by Alexis Jenni
She walked beside me, silent and self-confident. We left the cinema and stepped out into the mid-afternoon roar and the heat of the pedestrianized street, where the crowds flowed in both directions. ‘I’m taking you to Voracieux,’ I said to her. ‘You’ll get to meet the man who’s teaching me to paint.’ We took the metro to the end of the line, then the bus. She was sitting next to me, her head on my shoulder; she was curious, but asked no questions. ‘He’s teaching me to try and paint. I’m not very good, but there’s nothing I want more.’ She kissed me gently. I thought of the terrible image at the end of the film that caused it to suddenly tip into falsehood, when every detail had been true, that image of the tank at Climat de France, like a slip of the tongue where we try to say what we think is the truth and end up telling the real truth, because of a single stubborn detail it’s impossible to hide.
Sitting in his ugly living room, I explained the situation to Salagnon. He laughed.
‘Of course I know what you’re talking about. I’ve been living with a pied noir for a long time.’
And he softly stroked the cheek of Eurydice, who was sitting next to him, and she gave a smile so gentle that all the wrinkles that marked her skin of crumpled silk vanished. Leaving only her beautiful, dazzling face. She was no older than that smile: a few seconds.
‘There’s nothing here, nothing that explains what you lived through. There’s not a single trace.’
With a sweeping gesture I took in the oppressive, impersonal decor all around us.
‘The absence of traces is the trace.’
‘Stop it with the Chinese aphorisms. It’s just bullshit to make things seem profound. Be honest.’
‘There should be traces, but there are none. I brought back Eurydice. If I want her to stay with me, we can never go back there; never. Otherwise she would be swallowed up by the well of bitterness left by the pieds noirs when they came here. I cannot go back, only rescue her from Hell and be with her, and never speak of what went before.’
‘What have you done since? Since you’ve been together?’
‘Nothing. Have you never wondered what happens to a man and a woman who meet in an action movie? They do nothing. The film ends, the lights go off, you go home. I made the little garden that you’ve seen where nothing much grows.’
‘You never had children?’
‘Not one. When you have lived through such a thing, either you have lots of children or you have none and you think only of yourself. We love each other enough, I think, to think only of ourselves.’
The two of them fell silent; they fell silent together and this was even more intimate than when they spoke together. I did not interrupt.
Through the open door I could see a hallway and, at the far end, a knife hung on the wall, swaying slightly, moved by some breeze, although I could feel nothing and the windows were closed. The battered leather sheath gave off a dark red glow, the colour of raw, undyed leather, the colour of the night that was just drawing in, the colour of a blade eaten away by rust, the colour of crusted blood covering the whole blade. It was impossible to see the blade sheathed in leather, sheathed in rust, sheathed in dried blood, all that was visible was a reddish emanation that swayed at the end of a piece of string hanging from a nail. Blood moves of itself, tirelessly, it gives off a dark glow, a gentle heat that keeps us alive.
‘Painting helped me,’ he said at length. ‘It helped me not to go back. Painting requires me to be here, nothing else; thanks to painting, my life can be content with a sheet of paper. I can teach you the art of the brush if you come to see me again. It is a humble art, adapted to what can be achieved with a human hand, a dense tuft of hair, a drop of water. The art of the brush, if you practise it faithfully, allows you to live without pride. It simply allows you to assure yourself that everything is there, in front of you, and that you have seen correctly. The world exists, and that is enough, even if it is crueller than you could possibly have imagined, and more indifferent.’
He fell silent again. I did not interrupt him. I could hear only our breathing, mine, hers, and the breathing of the two old people sitting facing us, this tall thin man and this woman with her finely furrowed skin, their slightly sibilant, slightly curdled breath, fitful from passing through their battered bronchial tubes, worn thin by years of breath. Sitting beside me, my heart did not say a word. She had been looking at Salagnon, hanging on his every word, staring at the old man who was teaching me something about which I knew nothing and who, in exchange, was teaching me an art I wanted to use with her. The light of evening streamed through the window veiled with muslin. Her bushy hair flecked with white haloed her like a swan’s feathers. Her firm lips glistened a deep red; her eyes gave off a glow that to my eyes looked violet; three blood-coloured stigmata at the heart of a cloud of feathers. I do not know what you were thinking just then, my heart; but had you known what I was thinking at that moment, as we all sat motionless, had you known what I was incessantly thinking about you, you would have nestled into my arms and stayed there for ever. I was convinced that through the open door, at the far end of the hallway, the knife in the scabbard hanging from a nail was moving.
Salagnon shifted his position with a grimace. He stretched his leg.
‘My hip,’ he muttered. ‘I get a pain in my hip sometimes. I don’t feel a thing for years on end and suddenly it comes back.’
