The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  While Castor had forged ahead until we reached the Gandegghütte, since she had the maps, knew how to read them and had a good sense of direction, I now took the lead, my overheated body suddenly cold, constantly turning back to make sure she was still behind me, watching the gap between us increase, even though I did not feel I was walking any faster. We were behind schedule, we had stopped too often and for too long to contemplate the wonders of nature; we had arrived late at the Gandegghütte, had had too much to eat and drink, set off again too late. I knew that the last cable car to Cervinia left the Theodul station at seven o’clock precisely and had stupidly calculated that if the Gandegghütte was at 3,029 metres and the Theodul Pass at 3,301, we would make short work of the final 272 metres. What a fool! Tragedy suddenly loomed in the mountains in this ‘magnificent’ weather just as, years later, in the sea off Caesarea, it almost cost me my life. Veteran climbers, roped together wearing crampons, quickly made their way down the glacier, which we were struggling to ascend. I asked one of them how far it was to the pass. He looked at his watch and said that we would certainly miss the cable car. Castor was exhausted, her heart hammering in her chest; even if we slowed our pace considerably she would not make it to the top. We had a quick, urgent conversation. I made her lie on the snow close to a rock that still retained some warmth and, though I was not in much better shape, set off to find help. When I finally arrived, the last cable car to Italy had indeed already left, night was drawing in, and with it the cold; the Swiss all seemed to have been struck deaf and it was the Italian Bersaglieri, whom I promised to pay whatever it took, who showed their human side. Castor had to be saved, I was worried about her heart, all this I explained in bad Italian, making little drawings to indicate where I had left her. Three Bersaglieri strapped on their skis, put on helmet lamps and disappeared into the darkness, dragging a sled equipped with blankets and duvets. They were cheery, earnest, sturdy, seasoned. As I waited for them to return, I negotiated with their comrades and by phone with their superior officer, explaining to him what a shining light to the world Signorina de Beauvoir was. I must have been convincing because he agreed – exceptionally – to send a cable car back up to the pass. It arrived just as Castor showed up, somewhat revived by the kindness of her Italian rescuers, the warmth of the sled and the fact that her heart was beating normally once more. But we were a long way from getting back to the Hotel Monte Rosa. As soon as we got to Breuil-Cervinia, I saw a doctor; I was seriously burned and shivering with fever, I had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital in Aosta, where I was immediately admitted, suffering first-, even second-, degree burns. I spent three days in hospital, watched over by a fretful Castor.

  So many images from our trips are jumbled together in my memory, in no apparent order, but always as though time had ceased to exist. We are driving to Salamanca, or from Salamanca to Madrid, across the high desert plains of the Province of León, through what once was Castile, endlessly commenting, she and I, our minds agreeing, sometimes competing, about the wonders of the world, the measureless skies, the infinite gradations of yellow and ochre of the arid ground that itself seemed boundless. Me behind the wheel, we talked for hours and hours, never tiring, of what we had seen, what we would see, of the books we had both read and those one of us had read. My capacity for wonderment, my childlike freshness, rekindled hers. Midnight in Toledo, the promenade des cigarrales that snakes above the deep gorge of the River Tagus and the city on the far shore, close-packed houses huddled around the cathedral and the Alcázar. We spent hours attempting to understand the nature of a fortified town; which principles of fear, defiance, defence caused it to be built, to thrive, coming back to gaze on it every night we spent there. But the Alcázar was also a part of recent history – this was the height of Francoism – when, some twenty years earlier, in 1936, in a defiant gesture, Colonel Moscardó held out for seventy days at the Siege of the Alcázar against the ‘Reds’ who had captured his son, a boy of sixteen, telephoning Moscardó and giving him ten minutes to surrender or they would shoot his son and putting the boy on the phone to convince him they were serious. There ensued a heroic conversation that the colonel himself recounted in a letter he sent to his wife that, after Franco’s victory, was taught in every Spanish school: ‘I regret to inform you that I spoke to our dear son on the telephone. “Father, they say they are going to shoot me, but I do not believe them.” I answered him: “To save your life, they would take my honour. I shall not surrender the Alcázar.” All I could do was to tell him to commend his soul to God if the worst were to happen and cry out before the firing squad, “Viva España”.’ The boy was indeed executed a month later, and his father greeted the senior officer of Franco’s Nationalists who came to relieve the fortress with the words, ‘All quiet at the Alcázar, sir.’ Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, the Generalissimo, promoted him to general – it was the least he could do. Another man to die by firing squad, Robert Brasillach, who, as I had said, preceded me at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, wrote a book in praise of Moscardó, Les Cadets de l’Alcazar.

