by Alexis Jenni
Ink painting tends to be the penultimate trace of breath, the slight stirring of air that accompanies a murmur before it fades completely. This is what I want: to preserve the movement of language before it stops, to conserve the trace of breath and the moment that it vanishes. Ink becomes me.
I felt you quivering next to me, my heart; more than anything I longed to paint you; more than anything I yearned to approach you, to hear within you, to resonate within myself, the constant pulse of presence.
You left me in the morning, my heart, and you murmured as you kissed me that you would come back soon, very soon, and so I stayed in your apartment and waited. All alone in your apartment, without bothering even to get dressed. I wandered from room to room. It was not very big. There was the room where we had slept and a room whose window overlooked the Saône. I moved from one to the other, impregnating myself with you, although you were absent. I waited for you with the infinite patience of one who knows you will return. I spent time at the window. I looked at the bridge spanning the river in three arches, and when the smooth, glassy waters of the Saône reached the stone pillars its surface rumpled lazily, like the sheets of a bed with someone sleeping under them. I watched the gulls floating on the river, trying to rest on the water, which required them to perform slow loops if they were not to disappear into the distance, which demonstrates the impossibility of stopping while time continues to flow. They settle on the water, fold up their wings, and the current carries them along. Having been carried a few hundred metres downstream by the sluggish current of the Saône, whirling like plastic ducks, they shake their feathers, take to the wing, fly a few hundred metres upstream and land, and allow the current to carry them downstream again. Perhaps they manage to sleep between these brief flights to make up the time. They never float twice on the same water, yet always sleep in the same place. I leaned on the windowsill, taking the morning sun, watching the gulls and the people in the street. You cannot imagine what I have with you. Time restored; the stream flowing once more.
I saw a woman veiled in black coming into the building. I could see nothing of her but a moving shadow. A few moments later she left and disappeared around the corner. She came back carrying a full shopping basket, although I had not noticed a basket when she left. She went out again, but without the basket. She was carrying a bag. Instinctively, I looked at her shoes. She disappeared around the same corner only to reappear almost immediately, but without the bag. She came into the building. I leaned further out of the window the better to see her come in.
‘A lot of coming and going, huh?’
To my right, a middle-aged man in a vest was leaning on the wrought-iron railing of his window. Like me, he was watching the gulls on the Saône and the people in the street.
‘Absolutely. She never stops.’
‘They never stop. Plural, young man, plural. There are several of them. That woman you’ve been watching rushing around for a while is actually several women. They live in the big first-floor apartment.’
‘Together?’
He gave me a pitying look. He leaned further over the rusted iron railing, so he could whisper.
‘The guy on the first floor, the one with the beard, he lives with them all. He’s a polygamist.’
‘Officially? But you can’t marry multiple times, unless I’ve missed something…’
‘Well, he might as well. He lives with them all. I don’t even know how many there are. He’s a polygamist.’
‘They could be his sisters, his mother, his cousins…’
‘You’re blessed with a naivety that borders on stupidity. Or fascination. They’re his wives, I’m telling you. They’re married according to their own laws. They don’t respect our laws. They all pretend they’re the only wife so they can receive benefits, allowances they’re not entitled to. We signed petitions, made formal complaints to have them thrown out.’
‘Thrown out?’
‘Of the building – and out of France, while we’re at it. It’s intolerable, what they get away with.’
The polygamist came round the corner, bearded, smiling, wearing a crocheted kufi and a white gandoura; one step behind him floated a black shadow.
‘There he goes,’ said the neighbour.
Before coming into the building, he looked up and saw us. He smiled a strange, sardonic smile. He held open the door for the formless shadow accompanying him and let her go through, looked up again with the same mocking smile, then stepped inside. The neighbour at the next window, leaning on the railing like me, choked and muttered, ‘Fuck off back to where you came from,’ making a gurgling sound, since he was frothing with rage.
‘You see the nerve of the fucker? When the GAFFES are in power, he’ll be laughing on the other side of his face. There won’t be any sarcastic smirks. They’ll all be sent back where they came from.’
‘You’d like to see the GAFFES in power?’
‘Absolutely. As soon as possible. The guys who belong to GAFFES see things the way they really are and aren’t afraid to say so.’
‘Guys like Mariani? You think Mariani sees things the way they are?’
‘You know Mariani?’
‘Yeah, a little. But when it comes to seeing things and saying things, I think he’s all over the shop.’
‘I don’t give a toss. All I know is he bangs his fist on the table and we need men like that. To show them we’re not joking.’
‘Well, as far as that goes, he’s certainly not joking. Which is a pity, really.’
‘We have to show them. It’s the only language they understand. We can’t keep putting up with this.’
‘This?’
‘This.’
The first-floor neighbour re-emerged, followed by two floating shadows of the same height, impossible to tell apart. He walked stiffly, dressed all in white, and they followed behind. After a few steps he raised his head and shot us a mocking glance; his smile widened. He stopped and deliberately stuck out his tongue.
‘You see that! What did I tell you? A polygamist, right here under our roof, and he’s thumbing his nose at us.’
‘Makes you envious, doesn’t it?’
