The French Art of War

by Alexis Jenni

  ‘We’ is performative; simply to utter the word creates a group; ‘we’ denotes a group of people that includes the speaker, and the person speaking can speak in their name; their ties between them are so strong that the one may speak for all. How was it possible, in the spontaneity of a dream, that I had used this impulsive ‘we’? How can I have experienced something I had never experienced and I do not even know? How can I morally say ‘we’ when I know all too well that terrible acts were committed? And yet ‘we’ acted, ‘we’ knew; there was no other way to say it.

  Whenever I awoke from these alcohol-induced naps, I read books, I watched films. In the attic room where I lived I was free until the evening. I wanted to find out everything I could about this lost country of which only a name remains, a single, capitalized word filled with sweet, unhealthy vibrations, preserved deep within the language. I learned all there was to learn about this war of which there are no images, since few photographs were taken, many were destroyed, and those that survive are difficult to understand, eclipsed as they are by the photographs, so numerous and so easily understandable, of the American war.

  What to call these men who tramped in single file through the forest, shouldering old-fashioned, khaki canvas rucksacks like the one I carried as a boy, when my father gave me the one he had carried as a child? Should these men be called ‘the French’? And if so, what would that make me? Should they be called ‘we’? Is it enough to be French to be implicated in what other Frenchmen do? The question seems futile, semantic, a matter of knowing which pronoun to use to denote those who marched through the forest, with rucksacks whose metal frame I felt digging into my back when I was a child. I want to know who I’m living with. I shared a common language with these men, and it is good to share things with those you love. I shared a sense of place with them; we walked the same streets, went to the same schools, listened to the same stories; we ate particular foods that other people do not eat and we enjoyed them. We spoke together in the only language that counts, the one you understand unthinkingly. We are all organs of the body united by the caresses of a common tongue. Who knows how far that great body extends? Who knows what the left hand is doing while the right is busy fondling? What is the rest of the body doing when your attention is diverted by the caresses of that tongue? I wondered as I fondled the cleft of the girl lying next to me. I’ve forgotten her name; it’s strange to know so little about the people you sleep with. It is strange but, most of the time, when we are lying next to each other, we have our eyes closed, and when we open them by accident we are too close to make out the person’s face. It is impossible to know who ‘we’ is, impossible to resolve semantic questions, so what cannot be said is passed over in silence. And we will talk no more about those men tramping through the forest than we do about the name of the woman lying so close, that we will soon forget.

  We know so little about those close to us. It is terrifying. It is important to try to know.

  I saw him several times, the man with the unfolded newspaper. I did not know his name, but that was not important in this out-of-the-way café. Here, the regulars were just hoary clichés; each existed as a single detail, mentioned over and over; this detail, endlessly repeated, unchanging, meant people knew who you were; it meant others could laugh, and everyone could drink. Alcohol is the perfect fuel for such machines. It explodes, the tank is quickly emptied. The sudden emptiness is brutal; you have no choice; you refuel. He was the war vet who spread out his newspaper at a busy time so as not to be disturbed; I was the young man on a slippery slope who never went anywhere without a little old lady’s shopping trolley, and at one o’clock every afternoon went to get topped up: no one tired of making jokes about that.

  This could have carried on for a long time. It could have carried on until he dropped. It could have carried on until he withered and died, because he was older than me. It could have carried on until my final humiliation, until I had no money, no energy, or words left to hold my own, no strength left to sit with these men at the bar where we were all lined up, waiting for the end. It could have carried on for a long time, because that kind of life is designed not to change. Alcohol pickles the living in the last pose they struck. You see it in museums, where the bodies of those once living are preserved in jars.

  But Sunday saved us.

  Some people find Sundays tedious and avoid them, but that blank day is essential to change; it is the space reserved where change can come to pass. On Sunday I discovered his name and my life took a different turn.

  The Sunday I learned his name I was strolling through the Artists’ Market along the Saône. The name makes me laugh. It precisely sums up what it is: a flea market for art lovers.

