by Alexis Jenni
‘Here, listen to this…
There, for two nights, two days, we lay by, no let-up, eating our hearts out, bent with pain and bone-tired.
‘Homer describes us much more accurately than the newsreels. When I watch them, those pompous little newsreels in the cinema, they make me laugh: they show nothing; what this ancient Greek poet is describing is much closer to the Indochine I’ve spent months travelling the length and breadth of. I just got two of the cantos mixed up. You see, I don’t know the book yet. When I can recite it by heart, like a Greek, with no mistakes, I will be done. I’ll take no further responsibility.’
With the book closed on his lap, his hand on the cover, his eyes closed, he recited the two cantos in a half-whisper. He smiled happily. ‘Odysseus is fleeing, pursued by hoards of men who want him dead. His companions are all slaughtered, but he is left alive. And when he goes home, he sets his house in order; he kills the men who plundered his storehouses; he slaughters all those who collaborated. By the time he is finished, it is dark, hardly anyone remains, only corpses. A great peace finally descends. It is over. Life can recommence; twenty years to come back to life. Victorien, do you think it will take us twenty years to extricate ourselves from this war?’ ‘It seems like a long time to me.’ ‘Yes, it is long, too long…’ Then he lay back again, placed the book on his chest and fell silent.
November is not auspicious for anything. The sky looms closer, the weather closes up, the leaves on the trees shrivel like the hands of a dying man; then fall. In Lyon a mist hangs over the rivers like the heavy smoke that rises from the piles of smouldering leaves, but in reverse. In reverse, because it is not smoke but vapour, not flame but liquid, not heat but cold, everything is the other way round. It does not rise, it creeps, it spreads. In November nothing remains of the joy of being free.
Salagnon was cold; his greatcoat did little to protect him; cold draughts pervaded his room under the eaves; the damp walls forced him outside, where he wandered aimlessly, hands in his pockets, coat buttoned tight, collar up, between floes of fog that seeped from the façades of buildings and listlessly broke away like scraps of wet paper.
Drawing was becoming difficult. He needed to stop, to wait for the forms that would appear on the paper to come to him; it requires a receptive quivering of skin that cannot be left bare in the cold and damp. Quivers and shivers merge, diverge and shrivel as one walks, aimlessly, simply to drive off restlessness.
Near Gerland he stopped, transfixed, at the foot of a dead Christ. He had walked the length of the huge slaughterhouse that killed in slow motion, past the open-air Gerland Stadium, where grass grew in unkempt tufts. He had spent the whole day walking along this avenue that leads nowhere and he stopped in front of a concrete church whose façade was dominated by a huge bas-relief of the crucified Christ. He had to look up in order to take it in: the feet touched the ground, the ankles were at head-height and the head dissolved into the greenish mist that becomes impenetrable as it unfurls. Standing so close and being forced to look up warped the perspective of the body like a spasm, the statue threatened to rip out the nails holding the wrists, to collapse and crush Salagnon.
He stepped inside the church, where the equable temperature felt comforting. The feeble November light failed to pierce the thick stained glass, getting lost inside the glass blocks, which glowed like red, blue, black embers about to snuff out. Old women moved slowly, silently, busying themselves with particular tasks they knew by rote, never looking up, as diligent as mice.
November is good for nothing, he thought, pulling tightly on the thin coat that failed to provide him with warmth. But it’s just a bad patch you’ve got to get through. It dismayed him to think that to be young, strong and free was a bad patch to be got through. He had clearly started his life a little hastily and now felt suddenly tired. Runners who want to run long distances are advised not to start too strongly, to set off slowly, to keep a reserve of energy, to avoid running out of steam or getting a stitch that would jeopardize their finish. He did not know what to do. November, which is not auspicious for anything, which seemed to drag on indefinitely, seemed to him to be his own finish line.
The priest stepped out of the shadows and crossed the nave. His footsteps echoed so loudly beneath the vaulted ceiling that, without intending to, Salagnon watched him as he walked.
