Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  Master of his art, insensitive to fear, and, for both these reasons, deserving all our respect, the war ace was more like a pirate than a soldier; he was, in sum, a skyrover, and, just as the searover ought to dissipate in debauchery a good part of the booty coming to him by rights, the aerial huntsman, during lightning-quick joyrides to the rear without asking anything of anyone, orgiastically dishonored the laurels that, in default of more substantial prizes, had fallen to him as his lot. Between this passion for combat and this passion for pleasure, there was more than one correlation: it was with the same motion that the aviator hurled himself now into the deadly region where in the midst of the enemy projectiles he performed evolutions in themselves risky, now into the equally stormy zone of alcoholism and of sexuality, as though an essential characteristic of his were an indiscriminate scorn for the various limits set by a sense of self-preservation in most people and as though a single—though multiform—burning cloud represented the only milieu in which he could breathe.

  Although it is unwise, for the person who doesn’t have what it takes, to try to play the hothead (for he will assume only the superficial aspects, as I did, imagining myself to be made of somewhat the same stuff as the aviators because I spurned school discipline to go get drunk in bars), it is important for everyone to dare, at least, to break at some point or other the circle in which prudence and respect for custom has enclosed us. Whether one person makes little of his situation, his comfort, even what some will call his honor, for the sake of a passionate love whose object may or may not be worth such a sacrifice (this hardly counts in such a case); whether another abandons himself body and soul to some vice and becomes a gambler, a drug addict, a pederast, with a supreme scorn for the harm it may do him; whether yet another—basing his position, not on a personal whim, but on a view of things that appears to him to be an interconnection of solid reasons—stakes his life on a card such as social revolution or devotes his existence, in total disregard for the immediate consequences, to attacking a certain prejudice that he loathes, promoting (in both cases) what is not generally recognized over what is considered the norm—all these individuals, the proponents of pure pleasure like the champions of a higher reason, those all too unloyal to themselves as well as the uncommitted, have in common the fact that they are fighting a heavy battle against the Goliath of current morality and do not hesitate to confront a real danger: that of destroying themselves, of exposing themselves to disrepute, of ruining their health, of disappearing prematurely or simply dying after having gone without so many of the joys they might justifiably have desired. Fierce as they are, they evince—each in his own way—an audacity that is sufficient to situate them beyond the limit of the ordinary, whereas I myself (who believe I am capable, if really necessary, of standing fast when life is at stake) can’t bring myself to make any gamble and prove consistently to be without the strength to risk—as one throws down the gauntlet—my life or its tidy order expressly, unfit as I am (even though always on the verge of it) to seize my freedom with all that it comprises of hazard and remaining the spectator behind the barrier of shadow, the enthusiast in the first row who sees things from close up but is not in the heat of the corrida and even goes so far as lazily to give up to fans of more modest means the seats in which one roasts in the sun in order to loll, like a sybarite, in those that are in shadow.

  In the course of that worldwide conflict during which I was so dazzled by and paid such attention to the exploits of the aviators while concerning myself very little with so many other soldiers just as brave but consigned to more vulgar modes of butchery, combatants in the mud whose subjection to a stricter discipline expressed itself, whatever their rank might be, in their outfits, so much less fanciful than those of the men of the air (not yet clothed, as they are now, in a special uniform, but wearing, with greater license, the badges of the branch of service to which they had belonged before being assigned to aviation), I was passing, in school, from the “first cycle” to the “second cycle”—being about to enter the ninth grade when the war broke out—and attended the lycée or the cramming school with decreasing zeal almost up to the day of the armistice, which occurred just after I had secured (by a hair) my baccalaureate in philosophy, to which I would add other academic degrees only after many years and one or two false starts. At the same time that I was climbing these steps, I was also climbing the levels that, rising from the LITTLE BOYS’ to the MEN’S department, took me from the so-called tennis type suit of white-striped blue flannel (the jacket and pants bought ready-made at Biarritz in a shop selling articles for the beach and put on only when I was dressing up) to the made-to-measure suits turned out for me—soon without anyone else intervening in my choice—by branch stores such as the High Life Tailor and then by an obscure bearded tailor in the Bourse area, classic city wear at last becoming my informal as well as my formal dress after the transition represented by the use, during the week, of informal sporting costumes with breeches covering the knee and, some time later, English-or Saumur-style riding breeches worn with any sort of jacket, which I regarded as an already appreciable form of progress toward the adult manner of dressing.

