by Alexis Jenni
His voice is clearly audible as he says these words. His voice is clear, because we recognize his nasal whine, his ironic zeal, his witty eloquence that makes use of every linguistic register to castigate, to seduce, to make the listener smile, to muddy the waters in order to get the upper hand. He has a masterful command of rhetorical devices. It is always a pleasure to listen to him. But when the smile has faded, if you have been careful to take notes, you find yourself dumbfounded by the vagueness, the dishonesty, the blind contempt; and by the literary virtuosity. What seems to be a clear vision, built on solid foundations of common sense, is nothing more than bar-room politics, said simply in order to win over whoever is listening, to muddle matters, to hold the floor. When he speaks, The Novelist is a man driven by the most banal motives. No one is a great man in every circumstance, nor every day.
Just read the words! Djellabas, turbans! What is he talking about? Take a look at the people who live in Algiers, in Oran, are they so very different? A hummingbird? Brilliant! You expect a sparrow, but he throws in a little exotic lyricism. You smile and you have already lost the argument. Oil and vinegar? Who is the oil and who the vinegar, and why two liquids that do not mix when, by definition, man is endlessly mixed? The Arabs and the French? As though it were possible to compare two categories whose definitions are not remotely equivalent, as though the meanings of each were definitively set down by nature. He makes you smile. He is witty, because the brilliance of the French mind lies in wit. What is wit? It is all the advantages of faith with none of the difficulties of credulity. It means acting according to the strict laws of folly, while pretending to be no fool. It is charming, it is often funny, but in a sense this makes it worse than foolishness, because to laugh is to think we are not concerned, but no one here gets out alive. Wit is simply a means of masking ignorance. Forty million, he says, forty million others, as many of them as of us, conceived much faster than we can conceive, a perpetual demographic terrorist attack; is this not simply the age-old fear that the other, the other, the other holds the true power, the only power: sexual?
Fine words are more than enough for The Novelist. He takes the shiniest ones and tosses them in our faces, we gather them up like treasure, but they are fool’s gold. People who talk about kinship are always understood, since we think primarily in terms of resemblance. Race is an inconsistent concept grounded in our frantic desire to belong, which aspires to theoretical justifications it will never discover since they do not exist. But that does not matter; what matters is to give the impression… Race is a fart from the body politic, the mute manifestation of a body with digestive problems; race is a means of playing to the gallery, of keeping people busy with the notion of identity, the indefinable thing we struggle to define; we do not succeed, and that keeps us busy. The aim of the GAFFES is not to legally categorize the populace according to pigmentation, the aim of the GAFFES is illegality. What they dream of is the mindless, unbridled use of force, such that eventually the most dignified can lead an unfettered existence. And while the public is applauding their little racist puppet show, behind, below and in the shadows of the wings the real issues are being decided, and the real issues are always social. This is how they unsuspectingly ended up being taken in, those who blindly believed in the colour code of the colonies. The pieds noirs were a microcosm of what France is today, all of France, panic-stricken France, whose very language is contaminated by colonial decay. We clearly feel that we are lacking something. French people seek it, the GAFFES pretend to seek it, we search for our lost power; we desperately long to wield it.
I walked, hunched over. I did not really know where I was. I was heading vaguely west. In the distance I could see the Monts du Lyonnais and Mont Pilat. Luckily there are mountains around here, so you know where you are headed. In this sprawling suburb I do not know where I am, I do not know where anyone is. This is the advantage and the disadvantage of living alone, of doing little work, of being entirely, completely self-absorbed. It takes us back to the self, and the self is nothing.
I came to a fenced-off area where a pack of children was swarming all over contraptions intended for swinging and climbing. This meant it must be about five o’clock and the low-rise building with the large doorway had to be a school. Children are subject to regular migrations. I went and sat next to them, on a bench their mothers had left vacant. Sitting with my clenched fists in my pockets, my collar turned up, I had clearly not come here with a child. People kept a watchful eye on me. The children wrapped in puffer jackets climbed up ladders that turned into slides. They chased each other, bounced on seesaws mounted on springs, screaming constantly, and not one of them got hurt. The inexhaustible energy of children protects them from everything. When they fall, they suffer minimal impact. They get to their feet straight away; if I were to fall I would break.
Their scurrying about infuriated me, and the racket they were making all around. I am not like them. They are numberless, constantly in motion, the children of Voracieux-les-Bredins, black and brown beneath their woolly hats, above their scarves, none of whom belongs to me, so pale. They perform dangerous acrobatics, but nothing happens to them; their energy protects them; they resume their initial shape after every fall. They are the cement that proliferates and single-handedly mends the cracked community house. What we most need is a roof, one that will not fall down, to protect us and contain us. The colour of the walls makes no difference to the solidity of the roof. It just needs to stay up.