He stared at me, his eyes boring into my skull. He spluttered and slammed his window shut. I stood there alone, staring at the Saône, naked in the morning light. I was waiting for you in your apartment, my heart.
Salagnon had told me: with ‘them’ it always turns to rivalry, to who cuts who, who electrocutes who, who will fuck who. We desire each other too much to separate; we resemble each other too much to drift apart. If the GAFFES were in power, who would we throw out? Those who look a bit funny? And who would get to be the ‘we’ who throws them out? Those who feel united by blood? But what blood? Spilled blood? But whose blood?
Over there, Salagnon used to say to me, we tried to enforce a shameful boundary. We were determined. We got everyone involved, so that everyone would be implicated. Over there we were given free rein; we had carte blanche and we jeopardized everyone; we ensured that everyone took a pound of flesh from the victim. We. I’ve started to talk like Salagnon. I’m slipping into the style of Salagnon’s story. But what else can I do? We implicated everyone. We. I can’t say who ‘we’ were in the beginning, but it became everyone. Everyone is elbow-deep in blood. Everyone has their head in the bath of blood until they can’t drink any more, until they can’t breathe, until they throw up. We ducked each other’s heads in the bath of blood. And when it was all over, we acted like schoolboys caught in the act. We sauntered around, whistling innocently, hands behind our backs, looking around aimlessly. We behaved as though nothing had happened, as though they were the ones who started it. Everyone pretended to go home, because no one really knew who they were any more, no one really knew where ‘home’ was. We squeezed into the narrow confines of metropolitan France, packed tightly together, saying nothing, doing our best not to look to see who was there; and who was no longer here. France was leaving history. We decided to no longer be responsible for a
nything.
When the GAFFES appeared and began to monopolize the conversation, we – the mild-mannered, middle-class idiots – mistook them for a fascist group. We could replay the founding myths, we could ‘join the resistance’, something The Novelist used to write pages and pages about. We organized demonstrations. We decided they were the enemy, when in fact they were simply a flatulent sideshow to distract attention. They played on the notion of race, but race is little more than a fart, a flatus, a burp brought on by poor digestion, an unintelligible babble that masks something we do not want to see, because it’s so terrible, because it concerns us all, all the mild-mannered, middle-class idiots. We wanted to think of the GAFFES as a racist group, when in fact they are something much worse: an illegalist party, a party favouring self-segregation and the use of force, for whom colonialism is utopia on Earth. The reality of life in the colonies – the fake bonhomie and real beatings, the gentlemen’s agreements and the illegalism applied to all – is the true policy of the GAFFES, a ghost party that came back on the ships in 1962.
* * *
But who, then, are we? It is a question that is never asked. Identity is believed, it is invented. It can even be lamented, but it is not spoken. Open your mouth to define it and what comes out is gibberish; there is not a word to be said on the subject that is not nonsensical; keep talking and it becomes a madness. The separation of the races, utterly irrational, completely illegal, has no criteria that can be stated, but everyone practises it. It is tragic: we can feel it, but we cannot express it. A fart is meaningless. It is simply a fiction to describe identity, and it is a lie. We think about it and we think in vain, because identity in itself tends towards idiocy; it is idiotic, invariably, because it wants to be, itself, by virtue of itself; it wants to exist of and by itself. It leads nowhere.
If you listen to what people say, you might think that identity around here is Berrichon: an identity based on claggy soil and damp forest, an identity based on autumns and rains, of callow youths and felt hats, of manure heaps behind the farm and slate steeples that threaten to pierce the sky. You might think that the Mediterranean has nothing to do with identity around here. Surely it is incredibly false and stupid to be defined by the kingdom of Bourges? Because the Mediterranean is right there! The Mediterranean in all its forms, the distant Mediterranean, the Mediterranean right at our feet, the northern view of the Mediterranean, the southern view and even the side-view of the Mediterranean, la Méditerranée seen from everywhere and expressed in French. Our Sea. Rumour would confine us to the kingdom of Bourges, but I hear voices speaking in French, with different phrasings and strange accents, but in French I understand everything spontaneously. Identity is pure make-believe. Identity is simply self-identification. To believe it is inborn, in the flesh or in the earth; it is to stray into the lunacies that would have you believe in the external existence of something that animates the soul.
We feel the troubles. We do not know who exactly, but someone is stirring them. We are packed tightly in the narrow confines of France, not knowing exactly who, not daring to look, not saying a word. Following the wise precepts of The Novelist, we had set ourselves outside history. Nothing should happen – and yet. We try to identify who among us, trapped in narrow France, could be stirring up trouble. We talk around the subject of race without ever naming it. We have come to think of differences in religion as differences in nature. Race is a fart. The air here in cramped, confined France has become unbreathable; still the troubles continue. The origin of the violence is much more basic, much more French, but we are loath to see this naked truth. We prefer to be entertained by professional farters, to be part of an audience where supporters and opponents of farts rip each other to shreds. Our taste for literary squabbles is turning into a brawl.
