The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  We kept Évelyne at home for far too long, almost ten days, and the sweetish scent of her corpse pervaded the room. Since the funeral could not take place at the weekend, it was deferred to the beginning of the following week and the undertakers had to armour her body with plates of ice. When the coffin was brought out to be taken to Montparnasse cemetery, the tall-treed garden and the main courtyard of number 26, and the whole of the rue Jacob itself, was thronged with a silent, grieving, contemplative crowd. For everyone who followed the hearse, the death of Évelyne Rey was shattering.

  As the years went by, I found it increasingly unfair that Claude Roy had been made the scapegoat of her suicide. If there is blame to be apportioned, it should be shared, and there are many of us who must shoulder some responsibility. It is not a game I wish to play. I met Claude at the Festival d’Avignon once, I told him I was sorry, offered to make peace and we did so.

  Bahia, ou ces femmes de Tunisie [Bahia, or the Women of Tunisia], the television programme Évelyne was rightly proud of, was broadcast almost two years after her suicide, on 3 January 1968; it was fifty minutes long and was universally praised for its great intelligence and humanity. Robert Morris held the camera. My sister, beautiful, young, slim, her hair in braids, is on screen with sweet-faced Bahia for almost the whole film. And today, as I write these lines, more than forty years after the film was shot, I received – to my surprise – a diary from Jelila Hafsia, a Tunisian intellectual I don’t know, entitled Instants de vie – chronique familière [Moments in Life – a Family Chronicle], whose first entry is dated 1 June 1964. She explains to me that she worked as an interpreter for Évelyne in her conversations with Bahia and recommends that I read some of the relevant passages. I shall quote one or two:

  Monday, 21 November 1966. I got a phone call from Moncef telling me that Évelyne Rey is dead. It’s awful. I can hardly believe it. I had a letter from her three days ago. She wanted to spend a few days with us in the south. So young, so beautiful, so generous… The days we spent together, she and I… Why this suicide? She left Tunisia a fortnight ago in good spirits, happy to be alive… Her fears had receded… She was so happy with the film. I buy Le Monde. Read it with a terrible sense of sadness: ‘Death of the actress Évelyne Rey. The actress took her own life on Thursday night by swallowing the contents of a tube of barbiturates.’ The whole world seems meaningless to me.

  Wednesday, 23 November 1966. Last night, I had a sudden desire to see Évelyne, and I felt sad, terribly sad. I couldn’t sleep. Her youth, her beauty, her kindness. Why? Making the film had been really important to her – her encounters with Bahia… How do I tell Bahia?

  Friday, 25 November 1966. I went to Mellassine in Tunis to see Bahia. I had to talk to her, to tell her that Évelyne won’t be coming back… Bahia collapsed…

  My sister’s suicide devastated me; I thought I would always live in the shadow of her death, that it would be the only way of remaining loyal to her. A friend of Sartre’s, Claude Day, whom I did not really know but in whom I confided and who had also suffered great misfortune, told me, ‘You’re wrong, you will forget, life always prevails.’ She was right. And wrong. I have forgotten nothing. I have lived. But November is still worthless to me, it is the month of Évelyne’s death, it is also the month of my birth.