  To have to shave, to smoke blond tobacco and drink American drinks, to attend music halls with promenades, to exchange (rather shyly and awkwardly) a few boy-girl kisses or caresses, so that one no longer goes to confession because now one has little secrets that the priests don’t have to know, to go out alone in the evening and sometimes come back only after obscure gallivanting, to be connected (by links, in truth, as tenuous as they are innocent) to girls of loose morals, these—along with the move from 8, rue Michel-Ange (where we had experienced our first nighttime alert over Paris: a zeppelin, we thought, and everyone ran to the windows in the hope, disappointed in the end, of the fine fireworks display which would be created by the aerial battle that could not fail to take place), with the selling off of the old apartment which offended my nascent snobbery and our establishment in a more comfortable place, at number 2 in the rue Mignet (from which we were thenceforth to hear, from time to time, the sirens, followed by the “all clear,” of the firemen and the shooting of the antiaircraft batteries set up in the Auteuil racecourse on the site of the famous dairy)—these were a few more levels up which I allowed time to carry me and which I will ratify as the most visible of those whose ascension, as it appeared to me, I made throughout that period during which, separated quite early from my two brothers, who had been mobilized into the artillery, I soon felt the reins slacken, being, on the one hand, removed from the influence of those two older brothers and, on the other, less restrained than ever by parents who were now too worried about their sons in the army to keep a close watch on the one who was not threatened by any immediate danger.

  I have mentioned the close relations that tied me to one of my two brothers, the one who seemed headed for a career as a virtuoso on the violin and who, when he temporarily became an artilleryman, proved to be a courageous fighter and also an excellent horseman, as though it had been important to him to show that our old ideas about the heroic nature of the metier of jockey was not entirely a piece of childishness. I would be lying if I suggested that I missed his company; too exclusively concerned with the pleasures that I was—though not without anguish, vexation, and mistakes—gradually discovering (having gone only a very small piece of the road as yet), I had eyes only for that brilliant panorama unfolding before me and, if I looked away from it at all, it was only to gaze at my own exterior, bent as I was on appearing in that pageant with as much elegance as I could, given my small financial means and that confusion of my limbs which is simply my lack of decisiveness expressed in physical terms; proud of a life whose dissipation seemed to me very chic and in which setbacks counted for little (for, at the age I was then, one feels time stretching out ahead of one), enchanted with that life, whose most serious fault was probably the fear of finding myself much too short of money to be able to start in again the next day—and no doubt that impecuniousn
ess was itself the main reason I finally gave up this way of life—my days were very full, however empty they may have been objectively, untroubled in any way by the thought of my brothers at the front (except for an artificial sort of compunction) and containing no yawning hole favoring an exploration of myself which would, perhaps, have inclined me to measure how much vanity there was in my restlessness and led me, by the detour of pessimism, to more humane sentiments. I can’t deny that, mingled with the admiration and friendship I had always felt for the brother about whom my mother and my sister delighted in reporting certain instances of mischievousness in his early childhood (how he asked the schoolmistress, in grammar class, “What is the etymology of the word underpants?”; how he combed his hair every night before going to bed so that, he said, he would “be handsome” in his dreams), this attachment to my brother Pierre who, formerly as gifted in classroom competitions as in those that took place in the schoolyard, had later proved himself in the field of music, was passionate about many moral and religious questions, viewed intercourse with women only in the light of romantic love of eternal dimensions and dedicated himself for the time being to his vocation as soldier with a sort of cheerful self-abnegation, there was now a tinge of disdain: how different this brother, whose valor and intelligence I did not question, appeared to me, fighting his war so simply, from those cavalier pirates who, one could readily believe, only assumed such huge risks in aerial engagements in order to pay for their right to complete freedom; how tame he seemed, taking no more than his regular leaves and, far from running around the streets when he came to Paris, finding all his restorative in the small, quasi-familial circle of people we knew from the parish, not even from the neighborhood! It would therefore be inappropriate for me to lay a great deal of emphasis on the good feeling that persisted—and still persists in many areas—between my brother and me; what I can, however, accept as undeniable is that—despite the power that is still exerted on me by certain individuals who are surrounded with disquieting sparks or whose life, having reached a particular point, then glitters, becomes iridescent, alters, warps, acquires (if it did not possess it already, even if only by reason of a lowering of social position caused by birth) a direction comparable to the mysterious moment when, in many melodies of Mozart and especially of Verdi, the current bends, slips dizzyingly toward something else—I have up to now placed my truest affections where, in one way or another, a trusting relationship could be established such as exists between two brothers—or on the part of a younger brother for an older—and my need for which is most likely rooted either in a longing for the early years during which my brother and I together, he barely a step ahead of me, went in search of at least a theoretical solution to the lofty or trivial problems one poses oneself when puberty comes, or in a disposition whose deeper nature escapes me and which I see simply expressed in the high value I now place on that search conducted with a companion closer, obviously, than any father or mother could ever be (since he has become our accomplice) but respected as much as one of our ancestors could wish himself to be.

