by Michel D
‘But there’s one thing missing. The pleasure of control. I control my horse, and from the horse I control the places I go to, as if I was a giant.’
‘I’d be scared to marry a giant.’
Chantal was silent. He had contravened their unspoken agreement. Not by much, but enough to make her feel uncomfortable.
‘Some giants can bend their knees,’ she said finally.
‘That’s reassuring.’
One day he mentioned Michel.
‘You shouldn’t say anything against him,’ she retorted. ‘He not only doesn’t say anything against you, he actually admires you.’
‘Michel admires me? Now you’re making fun of me. He’s hated me since we were children.’
‘Perhaps he envies you.’
‘He has everything. I have nothing. He draws really well. Maybe he’ll become a great painter. His name is Michel du Courseau, and his mother will give him anything he asks for.’
‘Then why do you think he’s always drawing portraits of you?’
‘I didn’t know that. His main models are the neighbours’ son, who’s very handsome, or Élias, the Longuets’ young gardener.’
‘His mother has shown us lots of drawings of you. Apparently his bedroom walls are covered in them.’
Jean tried to remember the night he had made love to Antoinette on Michel’s bed. He hadn’t looked at anything surrounding him, hadn’t looked at anything at all apart from Antoinette’s white body.
‘The idea gives me the creeps,’ he said. ‘Anyway, why is his mother always pushing him in your direction?’
‘I know, it’s a bit comical. In the beginning I thought he was shy, then I thought he must have some sort of aversion to me. Now I don’t really think about him at all. I think we could be friends. But he’s so strange …’
She mounted her mare and rode off at a slow trot down the empty path, which the sun riddled with shafts of light between the leaves. Jean waited for her to disappear before sprinting back to his bicycle at the edge of the wood.
In the first two months of 1936 Jean had found a part-time job in a bookshop at Dieppe. The bookseller was a young man, Joseph Outen, who had started the business recently and was full of enthusiasm. Jean had met him at the Rowing Club, where they trained together on Sundays. In the changing room Joseph expressed surprise at Jean’s absence the last three Sundays.
‘You’re wrong not to train regularly. Regularity counts more than anything else.’
‘I was taking my philosophy bac.’
‘Did you pass?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you you get?’
‘Distinction.’
Joseph looked at Jean in a different light. Questioning him, he perceived that he was intelligent but incredibly ignorant. He explained to Jean that sport for sport’s sake was a folly as great as literature for literature’s sake … The young bookseller was an agile, muscular athlete who had a nicely dark, clipped beard and smoked a pipe. He loved literature and sport with an equal passion, and treated all writers with suspicion until he discovered their view on the subject. For a single excellent page about boxing, he had read everything Maeterlinck had written. He thought highly of Giraudoux, a former university 400 metres champion, Morand who drove racing Bugattis and hunted foxes, Montherlant because he had written The Eleven Before the Golden Door, Hemingway for his short story ‘Fifty Grand’, Byron for having swum the bay of La Spezia from Portovenere, Maupassant because he loved sailing. One can hardly disagree that, though not the only way to get interested in books and writers, as biases go it was far from stupid, and there were and are plenty of others a good deal less reliable. Jean’s ignorance, however, was not because of sport but because he lived in a house without books. Yes, we have seen him reading one evening, in the kitchen, during one of those family gatherings from which he preferred to keep his distance. He could borrow books from the lycée’s library, but had to wait his turn. Albert and Jeanne had never read a book in their life. Albert would say it wore out your eyes to no purpose, and Jeanne that, once read, a book was no more than a dust trap. Marie-Thérèse du Courseau, having given Jean several volumes of the Hetzel edition of Jules Verne for Christmas, had stopped giving him presents after the alleged incident with Antoinette. Captain Duclou had given him an atlas and Monsieur Cliquet a book about railways. The school curriculum betrayed a considerable mistrust of literature, using it simply as a pool of texts selected for their value as grammatical examples, of which Lamartine’s ‘The Lake’ was the apogee. Joseph Outen, with his passion for books, broke through this torpor. He had wanted to write, but had rapidly resigned himself to not being the equal of his great models and to introducing them instead to a public intimidated by such literary audacity and diversity. His job, as he saw it, was to guide those timid souls who came into a bookshop on the pretext of buying an envelope, and as they did so stole secret glances at its forbidden fruits, in the shape of the new books on display. Practised as an apostolic mission, bookselling is a philanthropic task. Joseph Outen began the conversion of his Rowing Club teammate-cum-sales assistant, and immediately found such fertile ground that they decided to shut the shop at five o’clock to give themselves up completely to reading. Jean was overwhelmed. He had imagined writers merely as glorious statues, yet here was a man as famous as Stendhal confessing his youth in all the naïve unsophistication of its first impulses and presenting his account to his readers with perfect ingenuousness. There was, then, no shame in being young, not the way adults wanted to make you believe, saying every time you advanced the slightest opinion, ‘Wait till you’ve grown up a little. We fought at Verdun. When you’ve done what we did, then you can speak.’ According to Stendhal, it was no crime to make mistakes, to give in to your enthusiasms, to be happy or unhappy because a girl made you suffer. Writers whose memories were preserved by literature revealed their youth, unvarnished.
