by Alexis Jenni
I did not know what to say. The lift stopped with a little spasm and the door opened. We stepped out into the hallway where a gang of youths were hanging around.
He walked through the group without breaking his stride, not slowing, not speeding up, not bowing his head or straightening up. He walked through the crowded hallway as through an empty room, stepping over the legs of a lad sitting across the doorway with a polite apology so perfectly judged that the boy automatically apologized and pulled up his knees.
They didn’t care about their deaths, he had said; I was not sure what exactly that could mean. Maybe they set something down on the ground, as he put it, and then nothing moved. The youths nodded at us and we responded, but they did not interrupt their conversation as we passed.
When we got outside, it was snowing. Hands in the pockets of our coats, we strolled through the empty streets of Voracieux; streets empty of everything, devoid of people, devoid of buildings, devoid of beauty, of life; shabby streets that are little more than the empty spaces between tower blocks; streets run down by constant use and little maintenance. The streets of Voracieux are as disorganized as a city in the East: everything is random, nothing goes with anything. Even people, in these streets, seem out of place. Even vegetation, which, as a rule, naturally finds its own balance: there were weeds where the ground should be bare, while tracks of bare earth snaked across the lawns. The snow falling that night made everything whole. It covered all things, drawing them together. A parked car became a pure mass, made of the same substance as a shrub, a low shed housing a convenience store, a bus shelter where no one waited, a kerb that ran the length of the avenue. All these things were transformed into paper-white shapes, sharp edges smoothed, textures unified, transitions obliterated; each object appeared as a simple presence, a swelling beneath the same vast blanket, they were sisters under the snow. Strangely, being hidden united them. For the first time we walked through a harmonized Voracieux, a silent Voracieux suffocated with white, all things afforded an equal life by the soothing snow. We walked in silence. Snowflakes, pressed against our coats, clung for an instant to the wool, then dissolved and disappeared.
‘So what do they actually want, GAFFES?’
‘Oh, they have simple wants, nothing but common sense: they want to settle things between men. As happens in small groups where there are no laws. They want the strong to be strong, the weak to be weak; they want the difference to be obvious; they want the obvious to be the guiding principle of government. They don’t want to argue, because it’s impossible to debate the obvious. For them, the use of force is the only worthwhile action, the only truth, because it requires no words.’
He said no more, this seemed sufficient. We wandered through Voracieux, calmed by the snow that covers all things. In the silence the 10,000 people were no more than wrinkles in a single white shape. Objects did not exist, they were merely the illusion of white, while we, in our dark coats, the only movement, were ink brushes traversing the empty space, leaving behind two streaks of dirty snow.
By the time we came to his garden the snow had begun to peter out. Snowflakes descended, less heavy now, fluttering rather than falling, and, without our noticing, the last flakes were absorbed into the purplish air. It was over.
He opened the squeaking gate and he looked ahead at the expanse of white that hugged the bushes, the flowerbeds, the patch of lawn and a few things it was impossible to identify. ‘You see, just when you come to my garden gate, the snow stops and in that moment the mantle is perfect; it will never be more perfect. Do you want to stay out here with me for a bit?’
We stood in silence, looking at nothing in particular, the garden of a suburban house in Lyon covered with a thin layer of snow. The glowing street lamps glinted purple. ‘I wish it would last, but it never does. You see this perfection? It’s already passing. As soon as the snow stops falling, it subsides, it melts, it disappears. The miracle of presence lasts only for the instant it appears. It’s terrible, but we must delight in the presence and expect nothing of it.’
We walked along the paths. The light dusting of snow sank beneath our feet, each footstep accompanied by a wonderful sound that combined the crunch of sand and the sigh of settling feathers in a huge eiderdown. ‘Everything is perfect and simple. Look at the roofs, how they end in a graceful curve. Look at the flowerbeds, how they melt into the pathways. Look at the washing line, how beautifully it stands out: we can see it now.’
A tall, narrow, uninterrupted band of snow had settled on the line, strung between two posts, and balanced there perfectly. It followed the sweep of the curve with a single stroke. ‘Snow unintentionally traces the sort of lines I would love to trace. It knows without knowing how to follow the line perfectly, impeccably accentuating the sweep of the curve; it describes the washing line better than it can itself. If I had wanted to arrange snow on a line, I could not have done it as beautifully. I am unable to deliberately do what the snow achieves by its indifference. Snow can draw washing lines in the air, because it doesn’t care about the line. It falls and, following the three basic laws of gravity, temperature and wind speed, and perhaps the law of humidity, it traces curves that I cannot match with all my skill as a painter. I am jealous of the snow. I would give anything to paint like that.’
