by Alexis Jenni
‘They’re childish ideas,’ I finally said aloud.
Mariani stopped. He stopped pacing up and down Salagnon’s shabby living room and stared at me. He was holding a beer in one hand and a little foam clung to his moustache, yes, his moustache, he had a grey moustache, the sort of adornment no one had any more, that everyone shaves, I don’t know why, but I understand. His tired eyes glared at me through tinted lenses that gave them a crepuscular hue. He glared at me, his mouth open revealing teeth that might have been real or false. His garish jacket clashed wonderfully with the ghastly upholstery.
‘We have to show them.’
‘But look how often you’ve tried to “show them”, and look how often it has failed.’
‘We’re not going to let ourselves be gypped; like… like we did over there.’
‘Gypped by who?’
‘You know perfectly well. You refuse to see the differences. And refusing to see leads to getting fleeced. I mean, you’re not stupid, and you’re not blind; you’re training your eye with Salagnon here and his colouring lessons: you can see the difference.’
‘Treating resemblance as a virtue is a childish idea. Resemblance proves nothing, nothing except what you believed before you noticed it. Anyone can look like everyone or no one, it depends on what you’re looking for.’
‘The difference is there. Open your eyes. Look.’
‘All I see is a bunch of different people who can speak with a single voice and say “we”.’
‘Your boy here is blind, Salagnon. You should stop the painting lessons. Teach him music instead.’
Salagnon was delighted by the conversation, but did not intervene.
‘Since you mention music,’ he teased, ‘and you mentioned my name, have you noticed that, of the three of us – or four, if you include Eurydice, who will be here in a minute – I am the only one with a name whose syllables are a part of classical French? The kid isn’t wrong.’
‘Don’t you start as well! If I’m the only one holding my course, we’ll all be fleeced; and when I say fleeced, they can do far worse with a pair of shears or anything with a blade. We won’t be able to set foot outside without getting stabbed.’
‘But no one carries a knife!’ I roared.
No one has a knife. Cutters, maybe, guns, chlorine bombs, but no knives. No one knows how to use them, except to eat, or to flaunt in the street. Yet everyone talks about getting stabbed. They used to carry them, the bad boys long ago, the boys from across the seas, as a sign of their virility. And that is what we are really talking about: an age-old sexual attack. Whoever loses gets his cut off. Someone who strays on to the other’s turf gets shafted. We were pretty good at that game. Our soldiers were outstanding.
‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just an image. Images are striking. People remember them, they’re useful.’
‘So you’re going to do what you did over there?’
‘And what exactly would you have done over there?’
‘I wasn’t there.’
‘That’s no excuse. What if you had been? Have you seen what they could do to you? We were defending people like you. We were keeping the terrorist in check.’
‘By spreading terror.’
‘Do you know what they did to our boys? To lads like you? To people with faces like yours, with clothes like yours? They slashed open their bellies and filled them with stones. Strangled them with their own intestines. We faced that violence alone. Some people, the people who hid away, who kept themselves safe from the torrent of blood, dare to claim that it was colonialism that created that violence. But whatever the situation, there can be no excuse for such violence, unless you’re not human. We were faced with savagery and we were alone.’
‘But the people in the colonies weren’t human, not really, not legally.’
‘In my company I had Viets, Arabs and a Malagasy, who wound up there by accident. We were brothers in arms.’
‘War is the simplest thing of life. It’s easy to get along. But afterwards, when the war is over, things get complicated. It’s not surprising some people don’t want it to end.’
‘So what would you have done, faced with a café terrace littered with victims and debris, with people groaning, kids who’ve had their leg blown off, covered in their own blood, ripped to pieces by shards of glass? What would you have done, knowing that it would happen all over again? With an axe, a bomb, a pruning knife, a stick. What would you have done with those who were flayed alive simply because of what they looked like? We did what we had to do. The only thing we could do.’
‘You sowed terror.’
‘Yes. We were ordered to do it. So we did. We spread terror in order to snuff it out. What would you have done in that moment? And when I say “in that moment” I mean when you were wading in blood, your shoes spattered, your soles crunching over broken glass, walking over hunks of still-bleeding flesh, listening to the whimpers of those who had been hacked apart. What would you have done?’
‘You failed.’
‘That’s a detail.’
‘It’s the most important detail.’
‘We almost succeeded. We didn’t get the support we needed at the end. A decision taken for ridiculous reasons botched up years of work.’
I looked at Salagnon and saw that he did not agree; he did not agree with any of this, not with Mariani and not with me. He got up, tidied away the beers, walked over to the window and came back, dragging his leg; he had problems rotating his hip, something that affected him when nothing was going right. I could see that all was not well, it was written on his face. I could see he was distressed; I wanted to ask why, but I was caught up in a squabble where we both needed to have the last word, needed the other to stop talking. Because every word of the one who stopped talking first would be contemptible.
