by Alexis Jenni
In late May the meadows and the woods reached their full beauty. The vegetation, gorged with light, finally filled every inch of space. The myriad greens would become uniform, the infinite variety of tones would fade and merge into a rather sombre, tarnished emerald. The brash greens of April and May gradually gave way to the soft, deep-water shades which had the force of constancy.
Combat units had been formed, whose members knew each other well. Every man knew who he could count on, who took the lead, who carried the ammunition, who gave the orders to hit the deck or to retreat. They had learned how to march in single file, letting no one fall behind; they had learned how to vanish at a signal, disappearing into foxholes, behind rocks and tree trunks, they knew how to fire in unison and how to cease firing, they knew how to work as a team. The Colonel was responsible for everything, from military training to camp maintenance. With a single glare he persuaded them that a well-run camp was, in itself, a weapon against the Germans. They felt themselves growing taller and more lithe, becoming stronger.
Salagnon carried on with his drawing; he became known for it; people would ask for portraits. The Colonel decided that this could be one of his duties. During the afternoon siesta, men would come and pose for him. He made sketches in his notebook, which he later copied on to loose sheets. He fashioned heroic portraits of boys brandishing their weapons, berets tilted at a rakish angle, shirts unbuttoned; young boys who were self-confident and smiling, proud of their uniforms, of their hair a little too long, and the rippling young muscles they liked to show off.
No one now tore the packing paper. They treated it with respect and brought it to Salagnon, wads of carefully smoothed sheets, as large as the folds in the wrapping allowed.
He also drew scenes of the camp: young men sleeping, gathering firewood, washing pots, doing weapons drill and sitting around the fire in the evening. The Colonel pinned a number of drawings to the wall of the barn that served as their command post. He often studied them in silence, sitting at his makeshift desk of parachuted crates or standing dreamily, leaning on his gnarled walking stick. The sight of these young heroes reduced to simple lines made his heart swell with pride. He considered Salagnon invaluable. Pencil and paper put fire in their bellies.
He gave Salagnon a complete set of Faber-Castell pencils, a flat metal tin containing forty-eight different colours. It came from a German officer’s briefcase which had been stolen from the préfecture for the documents it contained. A number of suspects were arrested and tortured on the flimsiest evidence. The man responsible for the theft was betrayed and executed. Information from the documents dispatched to London had been used to bomb a number of railway junctions while valuable cargo was being transported. The pencils were used by Salagnon, who never knew that they had been paid for in blood. He added depth to the shadows and made good use of the colours. He drew landscapes, sketching the tall trees and the great moss-covered boulders at their base.
Since he had no ink, he was forced to improvise with rifle grease and lampblack. Applied with a wooden spatula, this rudimentary, glistening black ink brought a dramatic chiaroscuro to certain scenes and faces. The young men in the camp saw each other in a new light; Salagnon helped them to adapt to life as a team.
For a very long time one early June night the sky remained a deep blue. The stars did not appear. They struggled to catch fire, while the soft, diffuse glow made lanterns redundant. A blue balminess made it difficult for the young men to sleep. Lying in the shadows or leaning against boulders, they quaffed the red wine they had stolen that afternoon. The Colonel had authorized the mission on condition that they did not get caught, that they abide by the rules he had drummed into them, and that they leave no man behind.
Armed with buckets, hand drills and wooden dowels, they had headed down the hill to the train station on the banks of the Saône. They slipped between the carriages in the shunting yard. When they had come to the tank-wagons stencilled with German writing, they assumed they had reached their goal. The spigots were sealed, but the tanks themselves were made of wood; so they drilled holes in the sides and wine spurted into their bucket with a splashing sound that made them giggle. They plugged the holes using the wooden dowels and headed back up the hill, careful not to be seen, sweltering under the blazing sun, spilling a little wine, and, as they moved further from the station, their laughter grew louder. They left no one behind and arrived back as a unit, so the Colonel could not complain. He had left the buckets of wine in the cool spring waters to chill and suggested they wait a while before drinking it.
