by Alexis Jenni
Salagnon spent a horrifying night trembling with cold. His injured leg seemed to swell until it choked him, then suddenly contracted again, causing him to lose his balance. The pile of corpses gleamed in the half-light, and several times Moreau moved and tried to speak to him. He politely stared at the stack of bodies which, hour by hour, shrank a little more, ready to respond should Moreau ask him a question.
In the morning a large red flag emblazoned with a gold star was hoisted. It fluttered on the edge of the jungle as a bugle sounded. A horde of soldiers wearing palm-frond helmets charged on the rolls of barbed wire, on the foxholes armed with mines, on the spikes, the traps, on the machine guns that went on firing until their muzzles were red. There were so many that they assimilated the shrapnel fired at them; they marched on; they withstood the gunfire. The ground beneath Salagnon’s supine body trembled. The trembling was agonizing; it penetrated his leg and travelled all the way to his skull. The effects of the morphine had worn off; no one thought to give him any more.
Many died on the outskirts of the village. The ditches filled with battered, mangled, charred corpses. The Viet Minh army suffered catastrophic losses and still they advanced; the Légion died, man by man, and did not retreat. They were so close, their cannon fell silent. They lobbed grenades by hand. Men found themselves face to face, grabbed each other’s shirts, slashed bellies open with their knives.
The amphibious tanks emerged from the river, black, glistening toad-buffalos preceded by flames and belching a trail of smoke. Dripping wet, they clambered up the muddy banks and counterattacked. Small planes buzzed in swarms above the trees, and behind them the jungle blazed and everyone in it. Armoured barges sailed up the river, their cargo holds empty. The fortified positions were evacuated; all equipment was destroyed, leaving only booby-trapped shells and grenades. ‘What about my bike?’ asked Salagnon as they carried him out. ‘What bike?’ ‘The bicycle I brought back from the jungle, the one I stole from the Viets.’ ‘The Viet Minh ride bikes in the jungle?’ ‘They were using it to transport rice. We need to take it to Hanoi as proof.’ ‘You think we’re going to bother our arses with a bicycle? Do you fancy riding back, Salagnon?’ The men calmly boarded the barges, loaded the wounded and the dead. Shells fell at random, some in the water, some on the banks, sending up jets of mud. One of the barges was hit; a shell obliterated the cargo hold and all those inside. A rudderless ball of flame, it drifted with the slow course of the river. Gascard vanished in a vortex of blood-stained water. Lying on the shuddering metal, Salagnon was nothing now but pain.
In the military hospital he woke up in a huge ward where the wounded lay in neat rows of beds. Emaciated men on pristine sheets daydreamed as they stared at the ceiling fans; they sighed and sometimes shifted their position, trying not to rip out the IV drip or press too heavily on their bandaged wounds. A soft light streamed in through the large, open windows screened by white curtains that barely stirred. They cast pale shadows on the wall, on the faded paintings eaten away by the colony’s humidity; the serene decay did more to heal their bodies than any medication. Some died the way a flame gutters out.
At the other end of the line of beds, far from the window, a man whose leg had been amputated was having trouble sleeping. He grumbled quietly in German, repeating the same words over and over in a childlike voice. At the other end of the row, a heavyset man threw back his sheet, got to his feet and limped quickly down the line, wincing and leaning on the metal bedframes for support. When he came to the bed of the moaner, he stood stiffly to attention in his pyjamas and bawled him out in German. The other man bowed his head, apologized, addressing him as Obersturmführer, and fell silent. The officer returned to his bed, still wincing with pain, and lay down. The only sounds in the vast ward were restful breathing, the buzz of flies and the creak of the ceiling fan as it turned slowly. Salagnon went back to sleep.