  Chapter 10

  ‘Voglio morire, voglio morire’ [‘I want to die, I want to die’], at almost regular intervals the cry broke the silence of the sweltering in the Florence train station. Swaggering, Mussolini-style architecture, with Carrara marble platforms, but empty of trains, except for a prison wagon full of common-law criminals waiting for an improbable locomotive, the serried convicts suffering the agonies of ignorance, of helplessness, of thirst, of overcrowding. Even we, as we lay on the cool marble, exhausted from having paced the platforms for hours looking for any train heading south, only to find that no one – in the chaos of the Italian railways in that summer of 1946 – could tell us when or if there would be a train, whether it would be a passenger train or a freight train like those used in the deportations; even we felt close to the howling man and his desperate pleas. There were five of us, all khâgne students. Cau, who had just taken up his position as secretary to Sartre, had assumed the role of leader because Sartre had entrusted him with a message to take to his publisher in Milan, asking him to give us the lire we needed for our journey since, the currency exchange regulations being both complicated and erratic, it was almost impossible to get lire in France. We had all handed over what money we had to Cau, and he had set himself up as paymaster-general. This was our first trip abroad. I was intensely excited, the connecting of names with places, the names of stations fleetingly glimpsed in the darkness – Brig, Simplon, Domodossola, Stresa – all attested to the truth of the world, merging language and reality, poignantly revealing the truth. Thinking back now it seems as though our youth and the youth of the world were melded there, and it is certainly true that any first time has a distinct flavour. And yet even now, I may experience something as intensely as I did when I was twenty; on reflection, I think it has nothing to do with youth or with age. Not long ago, driving from Río Gallegos in Tierra del Fuego across the vast plains of Argentine Patagonia, alone behind the wheel of a rental car, heading for the Chilean border and the magnificent Perito Moreno glacier, I kept repeating over and over, with the same joy I felt on that first train trip to Milan, ‘I’m in Patagonia, I’m in Patagonia.’ Yet it wasn’t real, though I might have seen a few small herds of white llamas, Patagonia was not truly incarnate in me. It suddenly became so at dusk, on the last stretch of unpaved road after the little town of El Calafate, in the sweeping of my headlights, when a long-legged hare leaped like an arrow and hopped across the road in front of me. I had just seen a Patagonian hare, a magical animal. Now all of Patagonia suddenly pierced my heart with the sure knowledge of our mutual presence. I am neither indifferent to, nor weary of, this world; had I a hundred lives, I know I would not tire of it.

  Milan, which over many years and numerous visits I came to think of as a heavy Lombard city, charmless and rather ugly, Milan dazzled me when we arrived there one morning. It was the first coloured city I had ever seen: the reds, the yellows, the ochres of its walls, its roofs, thrilled me with their newness. We stayed just long enough for our leader to get our money, because the itinerary of this rite-of-passage had been decided by him and voted on by everyone else: Venice, Florence and Naples, skipping Rome and the rest of Italy. But I know by heart the first lines of very many books, and as I wandered alone around the Duomo, I endlessly repeated once again, so that Milan and I could be one, the opening lines of La Chartreuse de Parme: ‘On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of a youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi, and announced to the world that after so many centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor.’

  On to Venice, with no time to lose. Our paymaster-general, dazzled by the thickness of the wad of lire he had just received and by the then spectacular size of Italian banknotes, kept our money in his overstuffed back pocket, feeling invulnerable. I warned him, ‘Be careful, we should divide it up.’ ‘We’ll divide it up this evening,’ he said, periodically slapping his pocket to ensure the loot was still there, and inadvertently, every time he did so, signalling its existence to exceptionally brilliant and well-trained pickpockets. It happened on our very first day, on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal: the paymaster’s pocket was neatly sliced with a razor and emptied without him noticing a thing. The trip was over before it had even begun and the magnitude of the catastrophe was such that it precluded any anger or reproach. Between the five of us, we managed to rustle up enough money to last a day. Cau wanted to ring Sartre for help but didn’t know where he was. I remembered that Toni Gaggio, my aunt Sophie’s husband – the circumcised Venetian belote champion of Clichy – had mentioned before we left that a close relative owned a glassworks on Murano. My mother, ever prudent and fretful, had insisted that I take the add
ress. I called, using my best Italo-Latin; the voice on the other end was at first curt and peremptory, but the name Toni Gaggio was like an Open Sesame and he agreed to meet with us the following day. I have racked my brains but I cannot remember the name of this captain of industry. His factory was massive, with glass-blowers describing convoluted arabesques of liquid glass in the air. The five of us were led upstairs to an immense office with windows overlooking the lagoon on all sides, where Il Duce was waiting for us. He was considerably shorter than Mussolini, but like him drew himself up to his full height and had the same way of clenching his jaw, throwing his head back, flaring his nostrils – in other words, posing as though for a round of applause exactly like the dictator addressing the Fascist hordes from the balcony of Rome’s Palazzo di Venezia. Fifteen months earlier, Benito Mussolini, together with his mistress Clara Petacci, had been executed by Communist partisans, their corpses strung up by the feet in a Milan street, but here he was, resurrected, in the office of Toni’s relative, who displayed photos of himself being decorated by Il Duce, of leading marches of Blackshirts next to the Leader; moving snapshots of him taking part, as a young man, in the 1922 March on Rome. He was a true Fascist, proud of the fact, and whatever Paisà or Rome, Open City might suggest, Mussolini’s influence in Venice, in Tuscany, the Abruzzi, Romagna and Campania was and remains much greater than the later history of the Italian Left and Communism has been prepared to admit. Cau was very uncomfortable, glancing around nervously, while our other companions, Maurice Bouvet, René Guyonnet and René Bray, said nothing. I was the only one to speak and, since this Fascist caricature strangely inspired in me a sort of sympathy, I found it all the easier. I told him everything, promising to repay him as soon as we got back to France; he asked me how much had been stolen and didn’t skimp, barking an order, summoning a foreman, instructing him to give us a tour of the factory before calling me back into his office and handing me, with panache, the exact amount that had been stolen from Cau. It was a family affair between him, Gaggio and me.

