A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  †

  Maurice Papon was eventually tried in 1998 for crimes against humanity during the Nazi occupation of France. The Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld said during the trial, which was held down south in Bordeaux, the capital of la France profonde, that the French people would interpret a guilty verdict as indication that ‘there is a limit, you must act on your conscience, even if you are a man motivated not by hatred but by procedures’.

  FB learnt later how in 1961 Algerian demonstrators had been bound hand and foot and thrown into the Seine to drown. He may well have asked himself whether that was regular police procedure, as administered by Papon, or police hatred resulting from the death of fellow officers at the hand of Algerians in the preceding weeks. Whatever the case, he knew nothing of all that as he stood by the bridge on the Île Seguin, scanning the crowd for Mathilde. But when the Algerian man had suddenly appeared from the crowd, coming right up to his face and handing him the pamphlets, FB could at least feel something of the horrors his people had endured, not only on the edge of the Saharan sands of their homelands but right there in the centre of a grasping, historic and intrinsically stylised Paris. And why, FB would ask himself later, did that man choose me to distribute the leaflets?

  Perhaps it was FB’s own vulnerability that saw him singled out for the cause: his, after all, was a vulnerability with no allegiance. Perhaps there was a blank, rather bewildered gaze on his face, a certain strangeness which in its unfamiliarity perhaps reminded the Algerian man of the purpose of his cause. They were both, in different ways, strangers, after all. And with those leaflets in his hand, bearing the question ‘Où sont les morts, Papon?’, FB felt an unlikely complicity with a cause he’d had no prior reason to even begin to understand.

  Or had he?

  †

  With respect to the proportions of the Haussmanian boulevards and their five-storey apartment buildings, and even despite the revolutionary barricades of history, the stimulus of 1789, 1848 and the Commune of 1870, the number of people assembled in Paris that day was unforeseen. FB handed out a few more leaflets and then moved across the bridge, making his way now back towards the metro and the Place de la République over the same ground on which cattle had once been driven before they were outlawed on the streets of Paris in 1828. Back then nature had been forced to make way, olfactorily, muddily, in all its desirous unpredictability, and this time, as the young FB Herschell emerged from the metro and approached the Place de la République by an unnecessarily circuitous route in the hope of sighting Mathilde and her friends, there was a different, less compliant writing on the wall. Such was the imposition of ‘reality’ on the moment that it felt almost as if the pre-1828 cows of a bucolic Paris might return.

  He passed amongst an excited city suddenly prepared to express its distaste for the ultimate outcome of an original abstraction, for the cruel obfuscations and outmoded strictures of the Gaullist regime, by converting the arrondissements of the Left Bank into an artist book. The writings seemed now to be everywhere FB looked: scrawlings that had multiplied in humour and chagrin, in the living centre of the city. He read the walls and walked with what felt like the remarkable knowledge that he himself, with Mathilde, had made his own contribution to the living book.

  La porte a été ouverte, mais l’oiseau va-t-il voler?

  Nevertheless, as he approached the Boulevard Raspail he felt as if, unless he found her, he would remain on the outside of the tumultuous events, even as he stood amongst them. With Mathilde he could write on walls, contribute to the moment; without her, and now without the pamphlets he’d distributed, he felt like a hick, a loner, a tourist. And so the words Mathilde and he had written on the walls of the Rue de Buci began to twist in his mind until he felt himself like the canary in the tabac at Clamart.

  FB walked slowly through Saint-Germain-des-Prés and crossed with the grain of the crowd towards the Pont Neuf and Rue de la Cité. In a few short hours the buses and cars would come to a standstill, the mass of people would be coming back along the streets in their millions, but as yet it was not entirely clear what would ensue. He took a detour to find the Rue de Buci and view their scrawled phrase, almost as a touchstone. Everyone was in groups, walking and talking volubly, but all there was to give him a sense of anything other than alienation were those words in the brown paint slightly discoloured by the blue.

  He stood there for a moment, lit a cigarette and, a little pathetically, felt much better. One act of creation, the distribution of some leaflets, and the world became a place he could inhabit again. And yet, would he have ever written that phrase, and would he have stood for a whole hour distributing leaflets by the bridge, if he hadn’t fallen in love?