I wanted to ask him what exactly pained him. Perhaps if I asked this man to tell me what torments him, I could heal his wounds. My heart beating, I shifted forwards in the drab, uncomfortable, shabby, velvet armchair. My heart was looming at me; she could sense that I was going to say something to him; she encouraged me with her eyes, her lips, with the three deep red glimmers haloed by swan’s feathers. I shifted forwards, but I lowered my eyes, and instinctively I picked up a small, heavy object that was lying on the coffee table. I had seen it there before, in the same little bowl, which was hardly surprising in Salagnon’s apartment, where everything was carefully placed with the precision one only sees in catalogues or in a television series. This dense object had always been there. I had never wondered what it was, because we never notice things that are always there. I had shifted forwards, falteringly, to the edge of my chair; it was in front of me, just within reach. I picked it up. It was heavy and compact, a couple of steel plates set into a Bakelite handle. I had never known what it was. That evening, I dared to ask him:
‘What is this thing that’s always here? A Swiss army knife? A souvenir? I thought you didn’t keep anything?’
‘Open it up.’
With a little difficulty I opened out the metal sections: a short, sharp, ordinary blade and a weighty awl about the length of a finger extended from the rusty handle.
‘It is a Swiss army knife. Only there’s no tin opener, no screwdriver, no serrated blade. What do you use it for? Collecting mushrooms?’
He smiled happily.
‘You don’t know what it is?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve never seen anything like it before?’
‘Never.’
‘It’s a break-neck blade, used to kill someone silently, you push the tip of the awl into the small hollow in the nape of the neck, at the base of the skull. A firm shove and it goes in easily. You use your other hand to cover the guy’s mouth; he dies instantly, and no one is any the wiser. It was designed for that very purpose; it’s the only thing it’s good for, killing guards without them crying out. I learned to use it. I taught others to use it. We carried them in our pockets when we were in the jungle. That one’s mine.’
He set the object back on the table, careful not to knock it, daring not to close it.
‘I’m glad you didn’t recognize it.’
‘I didn’t even know such things existed.’
‘We had tools for fighting wars. I come from a world no one understands any more. We killed each other with knives, splattering ourselves with the blood of others, wiping it away without thinking. These days, if someone blee
ds, it’s you; soldiers have no contact with anyone else’s blood. They don’t get close to each other, they kill at a distance, they use machines. The days are long gone when we could smell the other, feel the warmth, sense the fear of the other mingle with our own fear as we killed him. These days, I see TV commercials for the army. You can sign up, make a career for yourself; it’s a profession aimed at protecting people, saving lives, excelling yourself. The only lives we ever saved were our own; we protected when we could, but mostly we just tried to outrun death. I can finally die if you don’t recognize the tools of war. You can’t imagine how happy your ignorance makes me.’
I contemplated the object lying open on the table; now I recognized its simple purpose, it was clear from its form.
‘My ignorance makes you happy?’
‘Yes, it reassures me. It’s as though my uncle’s prophecy has finally come to pass: we will finally be able to end this. The last time I saw him was in prison. It only lasted a few minutes. I was ushered into his cell; the military guards couldn’t bring themselves to look me in the eye as they turned the keys, pushed the doors open. He had been sentenced to death. He was in solitary confinement, but there was the law and there was loyalty. They let me in, so I could see him one last time; they told me to be quick and to never mention the visit to anyone. He missed having his copy of the Odyssey. He knew the poem by heart now; he had finally finished learning it, but he would have liked to have it within reach, where it had always been for the past twenty years. There, in the prison, we didn’t have much to say to each other about events; a shrug of the shoulders was enough to convey the utter collapse of everything; the only other solution would have required a whole lifetime of recriminations; so he talked to me about the Odyssey, about how it ends. The end finds Odysseus and Penelope “Rejoicing in each other, they returned to their bed, the old familiar place they loved so well.” And when they have exhausted the pleasure of love, they give themselves over to the pleasure of conversation. But it does not end there. Odysseus must leave again, “must carry a well-planed oar until I come to a people who know nothing of the sea”. When finally he comes to a place where the people ask why he is carrying on his shoulder a fan to winnow grain, when he has gone so far that no one recognizes what an oar might be, he can stop, plant the oar in the earth like a tree; only then can he journey home to have a gentle, painless death steal upon him.
‘My uncle was sad that he, too, could not live to this end of ease and forgetfulness, when no one recognized the tools of war. At the time, everyone was still killing everyone else. Everyone had learned to kill and waited to be killed. Guns circulated freely in Algiers, everyone had them, everyone used them. Algiers was havoc, a bloody labyrinth; men killed each other in the streets, in the apartments, tortured each other in cellars, dumped bodies into the sea, buried them in gardens. And all those who fled to France had weapons stuffed into their suitcases, bringing home the terrified memory of all the guns they had ever seen. All their lives they would recognize them, they would forget nothing, and it would be a narrow cage around their heart, preventing it from beating. We will find peace only when everyone has forgotten this twenty-year war in which men were taught to trap, to murder, to inflict pain like so many craft skills. My uncle knew he would not see that peace, that he did not have the time. He had finally managed to learn his book by heart, and he knew that this was the end. We said goodbye and I left the cell.