  Catalonia, Barcelona, the Barrio Chino, a maze of narrow streets in the heart of the city running parallel to the Ramblas and down towards the sea. The Barrio Chino and its dark alleys with that nightly throng of lonely souls in the doorways of the brothels with their red lights lining the narrow streets. When first encountering an unfamiliar foreign city, we always have a sense of the centre and where it is; invariably, it proves not to be where we thought. The centre is elsewhere, at least it was when we were young; it is not the museums, the universities, the monuments or the governmental buildings, but those things that are hidden, censored, the red light districts. The true centre was that of sex, just as for foreigners coming to Paris the centre remains a series of stops on the métro: Clichy, Blanche, Pigalle, Anvers, a boulevard of many names that today is home to the dreary line of neon-fronted sex shops and peepshows. Unembarrassed, Castor wanted to see everything and missed nothing of the Barrio Chino, which fascinated her as much as it did me. The only difference was that she was not allowed to go upstairs, not even just to look, as I did once or twice. I say ‘just to look’ because never have I witnessed a trade in sex so terrifyingly raw and unvarnished, except perhaps once in Mexico. To understand what I am saying you would need to see the photographs taken of a brothel in Alicante by the young Cartier-Bresson. But we stood in the streets outside the most frequented bordellos and watched those going up and those coming down meet on the stairs, those leaving still adjusting their clothes, while strange men in white coats spattered with purple, carrying heavy syringes filled with potassium permanganate, which they brandished like an obscene solicitation, waved those arriving into a little office situated on the ground floor of every whorehouse marked Enfermería. Together with syphilis, gonorrhoea was the most common STD back then. The ‘nurses’ with their thin waxed moustaches then plunged a needle into the patient’s urethra and, with a single, painful, life-saving thrust, administered 10cl of their purple liquid. The Barrio Chino no longer exists, there are no alleys, no enfermerías, no permanganate, no brothels, everything is bright, refurbished, the mystery is elsewhere. Is it?

  Not content with daring to go to Franco’s Spain, we hurtled in a single day in a crazed diagonal across the country from Huelva on the Atlantic coast of Andalucía near the Portuguese border, to València on the Mediterranean coast much further north. Shame on us, shame on Castor and of course on me, since as her ‘husband’ I immediately and without query, but with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn, embraced her passion for bullfighting and corridas. A passion so real that she scorned the political correctness of the time, which, as you might guess, cared little for tourism in a Fascist country, the mass slaughter of bulls being considered symbolic of Franco’s barbarity. At Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Cau, who hailed from Carcassonne and who slipped off to Catalonia whenever he could, had told me about the bullfights and instilled in me the desire to see one. I had also read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon; I
was ready. Why that exhausting day, in the sweltering heat of August, on poor and dangerous roads? Because Castor had decided that for several weeks we would follow the greatest toreros of the day on the summer tour they call the temporada. A las cinco de la tarde [at five in the afternoon], Miguel Báez – ‘El Litri’ – and Julio Aparicio had fought in the bullring in Huelva together against black Miura bulls, the most feared and formidable beasts, and against the trade winds that made perilous the difficult passes with the muleta before the estocada. In spite of these gusts, which would suddenly lift the muleta to reveal the ornate gold embroidered uniform of the torero to the eyes of the bull, El Litri and Aparicio had dazzled with their fluidity and their courage – the cardinal virtues of their profession – and were presented with the ears and tail of the beast, which they brandished as they made five laps of the bullring. The audience applauded and threw flowers. In fact, The Ears and the Tail – Les Oreilles et la queue – is the title of another great book extolling the virtues of bullfighting, a book much loved by the Spanish for its humour, its poetry and its technical accuracy. It was written by my friend Cau in the 1960s.

  We stopped at Albacete, a city famous for its knives, a Castilian version of Laguiole, but one that to me is also associated with the name André Marty, a senior member of the Parti communiste français, appointed by the comintern as political commissar of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. He was nicknamed the ‘Butcher of Albacete’ by the anarchists in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the Trotskyites in the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista, since he was a Stalinist disciplinarian who cared little if he had to shed blood.

  We drove and drove past the harvested fields, bleached yellow from the heat only to plunge – literally, since the road dipped steeply and suddenly towards the Mediterranean – into the verdant huerta of València like a refreshing oasis. But València, where El Litri and Chaves Flores were to fight six more Miura bulls the following afternoon, was suffering from something else. While the huerta exuded a subtle perfume, València reeked. There was not a drop of water in the whole city, the ageing pipes had burst and it was impossible to wash or even to flush the toilet. Under Franco, València had been allowed to go to rack and ruin. The hotel we had booked into – because the toreros and their cuadrillas were staying there – stank so badly that their managers, the apoderados, had immediately moved them to houses out in the huerta, which had been spared this plague. Castor and I walked for hours, exhausted after the long drive, drinking – to forget, to numb ourselves – heavy Spanish wines, the only liquid to be found. It was just as well: we stumbled into bed, dead drunk and therefore oblivious to the stench. By morning there was water again, a cholera or typhus epidemic was avoided, and the corrida went ahead. It must surely remain unforgettable to all those who were there: here too, El Litri and Aparicio proved themselves to be at the height of their art, making passes that brought the beasts’ sharp horns within millimetres of their stomachs, their thighs, their vital arteries constantly threatened by the long, agile necks of the bulls. But Chaves Flores was gored when his second bull made a sudden upward thrust with his head, piercing the torero’s groin then attempting to toss him into the air, which served only to aggravate the ‘very serious’ wound, according to the medical report posted that evening by the arena enfermería.