And then? While Victorien Salagnon was recovering from his wounds, the war raged on outside. At all hours of the day and night, armoured columns roared through Hanoi, heading for various parts of the delta. Trucks unloaded their wounded in the hospital courtyard, crudely bandaged cripples were carried in on stretchers by soldiers, and the walking wounded were led by nurses to empty beds. They would slump on to the beds with a sigh, smell the clean sheets, and some would fall asleep immediately, unless they were in too much pain from their scabby wounds; then the doctor would come round, doling out morphine, easing their pains. That strange device that is the helicopter landed on the roof, bringing the seriously wounded, their uniforms unrecognizable, their bodies blackened, their flesh so swollen they had to be transported by air. Aeroplanes flew over Hanoi, fighter planes carrying special drums, processions of purring Dakotas filled with paratroopers. Some came back trailing thick black smoke that rendered them unstable.
Mariani would come to see him. He had come through the evacuation unscathed. He would bring the papers and tell him the news.
‘A fierce Franco-Vietnamese counteroffensive,’ he read, ‘has halted the Viet Minh incursion into the Haute-Région. A line of posts had to be evacuated in order to reinforce the defensive position in the delta. Everything is hunky-dory. I feel reassured. Do you know who they are?’
‘Who?’
‘The Franco-Vietnamese troops.’
‘It could mean us. Hey, Mariani, isn’t this getting a bit confusing? Here we are, the French army, waging a guerrilla war against the regular army of a movement waging a guerrilla war against us, who are fighting to protect the Vietnamese people, who are fighting for their independence.’
‘When it comes to fighting, we know what we’re doing. When it comes to the whys and wherefores, I hope they know back in Paris.’
This made them laugh. There was a pleasure in laughing together.
‘Did they find Rufin?’
‘They intercepted his last message. I badgered the Signals corps until they gave me a full transcript. He didn’t say much. “The Viets are a couple of metres away. Bye, everyone.” And after that, nothing, silence, the guy in Signals told me. Well, except for that noise a field radio makes when it’s not transmitting, like sand rattling in a metal box.’
‘You think he got away?’
‘He could do pretty much anything. But if he did get away, he’s been wandering in the jungle ever since.’
‘That would be just like him. The angel of war leading his own personal guerrilla operation out in the jungle.’
‘There’s no harm in dreaming.’
They talked about Moreau, who had not had the heroic death he deserved. Then again, when it comes, death is quick; in war, people die furtively. When reported lyrically, it is a white lie. It is to be able to say something, to invent, elaborate, set the scene. In reality, men die secretly, swiftly, silently; and afterwards, too, there is silence.
The uncle came to visit Salagnon, examined the wound himself, asked the opinion of the doctor.
‘I need you to come back to us fit and well,’ he said before he left. ‘I’ve got big plans for you.’
He rested. He spent his time walking in the tropical hospital, strolling under the trees in the garden, in that sauna on Earth that is colonial Indochine. ‘I’m starting to soften,’ he would say with a laugh to those who came to see him, ‘the way they soften hard tack on ships crossing the ocean, to make it more edible.’
He was starting to soften the better to scar, as wounded soldiers did, although opium did not appeal to him. In order to take it, he had to lie down and it made him sleepy. He preferred to be sitting up; that way he could see and he could paint. For him, using a paintbrush was enough to banish his lethargy, to alleviate his pain, and float. He would go out into the streets of Hanoi, eat soup filled with floating bits at grimy street stalls. He would sit down among the people of the street and stay there for hours, watching. He would sit at tea houses that were little more than two tables and a few stools under trees, where a scrawny man would come by with a dented kettle to pour hot water into the
same bowl, on to the same used tea leaves that gradually came to taste of nothing.
He took his time. He was happy to watch, and he sketched the men in the streets and the children who roamed in gangs; he also liked to draw the women. He found they had an extraordinary beauty, and a beauty that befitted sketching. He never got close enough to see them as anything more than a line. They were pure lines of flowing fabric, washing on a line, and their long black hair like an inkspill left by a brush. The women of Indochine moved gracefully, sat gracefully, held their large conical straw hats gracefully. He drew many, but spoke to none. He was teased about his shyness. Eventually he hinted, without providing any details, that he was engaged to a French girl in Algiers. People no longer teased him, but praised his courage with complicit smiles. They made knowing references to the fiery temperament of Mediterranean women, their tragic jealousy, their unrivalled sexual audacity. Asian women continued to pass by in the distance, in a rustle of lace, haughty, elegant, pretending to be out of reach, while discreetly glancing around them to gauge the effect. At first sight they look cold, people would say, but when you get past that first barrier, when you find the trigger, well… That said it all. It suited him to say no more.