In what way did they resemble me, these black and brown children playing and shrieking on these seesaws on springs? In what way did they resemble me, these children who are my future, as I sat on a bench in my winter coat? In no visible way, but they suckled the same milk of language. We are brothers in language, and what is said in that language we hear together; what is whispered in that language, we all understand, even before we hear it. Even in invective, we understand each other. It is a marvellous expression: we understand each other. It describes an intimate intertwining in which each is part of the other, a figure it is impossible to represent, but which, for the point of view of language, is obvious: we are entwined by an intimate understanding of language. Even confrontation does not destroy that understanding. Try having an argument with a foreigner: it is like banging your head against a rock. It is only among our own that we can really fight, kill each other; among ourselves.
I know nothing about children. I had spent months painting with a man who told me such things that I had to walk home in order to dry out. I needed to take a shower after listening to him. I would have preferred not to hear. But not hearing something does not make it go away: what is there exerts its influence in the silence, like a gravitational field.
I was a child once, too, even if it is difficult for me to remember now. I shrieked for no better reason than my boundless energy. I raced around aimlessly. I amused myself, which is the fundamental verb of childhood, with its strange reflexive form. But sitting as I am now, fists clenched, shoulders hunched, the collar of my winter coat hiding my lowered chin, it is difficult to remember. I am stuck in this moment, sitting on a bench, in this directionless suburb. This is the trouble, this is the tragedy: being stuck in this moment. Being terrified of what has happened, being afraid of what will happen, being irritated by the bustle, yet staying here; and thinking that here is everything.
One little boy who was running – they ran everywhere – stopped in front of me. He peered at me, his tiny nose poking out over his scarf, stray black curls peeking from under his hat, dark eyes shining with infinite gentleness. With his mittened hand he pushed aside his scarf, revealing a little mouth from which came clouds of white mist, a child’s breath in the cold air.
‘Why are you sad?’
‘I’m thinking about death. About all the dead we leave behind.’
He stared at me, nodded his head, his mouth open, wreathed in the vapour of his breath. ‘You can’t be alive unless you think about death.’
And he raced off
again, shrieking and laughing with the children on the seesaws, running in circles on the rubber mat that meant any fall was harmless.
Shit. He can’t be more than four years old and he just said that. I’m not sure he meant to. I’m not sure he understands what he is saying, but he said it, said it right in front of me. Children may not talk, but they speak; words pass through a child without them noticing. Through the power of language, we understand each other. Intertwined.
So I got up and I left. My fists were no longer clenched, time had started up again. I walked all the way home, the street lamps lighting the way; the streets here were better planned, the façades better aligned, I was in Lyon, in a city that like my thoughts finally fell into place. I walked calmly towards the centre.
I was a child, too, and like so many children at the time I lived on a shelf. Back then, people were stored in green parkland on huge, grey, concrete shelves, in narrow buildings that were tall and broad. In the orthogonal structure, the apartments were lined up like books, overlooking both sides of the shelf, windows at the front, balconies at the back, like the cells of a honeycomb. On the balconies at the rear everyone displayed whatever they wanted. From the communal gardens, from the vast car park, you could see all the floors, and the balconies that offered a glimpse of something, like the titles visible on the spines of books when they are lined up on the shelf. People could lean over and watch the world go by; leave their laundry hanging out longer than was necessary; shout at each other; complain about each other’s children; sit; sit and read; bring out a chair, a tiny little table, and do some work; housework, sorting vegetables, darning socks, sewing for some cottage industry. We lived cheek by jowl, all classes and creeds. Everyone enjoyed watching life played out on the balconies, while longing to get away. Everyone hoped to make enough money to buy a house, to have one built, to live alone. Many succeeded. But back when I was a child, we all still lived together, all classes and creeds, in the golden age of the cités, when tower blocks were built. They were new, we had more than enough space. Standing by the cypress tree in the communal gardens where we played, I could see shelves groaning under the weight of all human life: all ages, every band of wealth – from the modest to the middle-class – every possible configuration of the family. From far below, from my child’s-eye view, I saw the rungs of the social ladder. But already everyone was dreaming of building a little house, of living alone on some remote plot of ground ringed by leylandii hedges.
We played. The tarmacked spaces between the cars were perfect for roller-skating. We played urban hockey using ping-pong balls and sticks made from planks nailed together. We taped pieces of cardboard to the spokes of our bicycles so they sounded like motorbikes. We played in the rubble of unfinished building sites, ongoing projects that always left mountains of excavated dirt, mounds of sand on tarpaulins, piles of timber crusted with cement, rickety scaffolding we scaled by shinning up the jute ropes used for hauling buckets, jumping from long bendy planks that catapulted us into the air. So much building was going on during those years. Even we were works in progress. It was all anyone did: build, demolish, rebuild, dig and fill, renovate. The magnates of the Department of Public Works were masters of the world, the all-powerful lords of land, of housing and of thought. If you compare what existed back then with what you can see now, the whole area is unrecognizable. Back then, buildings were sprouting everywhere to accommodate all those who flocked to live here. They were quickly thrown up, quickly finished, quickly roofed. These buildings were designed to have no attics, only cellars. There was no clear thinking, no memory to be retained, nothing but buried fears. We would play in the labyrinthine cellars, in the bare stone corridors, on damp earthen floors as cold and elastic as a dead man’s skin, in corridors lit by bare bulbs in cages whose harsh glare did not travel far but stopped dead, fearful of the shadows, not daring to light the corners, leaving them in darkness. In the cellars we played war games that were not very violent, not very sexual; we were children. We would slink through the shadows and fire at each other with plastic machine guns that made a clacking noise, with pistols of soft polythene whose plosive gunfire we imitated by puffing out our cheeks. I remember being held captive in a cellar, pretending to be tied up, while “they” pretended to interrogate me, torture me, force me to talk – “they” were characters in the game – and the sickening sound of a real slap across my face.