  The word FRATERNITY—which follows in red the all-white EQUALITY, itself preceded according to protocol by the azure of LIBERTY—is perhaps, therefore, the most alive of these three words for me, the one that (without claiming to make it the ultimate magic word) I would most readily freight with these precise, biographical references I prize so greatly.

  A tacit agreement among several individuals who do not need to be of the same stock (nor of the same sex, nor of the same generation) to form a species of secret society; an open solidarity with the mass of people (whatever may be their occupation, their country, or the color of their skin) represented by people of goodwill, FRATERNITY oscillates from one of these poles to the other, their distance apart being more than a simple question of quantity, and I feel—for the moment—incapable of opting either in the direction of an attachment to an infinitesimal number of persons with whom everything happens implicitly or by innuendo, or in the direction of a communion that is vaster but, because of this, more diffuse and valid only when expressed out loud and constantly translated into action.

  Whatever the size I give, in the end, to this circle of relations in which community of origin does not matter—and it is not necessarily out of the question for me to admit to it representatives of species different from mine, at least as invited guests (one New Year’s Eve, friends found me dead drunk sleeping on the floor of their vestibule with the family dog, a fine German shepherd to whom I felt tied by a familial sort of affection, and some fifteen years later I chanced to address friendly gestures to some caged monkeys I saw in the Jardin des Plantes where a few of us from the Musée de l’Homme were walking, after a hearty lunch such as we were accustomed to eat once every week when we came out of the swimming pool on the rue de Pontoise, drinking considerable quantities of beaujolais, whence my condition that day: a true return to childhood or to nature, as on that New Year’s Eve during which too many rounds of drinks exchanged had put me on the same footing as a quadruped and that Sunday when, awaking at home after another drinking bout, I evinced some surprise, if not offense, at the fact that the maid had not taken the cat with her to Mass)—whatever the basis may be, if I succeed in getting beyond my present indecision, upon which this fraternity rests, a fraternity which I know is, in any case, quite distinct from the fraternity of pure chance that is too often that of blood relations, it seems impossible to me to eliminate from it the element of gratuitous choice, spontaneous gift, unconsidered (and, if need be, preposterous) motion toward another living being, without which it would be no more than an abstraction just barely good for carving on the walls of buildings, printing in ethics or history books and embroidering on the banners of gymnastics societies.