The ghost of Eurydice came to him in moments of idleness. He still wrote to her. He was bored. He met only people he did not want to meet. The army was changing. Back in France they were recruiting young men; Salagnon felt old. Blockheads arrived by the boatload, interested only in money, excitement or oblivion; they were enlisting in a career, because they could find no work in France. In the weeks he spent convalescing and walking the streets of Hanoi, he learned the Chinese art of the brush. Although in this art there is nothing to learn: there is only practice. What he learned in Hanoi was the existence of the art of the brush; and that was an education in itself.
Before encountering his master, he had painted to keep his hands busy, to give a purpose to his walks, to better see what was before his eyes. He sent Eurydice jungles, broad rivers, jagged hills wreathed in mists. ‘I’ve drawn you the jungle as a vast velvet carpet, like a deep, plush sofa,’ he wrote to her. ‘But do not be fooled. My drawing is a lie. It is impersonal. It will appeal to those – fortunate – souls who will never set foot in the jungle. The place itself is not substantial, as deep, as dense; in fact, the vegetation is sparse and chaotic. But if I drew it as it is, no one would believe it was the jungle; they would assume I am suffering from melancholy. They would think my drawing was a lie. And so I have drawn a lie, so that it will seem true.’
Sitting leaning against a tree trunk on the broad avenue lined with frangipani trees, he used a brush to sketch the hints of the magnificent houses visible between the trees. His eyes moved from the foliage to the colonial façades, searching for details; his brush hovered for a moment over the inkwell next to him. His concentration was such that the children crouching around him did not dare speak to him. Through art he achieved the miracle of slowing and silencing a group of Asian children. In their birdlike monosyllables they whispered to each other, singling out some detail in the drawing and pointing to the object in the street, giggling behind their hands to see reality thus transformed.
A man dressed all in white came down the avenue, swinging a cane, and stopped behind Salagnon to peer at his sketch. He was sporting a Panama hat and leaning lightly, more for effect than support, on his polished, bamboo cane.
‘You hesitate too often, young man. I can understand your wanting to check whether what you have drawn is faithful, but if your painting is to live, as you live, as those trees you wish to paint live, then it is vital not to interrupt your breathing. You must let yourself be guided by the singular stroke of the brush.’
Salagnon was dumbstruck; his brush suspended in the air, he stared up at the strange, Annamese man who had just addressed him without salutation, without lowering his eyes, with only the faintest trace of an accent, in a French rather more polished than his own. The little boys had scrabbled to their feet, embarrassed, and did not dare move in the presence of this man, who was so aristocratic he could speak to a Frenchman without kowtowing.
‘The singular stroke of the brush?’
‘Yes, young man.’
‘Is that a Chinese thing?’
‘It is the art of the brush expressed in its simplest form.’
‘Do you paint, monsieur?’
‘On occasion.’
‘Do you know how to paint those Chinese scenes with the mountains, the clouds and the tiny little people?’
The elegant man smiled benignly, accentuating the network of fine lines and wrinkles over his face. He was clearly very old, although he did not look it.
‘Come tomorrow to this address. In the afternoon. I shall show you.’
He gave Salagnon a visiting card printed in Chinese, Vietnamese and French and emblazoned with the red seal that artists there use to sign their work.
Salagnon got to know the man. He visited him regularly. The old man wore his hair tied back, which made him look Argentinean, and he invariably wore pale suits with a freshly cut flower in the buttonhole. His jacket open, his left hand in his pocket, he greeted Salagnon casually, shaking his hand with the grace of a dilettante and an amused detachment from traditional customs. ‘Come in, young man, come in.’ And with a single gesture he threw open the vast rooms of his house, all bare, whose paintings, eaten away by the frightful weather, took on the pastel tones of tears. He spoke impeccable French, his accent merely a distinctive, barely perceptible phrasing, like a slight affectation that he preserved for its amusement value. He used academic turns of phrase rarely heard outside certain places in Paris, and Chinese words which he always employed in their strictest sense. Salagnon was amazed by the man’s extraordinary command of his own mother tongue, a command he himself did not possess. He mentioned this and the old man smiled.
