by Alexis Jenni
‘I don’t understand.’
He stopped talking; he got to his feet and started to pace up and down his ridiculous living room. He kept his hands behind his back and his jaws moved as though he were muttering, causing his jowls and his wrinkled neck to quiver. He suddenly stopped in front of me and stared into my eyes with eyes so pale their only colour was translucence.
‘It takes only a single act, you know. A precise moment, one that will never come again and can be the basis for an undying friendship. Mariani carried me through the jungle. I was wounded, I couldn’t walk, so he carried me through the Tonkin forest. The jungles around there are hellishly steep, and he marched through them with me on his back and the Viets on his tail. He carried me as far as the river and the two of us managed to get to safety. You can’t know what that means. Get up.’
I stood up. He stepped towards me.
‘Carry me.’
I must have looked stupid. Though tall, he was so scrawny that he could not weigh much, but I had never carried an adult, never carried a man, never carried someone I didn’t know well… But I’m getting muddled: the simple fact is I had never done what he was asking of me.
‘Carry me.’
So I picked him up and carried him. I held him across my chest; he slung one arm around my shoulder, his legs dangled. His head lolled against my chest. He was not very heavy, but I felt completely overcome.
‘Take me out to the garden.’
I did as he dictated. His feet hung loose. I crossed the living room, walked down the hallway, using my elbow to open the doors; he did not help. He was heavy. He was a burden.
‘Over there, we carried our dead,’ he said, his mouth close to my ear. ‘The dead are heavy, useless, but we tried to bring them back. And we never left a wounded man. Nor did they.’
The front door was not easy to open. I almost tripped on the steps. I could feel the bones poking through his skin, against my arm, against my chest. I could feel his papery old skin against my fingers, smell his exhausted old man’s smell. His head weighed nothing.
‘To carry, to be carried, is not easy,’ he said, his voice close.
On the path through his garden I looked foolish, cradling him in my arms, his head against my chest. Finally, he was beginning to feel heavy.
‘Imagine you had to take me back to your place, on foot; imagine it going on for hours, in a jungle with no trails or paths. And if you should fail, the guys following you will kill you; and they will kill me, too.’
The gate creaked and Eurydice stepped into the garden. The gates squeak, because it’s rare for anyone to take the trouble to oil them. She was carrying a shopping basket with a baguette sticking out; she walked in long strides, her head held high, and stopped in front of us.
‘What the hell are you two doing?’
‘I’m explaining Mariani.’
‘That arsehole? Has he been round again?’
‘He was careful to leave before you got back.’
‘Just as well. It was because of men like him that I lost everything. I lost my childhood, my father, my street, my history, all in the name of their obsession with race. So when I see them re-emerging here in France, I’m fucking incensed.’
‘She’s a Kaloyannis from Bab El Oued,’ said Salagnon. ‘She grew up listening to torrents of abuse being shrieked from one window to the next. She knows insults you could not imagine. And when she’s angry, she makes up new ones.’
‘Mariani is very wise not to cross me. Let him go finish his wars somewhere else.’
Taking her basket of vegetables and holding her head high, she strode into the house and shut the door with enough force that it did not quite slam, but almost. Salagnon tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Relax. It’s fine. You managed to carry me into the garden without dropping me and you escaped the tigress of Bab El Oued. A very rewarding day and you came through it alive.’
‘Mariani I can understand at a push, but what is he doing hanging around with guys like that?’
‘The kid who was belching? He’s a member of GAFFES – the Guild of Autonomous Freeborn French Elders. Mariani heads up the local branch. And just like he did over there, he keeps his dogs around him.’
‘Freeborn Frenchman? Mariani, with an “i”?’ I said with the withering sarcasm one uses in such circumstances.
‘The physiology of what constitutes pure stock is complicated.’
‘We’re not trees.’