  I have intentionally referred to the deep, abiding influence of Mussolini. A year ago, I wanted to visit once more the Paestum temples south of Salerno in the heart of Campania, to see again the sublime fresco of the Diver. These are the most perfect of the peripteral Doric temples, and I have always loved to dive – I still do on occasion. I had dinner in the evening near the edge of the temple complex, in a restaurant where I knew I could get some incomparable mozzarella di bufala, one of the joys of the Paestum region. On previous visits I had not noticed that this particular restaurant backed on to a large patrician house, which – having gone to wash my hands – I wandered into almost by accident, only to experience, sixty years later, the same stupefied astonishment I had felt in Venice in our benefactor’s office: I allowed myself to be led from room to room, floor to floor, past photographs of the current proprietors in the company of Mussolini, with his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, both wearing black shirts, arms outstretched in a hearty Fascist salute. Nothing was hidden, there was no shame, no crime, this was the history of Italy and for me it was like an exhumation.

  In Venice we divided up the money, but the Italian thieves proved more cunning, surprising and inventive than my sensible friends. Each of them in turn was fleeced again; I was the only one whose vigilance never failed me. The phenomenon reached its apogee in Naples on the eve of our return to France. The five of us were sharing one room in a dubious pensione. We had just enough to pay for our train tickets and our fear of being robbed had grown exponentially, superstitiously, to become a mortal terror. Since by this time we could barely stand the sight of each other, it had been decided that on our last day in Naples we would each do our own thing, but the money for the tickets was to be put in an impregnable strong-box and left in the room. When we returned that evening, Guyonnet, the future managing editor of L’Express, was missing. Someone decided to check: the money was also missing. Guyonnet arrived back late, looking business-like, wearing the sunglasses he wore day and night to render him anonymous, carrying a large parcel tied up with string that he set down carefully like a treasure on the table. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, opening it up. Aside from the mood of mystery, and the impassive poker-face he preserved in all circumstances, Guyonnet, who was from Luçon in the Vendée, had another abiding passion: the American language. He had already translated one of the first ‘Série Noire’ published by Gallimard. Now, on his last tour of the port of Naples, he had been approached by an ‘American marine’ who offered to sell him pure cashmere, worth its weight in gold, a deal that had to be concluded immediately because his ship was about to put out to sea. Feverish with excitement, Guyonnet had rushed back to the pensione and took it upon himself to seize all the money for the journey home to finance the deal of the century. ‘What do you think of this?’ The cashmere was nothing but paper, which, the moment it was touched, disintegrated into scraps, strips, confetti, into air! That evening I hated my dear friend as much as I hated Bagelman who couldn’t bring himself to shoot the milicien. The following morning we went to the French consul in Naples to beg him to arrange for us to be repatriated. Understandably, he bemoaned the stupidity of his compatriots. Only Sartre’s name stirred him into action. During the forty-hour journey from Naples to Nice, Guyonnet was completely ostracized. Forty hours standing on a train, with no possibility of sitting down: by the time I got to Nice my ankles had swollen to four times their size; it was three days before I could walk again.