  In Spanish, a passion for bullfighting is called an afición and its devotees are known as aficionados. Surely I have recounted here our holiday in the summer of 1955. Our afición became such that the spectacle alone was not enough: we needed to take home material proof to allow us to dream during the winter months, so wherever we went we bought posters of the temporada to take back to France. In fact, we would use them to paper the high walls of the studio Castor had just bought at 11 bis rue Schoelcher with the money from the 1954 Prix Goncourt she had won for Les Mandarins; we could think of nothing better to decorate the vast, dreary walls of this new residence. Later, coming back from my trip to North Korea and China, I would bring her precious offerings: Korean drums formed from two cones, whose points meet, and two identical heads of animal skin on which the drummer beats. Rarer still, and to me more poignant, a war drum from the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, those who fought like devils, like lions, in the bloody assaults on Hill 1211, captured a dozen times, lost a dozen times. It was painted red, streaked with white lines made by the hail of bullets; it was round, bulbous at the centre, with rings that buckle so the drum could be strapped over the drummer’s belly while, on the other side, the drumskins were held in place by three rows of gilt tacks, like those used to upholster English leather armchairs. The atelier at 11 bis was also a single room, but it was much bigger, high-ceilinged and in one corner there was a narrow mezzanine entirely occupied by the bed and the wardrobes, which received scant sunlight from two small decorative windows that opened onto the studio below. Access to the mezzanine was via a spiral staircase that led to a suspended balcony. The bedroom was on the left and on the right was a small bathroom with a window that overlooked the street, but was set so high that it was possible to see all the way to the great mausoleums of Montparnasse cemetery. Castor and I were together when we first set foot in the studio – the only property she ever owned – and we had a sexual housewarming in which we explored the new possibilities afforded by the breadth and height of the space. As I write, 11 bis, which many would have liked to see become the Musée Simone de Beauvoir, has been sold and resold, but a commemorative plaque was recently affixed to the wall outside that reads: ‘Simone de Beauvoir, writer and philosopher, lived here from 1955 until her death in 1986.’ I had crossed the threshold with her, spent five crucial years of my life there, and even after we separated, I spent at least two evenings a week there since we remained, to the end, bound by an unbreakable friendship, a relationship of equals based on love and mutual respect, on complicity, work and our mutual struggles.

  During the twelve difficult years when I was making Shoah, I went to see her whenever I could, I needed to talk to her, to tell her of my certainties, my uncertainties, my fears, my disappointments. I always came away from these evenings together if not serene, at least strengthened in my resolve. It was not so much what she knew and what she shared – how could she have known about the horrors I was discovering? It was I who told her about them – but the unique and intensely moving way she had of listening, serious, solemn, open, utterly trusting. She was transfigured by the act of listening, her face became pure humanity, as though her ability to focus on other people’s problems relieved her of her own fears, of the weariness of living that never truly left her after the death of Sartre. On several occasions I brought her to the LTC studios in Saint-Cloud where Shoah was being edited to show her sections of the film in progress. She wanted to be present at all the screenings I had to organize while the film was still in production. In 1982, when François Mitterrand asked to see the first three hours of the film, she came with me to the private screening room of the Elysée Palace. All I could show him was a rough, well-worn, black-and-white copy with no subtitles, meaning that I had to shout the translations from the aisle. We know that after Shoah was released, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a front-page article for Le Monde, a piece that was decisive for the future of the film, a wonderful text that now serves as the preface to the book Shoah, published all over the world. But six months earlier I had screened the whole film – nine and a half hours – in a private screening room in Paris. The film had not yet been subtitled and I gave a simultaneous translation before an audience of 200, including Castor. Knowing Shoah by heart, every lull, every sigh, every silent shot, I knew precisely when to speak and in fact, without intending to, I occasionally mimicked the rhythm and the intonation of the protagonists. The problem was my voice: would it hold out for such a long period? My assistants had prepared bottles of freshly squeezed lemon juice, which they handed me whenever the strain in my voice began to show. I persevered to the end. There were those who said that my presence, my voice
, the obvious fact that I was utterly caught up in the film, added to the screening. The following day I got a call from Castor: ‘I don’t know if I’ll still be alive when your film is released,’ she said. ‘I want people to know what I thought of it, what I would have thought of it, what I think of it. I’ve written a few lines, I’ll send them to you.’ This is the first time I have mentioned those lines. Here they are:

  I consider Claude Lanzmann’s film to be a great work; I would go so far as to say a genuine masterpiece. I have never read nor seen anything that has so movingly and so grippingly conveyed the horror of the ‘final solution’; nor anything that has brought to light so much evidence of the hellish mechanics of it. Placing himself on the side of the victims, of the executioners, of the witnesses and accomplices more innocent or more criminal than others, Lanzmann has us live through countless aspects of an experience that, until now, I believe, had seemed to be inexpressible. This is a monument that will enable generations of mankind to understand one of the most malign and enigmatic moments of their history. Of those who are still alive today, the greatest possible number should be part of this discovery.