by Alexis Jenni
It doesn’t last, of course; such things never last. He opens the door and shakes my hand, then our hands disengage, his smile vanishes and I step inside. He walks ahead of me down the hallway; I follow behind, peering as I pass at the rubbish he hangs on the wall. He decorates the walls of his house with paintings. He also displays other objects. The wallpaper is so baroque, the lighting so dim, that the corridor ahead looks like the tunnel of a cave, the angles appear rounded, and against the background of repeated patterns it is difficult to make out the objects hanging on the walls. I do not stop in the hallway, I simply follow him; in passing, I spot a barometer with its needle permanently stuck on ‘changeable’; there was a clock with roman numerals, the hands of which, I noticed after several months, no longer moved; there was even a mounted antelope head and I wondered how it came to be there, whether he had bought it – where? – whether he had inherited it – from whom? – whether he had hacked it from the body of an animal he had killed – how? I don’t know which of these three possibilities I found most revolting. Apart from that there were frames, horrid, gilded baroque frames in which slumbered pseudo-Dutch landscapes so murky you had to step close to make out the subject and the mediocrity, and garish scenes of Provence full of affected joy and clashing colours.
I had imagined Salagnon’s house to be very different: Asian curios and a kasbah atmosphere; or perhaps nothing, a white space and windows with no curtains. I would have expected the decor to reflect him, if only a little, if only by little touches, something that reflected his life story. But not this banality pushed to the point where it was crushing, where it was stifling. If every person’s home reflects their soul, as people claim, the home of Eurydice and Victorien Salagnon had the good taste to divulge nothing.
When at last I found the courage to point out a pathetic seascape in a polished wooden frame, a storm raging on a craggy stretch of coast, where the rocks looked like pumice stone and the waves like curdled resin (to say nothing of the sky, which looked like nothing), he simply gave a disarming smile.
‘It’s not one of mine.’
‘You like it?’
‘No. It’s just a wall. It’s just a decoration.’
A decoration! This man, whose brush trembled, whose brush pulsed with life the moment he fed it with ink, this man surrounded himself with ‘decorations’. He lived in rooms that were decorated. In his home he had recreated a furniture warehouse catalogue from twenty years ago, maybe thirty, I don’t know. Time here was irrelevant, it was rebuffed, it did not pass.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘those paintings are made in Asia. The Chinese in particular have always been particularly talented; they bend their bodies according to their will, by dint of practice. They learn how to paint in oils in vast studios and they produce Dutch, English, Provençal landscapes for the western market. Sometimes several at a time. They paint much better and much faster than the Sunday painters here; the canvasses are shipped here in cargo freighters, rolled up in containers.
‘They’re fascinating, these paintings: their ugliness belongs to no one, neither those who paint them nor those who look at them. It is calming for everyone. I have been much too present all my life, too much in the moment. I’m exhausted.
‘The thought process of the Chinese does me good; their indifference is a balm. I have spent my whole life obsessed with their ideals, although I have never set foot in China itself. I have seen China only once, from a distance. A hill on the far bank of a river where we had just blown up a bridge. A couple of Molotova trucks were burning, and behind the curtain of smoke rising from the flames I could see the steep hills covered with pine trees exactly like the trees framed against drifting clouds in their paintings. But the clouds from the burning petrol were too black that day, an error of judgement. And I thought: so this is China; it’s a stone’s throw away, but I’ll never go there, because I’ve blown up the bridge. I didn’t hang around; we had to get out of there fast. We ran all the way back, we ran for days. One of the guys with me died of exhaustion just after we got back. I mean actually died; he was buried with full military honours.’
‘You never show your paintings?’
‘I’m not going to hang something I’ve done on a wall. It’s finished. What remains of those times is a burden.’
‘You never thought about exhibiting, selling, becoming an artist?’
‘I sketched what I saw, so that Eurydice could see it. Once she had seen it, the drawing was complete.’
When we stepped into the living room, there were two guys waiting for us; and when I saw them slumped on the sofa, I felt another rush of disgust at the preposterous decor. How could he and Eurydice live in this fake setting? How could they live in this TV set that looked as if it were made from hunks of cut out, painted polystyrene? Unless they no longer wanted to know, no longer wanted to speak, not ever.
But this strategy of mediocrity was no match for the physical violence that these two guys gave off. They sprawled on the sofa like regular visitors, making themselves at home. Against the mawkish backdrop of fake furniture, against the idiotic background of the wallpaper, they looked like adults in a kindergarten. They did not know where to put their legs, their very weight threatened to demolish the sofa.
The older man looked like Salagnon, but stockier, and his features had begun to sag, despite the energy he put into every gesture. I could not really see his eyes, because he was wearing tinted glasses, huge lenses with a gold wire frame. Behind the greenish glass, his eyes darted like fish in an aquarium and I could not make out the expression behind the reflections. Everything he was wearing seemed strange: the baggy, checked jacket, the shirt open to reveal his chest gaped too wide, the gold medallion, the flared trousers, the shiny loafers. He looked like what passed for flashy style thirty years ago, wearing colours that no longer existed. He was like a ghost. Only the dent in the sofa beneath the weight of his buttocks made it clear he really existed.