‘Maybe, but “pure stock” is a broad concept. It’s instinctive, felt. Deciding what is pure is a matter of delicate judgement that can’t be explained to someone who doesn’t feel it.’
‘If it can’t be explained, it’s bullshit.’
‘What is truly important does not need to be explained. You simply feel it. You surround yourself with those who feel as you do. Pure stock is something you can hear.’
‘So I’ve got a tin ear?’
‘No. It’s your way of life. You’re so completely surrounded by people like you that you’re blind to differences. Like Mariani was before he went away. But what would you do if you lived here? Or if you’d been shipped over there? Do you really know for certain? It’s impossible to know what we will become when we are truly uprooted.’
‘Roots, stock, it’s all lunacy. Family trees are nothing more than a metaphor.’
‘Probably. But that’s how Mariani is. There is a touch of madness in him, and there is something in him that carried me through the jungle. Defining people by a single trait is something I can do only with a brush. But it’s something I found easy in wartime; it was simple, straightforward: them and us. And if there was any doubt, you made the call. Now that we’re in peacetime, things can’t be so simple without being unfair, without risking destroying that peace. That’s why some people would rather go back to war. Why don’t we go and do some painting?’
He took me by the arm and we went indoors.
That day he taught me how to choose the thickness of my brush. He taught me to choose the weight of the line I would lay down on the paper. It is instinctive, an action easily confused with that of reaching for a brush, but the brush you choose defines the rhythm of your work. He taught me to choose the heft of my strokes; taught me to decide on the scale of my gestures on the paper.
He explained it in simple terms. He had me practise and I realized that painting with ink is a musical act, a dance performed not just by the hand, but the whole body, the expression of a rhythm that is deeper than myself.
To paint with ink, you use ink, and ink is simply darkness, a brutal obliteration of light that follows the line of the brush. The brush traces the blackness and in doing so the white appears. White and black appear at one and the same time. The brush, loaded with ink, trails a dark mass in its wake, and in doing so it traces the white, allowing it to appear. The rhythm that binds the two depends on the thickness of the brush. The density of the bristles and the amount of ink define the thickness of the stroke. This weighs down the paper in a sense, and it is the thickness of the brush that determines the balance between the conscious black and the untouched white, between the mark that I make and the echo that, although I do not make it, exists nonetheless.
He taught me that virgin, as yet untouched, is not white: it is as black as it is white; it is nothing, it is everything, it is the world as yet untouched by the self. Choosing the size of the brush means choosing the rhythm one will follow, the force one plans to adopt, the breath of the trail that will follow our breath. We can leave behind the impersonal now, move from ‘one’ to ‘we’, and very soon I will say ‘I’.
He taught me that the Chinese use a single, tapering brush, deciding at every moment how much pressure to exert on it. The logic is the same, since pressure is the same as force. Through the tension of their wrist they regulate, moment by moment, the forcefulness of their presence, the scale of their action.
‘I met one of those demiurgical painters in Hanoi during the war,’ he told me. ‘He used a si
ngle brush and a single drop of ink in a soap-stone dish. From these simple tools he could draw the power and range of a symphony orchestra. He claimed to worship his brush, which is cleansed in pure water after use, before laying it in a silk-lined box. He talked to the brush; he claimed he had no dearer friend. For a while I believed him, but he was making fun of me. In time I came to understand that his only tool was himself, and more especially the presence he allowed himself in each moment. He had a precise sense of his presence, and the self-assured variations created the drawing.’
We would paint until we could not carry on. We painted as one; he teaching me what to do, by which I mean that I painted with brush and ink and he by eye, by voice. He would appraise my strokes and I would start over; there was no reason for it to end. By the time I realized how utterly exhausted I was, it was already the middle of the night. My brush as I applied the ink now blotted the paper; I could no longer give it form. By then, he was saying only ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and by the end simply ‘no’. I decided to go home; my body no longer responded to my wishes; it longed to lie down, to sleep, despite the thirst for ink that would have had me carry on and on and on.