  I will discover these particular references, capable of giving visible substance, for me, to the idea of fraternity, here and there in the jumble of stories I decided so long ago to note down, stories often multifaceted which, I would say, I held onto the way one saves objects as evidence, even though I did this (in the case of more than one) without really knowing what they would become evidence of and what, in the end, would be their most important aspect; without having recourse to childhood memories, always dubious because too fragmentary and malleable, I will find at least one of these references if I turn to those of my stories that, lit by the uncertain glimmer of a war which I never more than vaguely touched, concern the several months during which I had some, however little it may have been, experience of military life, a group life that everything—beginning with the uniform—strives to imprint with an esprit de corps and in which it is difficult anyway, even for the most refractory, to avoid the camaraderie of the small clan (reduced to the volume and, most often, the duration of that transitory training).

  As a soldier in the 1939-45 war, I have some very short daily duty sheets which of course do not provide the motivation for any epic story but could, if the opportunity presented itself, furnish the substance for a travel story since their more significant element is the stay I made in the rocky portion of the Sahara during seven to eight months, the greater part of which elapsed in a truly desert region, in that somewhat cenobitic collection of buildings designated by the name of “Base 2” as opposed to our “Base 1,” situated about one hundred kilometers away in the largish village of Revoil Béni-Ounif, which represented our only contact with what is conventionally called the civilized world. In that unit, whose exclusive activity consisted in carrying out tests on what in the language of the general staff was known as “substance Z” (in other words shells and other terrestrial or aerial devices loaded with toxic products), my modest functions were those of the artificer and scarcely went beyond the limits of a bureaucrat’s work or, at the very most, a scholar’s; to have charge of the munitions book, to record the distinctive marks of the cartridges and fuses (some with fins) used in the firing or release of bombs, to be at once the warehouseman and the accountant of all the varieties of objects of destruc
tive properties that we were assigned the duty of testing—this was in effect my main occupation, to which was added, each morning, the role of water distributor, when the tank truck arrived from Base I and I had to divvy up as judiciously as possible (trying to reconcile the colonel’s instructions with the troops’ quite contrary desiderata) an always insufficient quantity of liquid among the laboratory, the kitchens, and the bathrooms. I was, in sum, overseer of fire and water, and this, in the majesty of the middle of the desert; so that, as I strolled from reservoir to reservoir holding in my hand the long pole with its quadrangular section that I used as gauge, I could have imagined without much effort that I was something like one of those thaumaturges, controllers of storms or rainmakers, described in myths.

  In the rather motley group we formed (since, along with people coming from France, as I had, and other reservists belonging for the most part to an artillery unit quartered in Oran, there were several career NCOs attached to the staff of our center, Legionnaires working at the radio station, a detachment of native North African infantrymen, and a few mokhaznis appointed to the camp’s permanent guard, troops joined, during a certain time, by some Englishmen from the RAF) the chemists represented, among the French-speaking military, a sort of intelligentsia whose members, with few exceptions, hardly mixed with the other soldiers (whose duties, anything but scientific, gave them no occasion, anyway, to have contact with the laboratory). I myself was theoretically attached to this little body of intellectuals and technicians, having been called up, like them, to the Twenty-second BOA (which we obviously enjoyed calling the “Boa”) and having met them in Paris at the time of our initial gathering at the Palais de la Mutualité, our company’s depot, before we were dispatched—by train, boat, train again, then truck—to this remote spot where almost everyone was bored and sought a semblance of entertainment in playing bridge. Now, if it was true that I used to have the idea of becoming a chemist, at no time in my life did I have the least fondness for bridge, and this alone (without mentioning the special position I occupied because of being attached to the general staff) would perhaps have been enough to deter me from the exclusive association with these early partners, to whom, though some were certainly excellent friends, I did not feel allied by any team spirit, where either our work was concerned or our leisure time in the evenings.