At the beginning of September 1936, Joseph Outen was obliged to admit to Jean that business was not going well. In the face of the last three months’ economic and social tumult in France, everyone was reacting the same way. They did not go without a litre of wine or a can of petrol, but they went without books. Publishing’s doldrums had reached the bookshops.
‘I’m sacking you,’ Joseph said. ‘Without notice, with nothing. Since you’re not a union member, don’t even think of taking me to court …’
‘I’ll stay. For nothing. Not a centime.’
‘That would be capitalist exploitation. No. Let’s go our separate ways. I’ve infected you with a vice. It’s your bad luck. Deal with it the best way you can. Here’s your month’s money. Take your bike and go wherever you want.’
‘Wherever doesn’t exist. I want to know where.’
‘I don’t know … go and look for Stendhal in Italy.’
‘Where exactly?’
‘On his tomb it says, “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese”. Go to Milan. Look. You’ll find it.’
‘To Parma?’
‘That’s the one place he isn’t. You need to go further.’
‘Then I’ll go to Civitavecchia too.’
‘As you like. It’s nothing to do with me. Send me some postcards. Goodbye.’
Joseph Outen knew how to be offhand when he had to. He would continue, alone, the tireless task of bringing lost and lonely customers to the pleasures of literature. Jean would have liked to kiss him, as he would have a brother, but between two athletes it was not done.
‘I shan’t forget!’ he said.
‘We’ll see about that.’
We will come across Joseph Outen again, following a new destiny. He still has to go bankrupt, to start and abandon a thousand things, to join up in 1939, serve in the infantry on the Maginot Line, and answer the call in a prisoner of war camp. But let us not get ahead of the story.
The same day Jean began the task of winning his father over to the idea of his journey. Albert was so flabbergasted that he did not know what to say. He had consented to t
he London journey four years earlier because Antoine du Courseau had been the instigator of that escapade. But Italy! In that nation of Fascists, who knew what might happen? They assassinated socialist leaders like Matteotti, and force-fed their opponents with castor oil after throwing them into the fountains in Rome. At the Vatican there lived the world’s obscurantist-in-chief. Here Jeanne protested in the name of the Holy Father. If her son could receive the Sunday blessing from the window of Saint Peter’s, she would be as happy as if she herself had made the pilgrimage there. Jean saw a chink of light. Where Fascism was concerned, he was entirely in the dark. He wanted to see palaces, monuments, sculptures. He did not mention Stendhal, whose name would have meant nothing to his parents. Albert declared that there were more than enough monuments and châteaux in France for Jean not to need to bother to see what there was in Italy. The discussion might have gone on for ever without the intervention of the abbé, who took Jean’s side. He had been to Rome when he was young and had retained a dazzling memory of it, even though in his hotel for ecclesiastical visitors he had been robbed of two pairs of underpants and a missal. Albert gave in, with an obscure premonition that he was losing his son for good. But could he say ‘his son’? Each time he had the thought he found his paternal authority paralysed. Besides, Jean had earned the money for his journey. He could not, in all fairness, be refused the opportunity to use it as he wished.
