譬如克劳斯•巴比，绰号“里昂屠夫”，,被指控341项谋杀与放逐罪名；胡狼卡洛斯，被指控参与多起针对法国和以色列的；乔森潘，，200万之巨；还有巴德尔和迈因霍夫集团的成员。，斯洛博丹-米洛舍维奇辩护，并做好了为萨达姆-侯赛因辩护的准备。？没有问题。他不以为然地笑道——只要乔治•W•布什肯认罪的话，他甚至可以为他辩护。

His method in the courtroom was simple, but explosive. He accused the accuser. “Rupture” was his word for this: are cognition that, like Antigone facing Creon, the judge and the defendants shared no common values. This was war. He had learned the technique in boyhood, when his father taught him to throw stones at boys who bullied him. In Algeriain the 1950s he refined it, as a brand-new lawyer imbued with communism and passionate anti-colonialism, when he represented FLN terrorists fighting for independence from France. They had planted bombs, but what was that compared with the injustices and discrimination daily meted out by the French? (He knew of those first-hand, having grown up mixed-race in the French colony of Réunion, and recalling his father’s disgrace for marrying a Vietnamese woman.) Equally, what were Carlos’s crimes, compared with Israel’s long oppression of the Palestinians? In Barbie’s case, hadn’t the Vichy government freely collaborated with the Nazis? In Saddam’s, hadn’t America given him the weapons with which he killed his own people?

他在法庭上的方法很简单，但颇具轰动性。他反过来控诉原告。他把这种策略叫做“Rupture“：认定法官和被告间不存在共同价值，就如同安提戈涅面对克瑞翁那样。这就是战争。这种技法他少年时期就学到了，当年父亲教他，要用扔石头来回敬那些欺负他的男孩子。1950年代他精炼了自己的技法，，在阿尔及利亚以一名初出茅庐的律师的身份，代表FLN（全国解放阵线）的出庭，为从法国手中重获独立而抗争。他们是安装了炸弹，可是这比起法国日复一日的不公与歧视又算得上什么呢？（他自己亦是在法国殖民地留尼汪长大的混血儿，回忆起他父亲因与越南女子结婚而遭致的贬黜，他对法国的歧视有着切身的体会。）同样的，卡洛斯的罪行比起以色列对巴勒斯坦的长期压迫又算得上什么呢？在巴比的案例中，？至于萨达姆的案例，？

His outrageous methods encouraged the thought that he might be a co-conspirator. As Barbie’s only lawyer, against 40 prosecutors on the other side, he called him mon capitaine, stressed how Christian he was, and sang “Lili Marlene” with him in his cell. He described Khieu Samphan as a gentle idealist, and mocked the idea of genocide in his country. There were so many meetings with Carlos that he was suspected of being part of his network. Nothing was pinned on him. From 1970 to 1978 he disappeared: the wind had whispered to him, “Leave!”, he said, and he had walked out on family, job and country, returning to Paris penniless and battle-hardened. Had he been helping some vile regime in Cambodia, Congo, Syria? He would never say. He had simply “crossed to the other side of the mirror”.

他离经叛道的手段让很多人认为，他可能也是共犯之一。作为巴比唯一的律师，面对对方的40名检察官，他把他称为“moncapitaine（我的上尉）”，强调他是彻头彻尾的基督徒，并且在牢房中和他一起唱《莉莉•玛莲》。他把乔森潘描述为温和的理想主义者，。他和卡洛斯的会面是如此之多，以至于被怀疑是其网络中的一员。但他没有被加以任何罪名。1970年到1978年间，他失踪了：用他的话来说，是风悄悄对他说“离开吧！”，于是他离开了家庭、工作和祖国；回到巴黎时，他身无分文，似乎饱经战争的风霜。他是不是去帮助柬埔寨、？他永远不会开口。他只不过是“穿到了镜子的另一面”。

From day to day he tried to do the same. To cross to the other side and enter his client’s world, whether pimp or mass-murderer, peasant or politician, brainbox or idiot. To empathise with someone—who, after all, had two eyes like himself, two hands, who listened to music, who loved—and ask whether he himself, given the circumstances, might have done the same. Why had it happened? How? Ce mec, c’est moi. His one  principle was to have noprinciples, he said, though critics could find many of a Marxist and anti-Israeli kind. The only morality guiding him was his heart’s caprices.There was no such thing as absolute evil: the worst criminal, he wrote, had a secret garden in his heart, and the most honest man a nest of reptiles.

日复一日，他试着做相同的事情。，农民或是政客，天才抑或白痴，他都会穿到另一面、进入客户的世界。为了能与他们共鸣——毕竟，他们和他一样，有两只眼睛、两只手、会听音乐、会爱。他会设身处地的想，相同情况下，自己会不会做出一样的事情。这件事为什么发生？是怎样发生的？Ce mec, c’est moi（这个家伙，就是我）。他说，他的唯一原则就是没有原则，尽管批评家可以归纳出许多马克思主义和反以色列的原则。内心的反复无常是他唯一的道德标准。世上没有绝对的邪恶：他写道，最坏的罪犯心里也有一座秘密花园，而最诚实的人心中亦有住着蛇蝎的角落。

His no-holds-barred defences of famous villains seldom got them off, but they won him fame. He enjoyed it hugely. The unpredictable “magic” of each trial, the chase after truth (never found, in his experience), the exhilaration of his rage against “illegal” international tribunals and the hypocrisies of America, energised him as nothing else could. His life was a drama in which he was the ever-battling, questioning outsider, like Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov or Stendhal’s Julien Sorel. In 2008 he wrote a play about himself and starred in it at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris. No one thought that odd. He died in Voltaire’s bedroom: that, too, suited his uncompromising defence of hateful things.

他为著名罪犯毫无节操地辩护，虽然很少能为他们开脱罪名，但为他赢得了名声。他深深乐在其中。他享受每一场审判中难以预料的“魔力”，享受追求真理的过程（就他的经历而言，真理尚未找到），享受愤然控诉“非法”的国际法庭和道貌岸然的美国而得到的愉悦，世上没有一样东西能让他如此干劲十足。他的人生就是一场戏剧，他是剧中那位战斗不息、质疑一切的局外人，如同陀思妥耶夫斯基笔下的迪米奇•卡拉马佐夫,或者司汤达笔下的于连•索黑尔.2008年，他写了一部关于自己的剧，并在巴黎的玛德莲广场剧院亲自出演。没有人感到奇怪。他死在伏尔泰的卧室：这同样，与他永不妥协地为可憎之物辩护一脉相承。

Much of his work was humdrum, in fact:defending bankrupts, thieves, petty criminals, usually for no fee. He had never seen the law as a vocation. History was his first love, and he still dreamed sometimes of deciphering Etruscan or Linear A, unfolding the secrets of mysterious civilisations. Yet the greatest mystery was man himself—where he had come from, where he was going, why he did what he did. And in so far as anything was sacred to godless Maître Vergès, it was man: un salaud, perhaps,but, like him, un salaud lumineux.

事实上，他的工作大部分时候是平淡无奇的：为破产者、窃贼、小罪犯辩护，通常分文不取。他从来不把法律当做一个职业。历史是他的初恋，并且，有时他仍会梦想着破译伊特鲁利亚语或线性文字A，破解失落文明的秘密。但这个男人才是世界上最大的秘密——他自哪而来，要到哪去，为什么要做他做过的事情。并且，如果要问无神论者的雅克•韦尔热斯何为神圣之物，那即是“人”：杂种(un salaud)，或许吧，不如说是“(un salaud lumineux)聪明的杂种”,就像他一样。