Through the night that never quite drew in, they drank at a leisurely pace, and every now and then they would laugh at some joke or at their accounts of the day’s adventure, which they told over and over, embellishing and embroidering it as they did so. The stars did not come out, time stood still. It had stopped, just as the pendulum of a clock stops when it comes to the top of its arc: stops for a moment and then starts up again.
A paraffin lamp glowed in the barn that they used as their headquarters, and the yellow light trickled through cracks in the door. The Colonel had summoned the perfect team of officers to lead the units – those young men the boys looked up to like big brothers, like young schoolteachers – and, behind closed doors, they talked for many hours.
A little tipsy, Salagnon was lying on his back next to the bucket. He scrabbled at the grass beneath him, the grass damp with dew and sap, his fingers sinking between the roots, and he felt the cold breath rising from the earth. In his fingertips he could feel the night swelling beneath him. It is foolish to say that night falls when, in fact, it rises from the ground, gradually suffusing the sky, which, to the very last moment, remains the only source of light. He stared at a lone star suspended above his head and fathomed the depths of the sky; he felt against his back the curve of the Earth, a vast sphere on which he lay as it whirled in space, for ever falling through the dark blue immensity that encompasses all things, at the same pace as the motionless stars above him. Together they fell, pressed against the vast sphere to which they clung, fingers buried among the roots of the grass. That presence of the Earth beneath him coursed through him with a profound happiness. He tilted his head back: the trees were black shadows against the pale night, each an immeasurable weight, the unmoving rocks gleamed softly at the base of the trees, the Earth buckling under their weight, while the vast expanse of space was a sheet stretched taut by the weighty presences of the boys lying on the grass, the squat trees, the mossy boulders, and this thought filled him with the same deep, enduring joy.
He felt an endless, boundless goodwill towards all those stretched out on the grass like him, those drinking from the same bucket of wine; and he felt the same goodwill tinged with hope towards the officers gathered in the barn, towards the Colonel with his sempiternal, sky-blue Camel Corps kepi. They had been talking for hours now behind closed doors, huddled around the only lamp, whose light spilled through the cracks in the door, a yellow light against the outside world that was blue or black.
The paraffin lamp was extinguished. The unit leaders came out to join them, drank with them until finally the night grew dark and the grass was wet with crisp dew.
The next day, standing before the serried ranks of men, before the flag fluttering atop a pole, the Colonel solemnly declared that the battle for France had begun. It was time to go down and to fight.
Commentaries III
A prescription for painkillers from the all-night pharmacy
THIS HAPPENED ON A NIGHT when I went out, a summer night when I was out walking, when I was sick, when I could not even swallow my own saliva, could not swallow at all because of the damage to my throat caused by a viral raiding party. If I was not to drown in my own spittle, I had to prattle on and on, letting the saliva evaporate. Mouth open, I meandered through this summer night and glimpsed a reality I had never seen before. It had been hidden from me. I had walked through it yet never noticed it. But that night I was ill, my throat was red-raw from the
marauding virus and, unable to swallow, I was forced to walk the streets with my mouth wide open to allow my saliva to evaporate. I talked to myself as I prowled the streets of Lyon, heading for the late-night pharmacy in search of painkillers.
We enjoy a riot; we relish the thrill. We dream of civil war, just for fun. And if our little game results in a few deaths, that only serves to make it more interesting. Since time immemorial, douce France, the land of my youth, has been laid waste by violence, just as my throat has been ravaged by this virus that causes me so much pain that I can’t swallow. So I walk the streets, my mouth agape, and I talk.
How dare I speak for my whole country?
I speak only of my throat. A country is nothing more than a tongue, a dialect with an army. France is the sum of spaces in which French is spoken; my aching throat merely the most obvious, the most real, the most palpable instance, and so that night I was wandering the streets in order to heal it, looking to get painkillers from the all-night pharmacy.