Ten days after the sale of La Sauveté, Jean boarded the train for Paris. He had never visited the capital, but he did not stop there. A taxi took him and his bicycle to the Gare de Lyon. The bicycle was loaded into the baggage car, and the train for Milan pulled out. But that is another chapter.
7
Certain to leave one another tomorrow, we hasten, my colonel and I, to say to each other in a few words all the most interesting things we have to say.
Stendhal
Was this truly the town that Henri Beyle had so loved? You might not have thought so. Trams clashed in the narrow streets, shaking windows that remained permanently shut, cars chased pedestrians onto pavements, people advanced with urgent steps, head down and cheeks unshaven, a low cottony sky crushed Milan beneath its factories’ smoke, owners of palaces barricaded themselves behind studded doors guarded by bulky doormen in white gloves, and La Scala was shut. Of course in the Galleria, where it emerged onto the Piazza del Duomo, it was still possible to find some of that easy -going atmosphere Stendhal had liked so much: the disoccupati in sandals rolling cigarettes of dark tobacco, the girls in pairs, arm in arm, pausing in front of shop windows to examine their pursuers, the ice-cream sellers bawling their monotonous cries of ‘gelati’ that ricocheted off the glasswork, a man in discussion with another suddenly making an obscene gesture with hand and elbow, a blind man offering lottery tickets beneath the suspicious gaze of a couple of carabinieri whose white leatherware and wide red stripes down their trouser seams were incongruous in the daily grind of a crowd surviving on espresso coffee and watermelon seeds.
Jean rapidly discovered his inability to see behind the mask of this foreign city, where the only people who addressed him were those who had something to sell and the only people who smiled were tarts painted as though they were on their way to mass. He wrote a postcard to Joseph Outen: ‘Arrigo wasn’t at the meeting place. I’m pushing on further.’ Further was Parma, 150 kilometres away, covered in two days at the meandering speed of a tourist, sleeping in a barn and washing himself in a fountain where an old woman, cackling, drenched him with a large bucket of water. The weather was ideal for a fine ride along a well-maintained road between plump fields bordered by young poplars. If not for the cars that nearly grazed him as they raced past at terrifying speed, he would have felt complete pleasure at letting himself roll southwards on his comfortable bicycle. What was it with Italians and cars? They drove around in patched-up Fiats and Lancias with open exhausts and thought they were Tazio Nuvolari, the wraith-like champion in the yellow shirt who walked off with every prize for Alfa Romeo, or the burly Campari in his checked cap, or the battler Ascari. Jean noted that they rarely rode bicycles. Cycling had been in decline since Bottecchia’s 1925 Tour de France victory. The country needed a new champion. People were starting to talk about a pious, athletic young man named Gino Bartali, but the lack of international prizes in the last decade had kept bicycles out of fashion, while the successes of Alfa Romeo and Maserati, battling wheel for wheel with Bugatti, Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union, had raised Italians’ mechanical passion to fever pitch. The country was in the grip of a hysteria of popping exhausts and speed. Jean was thus delighted when, after his wash at the fountain, he saw a boy of his own age approaching on a black bicycle with sit-up-and-beg handlebars. He had straw-coloured hair, a blushing complexion, and wore leather shorts with shoulder straps. He was also shirtless. Luggage elastics kept a sleeping bag and large satchel strapped to his carrier. He spoke French very well, with a strong German accent, and introduced himself straight away by his first name: Ernst.