The other guy was thirty at most. He was wearing a leather jacket from which jutted a little pot belly, hair close cropped on his round head; the head set on a fat neck with folds of flesh, folds at the front when he leaned forwards and folds at the back when he sat up.
Salagnon introduced us, although he remained evasive. Mariani, an old friend, and one of his lads. Me, his pupil; his student in the art of the brush. This brought a laugh from the man in the 1972 jacket.
‘The art of the brush! Still plugging on with your ladylike hobbies, Salagnon. Knitting and embroidery: that’s how you’re spending your long retirement, instead of joining us?’
He laughs loudly, as though he finds this really funny, and his kid laughs too, but more maliciously. Salagnon brought in four beers and glasses and, as he passed, Mariani slapped his buttocks.
‘You make a fine servant! You know back when we were marching, he’d get up before everyone else and make us coffee? He hasn’t changed.’
Mariani’s kid sniggered again, grabbed a beer and, pointedly ignoring the glass, drank from the bottle. He looked me straight in the eye and was about to let out a macho belch when the older men glared at him and he stopped himself, swallowed it down and mumbled an apology. In a silence I found embarrassing, Salagnon poured the beers with the polite aloofness of a host.
‘Don’t worry,’ Marini said to me after a moment, ‘I’ve been teasing him for half a century. They’re private jokes between us that he wouldn’t put up with from anyone else. He’s good enough not to get riled when I lapse into my natural stupidity. He indulges me, the way you do survivors.’
‘And besides, I’m light years ahead of him when it comes to being offensive,’ said Salagnon. ‘He carried me through the jungle on a stretcher. Being carried was so painful that I spent the whole time I wasn’t unconscious screaming abuse at him.’
‘Capitaine Salagnon has genuine talent. I don’t know much about these things. He drew a portrait of me one night when we were standing guard in a different time, a different place, and this portrait tha
t he tossed off in a few seconds, tore out of his notebook and handed to me is the only picture of me that is true. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. He probably doesn’t know himself. If I tease him about his genteel hobbies, it’s only to get back at him for the abuse I got when I was carrying him, which was pretty vile. His talent as a painter was an oddity back in the places, in the times we served together, where nobody much had anything to do with the arts. It was like having blond, flowing locks when everyone around you has a military buzz cut. It’s not his fault, and it says nothing about his strength of character.’
Salagnon sat, sipping from his glass, saying nothing. His face was once again that bony mask that could inspire fear, which divulged no more than might a crumpled piece of paper: the lack of signs, the same blank whiteness. But though it was scarcely visible unless you knew what to look for, I could just make out the flicker of a smile playing on thin lips, like the shadow of a cloud gliding over the earth without disturbing a thing; I watched as it passed over his skin like a shadow, this indulgent smile of a man content to listen. I could see it, I knew his every gesture. I had pored over every drawing he was prepared to show me until my vision blurred. I knew his every gesture, because ink-wash painting, more even than the ink itself, is composed of inner impulses expressed as gestures. And I could see them in his face.
‘We all had the greatest respect for Salagnon over there.’
Mariani’s kid squirmed in his seat, toying with the bottle. The older men turned towards him as one, the same smile playing on their weathered lips. They gave him the same tender look they might a puppy stirring in its sleep, its dreams of hunting revealed by faint shudders and slight twitches of its paws.
‘That’s right, my lad! Over there!’ Mariani said, slapping the boy’s thigh. ‘Over there is something you never had to go through. Nor did you,’ he said, nodding at me.
‘So much the better,’ said Salagnon, ‘because men died over there, died in the most idiotic or the most appalling way. And even those who came home did not come back in one piece. Over there we lost limbs, we lost chunks of flesh, we lost whole sections of our minds. So much the better for your physical integrity.
‘But it’s a pity in a way, because you’ve had no forge in which to form your character. You’re unmarked as the day you were delivered into this world, the original wrapping paper is still intact. Packaging protects, but a life lived wrapped up is no life at all.’
The boy squirmed, looked sullen, but his manner was still respectful. When the two old men paused, grinned broadly at each other and winked, he finally managed to get a word in edgeways.
‘Life on the streets is just as brutal as your colonies.’ He leaned back against the cushions to make himself seem bigger. ‘The wrapping paper is ripped off pretty quickly, let me tell you. You learn stuff there they don’t teach you in school.’
This was directed at me, but I had no desire to get involved in this sort of conversation.
‘You’re not wrong,’ said Mariani, amused to see the pup bare his fangs. ‘The streets are getting to be like over there. The forge is getting closer, lad, soon everyone will be able to prove their worth at home. Then we’ll know the strong from the weak, and those who act tough but crumple as soon as someone throws a punch. Just like over there.’
The boy sat fuming, his fists clenched. The gentle mockery of the two old men had him spluttering with rage. They were trying to exclude him, but who could he take out his fury on? On these men who represented everything to him? On me, who represented nothing, except perhaps a class enemy? On himself, given that, having never been tested, he didn’t yet know what he was made of?
‘We’re ready,’ he grunted.