‘Brioude!’
The name boomed through the church, making the old ladies start. The priest turned suddenly and squinted, peering into the darkness, then his face brightened. He came towards Salagnon with his hand outstretched, his long, hurried strides hindered by his soutane.
‘Your timing is perfect,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘I’m seeing Montbellet tonight. He’s in Lyon for forty-eight hours; after that he leaves for I don’t know where. Come by at eight o’clock. Call for me at the presbytery.’
Then, just as brusquely, he turned and left Salagnon standing there, still holding out his hand.
‘Brioude?’
‘Yes?’
‘After all this time… are you well?’
‘Of course. We’ll talk tonight.’
‘You’re not surprised by the coincidence: me here, you there?’
‘I’m not surprised by life any more, Salagnon. I accept it. I let it happen and then I change it. See you tonight.’
He vanished into the shadows, and there came the resounding clicking of his shoes on the flagstones, then the clicking of a door closing, then nothing. An old lady pushed past Salagnon while clicking her tongue irritably; she tottered as far as the wrought-iron stand in front of the statue of a saint. She planted a tiny candle on one of the iron spikes, lit it and made a cursory sign of the Cross. Then she stared up at the saint with that look of exasperation one reserves for those of whom we expect great things, but who fail to do anything, or do it badly, or not as they should.
She turned and shot Salagnon the same look as he was leaving. Outside, he tried to turn up the collar of his coat, but it was too small; he hunched his shoulders, drew in his head and walked off, without looking up to see the horribly misshapen Christ. He did not know where to go between now and this evening, but the sky seemed less sickly, it no longer looked like a grimy sheet of rubber about to collapse. Soon it would be dark.
* * *
The presbytery where Brioude lived looked like a pied-à-terre, an abandoned hunting lodge, a shack where people take shelter but are ever ready to leave. Paint flaked from the walls to reveal older layers beneath; the large, chilly rooms were stacked like a lumber room with old furniture, piles of timber planks, warped doors leaning against the walls. They ate in a dimly lit room where the wallpaper was peeling and the dusty floorboards badly needed a coat of polish.
They ate indiscriminately, lukewarm, overcooked noodles and left-over meat in sauce that Brioude served up in a battered pot. He doled out the food perfunctorily, letting the ladle clang against the plates, and poured them glasses of thick Côtes du Rhône from a small cask in a dark corner of the room.
‘Church food isn’t up to much,’ said Montbellet, ‘but it’s always had good wine.’
‘That’s why we forgive this venerable institution. It has grievously sinned, it has often failed, but it provides intoxication.’
‘So you’re a priest. I never knew you had a vocation.’
‘I didn’t know either. Blood showed me the way.’
‘Blood?’
‘The blood we were soaked in. I saw so much blood. I saw men whose boots were soaked in the blood of those they had just killed. I saw so much blood it was a baptism. I was bathed in blood, and then transformed. When the blood stopped flowing, we needed to restore those things we had broken, and everyone joined in. But we also needed to restore our souls. Have you seen the state of our souls?’
‘What about our bodies? Have you seen the state of our bodies?’
They laughed at how scrawny they were. None of them weighed much. Brioude’s skin was translucent, taut, Montbellet was desiccated by
the sun and Salagnon was haggard, his face sallow with exhaustion.
‘It has to be said, that given the way you eat…’
‘…you’ve forgotten the meaning of good food.’
‘Precisely, gentlemen. The food is bad, so I don’t eat much, just enough to maintain a minimal presence in this world. Our thinness is a virtue. All around us people gorge themselves on food, trying to gain back the weight they lost during the war. For us, staying thin is a sign; we’re not behaving as though nothing had happened. We came through the worst, so we are striving for a better world. We are not trying to go back.’
‘Except my thinness isn’t deliberate,’ said Salagnon. ‘For you, it’s self-denial and you have the face of a saint; with Montbellet, it’s a life of adventure; but for me it’s poverty, so I just look like a sad case.’