  What was I doing there? I had seen better days. I’ll tell you about it sometime. I once had education, and taste. I loved the arts and knew a little about them. I may be disillusioned with them, but I’m not bitter, and I completely understand Duchamp’s maxim: ‘Even the fart of an artist is art.’ That, to me, seems conclusive; it may sound like a joke, but it perfectly describes what inspires painters and those who come to see them.

  There is nothing particularly expensive at the Artists’ Market, but there is nothing particularly beautiful. You stroll in the shade of the plane trees, idly studying the works of the artists, who size up those browsing behind their tables with increasing contempt as they swan past without buying anything.

  I prefer this to the closed world of art galleries, because what is on display here is clearly art: oil on canvas, painted in a traditional style. The subjects are familiar, recognizable, easily expressed, and from behind these irrefutable canvases glower the feverish eyes of the artists. Those who choose to exhibit their work also put themselves on show; they come to save their souls by virtue of their status as artists, not onlookers; as for the onlookers, they save their souls by coming to see the artists. He who paints can save his soul as long as someone buys, and buying his paintings is like buying indulgences, a few hours of paradise snatched from everyday damnation.

  I would go and be amused to confirm, yet again, that artists look like their work. People lazily assume the contrary, like some bargain-basement maxim by Sainte-Beuve: the artist expresses himself, gives form to his work, hence that work must reflect his personality. Bullshit! A stroll beneath the plane trees at the Artists’ Market reveals everything. The artist is not expressing himself – after all, what does he have to express? He is constructing himself. And what he is exhibiting is himself. Behind his stall, he exposes himself to the gaze of passers-by whom he envies and despises; they return his feelings, but differently, inversely, and thus everyone is happy. The artist creates his work and in return his work gives life to him.

  Consider this tall, skinny guy who paints terrible portraits in bold strokes of acrylic: every portrait is him from a different angle. Put them together and they show what he would like to be. Hence what he would like to be, is.

  Consider the guy who methodically paints watercolours that are too brash, too clear-cut, the colours are garish, the forms too solid. He is deaf and can barely hear the remarks of the curious onlookers; he paints the world as he hears it.

  Consider the beautiful woman who paints only portraits of beautiful women. Each one looks like her, and as the years pass she takes more care in how she dresses, she withers, and the beauty of her painted ladies seems more and more disproportionate. Predictably, she signs herself ‘Doriane’.

  Consider the shy Chinese man exhibiting paintings of brutal violence, faces in close-up distorted by thick impasto strokes. Never knowing where to put his huge hands, he apologizes with a charming smile.

  Consider the man who paints miniatures on waxed wooden panels. He sports a pudding-bowl haircut the likes of which are seldom seen outside the margins of an illuminated manuscript; he has a waxy pallor and his repertoire of gestures is gradually diminishing until he is no more than a medieval statue.

  Consider the fat lady with the dyed black hair, she has seen b
etter years, she is fading now, but she stands straight and has a twinkle in her eye. In lissom lines of Indian ink she sketches tangled bodies, assertively erotic yet innocuous, restrained.

  Consider the Chinese woman sitting amid decorative canvases. Her hair enfolds her shoulders in a curtain of black silk, framing her dazzlingly red lips. Her gaudy paintings are of little interest, but when she sits among the canvases they become the perfect background for the deep crimson of her lips.

  I went, and I recognized him, recognized his stiffness, his gangling frame, his lean, handsome head held aloft as though planted on a pikestaff. From a distance I recognized the clean lines of his profile, the close-cropped white hair, the straight nose pointing the way ahead. His nose was so thrusting it seemed to leave his pale, hesitant eyes behind. His bone structure was active, but his eyes pensive.