‘You know, young man, the most perfect incarnations of French values are to be found in what are called “coloured people”. The France that people extol for its grandeur, its lofty humanism, its clarity of thought, its veneration of language, that France is to be found in its purest form in the West Indies, among the Africans, the Arabs and the Indo-Chinese. The white French born in what is narrowly defined as France are always astonished to find that we embody those values they heard tell of in school, which, to them, represent some unattainable utopia and to us are life itself. We perfectly exemplify a France with no superfluity, no excess. We, the cultivated, indigenous people are the crowning glory and the justification of the Empire. We are its triumph, and that will bring about its downfall.’
‘Why its downfall?’
‘How can one continue to be what is called indigenous, while simultaneously being utterly French? One is forced to choose. It is fire and water contained within a single vessel. One of them must prevail, and swiftly. But come, come see my paintings.’
In the largest room of the old house, where the corners of the ceiling were begrimed with soot and the plaster flaked from the walls, the only furniture was a large rattan chair and a red lacquer cabinet with a circular metal lock plate. From it emerged scrolls wrapped in silk and tied with cord. He had Salagnon sit in the chair, swept the floor with a small brush, and set the rolls at his feet. He untied the cords, slipped off the silk sheaths and, bending gracefully, unrolled them on the floor.
‘This is how Chinese paintings are meant to be viewed. It is not fitting to hang them permanently on a wall. They must be unfurled as a path unfurls. In doing so, one can see time appear. The time spent contemplating them merges with the time required to conceive and create them. When no one is looking at them, they should not be left open, but rolled, hidden from view, hidden even from themselves. They should be unrolled only in the presence of someone who knows how to appreciate their unveiling. This is how they are envisioned, as one might envision a path.’
With slow, measured movements, he unrolled a towering landscape at Salagnon’s feet, intent on the emotions flickering over t
he young man’s face. Watching it unfurl, Salagnon felt as though he were slowly raising his head. Vertiginous mountains rose above the clouds; thickets of bamboo soared; from the tangled branches of the trees hung the aerial roots of orchids; water cascaded from background to foreground; a narrow path wound between jagged rocks, scaling the mountain between twisted pines that were rooted, as best they could, more in the mists than in the rock.
‘And you use only ink?’ murmured Salagnon, filled with wonder.
‘Does one need anything else? To paint, to write, to live? Ink meets every need, young man. One needs only a single brush, a single stick of compressed pigment from which to dilute ink, and a hollow stone to hold it. And a little water too. The material for a whole life can fit in one’s pocket; or if one has no pockets, in a knapsack. One can move unencumbered with the materials of a Chinese painter: he is a man who paints as he moves. With his feet, his legs, his shoulders, his breath, his whole life in every step. Man is a brush, his life the ink. The traces of his footsteps leave behind paintings.’
He unrolled several more images.
‘These are Chinese, very ancient. Those are mine, although these days I hardly paint.’
Salagnon hunkered closer, following the rolls on all fours, feeling he understood nothing. They were not exactly paintings, nor was this the act of seeing or indeed of understanding. A profusion of little symbols, both traditional and figurative, jostled restlessly as far as the eye could see, kindling a thrill in the soul, a delirious yearning for the world, a surge towards life itself. As though he were seeing music.
‘You talk about the man who paints, but I see no sign of man here. No forms, no characters. Do you ever paint portraits?’
‘No man? You are mistaken, young man, and you surprise me. Everything here is man.’
‘Everything? I see only one.’
Salagnon indicated a small figure in a pleated robe, difficult to distinguish, climbing the first part of the path, a figure no bigger than a fingernail, about to disappear behind a hill. The other smiled patiently.