‘Salagnon! “There are no riches other than men.” Are you familiar with that phrase? It’s old, four centuries old, but it’s an unchanging truth, summed up in few words. “There are no riches other than men.” Think about what that phrase means in 1946. At the point when we were using the most powerful means to destroy mankind, physically and mentally, at the very moment when we realized that there are no resources, no riches, no power other than man himself. The sailors trapped aboard metal tubs that were scuttled, the soldiers buried alive by bombs, the prisoners starved to death, the men forced to conform to death-dealing systems, these men survived. In desperate situations they survived with nothing other than their courage. We made no attempt to understand their miraculous survival, we were too afraid. To come so close to annihilation is terrifying, and all the more terrifying because of this indomitable life force that comes from us at the last moment. Machines were crushing us and, in extremis, life saved us. In material terms, life is nothing; and yet it saved us from the infinite matter intent on crushing us. How can that not be seen as a miracle? Or as the sudden advent of a profound universal law? For this life to emerge, it is necessary to stare the terrifying prospect of annihilation in the face; such a prospect is unendurable. Suffering brought forth life; the greater the suffering, the greater the life. But that is too hard. We prefer to grow richer, to ally ourselves to that which would annihilate us. Life does not spring from matter or from machines or from wealth. It springs from the absence of matter, from the sheer nothingness to which we must submit. As living beings, we are an affront to overcrowded space. Abundance and excess oppose our plenitude. There must be nothingness for man to emerge again; accepting the void that, in extremis, saves us from the threat of extermination is the greatest fear imaginable; yet we must overcome it. The urgency of war gave us the courage; peace has made it more difficult.’
‘Don’t communists say the same thing, that there is only man?’
‘They are talking about Man in general. Of Man manufactured by a factory. They no longer even talk about the people, they say “the masses”. I think of each man as the sole source of life. Each man deserves to be saved, spared; no man is interchangeable, for life can burst forth in him at any moment, especially in the moment when he would be crushed, and the life that bursts forth in a single man is life itself. One might call that life… God.’
Montbellet smiled, threw his hands wide in a gesture of welcome and said: ‘Why not?’
‘You believe in God, Montbellet?’
‘I have no need. The world is enough in itself. Beauty helps me to live.’
‘Beauty, too, might be called God.’
He made the same gesture, parting his hands, and said again: ‘Why not?’
The ring he wore on the ring finger of his left hand underscored his gestures. Highly ornate, in tarnished silver, there was nothing feminine about it. Salagnon had no idea such rings existed. The designs chased into the silver framed a large, deep-blue stone shot through with shafts of gold that seemed to move.
‘This stone,’ said Brioude, nodding towards it, ‘looks like the sky in an illuminated manuscript; all this in such a tiny space; a Romanesque church hewn into rock, where the sky is represented by stone.’
‘That’s a bit much, it’s just a stone. Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The idea of a chapel wouldn’t have occurred to me, but you’re not wrong. I often look at it and stare at it; it gives me the pleasure of meditation. My soul nestles there and contemplates the blue, which seems to me as wide as the sky.’
‘The sky is so immense that it is embedded in all small things.’
‘You priests are amazing. You speak so well that everyone hears you. Your words are so fluid they infiltrate everything. And with those beautiful words you tint everything in your colours, a mixture of sky blue and byzantine gold, tempered somewhat with sacristy yellow. You call life God, and beauty too; my ring, a chapel; and poverty, existence. And when you say it, I believe you. And that belief lasts for as long as you speak.
‘But it’s just a ring, Brioude. I travel the length and breadth of Asia for the Museum of Mankind. I send them objects, explain their uses, and they show them to a public who have never set foot outside France. I travel, I learn languages, I make strange friends, and I feel as though I am exploring the world of AD 1000. I am within a hair’s breadth of eternity. But I understand what you mean: man is not the measure of things, he is simply not to scale. Man is too small on mountains that are vast, naked. How do such men manage? Their houses are built of stones found lying around, you can scarcely see them. They wear clothes the colour of dust and when they lie on the ground, rolled up in the blanket that serves as a coat, they disappear. How do they manage to exist in a world that is not intentionally hostile, but simply repudiates you?