Suddenly, the game stopped and we all flushed red; we were excited, feverish, panting for breath, our foreheads burning. Things had gone too far. My stinging cheek was proof that things had gone too far. We stammered something about the game being over, about having to go home. We all climbed back up into the daylight, heading to our homes, back up on to our shelves.
We were children. We didn’t know how to talk about violence or about love. We acted without knowing. We had no words. We acted.
One summer evening we were desperately chalking hearts with arrows through them on the tarmac. We drew them in pink, two hearts interlinked, surrounded by wavy lines, and in the centre we wrote out the names of everyone we could think of; we scribbled furiously, drawing with a fevered excitement that made the chalk break, feeling as though we were writing swear words, but nice ones, and if one of our parents had shown up, we would have scattered, blushing and giggling, our hands covered in chalk dust, incapable of explaining our joy or our embarrassment. We drew these hearts one summer evening underneath one of the first-floor balconies, scarcely a metre off the ground, where a new couple had just moved in. A swarm of kids traced linked hearts under their balcony; the sky slowly shifted from pink to purple; the air was balmy, joyous, and they watched us, their arms around each other, her head on his shoulder; they smiled and said nothing as the blue light of evening slowly thickened.
We did things, we feverishly did things; we shared our elders’ passion for public works, and every day we created our own miniature building sites. We worked the soft earth to create flat surfaces on which to play marbles, paths for tin cyclists so we could race our Majorette die-cast cars. We would start out with bulldozers with metal blades found in our toy boxes, but very quickly they proved to be inadequate. We would dig using broken sticks, with toy shovels, with little plastic buckets and spades we brought with us to the seaside or anywhere there was sand to be dug. There we dug up the ground and built our houses, and quickly the small began to spread.
The three tower blocks in the cité had been built on a sloping site, which had been levelled in three places in order to construct the tall shelves containing the apartments. The car park was a smooth, steep plane, ideal for skating, and the road out to the street was bordered by a concrete wall that measured two metres high at the street – which was out of bounds – and gradually sloped until, near the tower blocks, it was level with the ground. This smooth concrete wall played a major role in our games. It was an ideal motorway, the smoothest surface in the cité, and perfectly adapted to the pocket-sized traffic of Majorettes. Every day scores of little boys raced their cars and trucks along the wall, their pursed lips throbbing, making a roar of engines, coming and going, performing U-turns where the wall merged with the tarmac or where it became too high for them to carry on. The taller boys could go farther before they were forced to turn.
This wall, built on a slope, shored up a bank of bare earth that had not yet been planted; this provided the virgin territory for our building sites. Grass never grew there because of our constant digging, the roads, the garages, the landing strips next to the motorway, which was constantly filled with a traffic of toy cars, except when it was time for meals or for our after-school snack. One tumultuous day, one summer evening when night seemed reluctant to fall, we dug deeper; there were lots of us with shovels, sticks, excitedly digging a hole. The smell was intoxicating. The more we dug, the more it stank. A horde of boys was toiling on the dirt embankment above the wall where our cars were now parked, since no one was interested in pushing them. The bigger boys, the most resourceful, burrowed int
o the root-tangled soil, making great play of excavating the rubble; some appointed themselves foremen and organized lines of buckets. Most did nothing; they scurried about excitably, wrinkling their noses and giving little disgusted yelps, their limbs quivering. The smell came from the ground itself, like some noxious layer we had accidentally breached and which now spilled out, heavy, viscous, at its most pungent where we were digging. We found teeth. Visibly human teeth, like the ones in our mouths. And then fragments of bone. A grown-up watched us work, amused; another watched from the open window of his kitchen. The rank smell did not reach them, it slithered along the ground. They did not take us seriously, they thought it was just a game, but we were not playing any more. The fetid stench was proof that we had struck reality. It was so overwhelming that we knew we had happened on to something real. The teeth and fragments of bone multiplied. A big boy grabbed them, took them home and came back. ‘My father says it’s a grave. He said that this used to be a cemetery before. They built on top of it. He said it’s disgusting and we should fill in the hole and not go near it again.’