The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  In the study halls every boarder had a locker. Cau’s locker soon became a veritable grocery store, with set opening and closing times, operated under the noses of the surveillants. Paris was then swarming with American GIs on leave, selling cartons of cigarettes, chocolate, sweets, chewing gum, tinned food, shirts, trousers, jackets and every conceivable uniform. There were particular trading posts; you simply had to know where they were. Cau knew them and the future writer proved to have a real talent as a black marketeer, selling what he bought from the Americans to boarders and day pupils at the lycée, and not just to khâgneux but to the taupins – the maths students – at prices that made it possible for him to quickly amass a small fortune. He operated with a grim determination, indifferent to what the talas (talas, in the codified language of the khâgneux, meant ‘ceux qui vonT-À-LA messe’, ‘those who went to mass’) thought of him, and he was such a brilliant student and his essays so exceptional that their admiration soon equalled the contempt they felt for his work as a black marketeer. It quickly became clear to me that my best friend did not give a damn whether he passed the entrance exam to get in to the École normale supérieur. He had only two, non-conflicting interests in life: literature and women. This brought us even closer. He wanted to be a writer and, as I will show later, never has a vocation been so determined, proclaimed and so soon realized. We spent every Saturday night in a battle worthy of Corneille between our duties and our desires, between our passion for language and the pursuit of women, something which, in itself, required language of a very different order, the more so as our words had to compensate for our lack of money, our inability to buy a girl dinner or, very often, even a drink. Cau was an indefatigable talker, he had a fine knowledge of the classics and liked to declaim pieces by Valéry or Péguy. I remember one night just before dawn, on the Champs-Élysées near the place de la Concorde, both of us having already walked at least twenty-five kilometres, when he began reciting Péguy in a lyrical voice that delighted in itself, and which was directed at himself rather than at me:

  Mother, here lie your sons who fought so hard

  Happy those who died for the carnal earth

  But only if it be for a just war…

  He was a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist, his favourite writer that first winter we spent hunting was Montherlant, the Montherlant of Les Jeunes filles [Young Women], Le Démon du bien [The Demon of Good), Pitié pour les femmes [Pity the Women), La Reine morte [The Dead Queen], ‘Portugal splayed like a naked woman upon the flank of Spain’. The whole summer that followed our first year at Louis-le-Grand, while I was on holiday in Brioude learning to fly on ‘the Beam’, I received long, fervent letters from Cau in which he did his utmost to inculcate in me his righteous passion for Henry de Montherlant. So I read Montherlant, I liked some of his books, but I was much less systematic than my friend who invariably went his own way and whose mind was all but impossible to change. Sadly, I lost those letters. Later, I met Montherlant shortly before his suicide, standing upright in his low-ceilinged apartment on the quai Voltaire, hieratic, inwardly watchful, masked by solitude and the prideful knowledge of his forthcoming death, which saddened me when it was announced. But I realize that these last sentences could have applied just as well to Cau himself when, some fifteen years ago, he discovered he had an incurable, terminal disease. He barricaded himself behind the same pride, refused to be seen as diminished, fearing above all else the pity that his illness might evoke. He and Montherlant both dealt with death. Cau and I were on bad terms for a long time, or rather life put us on bad terms, but I remember, while on a plane between Paris and New York, reading his magnificent portrait of Sartre – precise, intelligent, affectionate and hilarious – in his book Croquis de mémoire [Sketches From Memory], and the first thing I did when I reached my hotel room in Manhattan was to call him to convey my admiration, to tell him my friendship held fast, and that I embraced him. He was, I think, as moved as I was. We met up as soon as I returned to Paris. Our quarrel was over.