‘They walk, they trek the mountain, they possess small objects in which all human beauty converges, and when they speak, their few scant words break your heart. Rings like these are worn by men who combine the greatest refinement with the greatest savagery. They are careful to circle their eyes with kohl, to dye their beards, to always carry a weapon with them. They wear a flower behind their ears, walk hand in hand with their friends, and treat their wives more contemptuously than their mules. They savagely massacre intruders, and they bend over backwards to welcome you as though you were a distant cousin, much beloved, finally returning home. I don’t understand these people, they don’t understand me, but now I spend my life with them.
‘The first day I put on this ring, I met a man. I met him at a mountain pass, a col in the foothills where a lone tree grew. In front of the tree, next to the road, stood a house. And when I say “road” you have to imagine a dirt track; and when I say “house” you have to imagine a flat-roofed, stone shack with a narrow door and a single window opening into a dark, smoky room. Here, at the pass, where the path wavers before plunging down the other side, there was a teahouse where travellers could rest. The job of the man I’m talking about, the man I met that day, was to greet those who climbed the mountain and serve them tea. Under the tree, he had set up a “conversation bed”, I don’t know if such a word exists in French. It is a raised wooden frame strung with rope. It is possible to sleep on it, but it is more common to sit cross-legged on it, alone or with other people, and to watch the world unfold beyond the bed. You float, like a boat on the ocean. You look out, as from a balcony over the roofs. Sitting on that bed, you feel a wonderful tranquillity. The man who worked at the house at the pass invited us to sit down, my guide and me. On a fire made of twigs he boiled water in an iron kettle. The tree provided shade and it also provided the kindling. He served us mountain tea, which is a thick beverage full of spices and dried fruits. We made the most of the shade of the lone tree that grew at that altitude, watched over by a lone man living in a stone shack. We surveyed the valleys between the mountains, which in that country are canyons. He asked me to describe where I was from. Not to name the place, but to describe it. I drank several cups of tea and I told him about Europe, the cities, the smallness of the landscapes, the damp and the war we had just ended. In exchange, he recited poems by Al-Ghazali. He intoned them magnificently, and
the breeze that blew through the pass whipped each word into the air like a kite; he would hold them with the thread that was his voice and then let go. My guide helped me to translate the words I did not quite understand. But the simple rhythm of the verses and what little I could understand made my bones tremble; I was a lute of bone strung with marrow. This old man sitting on a rope bed plucked me; he made me sound out my own music, a music I had never heard.
‘Leaving him to continue on my journey, I was overcome with gratitude. He gave me a little wave and poured himself more tea. I felt as though I was floating in the mountain air when we finally arrived at the garden deep in the valley; when I smelled the scent of the grasses, the humidity of the trees, I felt as though I was stepping into a perfect world, an Eden I wished I could commemorate in poetry; but I’m incapable. And so I have to go back there. This is the world this ring opened up to me; one I cannot be parted from.’
‘I envy you,’ said Salagnon. ‘I’m just poor. I have no heroism, no desire. My thinness is the result of cold, of boredom, of insufficient food. My thinness is a flaw I would gladly do without; I wish I could be free of it.’
‘Your thinness is a good sign, Victorien.’
‘Ecclesiastical painter!’ roared Montbellet. ‘He shows up with a pot of blue and a brush to dip in gold! He’ll repaint you, Victorien, he’ll repaint you.’
‘Signs are persistent, you heathens! They are even immune to irony!’
‘You’re going to tell him his haggard appearance is a blessing. That’s the real miracle of your religion: it’s just a coat of paint. The Church spends its time refurbishing life with blue paint.’
‘Signs are reversible,’ said Montbellet.
‘That is something religion is good at.’
‘That is why religion is great: it puts signs in the correct order, so that when they stumble, people can begin again. And common sense is what allows them to grow.’