When I left he gave me a smile and those smiles were enough to last me a lifetime. As I left he gave me a smile, as he had when I arrived, and it was enough for me. He opened those eyes so pale that their only colour was translucence; he let me come to him; he let me see inside him; and I went, without wondering where it might lead; I came back empty-handed, having seen nothing, but fulfilled simply by the access he granted me. The smiles he gave me when I arrived and when I left threw open the door to an empty room. Light streamed into the room, unhindered. I had a place there, and that made my world larger. I needed only to see this yawning door before me; that was enough.
I stepped out into the streets of Voracieux-les-Bredins. My mind teemed with inchoate thoughts I could not quite grasp; I let them slip away. As I walked, I thought about Percival, the foolish knight, who did whatever he was bid, since he blindly believed everything he was told.
Why did I think of him? Because of that vacant room filled with light to which Victorien Salagnon’s smile held the key. I stood on the threshold and, though I understood nothing, I was happy. ‘The Story of the Grail’ focuses entirely on this moment: Percival prepares for it, he anticipates it, but when the moment comes it eludes him; he regrets it and seeks it out again. What has happened? Quite by chance, Percival encounters the crippled Fisher King. The king fishes in a river that cannot be crossed, using a line baited with a glittering fish no larger than a minnow – it is his one remaining pleasure in life. He fishes from a small boat moored by the bank of the river that cannot be crossed; he can no longer step outside. To return home, four sturdy servants must take the corners of the blanket on which he sits and carry him. He cannot walk, having been crippled by a javelin that speared him through both thighs. The king could do nothing now but fish, and he invited Percival to the castle that cannot be seen from afar.
Percival the Fool became a knight, although he knew nothing of the world. His mother taught him nothing for fear that he would leave her. His father and his brothers had been wounded and killed. He became a knight, although he knew nothing. He reached the castle that cannot be seen and there saw the Grail, although he did not know it. While he talked to the Fisher King, while they ate together, squires and maidens passed through the room in silence, carrying objects of great beauty. One of these was the bleeding lance on which pearled a drop of blood that never dried; another was a silver carving platter fit for all who might use it, being so wide and deep, and piled with choice meats in their juices. The maidens moved slowly, soundlessly, through the room and Percival watched, but did not understand, he did not ask whom they served, whom it was he could not see. He had been warned against talking too much. It was a decisive moment. Percival would never see the Holy Grail close up, although he did not know this, since he did not ask.
Wandering the streets of Voracieux-les-Bredins, I thought about Percival the Fool, the gormless knight who is never at home anywhere, since he understands nothing. To anyone else the world is cluttered with objects, but to him it is meaningless, because he does not understand these objects. All he knows of the world is what he has been told by his mother, and she has told him nothing for fear of losing him. He is simply filled with joy. Nothing troubles him, nothing encumbers him, nothing hinders his progress. I thought of him, because Victorien Salagnon had opened himself to me, I had seen without seeing, it had filled me with joy and asked nothing of me in return. Perhaps that was enough, I thought, as I walked along.
I headed for the bus shelter on the avenue, to wait for the first bus of the morning, which would arrive soon. I sat on the plastic bench, leaned back against the glass wall of the shelter. I dozed in the chill air of the slowly fading night.
I longed to wield a huge brush over a tiny sheet of paper. A brush with a handle fashioned from a tree trunk, with bristles made of tightly packed hanks of horsehair. It would be taller than me and, loaded with a whole bucket of ink, would be too heavy for me to lift. I would need ropes and pulleys bolted to the ceiling to move it. Wielding this huge brush, with a single stroke I could completely cover the little sheet of paper, and it would scarcely be possible to make out a trace of motion within the blackness. What is happening in the painting would be this scarcely perceptible motion. Power would pervade everything.