  We nodded a curt greeting, not quite knowing how informal we could be in word, in deed, outside the familiar confines of the bistro. In a sense, we were in civvies: hands in pockets, we stood, speaking cautiously, without having had a drink, without a glass in front of us, without the usual ritual. He stared at me. In his clear eyes I saw only clarity; he seemed to see right into my heart. I did not know what to say. I flicked through the watercolours in front of him.

  ‘You don’t look much like a painter,’ I said unthinkingly.

  ‘That’s because I don’t have the beard. But I do have the brushes.’

  ‘Very beautiful, very beautiful,’ I said politely as I leafed through the pictures, and then realized that what I had said was true. Finally, I looked. What I had thought were watercolours were actually painted in ink wash. Technically these were grisailles, built up using various dilutions of Indian ink. From the deep black of the unadulterated ink he drew such a variety of shades, greys so varied, so transparent, so luminous, that they conjured everything, even colour, although there was none. From black he brought forth light, and from that light all else followed. I looked up, wordlessly commending him on his achievement.

  As I approached his stall, I had been expecting to find the sort of work turned out by those who take up art late in life, almost as a hobby. I was expecting landscapes and careful, meticulous portraits, flowers, animals, all those things that people consider ‘picturesque’ and hordes of amateurs stubbornly churn out, with great precision and little interest. And then I touched the outsized sheets washed with ink, held them, one by one, between my fingers, fingers that were more and more sensitive and sure, I felt the weight, the grain, I gazed at them and my gaze was a caress. Scarcely daring to breathe, I leafed through this explosion of grey, the translucent wreaths of smoke, the sweeping shores of untouched white, the solid slabs of pure black whose shadows brooded over the whole.

  He was offering them by the boxful, badly organized, badly sealed, at ridiculous prices. The dates stretched back half a century. He had used every conceivable kind of paper, watercolour paper, drawing paper, wrapping paper in every shade of brown and white, old yellow pages and crisp new ones bought from an art supply shop.

  He painted from life. The subjects were merely a pretext for working with ink, but he painted what he had seen. There were rugged mountains, tropical trees, strange fruits, stooped women bent in paddy fields, men in floating djellebas, mountain villages; palls of mist over jagged hills, rivers lined with forest. And, everywhere, there were men in uniform, heroic and thin, some stretched out, visibly dead.

  ‘Have you been painting long?’

  ‘About sixty years.’

  ‘Are you selling the lot?’

  ‘It’s all just clutter. So I cleared out the attic and I’m taking the Sunday air. At my age, those are two important tasks. In the process I come across drawings I’ve forgotten and try to remember when they dated from, and I talk to passers-by about art. But most of them talk shit. So for now, don’t say a word.’

  I continued to browse, silent, following his advice. I would have liked to have talked to him, but I didn’t know about what.

  ‘Were you really over there, in Indochine?’

  ‘See for yourself. I can’t make thing up. Which is a pity, otherwise I could have painted more.’

  ‘Were you there at the time?’

  ‘If “at the time” means “with the army”, then yes. With the French Far East Expeditionary Corps.’

  ‘Were you a war artist?’

  ‘God, no. Paratroop officer. Must have been the only para who ever drew. The men used to take the piss out of me a bit. But not too much. Because if the colonial army didn’t have this kind of refinement, it had all sorts. And, besides, I would draw portraits of the lads who took the piss. They’re better than photos. They loved that. They asked me for more. I always took along paper and ink; wherever I went, I would draw.’

  I turned the pages feverishly, as though I had discovered a lost treasure. I moved from box to box, opening them, taking out the drawings, feeling his brushstrokes within myself, following their flow, their feeling in my fingertips, my arm, my shoulder and my belly. Each sheet appeared before me like a landscape glimpsed suddenly at a bend in the road, my hand fluttered over them, tracing whorls in the air, and in every limb I could feel a weary weight, as though I had travelled every step of the journey. Some were small sketches, others large, detailed compositions, but all were bathed in a raking light that transfixed the subjects, and gave them the presence on paper that they had had in that moment in life. In the bottom right corner, he clearly signed his name, Victorien Salagnon. Next to the signature had been added dates in pencil, sometime the exact date, sometimes the time, others were more vague, mentioning only the year.