  But I have gone too fast. Why? I will return to our twenties. The Champs-Élysées was our favourite hunting ground; tirelessly, we walked up and down the ‘most beautiful avenue in the world’, a well-deserved appelation, as much for its subtle opulence, the style and sophistication of the shops that lined the avenue, as for our reasons for hanging out there. Whenever we went there we were amazed – as though each time were the first – by the majestic sweep connecting the place de la Concorde with the Arc de Triomphe. Nowadays, you can no longer ‘see’ the Champs-Élysées, blighted as it is by fast-food restaurants, ugly shops and overcrowded pavements that make strolling impossible, the ceaseless roar of the traffic. Back then, there were girls who sauntered down the Champs-Élysées, girls who loitered, alone or in pairs, they were in no hurry, they had time, we could spot them, weigh them up, follow them or walk past, accost them. We had devised a highly democratic system, perfected over the course of our adventures. The principal rule was that we took turns; regardless of the charms or the appeal of the prey we lusted after, only he whose turn it was to take a chance had the right to do so, even if the other’s previous attempt had ended in failure. If, for example, it was Cau’s turn, I would hang back, following from a respectful distance, yet close enough to read and interpret the signs he made according to a mutually agreed, strictly observed code: scratching his right ear meant ‘For pity’s sake, keep following us, this is never going to work out’; a hand on his thigh meant ‘I’m not sure! Don’t leave!’; a clenched fist: ‘There’s hope, but don’t go yet…’; left hand raised, fingers splayed: ‘Success! I’ve nailed her! Get on with your life!’ This last scenario was rare, but the proportion of conquests, both for him and for me, all things considered, was not insignificant. As I said, we had no money, or so little that we had to compensate with words, words so stunning they would literally stun the object of our desire. Cau and I were past-masters of the art, and yet how often – discovering some hint of stupidity or nullifying vulgarity in a girl we had all but conquered – how often did we abandon her, hoping that the other was still somewhere nearby so we might carry on the wild, interminable conversation that was the warp and weft of our youth?

  Just as a lioness teaches her cubs to hunt, so Monny taught my brother and me – Cau sometimes joined the hunting party – the tricks of seduction, the thousand ruses and stratagems all based on the element of surprise created by his dazzling mastery of language and his genuinely surrealistic ability to shock. Sometimes, after dinner on a summer evening, he said to Paulette as she meandered through the apartment, ‘I’m taking them out: they need educating.’ She gave us her blessing, enfolding us in her beaming smile, and we stamped with joy since Monny, as we well knew, was imaginative and entirely devoid of what people mistakenly call human respect, in other words conformity. So we strolled along the peaceful avenues around the École militaire under street lamps that cast our shadows on the pavement. A tall, beautiful woman of about thirty with a stern face followed by her female companion was about to pass us when suddenly Monny’s sepulchral tones stopped her in her tracks, irresistibly so: ‘Oh, madame, do not step on my shadow, it is in pain!’ Without allowing her to go on her way or regain her composure, Monny took her hand, kissed it ceremoniously and, gesturing to me, said, ‘May I introduce my stepson Claude, a brilliant boy, a boarder at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, who has just come back from the war.’ (It was just Monny and me that particular night.) The lady was completely disarmed by this unusual situation: seduction is not generally a family activity. Monny did the talking, I said nothing; he sang my praises, making me an object of desire. We learned that the beautiful woman’s name was Élise and that she owned a hairdressing salon with twenty staff in the 16th arrondissement. Monny suggested – as he invariably did, he was never unfaithful to my mother – that she come back and have a drink at our place on the rue Alexandre-Cabanel as Paulette would be delighted to meet her. And so it was: Élise, her head in a spin, at once flattered and interroga
ted by my mother, fell in love with the family as a whole and could not resist the praise heaped on me. She became my mistress the following Saturday: we would meet either in my chambre de bonne, which, being terribly bourgeois, excited her immensely, or in a boudoir of the vast apartment on the rue de Longchamp she shared with a husband she no longer loved, whom she despised, in fact, as is often the case when a woman decides to take a lover. The ritual differed according to which room we were in. The chambre de bonne did not lend itself to languor, to foreplay; it barely lent itself to talk. The boudoir, on the other hand, was a small but exquisitely appointed room, the walls were hung with drapes, there were comfortable armchairs, deep sofas, a mahogany door that opened on to a bar generously stocked with hard liquor. Since I was studying philosophy, my beautiful patronne insisted that I give her lessons. It was imperative, when we met at the rue de Longchamp, to begin with elevated conversation, objections and, on my part, responses designed to win her over. From these lofty heights, Élise elevated herself further, sipping glass after glass of vieil armagnac until finally she bowed her blonde head and her pronounced jaw towards my erect penis, nibbling along the length of it through my trousers in an agonizingly pleasurable torment while I – such was our ritual – continued to philosophize. I was not allowed to stop until she suddenly decided to ravish me, opening my trousers and freeing my penis, not bothering to undress herself, her skirt like a corolla concealing the wrongdoing. As she straddled me, she repeated with mounting passion, ‘You’re so handsome, Claude, so handsome, oh Claude, you’re so handsome.’ I was unaware that I had been gifted with such great beauty and only much later, in my chambre de bonne, did I realize what ‘you’re so handsome’ meant. One morning, after a rough night, just this once I failed to rise to the occasion, and Élise’s face, contorted with anger, became hateful as she spat, ‘oh Claude, you’re not handsome any more.’ So beauty was tumescence and detumescence was non-beauty; such is idealism. I was probably in the same state as Monny when he was being inspected by the Gestapo’s fake doctors. I told the story that night over dinner, and for years ‘you’re so handsome’ and ‘you’re not handsome any more’ were common family catchphrases.