The garden furniture, a circular table and two painted metal chairs were also covered by cushions so precise that it would have been difficult to cut and sew them as perfectly with a measuring tape. Beneath the snow these decrepit pieces of furniture, with spots of rust showing through the flaking paintwork, had become masterful works of harmony. ‘If I could achieve that same indifference I would truly be a great painter. I would be at peace. I would paint the things around me and I would die in peace.’
He walked over to the table covered by a flawlessly proportioned eiderdown, fashioned simply by the forces of nature. ‘Look how beautiful the world is when you let it be. And how fragile.’
He scooped up a handful of snow, compacted it and threw it at me. Instinctively, I ducked, more because of the gesture than to avoid the projectile, and when I stood up again, surprised, the second snowball hit me square in the forehead. It settled on my eyebrows and immediately began to melt. I wiped my eyes and he ran off, scooping up snow as he ran, which he scarcely took the time to shape into balls before throwing them; I gathered my own ammunition and set off after him. We ran through the garden, shouting; we laid waste the whole mantle of snow and threw it at each other, taking less and less time to tamp it, aiming less and less carefully, throwing less and less far, shivering and laughing in the cloud of powdery snow.
It ended when he caught me from behind and dropped a fistful of ice harvested from a branch down the back of my coat. I gave a high-pitched yell, choking with laughter, and sat down hard on the cold ground. He stood in front of me, struggling to catch his breath. ‘I got you, I got you… but we have to stop. I can’t keep this up. And anyway, we’ve already thrown all the snow.’
We had spoiled everything, trampled everything, a jumble of crisscrossing footprints with amorphous piles of dirty snow between.
‘Time to go inside,’ he said.
‘Shame about the snow.’
I got to my feet and tried to smooth one of the piles with my foot; it no longer looked like anything.
‘And there’s no way to put it back.’
‘You just have to wait for another snowfall. It always falls perfectly, but it’s impossible to imitate.’
‘Better not to touch it at all.’
‘You’re right, don’t move, don’t walk, just stare and be satisfied to contemplate its perfection. The problem is, as soon as it stops falling, it starts to disappear. Time ticks on and the magnificent bas-relief dissolves. Such beauty cannot bear for us to be alive. Let’s go in.’
We went in. We shook out our shoes and hung up our coats.
‘Children are the ones who love to announce that it’s snowing. They run around, they shout, and it sets off a joyous fre
nzy of activity: parents smile and fall silent, schools close, the whole landscape becomes a playground that can be modelled. The world becomes soft and malleable; you can do anything without worrying about anything, there will be time enough to dry off later. It lasts as long as you are filled with wonder. It lasts as long as it takes to say the words. It lasts as long as it takes to say “It’s snowing”, then it’s over. So it goes with dreams of order, young man. Now, let’s go and paint.’
In brush-ink drawing the most important strokes are those the artist does not make. These leave a void and only the void can create space: the void space causes the eye, and hence the mind, to move. Drawing is a series of skilfully placed voids, it exists first and foremost as that movement of the eye. The ink, ultimately, is superfluous to the drawing, you paint with nothingness.
‘I find your Chinese paradoxes irritating.’
‘But any truth that is remotely interesting can be expressed only in paradoxes. Or demonstrated with actions.’
‘But given what you’re saying, you could just remove the lines. A blank page would do.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, very clever.’
Through the window the devastated garden gently gleamed, a glow marbled with irregular black streaks.
‘Such a drawing would be perfect, but too fragile. Life leaves a lot of traces.’
I did not persist. I went back to painting. I made fewer strokes than was my habit or my intention; it was no more difficult. And the remaining strokes traced themselves around the deeper white. Life is what remains; what the ink has not obliterated.
I returned to the fray; because they worried me, the home-grown sectarians with their guns camped out high above the roofs.
‘Mariani’s a dangerous guy, don’t you think? His lads have weapons of war and they aim them at people.’
‘It’s all show. They amuse themselves and they take pictures of each other. They’d like to imagine that people seeing them are physically afraid. But in the fifteen years they’ve been play-acting, they haven’t had a single victim, if you don’t include the skirmishes that would have occurred with or without them. The damage they do bears no relation to the arms they possess.’
‘You don’t take them seriously?’
‘Of course not; but when people listen to them, they become horribly serious, and that’s the worst part. What GAFFES has been saying for the past fifteen years has had more effect than their flabby muscles and their prop guns or the cosh they carry around in their car.’
‘And race?’
‘The stuff about race is all hot air. A curtain hung across the room as a screen for a shadow theatre. The lights go down, you take your seats, and all that’s left is a lantern casting shadows. The show starts. People howl, they clap, they laugh, they boo the villains and cheer the good guys; but they’re talking to shadows. They have no idea what’s going on behind the screen; they believe in the shadows. Behind the screen are the real actors we cannot see, behind the screen they deal with the real problems, which are always social. When I hear a guy like you talking about race with that heroic quiver in his voice, I realize that GAFFES has won.’