  ‘I go through them. Try to remember. I have boxes of them, suitcases, trunks full.’

  ‘You painted a lot?’

  ‘Yes. I work quickly. When I had the time I’d turn out several a day. But a lot of them were lost, mislaid, abandoned. In my time in the army I often had to beat a retreat, and at times like that you don’t load yourself down, you don’t take everything. You abandon things.’

  I marvelled at his inkwork. He stood facing me, a little stiff. He had not moved an inch; being taller, he looked down on me, his gaze frank, a little sardonic. He looked at me with that raw-boned face, those transparent eyes in which the lack of barriers seemed like gentleness. My droll theory about art and life no longer seemed of any interest. So I put down the drawing I still held and looked up at him.

  ‘Mister Salagnon, would you teach me to paint?’

  * * *

  Towards nightfall it started to snow; big flakes floating down and hesitating before they settled. At first they were invisible against the grey air, but as night drew in, rubbing the sky with charcoal, their whiteness stood out. In the end it was all you could see, snowflakes shimmering in the air beneath an ink-black sky, and whiteness on the ground covering everything with a damp blanket. The little house was cloaked with the snow, in the violet glow of a December night.

  I was happy sitting there, but Salagnon was gazing out. Standing by the window, hands behind his back, watching as snow fell on his suburban house and garden in Voracieux-les-Bredins, on the eastern edge of the town where the rolling meadows of the Isère break like waves.

  ‘The snow enfolds everything in its white coat. Isn’t that what they used to say? That’s how we talked about snow at school. Its white shroud unfurled. There was a time when I never saw snow, or shrouds, for that matter – all we had were tarps at best, and if we didn’t have them, we covered everything with dirt and put a cross on top. Sometimes we left them where they fell, but not often. We tried not to give up on our dead, we tried to bring them back with us, to count them, remember them.

  ‘I love snow. We don’t get much of it these days, so I stand at the window and watch each snowfall like it’s a major event. I lived out the worst moments of my life in sweltering heat and noise. So for me, snow is silence, it’s peace, and a bracing cold that makes me forget that sweat even exists. I can’t abide sweat, but for twenty years
I was constantly bathed in it, never able to dry off. So to me, snow is human warmth, a dry body, safe and sheltered. I doubt the soldiers who fought on the Russian front with threadbare uniforms, terrified of freezing to death, shared my love for snow. The old German veterans can’t bear it; they head south at the first sign of winter. Me, it’s the opposite. I can’t stand the sight of palm trees. In all the twenty years I spent fighting, I never once saw snow; and now, what with global warming, there won’t be any. So I make the most of it. I’ll go when it goes. I spent twenty years in hot countries; in the tropics, I suppose you’d call them. To me, snow is France: toboggans, Christmas decorations, thick, patterned jumpers, ski-pants and après-ski drinks; all the stupid, boring things I fled, the very things I returned to in spite of myself. By the time the war was over, everything had changed; the only pleasure I have now is the snow.’

  ‘What war are you talking about?’

  ‘You didn’t notice it, the twenty-year war? A never-ending war that started badly, ended badly; a faltering war that even now might still be going on. A constant war that permeated our every action, although nobody realized it. The start date is a little vague – 1940, maybe 1942, it’s hard to say. But the end is clear-cut: 1962, not a year more. And as soon as it was over, everyone behaved as though nothing had happened. You didn’t notice?’

  ‘I wasn’t born until after.’

  ‘The silence after war is still war. You can’t forget what you’re struggling so hard to forget. It’s like being told not to think about an elephant. Even if you were born afterwards, you grew up surrounded by the symptoms. For example, I’m sure you hated the army, even though you knew nothing about it. That’s one of the symptoms I’m talking about: a mysterious loathing that spreads from person to person without anyone knowing where it comes from.’