by Alexis Jenni
Because the distribution of wealth in the world we live in is far from clear: there is obviously no correlation to the efforts expended. So it is possible to imagine that what we have earned we have in fact stolen; and that we are entitled to take what we have not earned. And when the poor are identified by their facial features, by the sound of their names, it is possible to believe that one racial group wants to take back what another has taken from it. It is possible to believe that certain facial features, taken to express a common ancestry, will choose to demand reparations. Such things tend to be settled with guns, but they could be settled through sex. Within three generations, sex would muddle facial features and confuse ancestries, leaving only language intact; but we prefer guns. We cover women with black tarpaulins. We keep them at home. We hide them and we brandish guns. Weapons offer immediate gratification. The effects of sex are a long time coming.
There were violent incidents. It began with something minor. A hold-up in a place where a man can flaunt the fact that his wealth is worth that of a thousand others or a hundred thousand others; in a world in which money is flourished like a taunt, in which one does not have to go far to help oneself, in which guns can be bought cheaply. A heist is a simple solution, a rational, feasible strategy; there are movies about it. But in our world there is another factor: ancestry can be read in faces. This means that every social problem is coupled with an ethnic problem, which is further aggravated by historical unrest. Violence flares, it only takes a spark. A riot is brewing; a riot is fun, a riot is coming.
It started with something trivial: a hold-up. A man turned gangster. He wanted to help himself. He was killed. If this had simply been about money, there would be nothing more to say. But his ancestry was highlighted. The hold-up, followed by the chase, triggered a state of siege. There were violent incidents: several nights of unrest and insomnia, the glow of fire reflected on the high ramparts of towers, dustbins set ablaze, cars burning and exploding when the flames licked at the petrol tank; there were several nights of stones being thrown at firefighters who came to douse the fires, of catapult bolts raining down on the police officers who came to protect the firefighters, to restore order, to dissolve the thrombosis threatening to choke the city; the hail of objects crackled in the night that glowed with petrol fires, on the riot shields and the helmets, a dangerous shower of steel hailstones; there were gunshots, several of them in the darkness, fired with singular ineptness; gunshots that killed no one, that scarcely wounded; less than a steel nut fired from a slingshot, which might fracture a skull, break a hand, but a gunshot is a different matter. They had not come for this, the young men who arrive in the armoured column; they had not come to be the target; they were athletic and efficient, they were trained, but they were civilians. They seized, they searched, they frisked without the slightest consideration; they threw people to the ground, slapped on the plastic handcuffs, dragged them up by their armpits and shoved them into wagons with barred windows. This they could do flawlessly – these young men had just completed their training; most of the men in the anti-gang brigades sent into these cities are very young; they are just starting out; they understand the tools, the procedures, the techniques, but they know little about people. They arrive in armoured columns to the roar of fires and the hail of stones; they take prisoners, they wreak havoc and they leave again. They are peacemakers. We have the power. Our national reflexes are like mantraps.
In the days that followed, six young men were arrested, based on tip-offs; all were released for lack of evidence the following day. There was no proof, no case, the tip-offs were anonymous. The riot swelled; riots are fun. Militarized police leapt from their armoured minibuses in full riot gear, shielded themselves from the hail of stones and bolts, arrested anyone who could not run fast enough. The riot carried on. It is useless to be so powerful. The use of force is absurd, because the nature of the world is liquid; the harder you hit, the harder the surface, the greater the force exerted, the greater the resistance, and if you go on hitting you crush yourself. It is our force that actually produces the resistance. Of course it is possible to dream of destroying everything. It is the dream outcome of force.
Hoarding money creates thieves, gunning down a thief starts a riot, quashing the riot strikes the country so forcefully that is seems like two, two countries occupying the same space, fighting to the death to extricate themselves. We are so entwined that we scrabble for anything to disentangle us. A curfew was imposed. A law from over there was exhumed; using it was like pouring petrol on the fire. Foreign gang-members were accused of instigating the riot, but those caught in the nightly round-ups were neither foreign nor gang members, they were simply disappointed. They had been promised they would be treated the same; the law guaranteed they were the same, and yet they are not. You only had to look at them so see the difference. On the basis of their facial features, young men were arrested who were ordinary, educated, eager to be a part of France, yet found themselves pushed to the sidelines for illogical reasons we cannot seem to overcome. We don’t even know what to call them. We don’t know who we are. This is something that someone needs to write.
When they invited me to go fishing, I was momentarily taken aback. This made them laugh.
‘What’s so surprising about us go fishing? I mean, we’re old fogeys, so it’s hardly strange that we have old fogey hobbies. We wade into the middle of the river and wait there, without moving, for the fish to come. It relieves the passing time, consoles us for the times gone by; as for the time to come, we don’t care: it’s so slow in coming when we’re at home that it might as well not bother. Come with us.’
