The French Art of War

by Alexis Jenni

  ‘When she sees me, I remind her of the death of a significant part of herself, and the silence that cloaks her and her loved ones. They are an irritant. All her bitterness and her grief have been sealed in a thermos flask, my being here opens the flask and it all pours out again. You can’t imagine how much it reeks, that rancorous bile. I want to tell her that I understand, that I share her pain, but she won’t let me. She wants to rub my face in it, make me eat it. And I eat it. The pieds noirs are our guilty conscience; they are the living evidence of our failure. We wish they would disappear, but they’re still here. We can still hear their howls and their outrage. The accent is dying out, but we hear it still, like the cackling of ghosts.’

  ‘But that’s all done with, isn’t it? They were repatriated.’

  ‘There’s a word that makes me smile. Because we were all repatriated. The repatriation exceeded all expectations. Everything we ever shipped over there, we brought back. Applied to people, the word was absurd, although it was used again and again: how can you repatriate people who have never even seen France? As though being French was in their nature; in fact, this just proves that it wasn’t. It was not people we repatriated, it was the frontier spirit we had sent over there, the spirit of aggression and conquest, the illegalism of the pioneers, the use of force among one’s own. All that we brought back.’

  Now I can see them, the ships in 1962. I can see them floating on a noonday sea like hot blue sheet metal, the white haze above it twisting up into the cloudless sky, distorting the outline of the ships as they move slowly, scarcely visible unless you squint your eyes and stare at the sea, that searing, cruel sea. I can see them appear in the darkness strewn with lights, the ships of 1962, making their tireless rotations, trembling with rage and tears, crammed with people packed on to the decks, in steerage and the cabins, soldiers, refugees, murderers, innocents, conscripts coming home and immigrants leaving theirs; and between the people thronging the boats of 1962 are the ghosts that came with them, phantoms bounded by the spaces between them, by a particular use of language. In between the passengers as they sat or sprawled or curled into a ball, those who leaned on the gunwales or paced the decks, those who clung to their suitcases and those who had nothing but rage and tears, between the people hurriedly shipped home on the boats of 1962, the ghosts were wide awake. All through the crossing, they kept watch, they were clear-headed and single-minded and, as soon as they reached the shores of the shrivelled rump that France was now reduced to, as soon as they landed at the quays at Marseille, teeming with lost souls, they flourished.

  Ghosts are fashioned from words, from words and nothing else. We imagine them shrouded in sheets, but that is a metaphor for the text or the screen on which it is projected; these ghosts were made of figures of speech whose origins we have forgotten; they were woven from certain words, certain implications, the unseen connotations of certain pronouns, of a certain way of thinking about the law, a certain approach to the use of force. Repatriation succeeded beyond all expectation. The ghosts repatriated on the ships of 1962 made themselves at home; they melted into the crowd that was France; we adopted them; after that, it was impossible to get rid of them. They are our guilty conscience. These ghosts that haunt us here as they did over there.

  ‘I’d better get going,’ said Mariani.

  ‘You see, it is possible to talk to the kid.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s exhausting.’

  ‘Does she shout at you too?’ I asked Salagnon.

  ‘Me? No. But I never look back. I paint for her, only for her. I spit ink, it forms a cloud that cloaks me. We live here, we don’t draw attention to ourselves, and if Mariani didn’t come round we would be long gone. But I won’t stop him from coming. I won’t stop seeing him. Hence the jungle with its presences, its absences. I try to make sure their paths don’t cross.’

  ‘I’m off,’ said Mariani.

  The two of us stood there, Salagnon and I. In silence. Perhaps the moment had come to ask him what was troubling him, but I did not ask.

  ‘You want to paint?’ he asked after a moment.

  I hurriedly accepted. We sat down at the broad, fake walnut table on which he had laid out the painting tools, the paper that inexorably absorbs, the Chinese brushes hanging on a little stand, the hollow stones each with a drop of water, the sticks of compressed ink to be diluted with careful gestures. I sat down, as to a banquet; my hands were slick with sweat, lubricating my fingers as though they were so many tongues. I was hungry.

  ‘What are we going to paint?’ I asked, glancing around and seeing nothing worth the ink or the brushstroke to capture it. This made him smile. He found my quizzical look, my expectancy, my pupil’s expression amusing.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Paint.’

  In his small, horribly furnished home, he taught me that there was no need for a subject; that one need simply paint. I was grateful to learn from him that anything was as good as anything else. Before he taught me this, I constantly wondered what to paint; having no answer, I searched in vain for a subject that suited me, the burden of the search for a subject became overwhelming. I stopped painting. I told him this, he smiled; it was of no importance. ‘Paint trees, paint rocks,’ he said, ‘real or imagined. There are an infinite number; all of them the same, all of them different. You simply need to choose one and paint, and immediately the boundless world of painting will open up. Anything can serve as a subject. The Chinese have spent centuries painting the same non-existent rocks, the same falling water that is not water, the same four plants that are merely symbols, the same clouds that are really just the vanishing of ink; the life of a painting is not its subject, but the trace lived by the brush.’