‘The following morning my uncle was shot by firing squad for high treason, plotting against the République and the attempted assassination of a head of state. Attempted, the charge specified, because they botched it; they botched everything. I’m still surprised that men who had been so effective in other circumstances could have been so sloppy. In that final uprising, all they managed to do was kill people indiscriminately. They simply aggravated the atmosphere of terror, decided who was guilty more or less at random and gunned them down; they interfered in the politics and their only achievement was the most simplistic, the stupidest political act, the most ridiculous display of strength: kicking a dog, putting a bullet in the first head they saw. In their desperation at the end, people killed passers-by. In return they ensured ignominy, waste, their own death and that of others. The river of time cannot be diverted or even slowed by throwing stones into it; they didn’t understand anything.’
He sat up a little, winced, brought a hand to his hip. Eurydice gently ran her slender, liver-spotted hand over his thigh. I had to ask him now. He had taught me to paint, he had told me his story; I knew every modulation of his pain, every timbre of his voice. I had to ask him what it was, this torment that followed him everywhere, this pain that had been boring into his hip for so many years, this nagging wound that no one wants to know about any more in this world in which he was barely alive, in which I would live on.
‘Monsieur Salagnon,’ I asked finally, ‘did you torture?’
She looked at me, my heart, as she sat next to me. She held her breath. At the far end of the hallway, the knife hanging from the nail swayed, glowing a reddish crimson glow that might have been the leather, the dying light or dried blood. Salagnon smiled at me. For him to smile at that moment was the worst possible thing he could do. You were quivering next to me, my heart, your eyes, your lips, three bloodstains in a halo of swan feathers.
‘That’s not the worst thing we did.’
‘What could be worse?’ I yelped, my voice sounding shrill.
He shrugged. He spoke to me gently. He was patient.
‘Now the war is ended, the war that lasted twenty years and consumed my entire life, all people talk about is the torture. They try to find out whether it really happened or they deny it did; they want to know whether reports of it were exaggerated or not; they point the finger at those who carried it out. It’s all anyone thinks about. But it’s not the issue. It was never the issue.’
‘I’m talking to you about torture and you’re telling me it’s just a detail?’
‘I didn’t say a detail. I said it was not the worst thing we did.’
‘What, then? What was worse?’
‘We failed humanity. We carved it into groups when there was no reason to. We created a world in which, judging simply by someone’s face, by the way they pronounced a name or spoke the language that was common to us, they could be classed as subject or citizen. Everyone was pigeonholed, a pigeonhole passed down from father to son, one that could be read in a man’s face. This was the world we had agreed to defend; there was no atrocity we would not have committed to preserve it. From the moment we accepted the untold violence of colonialism, whether we did this or that was just a matter of scruples. We should never have come; but I came. We all behaved like butchers, every one of us, all twelve antagonists in that terrible war. Everyone was meat to be battered by everyone else. We slashed, we hit out with whatever was to hand until we had reduced the others to a bloody pulp. Sometimes we tried to be chivalrous, but it was never more than a fleeting thought. The fact that the other was evil proved that we were justified; our survival depended on our separateness, on their debasement. And so we distinguished between accents, we laughed at names, we sorted human faces into categories, each assigned with a clear-cut action: arrest, suspicion, elimination. Generally, we made things simple: them and us.’
Salagnon squirmed. He could not bring himself to stop, because he was expressing the realization that had come to him, year on year, one he had never had anyone to whom he could tell it. Not because nobody talks about it – on the contrary, everybody talks about that war, but it just results in a garbled cacophony of bitterness and hatred. The roles of victim and executioner are constantly shifting among the twelve protagonists in that terrible war, and in the social milieu I grew up in, it was accepted without question that Salagnon and his like had been the bad guys. The so-called silence surrounding the twenty-year war was a deafening row, a vicious circle where everyone joined in that went round and round, endlessly avoiding the crux of the problem. If over
there was also France, then who were the people living over there? And if they are living here, who are they now? And who are we?
Victorien and Eurydice, between them more than a century old, sat huddled together, frail and wrinkled, two relics of the twentieth century whose breathing we could hear, she and I, she sitting next to me, their slight sibilant breath, like a light wind fluttering paper.
‘Colonial rot was eating away at us. We all behaved inhumanly, because the situation was impossible. Only within our armed gangs did we behave with even a shred of the respect that all men owe each other if they are to remain men. We stuck together. There was no humanity, there were only comrades and enemy meat. In taking power, this was what we wanted: to organize France like a Boy Scout camp, one modelled on the bloodthirsty units that roamed the countryside following their capitaine. We imagined a republic of comrades who would be feudal and fraternal, who would follow the lead of the most worthy. We considered it egalitarian, logical, thrilling, like those times we spent together in the mountains cleaning our guns by the light of the campfire. We were naive and strong. We mistook a whole country for a gang of boys in their own little world. We were the honour of France at a time when honour was measured by one’s capacity to murder, and I don’t quite know where it all went.