Mariani had two of his lads take his Zodiac dinghy down to the river, across a shingle beach where it was possible to get the four-by-four and trailer close to the greenish water. We climbed aboard the rubber dinghy, loaded the plastic boxes, the fishing lines, enough food and drink for the day and a little more. We sat on the inflatable tube. All the equipment was military green. A cool, clear sun rose. We took off our waterproof parkas. The soft light warmed everything it touched. Mariani started the outboard motor and we left the two lads on the bank with the four-by-four and the trailer. They watched us move off, hands in their pockets, kicking at the shingle.
‘Are they going to stay there?’
‘They’ll wait for us. They know that war is mostly about waiting, the way we used to in the foxholes in the jungle or crouching behind hot stones. They’re training.’
We headed down the Rhône, flanked by gallery forests; the clean lines of the white buildings rose above the treetops. Beneath the overhanging branches were stretches of shingle. Men came and stood there. They took off their coats, opened their shirts, some stripped to the waist. Their eyes half-closed, they let themselves be painted pink and gold by the mellow sun. They formed a curious collection of silent, half-naked beach attendants. Mariani suddenly accelerated. We clung to the rubber dinghy. The Zodiac reared up and skimmed across the water, leaving behind a wake like a trench carved in the water. He headed towards the shore, turned hard and a huge wave splashed the men standing there, who scattered. ‘Chicken-shit landlubbers!’ he roared, turning back to them, and this made them laugh.
‘Stop it, Mariani,’ said Salagnon.
‘I can’t stand them,’ he grumbled.
‘It’s illegal.’
‘Don’t give a fuck if it’s illegal.’
He came back to the middle and headed straight downriver, the motor whining as he skimmed the current, the Zodiac bouncing off the hard surface of the water.
‘Who exactly are you talking about?’
‘If you don’t know, you don’t need to know – much like a lot of things.’
They both laughed. We crossed Lyon at water lever. Mariani steered, keeping a steady hand on the rudder, his feet firmly wedged against the bottom of the boat. The engine thundered, pushed to the maximum. We sped along smoothly, we cleaved space with no resistance, we were strong and free, we would pounce upon o
ur prey, the fish, as deftly as kingfishers. We passed the confluence and sailed several kilometres upriver on the calmer waters of the Saône. We stopped on the glassy river between two lines of trees. Huge mansions of golden sandstone looked down on us with their antique, unruffled air; large, middle-class houses lay languidly at the far end of manicured lawns. We fished. For a long time, in silence, each with our own line. We baited the hooks. Salagnon plonked – I don’t know the technical term, but he beat the water with a hollow tube that made a hollow, plonking sound that resonated through the water. This attracted the fish, those that were half-asleep and slithering through the mud. They woke up, came to the surface and took the bait without thinking. Each of us fished, chatting lazily about nothing much. A satisfied sigh said all there was to say. They got along well. They always seemed to understand each other. They could laugh at a single word pronounced a certain way. Their conversation was cryptic, allusive, and I couldn’t understand it, because the roots of my language did not extend so deeply in time. So I asked questions, explicit questions, about what had happened. They answered me, then we carried on fishing. The soft sunshine kept us warm without ever burning us. The size of our catch was ludicrous. But we drained all the bottles we had brought.
‘And the German, what became of him?’
‘He died over there, with all the rest. The equipment, the people, it was all second hand, it didn’t last; it quickly gave up the ghost. We fought a second-hand war with the surplus from other adventures, with American weapons, soldiers that had deserted from other armies, patched-up English uniforms, with resistance fighters with nothing better to do and blue-blooded officers who dreamed of glory: all second-hand equipment of no use anywhere else. He died in his own shit, where his fate took him. He was in Diên Biên Phu. He was manning a trench with his Teutonic legionnaires. He withstood the shelling and the assaults. He was captured with the others when the position fell. He was taken into the jungle and died of dysentery in one of the Viet camps. People died quickly in those makeshift, poorly guarded camps; they died of exhaustion, of malnutrition, of neglect. They caught tropical diseases; they ate rice and leaves, sometimes with a little dried fish.’
‘Were you ever prisoners?’
‘Mariani was, I wasn’t. He was also captured in Diên Biên Phu, but he survived. The kid he was when I first knew him was battle-hardened by then. He had become a madman. That helps you not to go under. I was there when he came back, when the prisoners were exchanged, not many of them, all skin and bone: he marched behind Bigeard and Langlais, as thin as a rake, his eyes wild, but his beret firmly crammed on his head, properly tilted, as if he were on parade; and they all marched in step, even though they were about to collapse, barefoot on the dirt track, in front of the inscrutable Viet Minh officers. He wanted to show them.’
‘I was in good shape when I was captured. The German was, too, but he had spent too long living in a kind of no-man’s-land. He had had enough, I think. He just gave up. The guys who stood around waiting, who had nothing to cling to, they died quickly. I was fuelled by rage.’
‘What about you, Salagnon?’
‘Me? I was nearly one of them. I’d volunteered to go with them. A certain number of us had volunteered to rejoin the fighting just before the end. With magnificent thoughtlessness, our requests were granted. I was scheduled to be in the last flight. I was standing on the airstrip, parachute on my back, helmet on my head. Most of us had never jumped in our lives. We were getting into the plane when the engine stalled. Kaput. We all had to get out again. By the time it was fixed, Diên Biên Phu had fallen. I regretted it for a long time.’