‘Wars are straightforward when you describe them,’ Salagnon sighed. ‘Except for the wars you have fought yourself. Those are so confused that every man tries to cope by telling a sad little story, but everyone tells it differently. If wars are to be used to forge identity, then we truly have failed. The wars that we fought wiped out the pleasure we had in being together, and retelling them now simply speeds up that disintegration. We cannot comprehend them. There is nothing about them that we can be proud of; we miss that. And saying nothing makes it impossible to love.’
‘What would you have done?’ Mariani yelled. ‘Would you have gone into hiding so you didn’t have to deal with it? Would you have run away? Would you have pretended to be sick so you didn’t have to act? Would you have holed up somewhere? Where? Under your bed? How can someone who hides be right? How can someone who wasn’t there be right?’
Mariani had a point, in spite of his provocative tone. Our only distinction was being absent. To participate, in whatever way, constituted tacit support; even living itself was a form of support. And so we forced ourselves to live a little less, to be almost invisible, as though we had a sick note.
I am not sure where we should have been in those moments we were absent. How to go about things is something we learn, something we test through movies. Cinema is a window on to adulthood, one we look through while sitting in a comfy chair. Through it we learn how to drive during a car chase, how to brandish a gun, how to kiss a beautiful woman without being awkward; all these things that we will never do, but which matter to us. This is why we love fictions: they offer solutions to situations that in life are labyrinthine; but distinguishing the good solutions from the bad makes it possible to live. Cinema gives us the opportunity to live multiple lives. Through this inaccessible window, we see those we should reject and those that should serve as an example. Fiction puts forward a means of going about things, and the movies everyone has seen present the most common solutions. When you take your seat in a cinema, you fall silent and you watch what has been, what might have been, together. In the Great French Films, we learn how to survive not being there. None of the solutions really work, of course, because there can be no solution t
o absence; all of the solutions are shocking, but all have been used, all offer us an alibi we can believe in; these are our sick notes.
Long before I saw it, I had heard of Les Visiteurs du Soir. The film is a part of our national heritage, a film considered to have certain aesthetic qualities, moral virtues, a historical sense. It was filmed in 1942. The story is set in the Middle Ages. As I sat in the cinema, I instinctively wondered what connections I might find between 1942 and a medieval tale. It is the academic reflex of the film buff to think there must be some connection between a film and the period in which it was made. Not this time! I thought, as I sank into my seat. But the film portrayed the dregs of our society in 1942. The devil appears. He wants the lives of a pair of lovers. He wants their souls. He longs to destroy them. And, to his fury, they turn to stone in front of him: he can no longer rip out their souls. Their bodies no longer move, but their hearts continue to beat, they wait for things to pass. Oh yes, I thought when I finally watched Les Visiteurs du Soir, this is the classic French solution to the problem of evil: we do nothing, keep our opinions to ourself, turn to stone so that evil can do nothing. And nor can we.
It is easiest to say nothing specific about the delicate moments of our history; we were not there. We have our reasons. Where were we? De Gaulle tells us in his memoirs: we were in London, we were everywhere. He single-handedly satisfies our taste for heroism.
It is also possible to claim to have acted, but alone. We have our reasons. Here is the most pernicious film of our cinema, and as such one voted a favourite. The plot is a meticulous account of vigilantism with a concocted justification. The main character in Le Vieux Fusil is utterly in love with his beautiful wife and wants nothing more from life. He cares nothing about history. He owns a ruined château. He is French. When the occupying Germans first arrive, his relationship with them is distant but polite. They kill his wife in the most grotesque fashion, the camera lingers on the scene. And he decides to kill them, one by one, in the most brutal manner. The camera does not miss a single ingenious detail of the sadistic murders. The film is a piece of blackmail: because the pretty wife is murdered, a beautiful woman who has nothing to do with the events and is simply peacefully living her life in a country château, because we witness her being burned alive, the viewer is allowed to see the excruciating details of the deaths that follow, is permitted to wallow in them, is forced to wallow in them. The viewer cannot condemn the later deaths without being complicit in the first murder. Eyes wide in the darkened cinema, the audience is compelled to violence; they are made complicit in the violence meted out to the guilty men by the violence done to the wife, which the film so lovingly showed. Violence binds people. By the time they left the cinema, the audience was complicit. In its day, this film was considered the favourite film of French audiences. It makes me sick. At the end, when all the bad guys are dead, when the main character is alone in his cleansed château, a group of résistants with their Cross of Lorraine, their Citroën traction, their berets, arrives. They ask what happened, whether he needs help. He tells them he does not need anything. Nothing has happened. The résistants drive on. We stay behind with this man who had his reasons. We are steeped in blood.
I don’t know what to do. There is no shower that can wash off that kind of blood. There is no way to be clean except by pretending one was not there. I cannot pretend that it did not happen: the humiliation, the death, the redemption through carnage and the silence that followed in the years when I was growing up, a silence heavy with condemnation of the use of force. It was better not to talk about it; to scorn it in silence. To refuse to support the military, to relish the constant failures of our armies, to think of these close-cropped heads as the embodiment of brutish stupidity. Violence was there, right there, outside us. It was not us. We feared power like the plague; we dreamed of it in shameful reveries.