I reopened my eyes suddenly, feeling as though I was falling. In front of me an armoured convoy passed by in silence. As I got to my feet I could have reached out and stroked their metal flanks, the fat, bulletproof tyres as tall as me.
They towered over me, these armoured vehicles. They passed with no other sound than the crunch of gravel and the muffled purr of powerful engines running in slow motion. They moved in strict formation down the broad avenue in Voracieux-les-Bredins, one of those too-wide streets they have there, empty at this hour. The steel-blue trucks, their windscreens protected by wire mesh, were followed by police vans, each towing a cart that probably contained the heavy equipment necessary for enforcing law and order. As it came to a block of flats, the column divided; some of the trucks stopped, while the others rolled on. A number of vehicles parked next to the bus shelter, where I was waiting for the night to melt away. Militarized police jumped down; they were equipped with helmets, conspicuous weapons and riot shields. Their silhouettes, distorted by shin guards and shoulder pads, made them seem like warriors in the metallic, early morning half-light. On his shoulder one officer was carrying a fat, black cylinder fitted with handles used for breaking down doors. They waited outside a block of flats. A number of cars arrived and hastily parked, disgorging men in civilian clothes with cameras and camcorders. They went and stood next to the policemen. Camera flashes ripped through the orange glow of the streetlights. A light flickered on over one of the television cameras, only to be extinguished after a curt order. They waited.
By the time the first bus finally arrived to pick me up it was already crammed with ordinary people, half-asleep, on their way to work. I found a seat and dozed, my face pressed against the window; twenty minutes later the bus dropped me off in front of the metro station. I headed home.
I found out the rest in the newspapers. At a precisely appointed hour, a large contingent of police had carried out a dawn raid on a problem neighbourhood. Individuals known to the police, mostly young men living with their parents, had been dragged from their beds. Riot squads had stormed through family living rooms and burst into their bedrooms, smashing down doors. No one had a chance to flee. The operation was swiftly brought to a successful conclusion in spite of minor domestic scuffles, heartfelt insults, a few slaps to calm things down, some broken crockery and girlish, high-pitched screams, mostly from mothers and grandmothers, though a number of young women joined the chorus. Volleys of abuse were hurled in stairwells and from windows. The handcuffed suspects were whisked away, some voluntarily, others forcibly. Stones began to rain down from
nowhere. In a clatter of rigid polycarbonate, the officers raised their riot shields as one. The projectiles bounced off. Crowds gathered at a distance, dressed in pyjamas or in underwear. Tear-gas canisters were fired into apartments, which had to be evacuated. The officers involved retreated in good order. They hauled away young men wearing babouches, slippers, trainers with the laces undone. They bundled them into police vans, pushing their heads down. A washing machine tossed from a window fell with a dull thud as the counterweight buried itself in the ground; the shriek of metal caused everyone to flinch, but no one was injured; soapy water still belched from the plastic pipe snaking along the ground. Slowly everyone backed away, the line of officers careful to stay behind their riot shields, the locals half hidden in the shadows did not dare move forwards, but lashed out at the armoured trucks as they drove past at a walking pace. The apprehended suspects were dragged before the courts. The media – who had somehow been alerted – brought back footage and gave an account of the events. The stories focused on the media presence. All editorial comment was about the presence of the media. People were shocked at the way the suspects had been publicly paraded. They were hostile or they accepted it, but about the incident itself they had nothing to say. All the suspects were released the following day; nothing had been found.
No one commented on the militarization of the public order. No one seemed to notice that convoys of armoured trucks could roll into troublesome neighbourhoods at dawn. No one seemed surprised by the use of an armoured column in France. They could have mentioned it. It could have been discussed from a moral standpoint: is it right for police to break down doors and burst into apartments to arrest a bunch of little brats? Is it fair to brutalize everybody, to arrest many, only to release everyone, since it could not be proved they had done anything much wrong? I say ‘right’ and ‘fair’, because the discussion needs to be had at the most fundamental level.