‘I hope you’re not shocked by me saying such things,’ Mariani said to me with a hint of malice. ‘But life in the outer zones is changing in very different ways from anything you have experienced. And that’s where we are, in the outer zone. The law is different here, life is different. But the people in the cities are changing too; these days even the city centres are stalked by armed gangs; infiltrated, day and night. You can’t tell that they’re armed, but they are, every last one of them. If they were frisked, if the laws of our gutless Republic authorized stop and search, we’d find every one of them has a flick knife, a Stanley knife, some even carry guns. When the police set us loose, when they turn tail and leave the zones to go to hell, just like we did over there, you’ll be all alone, alone and surrounded, just like the people we went to defend over there. We have been colonized, lad.’
Comfortably slouched against the cushions, his son nodded, not daring to say anything, since he was suppressing a burp, but emphasizing each key idea with a large swig of beer.
‘We’re colonized. We need to use that word. We have to have the courage to use that word, because it fits. No one dares to use it, but it accurately describes our situation: we are in a colonial situation and we are the colonized people. We have retreated so much it was bound to happen. You remember, Salagnon, when we were running through the jungle with the Viets up our arse? We had to abandon our position or we would have died there, so we abandoned it. Back then, an orderly retreat with few casualties seemed like a victory; you could get a medal for it. But let’s call a spade a spade: we ran away. We ran away with the Viets hot on our tail and we’re still running. We’re almost at the core now, at the core of ourselves, and we’re still retreating. City centres have become the blockhouses of our fortified camp. But when I stroll around a city centre, when I walk around the heart of who we are, clapping my hands over my eyes like everyone else so as not to have to see, when I walk around the city, I hear. I hear because my ears are still open, because I don’t have hands enough to block out everything. Do I hear French? The French I should hear as I wander through the heart of who we are? No, I hear something else. I hear the sound of “over there” arrogantly blaring out. I hear the French that is who I am, but it is mangled, degraded, barely intelligible. This is why we need to use the right words, because we judge by ear. And when you listen, it’s obvious that we are already somewhere that is not home. Just listen. France is retreating, it is falling apart; our ears tell us as much, only our ears, because we choose to close our eyes.
‘But I’ll leave it there. Time is ticking away and your bourgeois friends will be here soon. I don’t want any trouble and I don’t want to cause you any. We’ll leave you to your knitting.’
He got to his feet with a little effort and smoothed his jacket. Behind the green glass of his lenses his eyes looked tired. His kid jumped up and stood next to him, waiting respectfully.
‘Do you remember everything, Salagnon?’
‘You know I do. When I finally die, they’ll bury me with my memories. Every one present and correct.’
‘We need you. When you eventually decide to give up your ladylike hobbies and do something worthy of you, come and join us. We need strong men who remember everything to train our young people. So that nothing is forgotten.’
Salagnon assented with a flicker of his eyelids, a gentle, vague gesture. He shook the man’s hand. He was showing that he would always be there; to what end, he did not indicate. The boy touched his hand, scarcely looking at him.
When they had left I could breathe more easily. I leaned back in the plush armchair and finished my beer; I let my eyes wander over this furniture that was soulless and deliberately ugly. The velvet cushions were rough, the armchairs offered no comfort; that was not their purpose.
‘The paranoid and his puppy,’ I said, spitting the words.
‘Don’t say that.’
‘One rants, the other barks. And the little one is just begging to go walkies. Friends of yours, are they?’
‘Just Marini.’
‘Strange friend who can come out with shit like that.’
‘Mariani is a strange friend. He’s the only one of my friends who isn’t dead. The others died off, one by one, but not him. I owe it to them to be loyal to him. When he comes roun
d I feed him, I give him something to drink, something to eat to shut him up. I prefer him to be eating rather than eructating. Luckily, we have only one orifice for both functions. But since you were here, he went off on one. He’s a sensitive soul, Mariani. He immediately detected your roots.’
‘My roots?’
‘Educated middle classes, consciously blind to differences.’
‘I don’t understand this whole thing about differences.’
‘That’s what I say. But with you here, he laid it on thick. Mostly he’s an intelligent guy, quite capable of being profound.’
‘That’s not the impression he gives.’
‘I know, it’s sad. He only ever killed people who fired at him first. But he surrounded himself with dogs that waded through blood and could see in his eye when he wanted someone’s throat ripped out. He’s not quite right in the head, Mariani. Out in Asia he had a breakdown, ripped his insides out, something inside him snapped. If he’d stayed here, he would have been a lovely man. But he went over there, and over there he couldn’t stand the way the races were separated. He was shipped out, raring to fight, but something broke, and for him it had the same effect as taking amphetamines. He never came down, it left a rip in his soul, a tear that has been widening ever since, these days he can see only through that hole, through the rip of the difference between the races. What we went through over there could have cut the sails of the strongest man.’
‘But not you?’
‘I had my drawing. It allowed me to re-sew the tears caused by events. At least that’s what I think now. There was always a part of me that wasn’t quite there; a part that was wilfully absent, I owe my life to that. Mariani didn’t come back in one piece. I owe a loyalty to those who didn’t come home, because I was with them.’