It was a balmy June night, there was no reason for me to have a cold. I had probably been infected on the protest march, from all the tear gas and the shouting.
In France we know how to hold a first-rate protest march. No country in the world can rival us in staging a demonstration, because to us they are one of the pleasures of our civic duty. We fantasize about street theatre, of civil war, with slogans like nursery rhymes and people thronging the streets; we dream of hails of tiles, of paving stones and catapult bolts, of mysterious barricades that appear in the night and of daring escapes in the morning. People take to the streets, people are angry, and wham! we all pile outside to perform the ultimate gesture of French democracy. In other languages ‘democracy’ translates as ‘the power of the people’, but in French, by virtue of the tongue that throbs in my mouth, it becomes an imperative: ‘Power to the people!’ and it is played out on the streets, with brute force, the timeless force of street theatre.
It is axiomatic that the French state does engage in discussion. It issues orders, directives, pokes its nose into everything. It does not debate. Nor do the People want a debate. The State is violent; the State is generous; everyone may benefit from its largesse, but it does not debate. Nor do the People. The People’s interests are defended by the barricade, and our militarized police are trained to breach that barricade. No one wants to listen; we all want to fight. To accede would be to surrender. To understand the other would be tantamount to accepting his words in our mouths, to have our mouths filled with the power of the other, to fall silent when he speaks. It would be humiliating; we find the very idea offensive. We must make the other shut up, force him to capitulate, overpower him, leave him speechless, we must slit his talking throat, ship him to a penal colony in the sweltering forests of some island where only the birds and the dormice will hear him scream. All that is noble is the struggle, the overthrow of the adversary, and his eventual silence.
The State does not debate. The People hold their tongue; and when they are dissatisfied, they riot. A society devoid of language is sapped by silence, it mumbles and whimpers, but it does not speak; it agonizes, tears itself apart, it communicates its pain through violence, it explodes, smashes windows and crockery, then lapses back into fretful silence.
Whoever has been duly elected tells us how gratified he is to have been granted such power. Now, finally, he will be able to govern, he tells us, to govern without wasting time on debate. Our immediate response is to call a general strike, bring the country to a standstill and the people into the streets. Finally. The people, who have had enough of tedium, of aggravation and of work, join forces in order to take action. We are off to the theatre.
When we see protest marches in Britain, we can’t help but smile. People march past, one by one, with their cardboard signs, with individual placards mounted on sticks, each with a hand-written message that needs to be read to be understood. They march past, the British, waving their carefully crafted, slyly humorous placards for the television cameras. They are flanked by lines of relaxed policemen in standard-issue uniforms. It is as though their police forces do not have the riot shields, the pads, the nightsticks or the water cannon to clear the streets. Their demonstrations give off an aura of politeness and boredom. In France we stage the most glorious protests in the world, they are outpourings of excess and joy.
We pile into the street. People taking to the streets is an everyday reality; taking to the streets is the dream that unites us, the French dream of solidarity with the common man. I went down into the street wearing running shoes and a tight T-shirt that would allow no purchase for anyone attempting to grab hold of me. I didn’t know anyone. I joined the swelling ranks, took up a position behind the banner and added my voice to the crowd shouting slogans. It took several people to carry our huge banners with short slogans written in big letters, and large vents to stop them being whisked away by the wind. A number of people are needed to carry these words that stretch for several metres, and they flutter, they are difficult to read; it hardly matters since no one needs to read them, they simply need to be large and red, and the words emblazoned on them are those we chant in unison. When you are part of a demonstration, you shout and you run. Oh, the delights of civil war! Heavily armed police cordon off the streets, massed behind riots shields, shin guards, helmets with lowered visors that make them indistinguishable; with long truncheons they pound on their shields, beating out a constant drumroll. Inevitably, things turned ugly. That was the purpose of our presence.
A hail of stones was answered by a volley of grenades, a cloud rose and spilled across the street. ‘Fine, then we’ll fight them in the shadows!’ laughed those among us who had come with helmets, with balaclavas, with iron bars and slingshots, and began smashing shop windows. Our throats were already burning from the tear gas and the shouting. A shower of steel bolts fired from catapults shattered shop windows into glittering splinters like crystal waterfalls.