  To tell the truth, although, as I said earlier, Cau and I were past-masters in the art of using words to seduce, I hate, loathe in fact, with every fibre of my being, the billing and cooing of courtship, a waste of time, conventional clichés, nothing but air. The older I got, the less I went along with it, and these days I head straight, as Husserl might say, for ‘the thing itself’, die Sache selbst, which, as it happens, suits me. This repugnance probably explains my taste for womanly women and my lack of interest in virgins. I don’t like to seduce. I understood the reasons for this in October 1943, fifteen months before I met Cau. In the boarders’ study hall of the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, a student a little older than me, with a high forehead and piercing blue, slightly bulging eyes, hair that was already white, a slight figure and a gentle voice, who moved in a silent glissade rather than a stride, came up to me and presented me with a heavy tome as an offering, telling me, ‘You must read this.’ It was Sartre’s L’Être et le néant [Being and Nothingness], which had just been published. My fellow student’s name was Granger – Gilles-Gaston Granger – who, as we know, grew up to be a celebrated epistemological philosopher. Only one other person – later, in our khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand – gave me that same feeling that I was dealing with a born philosopher, and he too was called Gilles: Gilles Deleuze. Filled with fear and trembling, I plunged into L’Être et le néant, losing courage as I read the thirty-page introduction, crushed by the pre-reflexive cogito, the being of percipi and of percipere. I would have been put off philosophy for life were it not that the book suddenly became fantastically concrete, luminous, illuminating, in particular the chapter on mauvais fou [bad faith]. This would later serve me in one of my classes at the University of Berlin, which, as it happens, was about seduction and in which I linked Sartre and Stendhal, L’Être et le néant and Le Rouge et le noir [The Red and the Black]. Sartre spends a whole page on the billing and cooing between a woman who goes on a first date with the man who is courting her. She is profoundly aware that the goal is fornication; Sartre writes, ‘but the desire, cruel and naked, would humiliate and horrify her’. Her suitor must show her admiration and respect, must address himself to her personality, to her whole freedom, yet at the same time make her feel the passion that her sexual body inspires. She does not want one without the other, admiration and respect must signify desire; sexual desire is acceptable only if it is dressed up in a spirituality that transcends the bonds of earth. ‘Now suppose he takes her hand,’ Sartre goes on.

  This act of her companion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave the hand there is to consent in herself to flirt. To take it away is to break that troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next: the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it […] because it happens that she is, at this moment, all intellect. She draws her companion up to the most lofty regions of sentimental speculation […] And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion – neither consenting nor resisting – a thing.