In the mental ruins that strewed the ground after twenty years of war, all that remained were victims who could see nothing but their own pain. These victims searched among the rubble for some clue to their torturer, since such suffering could not have happened without a torturer. This violence had to be perpetrated by someone, someone who was utterly evil, someone who is still evil, since such atrocities cannot be expiated: they are in the blood. Society fragmented into an infinite number of victims’ associations, each designating its own torturer, each having suffered; everyone went through it in all innocence, and the others fell on him.
There is too much violence. There are too many victims, too many torturers. The whole thing is a muddle. History does not make sense. The nation is a ruin. If a nation is defined by will and pride, then ours has been broken by humiliation. If a nation is defined by shared memories, ours has splintered into shards of memory. If a nation is the will to live as a community, ours is crumbling as the cités and the housing estates are built, as the subgroups who refuse to integrate increase. We are dying slowly of no longer wanting to live together.
‘Everyone is innocent, everyone is a victim after these wars, like the village of Porquigny,’ said Salagnon. ‘I went back to visit Porquigny just once. People remember the massacre; in fact, they remember nothing else. People show up in coaches and there are signs indicating what there is to see. There is a little museum you can visit. There are German rifles there, shorts worn by the Chantiers de Jeunesse, pieces of shrapnel, even a model of the armoured train which they call the Train from Hell. You can see the bloodstained summer dress of the young woman I saw lying dead. In the village itself they have preserved a stretch of wall pockmarked with bullet holes; it is protected by a sheet of glass, so it doesn’t disintegrate. If they’d been able to preserve the blood and the blowflies, they would have. The streets in the villages are called the rue des Martyres, the rue des Innocents-Assassinés. In front of the town hall there is a limestone plaque with the names of all the victims in letters twenty centimetres high. The last line is highlighted in gold leaf. It reads: You Who Pass By, Remember. Like there was a chance anyone could forget in that village; as though they might forget the duty of memory. In France we’ve always been very big on duty, we treat it like homework.
‘Next to the plaque they’ve erected a bronze memorial that features several raw-boned innocents who are visibly victims, but no killer is depicted. They are wild-eyed; they don’t know what is happening to them. So no one forgets, the square outside the town hall is called the place du 20-août-1944. Also known as Day-of-the-Massacre or the Day-of-Our-Death Square. But this is not the only thing that ever happened in Porquigny! Why not call the square something else? Why choose tragedy and death for all eternity? Why not name the square Liberty or Dignity-Restored Square or the Square-of-the-Timely-Arrival-of-the-Zouaves, The-120-German-Soldiers-We-Killed or even The-Final-Destruction-of-the-Armoured-Train?
‘In Sencey, on the other hand, there is no trace. There is a place de la Mairie, a place de la République, a memorial commemorating the First World War. On the plinth, where there was a little space, they have screwed a plaque with the names of the seven people who died in 1944. But they died fighting, while those in Porquigny were bound and sacrificed, lined up against a wall and slaughtered. We prefer to remember innocent victims. It allows us to think of war as a depravity: France was raped. It was not her fault. France does not understand, she still does not understand; and so we are authorized to use violence. France whimpers and threatens, and when it holds its head high, it’s to beat its dog. Do your homework, your duty of memory; they give you the right to legitimate force.’
‘Salagnon,’ Mariani sighed, ‘you talk too much, you dig deeper and deeper, but where are you going with this? You should be on our side.’
‘Eurydice will be here any time now.’
‘Are you scared of her?’ I asked, amused. ‘Oh, they’re tough, the Light Airborne Infantry!’
‘If the problem could be resolved by fisticuffs, I wouldn’t hesitate, but Eurydice wouldn’t go for that. When she sees me, she turns her head. When I’m in
her house, she stomps around, grinds her teeth, sulks, slams the doors, and eventually explodes.’
‘She yells at you?’
‘I don’t think it’s personal, but I’m the one that gets it in the neck. She hates everyone.’
‘Everyone who was ever involved gets dragged through the mud,’ added Salagnon. ‘And Eurydice has a fine pair of lungs on her! A pair of lungs fashioned by centuries of Mediterranean tragedy, by centuries of grief: Greek, Jewish, Arabic. She knows what she’s doing, her words hit home.’
‘Personally, I prefer not to hang around. They upset me, the things she says, and deep down I think she’s right.’
‘What has she got against you?’
‘We should have protected her. We didn’t.’
Mariani broke off. He looked tired and old behind the crepuscular glasses that dulled his eyes. He turned to Salagnon, who picked up.
‘We sowed terror and we reaped worse; everything she knew, everything she loved, dissolved into flames and slaughter. Everything is gone. She suffers like the princesses of Troy, scattered with no descendants in palaces that are not their own, their former lives obliterated by fire and the sword. And she is not allowed the memory. She is not allowed to complain, she is not allowed to understand, and so she wails like mourners at the graves of murder victims, she calls down vengeance.