  I am grateful to him for teaching me this; it is something he said in passing. Shortly afterwards we made the ink and we left traces of beautiful trails of perfect black that represented trees. The lessons calm me: there is only ink and breath; there is only the life flowing through my hands, leaving behind traces. He taught me that; it does not linger when you say it, but it takes a long time to understand; he taught me something more important than all the secrets of the artist’s studio, more fundamental than technical skills, which will fail you and betray you: it is futile to choose a subject, only paint. Oh, how that soothed me. The subject is unimportant.

  ‘Paint. Only paint. Anything. Paint true,’ he would say. ‘Place yourself in front of the tree, imagine it, paint its life. Take a pebble, paint its soul. Consider a man; paint his presence. Only that, his simple presence. Even a desert plain is filled with pebbles, it can be painted. It is enough to look around you to begin.’

  The infinite possibilities reassured me: it is enough to be present, and to act. He taught me to see the river of blood without trembling, and to paint it, to feel the river of ink within me without trembling, to allow it to flow through me. I could see, understand, paint. Only paint.

  I went to places where there were lots of people. I went to the train station and painted anyone. I sat in the plastic shells that serve as seats and I watched the vortex moving through the pipes. The Gare de Lyon Part-Dieu is a multimodal setting, an assemblage of huge pipes through which people pass. People are constantly arriving. I would sit there to sketch passers-by, to draw anyone. I did not choose. I would never see them again. The Gare de Lyon Part-Dieu is the perfect place to paint what comes next.

  It took me a long time to understand what the man sitting next to me was doing. Like me, he watched the people passing, ticking off boxes on a form on a clipboard in his lap. I did not know what he was ticking. I could not read the headings. I could not work out what he was counting. I saw his eyes follow the police officers patrolling the station. These muscular young men moved through the crowd. There were several groups, truncheons beating against their thighs, clips on their belts, the cracked visors of their helmets indicating the direction they were looking. From time to time, they stopped someone. They had them set down their luggage, verified their ticket, had them put out thei
r arms and checked their pockets. They asked for their papers, mumbled into walkie-talkies, arrested no one. At this point the man next to me would tick a box.

  ‘What are you counting?’

  ‘The police checks. To know who they’re stopping.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘They don’t just stop anyone. Ethnic affiliation is the differentiating factor.’

  ‘How can you judge?’

  ‘By eye, the same way they do.’

  ‘Not very precise.’

  ‘But real. Ethnic affiliation is indefinable, but real: it cannot be quantified, but it can trigger actions that are measurable. Arabs are eight times more likely to be stopped by the police, black men four times more likely. No one is arrested. It’s just about control.’

  Treatment is not equal or to claim it is equal is to claim that there are eight times more of ‘them’. Like ‘over there’. Over there has come back again. They have no name, but they’re instantly recognizable. They are here, all around, so many of them. The suppressed memories from over there haunt even the numbers here.

  And then I saw her, walking through the station, pulling a suitcase on wheels, walking with that lithe sway of her hips I liked so much, that I could feel in my hips, in my hands, when I saw her walking. I got up, said goodbye to the sociologist, who went on ticking boxes. I followed her. I did not get far. She took a taxi and disappeared. I have to meet her eventually, I thought, I have to meet her. I have to speak to her.

  How is it possible to imagine, given a social situation as dysfunctional as mine, that I could still have a love life? How is it possible to understand why women still allow me to take them in my arms? I don’t know. We are still Scythian horsemen. We owe our women to the prowess of our horses, the strength of our Scythian bows, the swiftness of our feet. Anyone who doubts it should take more interest in statistics. Statistics appear to say nothing, but they unwittingly describe how we behave. Social disintegration leads to isolation. Social integration promotes bonding. How is it possible, given my degraded social status, that some women are still prepared to kiss me? I don’t know. They are the oxygen, I am the flame. I gaze at women. I think of nothing else, as if my life depended on them: without them I would snuff out. I talk to them about themselves, at breakneck speed, and they are the story that I tell them. It keeps them warm, it gives me air. That’s right, that’s absolutely right, they say to me as I reflect on what they have just told me. The flame flares. And then they gutter out. They have used up all their air. I leave them panting, I am almost extinguished.

  But this woman, for some reason, made me burn hotter. I was no longer a candle flame but a furnace capable of melting anything, needing only more oxygen in order to leap before her, a blazing inferno.

  I often saw her, but only in the street. I constantly spotted her in the distance. It seemed to me some sensitive part of my being, the eye, the retina, that part of the brain that sees, everything receptive in me seemed to sense her presence wherever she was, and in the midst of the stream of cars, the trails of fumes, the scooters, the bicycles, the huge buses that blocked my view, the pedestrians randomly coming and going, in the midst of all this, I would immediately spot her. Her form was already traced upon my eager retina; I needed only the slightest clue and, among a thousand milling pedestrians, among hundreds of cars moving in contradictory orbits, I would see her. I saw only her. I was capable of extracting her presence with the sensitivity of a photon trap. I saw her often. She must have lived near me. I knew nothing about her, apart from the way she moved, the way she looked.