  Death to idealism. Even if L’Être et le néant is a work of hard philosophy, Sartre’s example is soft, or, to use a phrase of Engels, ‘a kindergarten example’ when compared to the extreme euphemisms of my nibbling Élise: in Sartre’s example, the couple are merely holding hands, in the preliminaries of foreplay. With Élise we were at ‘the thing itself’, in medias res, at the heart of the action, the idealistic poetic licence (‘handsome’) being the condition itself, a licence to unbridled licentiousness. Bad faith, as we can see, knows neither limits nor boundaries.

  Like Cau, Ferdinand Alquié, our philosophy teacher in K1, was from Carcassonne. Like Cau, he had done his best to lose his Languedoc accent, but unlike my friend, who had almost succeeded in doing so, Alquié still retained his accent, inventing a unique combination of word and action: he articulated each word, each syllable, deconstructing his sentences the better to be understood, all the while connecting these delicious, random Occitan pebbles through an extraordinary ballet of hands and arms, combining the graceful arcs of a Sevillian bailadora with the angular elbow movements of princely dancers from South-east Asia. To the end of my days I will remember the way in which, during one of his lessons on sexual perversion, opening and closing his incredibly expressive fingers, he married the gesture of strangling a pigeon with the word jouir [to have an orgasm], which he rolled around his tongue, drawing out the sound. He was talking to us about a woman (I don’t remember whether he was quoting Krafft-Ebing, Freud or André Breton) who could only reach orgasm by strangling a dove. I adored him, we all adored him. He had majored in philosophy in 1931 and was a short, very thin, always elegant man with heavy-lidded, shadowy eyes, and we all knew how fortunate we were, at twenty, to have such a teacher: an impeccable historian of philosophy, a philosopher in his own right, contemptuous of fads, gossip and intrigue; one who, in teaching us seriously without taking himself seriously, taught us to think for ourselves and not to bow to pressure. I liked his wife too, a beautiful, buxom blonde woman from Normandy, taller than he was and full of life. From time to time I liked to imagine him engulfed, like the turtle dove, in the pale, strong, beautiful arms of Denise.

  In his youth, when a student, Ferdinand had frequented prostitutes, and liked them, because he was working hard and had no time to court women. He assured us that with each of these women, he had known a sincere form of tenderness, of love, in which both parties retained their freedom and respected the other’s. The very opposite of what is said nowadays about sexual slavery. O tempora, o mores! In our literature classes or Première supérieure classes, our teacher extolled what he
called ‘abstract love’, love abstracted from conjugal hell; duty, demands, convention and boredom. It was normal that a well-brought-up boy should want to experience the delightful promises of such a tutor. I talked about this with Monny who, in spite of his surrealist austerity, was not shocked.

  The result was that, on one of my father’s visits to Paris, after dinner at the rue Alexandre-Cabanel – my mother, for once, having graciously agreed to receive the sodomite – I found myself, with my father and my ‘stepfather’, in the magnificent lobby of one of the most opulent brothels in Paris, Le Sphinx, on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet in the 16th arrondissement. The cashier at the establishment – possibly also the sous-maîtresse – was the sister of O’dett, one of the most famous pre-war comic singers, who had all of Paris in stitches with his imitations of Hitler, and whom we had known in the Auvergne where he had been forced to flee during the German Occupation. The courtesans of the Sphinx, who moved about between the tables from customer to customer – many of whom had come simply to look – were all, to my eyes, bewitchingly beautiful and O’dett’s sister assigned me to a sculptural dark-haired girl who, under the tender gaze of my fathers, both still in the prime of life, led me up the stairs. I was gone for some time, thanks to the praise showered on me by the sous-maîtresse. The ensuing dialogue I owe to Monny who, for years, told the story over and over. Since he and my father thought it odd I had been gone such a long time, they asked O’dett’s sister in unison, ‘What the hell is he up to?’ ‘Leave him, leave him, il est heurrrreux,’ she said, rolling her Rs.