The origin of the trouble, here and over there, is not simply a lack of respect and the fact that the unequal distribution of wealth is not shocking. This reason is utterly French, and the war over there was French from beginning to end. They were too much like us to go on living in the place we had assigned them. The coming riot will also be fought in the name of the République, values now somewhat watered down, eroded, as they have been by the understanding of lineage, by the illegal illegality, but values still cherished by those who, more than anything, want to live here. Here, because over there a war is waged between us, who are so alike, and we furiously seek out something that might distinguish us. The classification of faces is a military operation; the concealment of bodies is an act of war, an explicit refusal of any peace that does not entail the elimination of the other. The battlefield in civil wars is the image of the body, and any art of war consists of its abuse.
I saw Mariani on the front page of Le Progrès, but I may have been the only one, since the intent of the photo was not to show him. Le Progrès is the newspaper of Lyon. As it claims to anyone who might wish to read it, on posters, in small letters on the masthead, in huge letters on the sides of buses: ‘If it’s true, it’s in Le Progrès.’ Mariani was in Le Progrès. He was on the front page, in the corner of a large photo showing the police in Voracieux-les-Bredins. They were posing, proud and athletic in their militarized uniforms, hips girded with gun belts, trousers cinched at the ankles by parachute boots. Hands on their hips, they made a show of strength. The article quoted liberally from speeches which were panegyrics to power regained. ‘A new police force to counter delinquency and incivility. Return blow for blow. Take back the no-go areas surrounding the tower blocks, where the police do not venture, where by night the rule of law does not apply, retake the alleys and the car parks, the stairwells, the doorways and the halls, the public squares and the benches, which at night, and even during the day, have become the territory of menacing shadows moving through a constant haze of hashish fumes. Drug dealing. Brutality. Urban violence. The ancestral law of the caïds in the shadows of the towers. We must strike hard, assert the power of public authorities. Reassure genuine citizens.’
The photo was not of Mariani. It was a full-page photograph of the new police force in Voracieux-les-Bredins, the municipal force forged by willpower, equipped for shock and awe; but Mariani was there. In the crowd clustered around the boys in blue, around the musclemen of law and order posing in a show of force, I recognized him. He was present at the introduction of the first local anti-gang brigade. His face was not visible, no one knew who he was, but I knew, and I knew the role he played. In the crowd of faces I recognized the tinted glasses, the antiquated moustache, the hideous checked jacket; he was laughing. He understood his role. He was laughing silently in the crowd gathered around the police.
I bought a copy of the paper. I took it with me. I showed it to Salagnon, who immediately spotted Mariani in the crowd thronging around the musclemen, the sort of men France seems to turn out in large quantities and unthinkingly launches into the fray. How many private, municipal, national, militarized police forces are there? How many uniformed men trained in shock tactics? How many strongmen in France, whose strength is primed and misdirected?
The image of the policeman with his truncheon, his pot belly, his uniform cape wrapped around his arm to parry blows, is a part of a past we barely understand these days: how did we manage to maintain law and order without non-lethal weapons, without offensive weapons, with chubby men who could not run and barely knew how to fight? We find it difficult to believe. The Republic’s security companies, over-equipped, over-trained, over-efficient, take care of everything – sundry infractions, riots, abuse – they criss-cross France in armoured minibuses, stamping out trouble before it starts like stamping out small fires, sparking as many fires as they extinguish, only to be called in again and getting there too late, arriving like the cavalry to save the day, when they were partly responsible for the chaos. Oh, they are good at what they do! Three by three, behind their polycarbonate riot shields, one takes the force of the blow, the second props him up, the third has the truncheon ready to launch a counter-attack, seize the malefactor and drag
him to the back. They know how to fight better than anyone; they know how to operate; they are called in: they come, they see, they effortlessly conquer. They move around France like Roman legions. They douse fires, but fire breaks out again as soon as they leave. They are the elite, the shock troops; there are not enough of them. If they group together, they lose ground; if they spread out, they lose their strength. So they need to do further training, so they can move faster, strike harder.
‘They are as handsome as we once were,’ Salagnon sighed. ‘They have as much power as we once had, and it will be just as useless. They are as few as we once were, and those they hunt will always escape, into the jungles, into the stairwells and the basements, because their numbers are inexhaustible; they create as many as they catch. They will experience the same failure we once did, the same bitter, hopeless failure, because we had the power.’
There were violent clashes. At first it was minor, a hold-up at a casino, a robbery at the sort of business that anticipates such things and takes effective countermeasures, not a bakery. Some guy decided to turn gangster, to take money from a place where there were piles of it, rather than working for a living and being drip-fed. This can easily be explained in terms of free-market theory without becoming heated, without moralizing: it is simply an appraisal by a rational economic actor of the potential gains and losses. Things took a nasty turn. Following a chase and a series of gunshots, the thief was dead. That might have been the end of it, but his ancestry was mentioned; by common agreement, on all sides, his ancestry was discussed. It was enough to mention his name and his surname; that would indicate his bloodline. With this dead thief, sprawled in a housing estate with a bullet in his body, they did one of the above: they took a problem which essentially relates to microeconomics and turned it into a critical moment in history. On this, we were all agreed. This is what we thought: they come here, they come here armed with guns to try and take back the wealth accumulated in the city centre.