Riot police moved along the street, tooled up with old-fashioned weaponry, moving with the precision of a legion, stones clattering against the polycarbonate riot shields; the muffled explosions of grenades filled the air with tear gas; groups of plain-clothed officers plunged into the crowd, grabbed a few of the rioters and dragged them behind the wall of shields that continued to advance with its implacable drumroll of truncheons. The racket! Our banner fell. I picked it up and, with the help of someone else, hoisted it above my head; we were now leading the march, then we tossed it aside and ran. Oh, the joys of civil war! The joys of street theatre! We raced past show windows that splintered as we ran, past gutted shops where young men masked with scarves helped themselves, as though from their own cellars, then they too turned and fled, pursued by determined, square-jawed young men. This last group ran faster; they wore orange armbands and when they managed to pin a masked youth to the ground they took out their handcuffs. I was running. This was why I had come: a demonstration without a frantic chase is a waste of time. I was zigzagging through the side streets.
The sky began to flush pink. Night was drawing in. A bitter wind whipped away the acrid gas. Sweat trickled down my back and my throat was beginning to hurt. In the surrounding street, squad cars moved slowly, each carrying four square-jawed officers, scanning the scene through a different window as the car wheels crunched over the shards of glass. There was a smell of burning. The streets were littered with abandoned clothes, shoes, a motorcycle helmet, pools of blood.
Me, I was in pain, in agony.
The government, having gone too far, retreated; it reversed its hastily adopted measures with counter-measures born of panic. As always, stability was restored: the unspoken compromise was ineffective and unwieldy. France engineers its laws as it creates its cities: the imposing avenues of the Napoleonic Code are at the centre, while all around is a confusion of ramshackle, temporary buildings connected by a warren of roundabouts and inextricable contraflows. We improvise. The balance of power matters more than the law, chaos proliferates through t
he accumulation of individual cases. Each of these laws stands, because, while it would be inflammatory to enforce them, it would be embarrassing to repeal them. So they remain on the books.
Oh, I am in terrible pain!
It was June, yet here I was suffering from a cold, my throat was sore, my throat was inflamed, the throat which is the mouthpiece and the target. With a prescription in my pocket I tramped through the streets of Lyon to buy medicine from the all-night pharmacy. I crossed the city in the dead of night, my mouth hanging open so my saliva could evaporate. I couldn’t swallow anything, not even the natural secretions of my own mouth, its natural functions thwarted by pain, and so I wandered, open-mouthed, constantly talking to myself so that my saliva could evaporate, so I would not drown with drool I could not swallow.
I moved along the night-time pavements of shifting shadows, stepping aside to avoid the flotsam of cuddling couples, lone wanderers, excitable groups. I moved without seeing them, preoccupied by my pain. I passed white cars emblazoned with blue-and-red stripes that moved in slow motion, as their occupants scanned the street. The word POLICE was stencilled in large letters on the cars, and on the similarly decorated vans parked along the street, from which these same young men studied the shifting shadows.
Ô douce France! Mon cher pays de fraîcheur et d’enfance! O sweet France! The dear country of my youth, so serene, so heavily policed… Another car passes in slow motion carrying muscular young men… It swims silently through the night aquarium, draws level with me, studies me and moves off again. The summer nights are muggy and dangerous, and the streets of the city centre are under close police control; all night they circulate: the highly public police presence makes pacification possible. Yes, pacification! We practise pacification in the very heart of our cities, in the very heart of power, for the enemy is all around. We have no adversaries, only an enemy; we have no truck with any adversary that would lead to endless debates, but an enemy that we can counter with brute force. With the enemy, there is no debate. We fight him; we kill him, he kills us. We don’t want to talk, we want to fight. In a country famed for its gentle way of life, for the fine art of conversation, we no longer want to live together.