‘Regretted not being a prisoner, not being killed?’
‘You know, of all the suicidal, bullshit things we got up to, that was the worst. But it was the only thing we didn’t have to be ashamed of. We knew the last positions were about to fall, air support could do nothing, the rescue party would never arrive, and still dozens of us volunteered to go there, so as not to let them down. The high command, intoxicated by the smell of bravura, authorized this final, foolish stunt, supplied the parachutes and aircraft, and came and stood to attention to see us off. We didn’t have much left after all the years of war, we had lost most of our human qualities; all we had left was intelligence and compassion; all we had left was the furia francese. Senior officers, with their gold-braided kepis and their decorations, lined up in silence and saluted the planes as they took off, carrying guys with a one-way ticket to a camp in the jungle. We wanted to die together, that would have wiped out everything. But, unfortunately, we survived. We came back changed, our minds furrowed with ugly creases we would never get out. The Viets just dragged us into the jungle, fed us very little; they scarcely bothered guarding us and we watched each other melt away and die. We learned that even the strongest mind can self-destruct when left to fret and languish.’
He fell silent for a minute, because there was a tug on his line. He pulled it up too quickly and a bare hook appeared. The fish had eaten the bait and gone back to sleep in the mud, without us noticing. He sighed, re-baited the hook and carried on.
‘Obviously we were walking into the lion’s den, but only to kill it. It had to end: we resorted to shock tactics; we were trying to provoke it. It worked and we lost. It all depended on a bluff, a single strike that would decide everything. We went up into the mountains, far from Hanoi, to serve as bait. We had to seem weak to lure them in, but to be strong enough to destroy them when they came. But we were not as strong as we thought and they were much stronger than we anticipated. They had bicycles they pushed through the jungle. I saw them myself, but no one would ever believe me, everyone just left when I talked about the bikes. While our planes, hampered by the mist and the cloud, had trouble transporting supplies, their bicycles could negotiate the jungle trails, bringing the rice and the munitions that meant they were invincible. We had limited power. We were an army of second-hand goods merchants. We didn’t have the means. We didn’t have enough machines, so we sent the best of what we had: ourselves, beautiful human machines, the light airborne infantry; we dropped from the skies into muddy trenches, just like in Verdun, to be buried alive to the last man. We were captured, we gave up, we left. We were good losers, though. But I wasn’t there. I survived. It would have been better if we’d lost everything; what came after would never have happened. We would have remained clean, purified by our deaths. That’s what I regret. It’s absurd.’
The light became thicker, piercing the golden, sandstone mansions sculpted from translucent honey, dusk was drawing in.
‘And your father?’
‘I never saw my father again after 1944. I was in the Haute-Région when I got the news of his death in a letter from my mother that had taken months to arrive; the paper was buckled, the edges frayed from so much handling; there were whole sentences where the ink was washed out, as though she had been crying when she wrote it, but I knew it was just the humid weather in the jungle. Something sudden; his heart, I think. It didn’t really affect me, his death. I saw my mother after I came back from Algeria; she was tiny and so thin, and she hardly remembered anything. She lived for a few months in a hospice, where she just sat, silent, expressionless, her eyes vacant and bulging slightly; her atrophied brain couldn’t store anything. She died without even realizing. I had never tried to see them after I got back. I was afraid.’
‘Afraid? You?’
‘Never wanted to turn around, never wanted to look back. Why would I? To see the people whose deaths are on my conscience? I was doing fine. But the father, unfortunately, is unavoidable; the man whose blood we carry has already ploughed the furrow which we will drain away. We follow it without realizing; we believe we are simply going a little way only to find we cannot get out without undertaking expensive excavation works. I look like him, our faces are identical; I was afraid that in seeing him I would see my own end. The circus of his life disgusted me, the constant playing with rules, playing with words, the constant self-jus
tification, all the things I didn’t want to learn. It took me three wars to get away from that furrow, and I don’t know whether I’ve gone far enough. I think painting saved me. Without it, like Mariani, I would have retreated to a small world where I had control, where the windows were closed, ruled by dreams and power.’
‘Your world isn’t exactly big,’ grunted Mariani. ‘A blank piece of paper. I wouldn’t want it.’
‘I had no desire to be where other people wanted me to be.’
‘And that’s why you lived a life full of adventures? A life you could be proud of?
‘I’m proud of nothing, except maybe being alive. I did what I did and nothing can undo it. I don’t really know what my life is. There are things you cannot decide for yourself.’
‘Salagnon is no adventurer,’ Mariani interrupted. ‘He’s just a guy with an itchy arse.’
‘What?’
‘When he’s been sitting down too long, he needs to stretch his legs. In a different age, sport and a bit of travelling would have done the business. He might have been a mountaineer or an ethnologist, but he grew up during that brief period when you could handle weapons without meaning any harm. Before that, it was considered pathetic; afterwards, it was shameful, in France at least. If he had been born earlier or later, his whole life would have been different. He might have been a painter, a real painter, and I wouldn’t have taken the piss. I would have admired his delicate sensibilities.’