  After the summer, I enrolled in the Sorbonne, effortlessly studied for a number of certificats de licence, attended the philosophy lectures of Jean Wahl, Martial Guéroult, who for me represented an ideal of humanity, Gaston Bachelard with his wonderful, thick Burgundian accent, Georges Canguilhem and Jean Laporte, who agreed to supervise my postgraduate diploma. As I have already mentioned, I chose to focus on Leibniz and monadology, more specifically, on ‘possibles and incompossibles’ in the philosophy of that extraordinary mind that, even now, continually illuminates my thoughts and surprises me by its modernity. Michel Tournier persuaded me to join him in Germany, at the University of Tübingen in the French Occupied Zone. With orders from the military government, French students could get a sort of grant in the form of sixty meals per month at the Maison de France, a comfortable property from which you could look down on the Neckar Valley and young, muscular German boys rowing, just like the students at Oxford and Cambridge. The grant also entitled you to a room with a local family. Tournier, who had arrived there several months before me, met me at the station and, although he was living near the castle, informed me that the room allocated to me was on Hegelstraße, a road running parallel to the railway, from which I could hear the trains twenty-four hours a day. The landlord of this less-than-prestigious address was a short, chubby, rather jolly man from Schwaben. His name was Riese, which means ‘giant’. His wife was a German matron with a soft voice who was prepared to do anything for me. In addition to my room/office, I had use of the living room. And so I spent several hours a day reading Leibniz on Hegel’s street, convincing myself of the profound truth of monadology, each monad being an entire world in itself, but hermetic, with no door, no window (I’d say to Tournier, who was working on Plato, ‘I will never know what your life is like, mine will forever be alien to you’), if a little more sceptical about the great detour into Leibniz’s ‘system of pre-established harmony’ that was needed to make it all work. I was charmed by his letters to Queen Christina of Sweden: ‘I come once more to speak to you, Madame, of my beloved unities…’ ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, a way of dealing with the radical nature of contingency, his theory of ‘little perceptions’ prefiguring Freud and the subconscious, his principle of ‘the identity of indiscernibles’ kept me busy for the winter of 1947. Deleuze, who would later write about Leibniz – the possible and the incompossible were a major preoccupation for him – twice came to visit Tournier and me: for him, as for us, Germany was still philosophy’s mother
country and we could not imagine its overthrow, as was hoped for by Vladimir Jankélévitch, for example. But it was with the future author of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique [Friday, or the Other Island], Le Roi des aulnes [The Erl-King or The Ogre] and Météores [Gemini] that I spent most of my free time. Tournier was from a family of German scholars, spoke the language fluently and, as a child, had spent time in Hitler’s Germany. He rode and encouraged me to go with him. There was a military riding school in Tübingen run by a Colonel Whitechurch. I joined up, and, under the tutelage of a former Wehrmacht instructor continually barking insults and orders, I learned to perform riding figures, to ride bareback, to dismount a horse at full gallop, to run in the sawdust alongside the animal and get back into the saddle. I was pretty good and with every lesson I improved. Happiness for me was heading off with the school for long rides through the forest; riding a tall mare called Ténébreuse who would sometimes take off through the trees at a wild, terrifying gallop and, so as not to shatter a knee against a tree trunk, I had to saw at the reins with all my strength and force her to stop, steaming, rearing and trembling. On Ténébreuse, I also learned to show-jump.

  Tournier had a jovial, hail-fellow-well-met, barrack-room buddy side; he was succinct and clear-thinking, but would suddenly, without warning, become absent, swallowed up by who knew what abyss. This was a different Tournier, one prey to bouts of bleak isolation that could last for hours or days, though it was probably in this crucible that the malign reversals of the dark, dizzying masterpieces he would one day write were forged. In Tübingen he was friends with Thomas Harlan, the son of Veit Harlan, the director of Jud Süss [Jew Süss], the anti-Semitic film commissioned by Goebbels and adapted – so perversely as to utterly turn it on its head – from the wonderful novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, a hymn to the Jews of medieval Germany that is impossible to read without tears. I fancied a French secretary attached to the military government, or rather to the Security Services, who consented to come to my room on the Hegelstraße once or twice, teasing me with her long beautiful legs, her high heels. But the moment I tried to press what I assumed was my advantage, she stopped me dead: ‘I could never make love with a Jew,’ she declared abruptly. I asked why. It was simple: the Jews had ruined her family and, her eyes blazing vengefully, she began to recount an outrageous story worthy of the Rassenschande [race-shame], the charge Nazis levelled against those who sullied the purity of the race by fraternizing with Jews. This Jew threw her out and she left, petulant. The following day I received a threatening visit from her boss, the red-faced alcoholic chief of the Security Services, who was clearly also her lover and who had brought a henchman with him. He advised me to cease my obscene harassment immediately and to ‘watch my step’ because I could ‘very easily be deported’. The faces of these good Frenchmen were deformed by poisonous anti-Semitism. My relationships with German students were, thankfully, more compatible and less frustrating.