‘But I’m opposed to everything they stand for.’
‘When you oppose, you take part. Your inflexibility is a comfort to them. Race is not something that exists in nature; it exists only if you talk about it. By dint of talking about it GAFFES has convinced people that race is the problem we are most concerned about. They spout hot air and everyone thinks there’s a hurricane. A wind can be measured by its effects, so from racism we deduce that race exists. They’ve won; everyone thinks like them – they don’t give a shit whether they’re for or against: people once again believe in the division of humanity. I can understand why my Eurydice is furious and despises them with all the passion of Bab El Oued. I took her away from a life you can’t imagine, one that they want to recreate here, just as they did over there.’
‘But what do they want?’
‘They just want to want, and for that to have an effect. They want strong men to have free rein. They want a natural order in which everyone has their place and for that place to be obvious. Up there on the eighteenth floor of Mariani’s tower block they’ve created a commune, which, in modern France, is the dream of what life was like over there. The use of force was permitted; you could flout laws and laugh it off. You did what you had to do in the company of men you knew. Trust was earned within an instant; you could read it in their faces. Social relations were power-based and you could see it in action.
‘The dream of forming a pack. They want to live like commandos de chasse. For them, the vanished Eden is a group of lads living in the mountains, rifles slung over their backs, commanded by a captain. Not that such things didn’t exist, but you can’t turn a whole country into a boy scout camp. And it’s tragic to think that, in the end, we lost. Force never admits defeat: when the use of force fails, people think that if they’d used a little more force, they might have won. So they try again, harder this time, they lose again, there are a few more casualties. Force never understands and those who use force brood over their failures, they dream of trying again.
‘Over there, things were simple. Our lives depended on force: people utterly unlike us were trying to kill us. And so were we. We had to defeat them or escape them; success or failure; our lives were as straightforward as a game of dice. War is simple. Do you know why war is never-ending? Because it is the simplest form of reality. Everyone wants war, it simplifies things. When it comes down to it, we like the knots entangling our lives to be cut by force. Having an enemy is the most precious of possessions, it offers us a fulcrum. In the forests of Tonkin we hunted the enemy so that we could finally do battle.
‘This model for a solution to all life’s problems comes from the beating we give a child, the kick we give a dog. It is a release. When people annoy us, we all dream of using force to make them see reason, like a dog, like a child. People who refuse to do what we tell them need to be put in their place by force. It’s the only language they understand. Over there, we governed by common sense through beating, which is the most unambiguous social act. It is tragic to forget that in the end we lost; it is tragically stupid to think that with a little more force we would have succeeded. Mariani and his lads are the disconsolate orphans of power; it is a tragic mistake to take them seriously, because their seriousness taints us. They force us to talk about their ghosts, and in doing so we cause them to reappear, to linger.
‘I understand Eurydice’s anger. When she sees Mariani she wants to put a stake through his heart so that he never comes back, so that he disappears and all his ghosts with him. When he comes here, “over there” comes back to haunt us; when we spend our lives trying not to think about it. I understand Eurydice’s anger, but Mariani carried me through the jungle.’
‘And that’s enough? It’s not much.’
‘Where would you find more? Friendship is the result of a single gesture. It is given in an instant and, once given, it rolls on; it will not change direction unless something major knocks it off course. The guy who patted your shoulder at a particular moment is someone you will love for ever, much more than the person you talk to every morning. Mariani carried me through the jungle, and I can still feel the jolting pain in my leg every time the dumb fucker tripped on a root. You would have to cut my leg off to make me forget it. I was wounded, and he was wounded in a place where I was left unscathed. We see each other as two crippled men who know the reason why.
‘I don’t like his “lads”, but I can understand why he hangs around with them. The GAFFES’ political views are moronic, pure and simple. But I can understand that kind of stupidity. They learned it over there, where we never managed to govern. De Gaulle used to call them braggarts, the guys over there, and in his treachery he was often right. Over there, men bragged. Power was elsewhere. They relied on that power without having it, and when things turned nasty they called in the army. They had no idea how to gove
rn; they didn’t even know what the word meant: they issued orders, and at the slightest challenge they lashed out; like slapping a child, like beating a dog; and if the dog got its hackles up, if it looked like it might bite, they called in the army. And the army meant me, Mariani and a lot of other guys, most of whom are dead: we would do our best to put the dog down. Some job! Mariani believed in it and he never got over it; me, I think painting saved me. I wasn’t as good a soldier, but I saved my soul.
‘Dog killer,’ he muttered. ‘And when the dogs died, they looked at me with the eyes of the men they had been all along. Some life. If I had children, I don’t know how I could bring myself to tell them about it. But I’m telling you. I don’t know if you understand; like everyone else, you don’t understand anything about France.’
‘Not that again,’ I groaned, ‘not that again.’