Ernst is called on to play a role in this chapter, for which I crave your forgiveness. The proper thing to do would have been to talk about him in the opening pages, as also another character, Constantin Palfy, who is about to make an appearance. But I am not writing a novel. All we are talking about is the life of Jean Arnaud, and it is inevitable that in the course of the story this boy found in a basket will see a good many people enter his life: some will stay with us, others will detach themselves, like the lowest branches of a tree. So let me say here and now that, even though we are still four years away from 1940, we will see Yann and Monsieur Carnac again, and, soon, the prince and Salah. Geneviève, the invisible Geneviève, will appear at a moment of her choosing. We will be bringing back, briefly, Antoine du Courseau. As for Marie-Thérèse, Antoinette and Michel, they are not the sort of characters to let themselves be tossed aside. Mireille Cece is not far away. Marie-Dévote, Théo and Toinette will keep us waiting, but their return will not lack for unforeseen elements. Sadly we must lament the passing of a few faces. Captain Duclou is getting old. He will die the day the Germans excavate his garden on the cliff top to build one of the bunkers for their Atlantic defences, take down his weathercock rigged on the highest ridge of his roof, and remove his aneroid barometer, which they judge to be dangerous. He will have himself buried with weathercock and barometer in his coffin. Monsieur Cliquet will fare no better: obsessed by the go-slow strikes of 1936, he spends his time calculating impossible itineraries to Nice, Lille and Istanbul, though he has not moved from Grangeville for more than fifteen years. The delays he encounters, however fictitious, demoralise him to such an extent that people begin to wonder if he is not becoming a little strange in the head. His absurd end is something I shall recount later. Saddest of all is undoubtedly the fate of Albert and Jeanne. We shall come back to them in good time. But let no one accuse Jean of ingratitude. He loves his adoptive parents dearly and will be loyal to them till the end, yet he is from a different stock, and now that he has broken out from their very restricted universe by travelling to London, sleeping with Antoinette, reading the books lent to him by Joseph Outen, and, at this moment, riding far and wide with Ernst over Italian roads, he will never go back.
Our young German is, therefore, an occasional character. It would certainly be enjoyable to imagine that during the great upheaval that will, by its end, have whittled Europe away to almost nothing, he will again meet, at some bend in the road or the bottom of some shell-hole, his French friend from the summer of 1936. What a marvellous scene one could write, recounting their reunion in enemy uniforms! I can already see them shaking hands instead of murdering each other as the rules of war demand, recalling to each other their happy hours on the Lombardy plain, their climb up to the Passo della Futa between Bologna and Florence, their arrival in Rome browned by the sun. Unfortunately the war, so potentially fertile in coincidences, will not supply that opportunity, and each of them will pursue his destiny without influencing the other. I can even tell you at o
nce Ernst’s fate in the great cataclysm to come: enlisted in a tank regiment in September 1939 for the invasion of Poland, sergeant during the French campaign, in which he and his unit will reach Bordeaux, lieutenant by spring 1941, as Panzer divisions flatten the Soviet wheatfields. Attached to the Legion of French Volunteers as an interpreter, he will glimpse, along with his French mercenaries posted to the vanguard by Hitler in memory of Napoleon, a signpost indicating ‘Moscow 12 kilometres’, before retreating with his comrades and being promoted to captain outside Stalingrad. In 1943 we shall find him in Italy again, a tank officer without a tank, first fighting an infantry battle against General Juin’s Moroccans at Monte Cassino, then against partisans in the Abruzzi. In 1945, at twenty-five, he will be a major, Iron Cross first class, wounded three times, never seriously, and will return home, boots full of holes and uniform in tatters, to discover that his home in Cologne no longer exists, that his father, mother and sister were all killed in a bombing raid. He will commit suicide by biting a cyanide capsule as two members of the British Military Police arrive to arrest him in the cellar, where he has taken up residence with the rats.
This devastating future of fire, blood, glory and desolation did not yet weigh on the young man who leant his bike next to Jean’s and thrust his blond head into the fountain. When he straightened up with his eyelashes glued together and hair, suddenly less blond, plastered to his head, he burst out laughing.
‘You’re French?’ he asked.
‘Yes. How do you know?’
Ernst burst out laughing a second time, pointing at the maker’s name on Jean’s bicycle.
‘I know everything!’ he said. ‘Except whether you’re heading north or south.’
‘South.’
‘Like me. Shall we ride together?’
‘With pleasure. I’d like to stop at Parma this afternoon.’