  She walked quickly in the street, using that particularity of walking that is the bounce. I saw her often. She crossed streets where I shuffled along with the elasticity of a bouncing ball, all elegant curves, never losing her energy, an energy contained within her, which rebounded on contact with the ground and propelled her ever forwards. In the congested, noisy street I could detect her presence from the slightest clue. I would notice her swaying gait as she moved through a crowd, seeing in the throng only her movement. And I would notice her hair from a distance. Her hair was completely grey, except for a few stray hairs that were utterly white. And this lent her apparition a strange clarity. Her hair whirled about her neck with the same exuberance as her gait; there was nothing drab about her hair, it was alive, billowing, dazzling despite being grey streaked with white. It framed her face like a halo of feathers, of silvery down, a tremulous cloud positioned as precisely as snow settling on the bare branch of a tree, with perfection, poise, certainty. Her pretty, finely delineated mouth with its full lips, she painted red. I did not know her age. She was ageless; she was my age, which I also did not know, unless, from time to time, I made the tally. I found these contradictory signs perplexed me vaguely. Intensely. But this ignorance of age, mine, hers, is not a dearth but a duration, the gentle current of individual time. She was every age combined, as real people are: the past she wore, the present she dances, the future about which she does not fret.

  I knew her as I knew my own soul, without ever having spoken to her. City life meant that we ran into each other several times a year, but the feelings it inspired made me feel as if it were every day. The first time I saw her lasted only a few brief seconds. The time it might take for a car at moderate speed to pass a shop window. I still had a car back then, which I spent a great deal of time parking, inching from one traffic light to the next, joining the queue of other cars, crawling through the streets little faster than those on foot. I saw her for only a few seconds, but this first image was imprinted on my eye like a rambler’s foot on soft clay. It lasts no longer than a single footstep, but the slightest details of his foot are imprinted there; if it should dry, it will be there for a long time. If it is fired, for ever.

  I still had a wife at the time. We were driving home through the dark streets and I saw her suddenly in the illumined window of a patisserie I knew. She was standing in the white fluorescent glare. I remember her colours: the violet of her eyes edged with black, the red of her lips, her skin ocellated with tiny freckles, the gleaming brown of her well-worn leather jacket, and, framing her face, the mixture of grey and white, the glistening snow that settled perfectly over her gestures, her beauty, over the fullness of her features. Those few seconds quite took my breath away. A whole life was presented to me, folded and refolded like a little note, a message tightly packed into a few short seconds. Those few seconds passing the window lit by fluorescent strips had a phenomenal density, a weight that would bow my thoughts the whole evening, and the night that followed and the next morning.

  I should, I thought, have stopped the car in the middle of the street and left it there, doors wide open, raced into the patisserie and thrown myself at her feet, even if she were to laugh. I would have offered her an eclair oozing Chantilly cream, so white. And while I gazed at her, mute, groping for words, while she tasted the delicate cream with the tip of her tongue, my car idling, doors open, in the middle of the street would have brought the traffic to a standstill. Other cars would have piled up behind it, blocking the street, then the neighbouring streets, the whole quartier and half of Lyon. Lined up on the bridges and the quays with no hope of moving forwards, they would have sounded their horns angrily, endlessly, no one able to do anything but moan loudly, while I searched for my words, accompanying the timorousness of my first declaration with a colossal chorus of massed horns.

  I did not do it. I did not think of it at the time; the shock was such that my mind was completely paralysed. My body carried on driving by itself; it parked the car and made it home; unaided, my body undressed itself, put itself to bed and slept, closing my flesh-and-blood eyelids out of habit, but even in their sheltering darkness my mind did not sleep, it carried on searching for words.

  I saw her without her knowing with a frequency that allowed me to believe that I was almost living with her. I knew her wardrobe. I recognized her umbrella in the distance. I noticed when she had a new handbag. I merely oriented myself towa
rds her. I did not do anything, did not speak to her. I never followed her. With the efficiency of a censor, I redacted from my memory the faces of the men who were sometimes with her. They changed, I think, though I never knew what connection they might have to her. When I moved back to Lyon after changing my life, I ran into her again. She moved through the same streets where I had seen her so often, as enduring as the spirit of place.

  There are people who believe that what is bound to happen, happens; I have no opinion. But opportunity had knocked so often and with such insistence, such constancy, and I had never answered, never opened, that I finally decided to speak to her. I was sitting in a large, empty café and there she was, a few tables away. I was not even surprised. A man was talking to her; she was listening with amused detachment. He left hurriedly, wounded, offended, and still she had the same faint smile that made her so radiant, and aware of that radiance, and amused by what was emanating from her. I felt relieved as I watched the man walk away. We were alone in this café, empty but for the two of us, sitting on distant benches, our backs to the mirrors, grateful for the silence that had finally descended. We both watched the man leave, gesturing angrily, and when he had stepped through the door, we looked at each other across the empty room, multiplied by the reflections in the mirrors, and we smiled at each other. The café could hold fifty people, there were only two of us. Outside it was dark. We could see nothing but the orange glow of the street lamps and rushing shadows; I got up and went over and sat opposite her. The beautiful smile still played on her full lips. She waited for me to speak.

  ‘You know,’ I said, although I did not know yet. ‘You know, I have been involved with you for years.’