  Finally, as if drawn by the momentum of the streets beginning to surge with people all around him, he found his way out onto the Boulevard St-Michel and, savouring the memory of the pearl on his tongue, crossed the river.

  8

  Épanouie

  The malaise in which Mathilde awoke on the Monday morning of the Renault demonstration was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. According to the calendar, the weekend was over; normally she would have had classes to attend, but the university was shut down and the weekend, well, it seemed to have a lot more life in it yet. If the fervour of the last few days was anything to go by, France was about to experience the intense introspection of a holiday with no end in sight. And yet the whole city was alive with an atmosphere not of introspection but of catharsis. She felt as if, at last, some real work had begun; the jemmying up of the cobblestones of the boulevards was not only a practical necessity of the moment but also a perfect metaphor. Things had to be turned upside down. Finally everything was being exposed to the spring sky after years of an expertly administered darkness.

  Mathilde herself had only been sixteen and still living at home on the Atlantic coast when the two hundred Algerians had been massacred on the Pont Saint-Michel. She had known about it through her parents. Her own mother had been born in Algiers into a French colonial, or Pied-Noir, family and, although a pacifist, had sent packages to the Algerian National Liberation Front, the FLN, as a younger woman. When in 1960 Albert Camus died in a car crash at Villeblevin, Mathilde’s father had made a point of coming out fishing with his daughter on her pinasse to explain the contradictions of the man. With the narrow boat rocking under the celerity of the incoming tide, he told Mathilde how Camus had been against the Algerian war fundamentally because he was worried for the safety of his mother in Algiers. He felt keenly the humiliations that had been inflicted by colonialism and was philosophically aligned with the desire for independence, but refused to sanction a violence which included the torture of innocents and the murder of children. Thus, at heart, he was against both sides of the war. This man, Mathilde’s father said over the hiss of the fast-moving skin of the bassin, was pure to an impractical degree. He was of course associated with the star intellectuals of Paris, Sartre and de Beauvoir among them, but was also a champion footballer with his feet very much on the ground. Such contradictions, Alain Soubret told his daughter, are the sign of a man you can trust. Camus had brought the reality of his love for his mother like an untamed animal into the abstractions of the theoretical debate over colonialism. If you ever, he called to her over the whistling and buffeting of the rushing tide, meet a man who seems perfect, either in body or mind, and who exhibits that perfection as his primary gift, have nothing to do with him. In the flaw is the human. Think of Camus, Mathilde. Use such a man as your measure.

  When the two hundred were massacred near the Pont Saint-Michel the year after Camus died, Mathilde was not that concerned about it. But her parents were. The blatant savagery and significance of the act was not lost on them, nor the fact that it failed to make headlines around the world. They felt there was a secret France born not just of racist colonialism but more fundamentally of misanthropy. The police force in Paris signified the stubborn leftovers of Pétain and hi
s Vichy government. As a consequence Mathilde’s parents had refused even to visit Paris since the massacre. When she left home to study there she went with their blessing but, inevitably, with their worries and chagrin as well.

  The Pied-Noir community on the coast in Gascony was relatively small, the Algerian community even smaller, but in Paris, Mathilde wrote to tell them, there were people from the edge of the Sahara everywhere. She began to see her parents, though she did not write to tell them this, as negative, hermetic. She encouraged them, particularly her father, with whom she thought she might have more luck, to come and visit her in Rue Monge. She was calling him out of the past and into the present. From la France profonde to la France vraie, from the traditional south where they were gasping for air to a city whose population truly reflected the superabundance of the country’s history.

  Her parents never came, of course, not even her father. He wrote to encourage her, both in her studies and in her hatred of de Gaulle. But he told her to be careful, too, and to avoid the police. They were not to be trusted.

  Now she had seen this for herself during the night of the barricades. When the CRS riot squad had attacked at 2 am they had done so with violence and force, but more importantly with an attitude that implied things could get a whole lot worse. She had thought of the two hundred during those wild hours on the Rue Gay-Lussac. And she thought, too, of her parents’ hermeticism down there by the rushing tides. What would it achieve, that burying of their heads in the sand? Or perhaps they had simply done enough and were now too old. Perhaps it was Mathilde’s turn now, just as it had been theirs during the war. Perhaps.

  She saw now that the malaise she was feeling had been seeded not so much by the night of the barricades but by her need to visit the Galerie Sarcon. Why, she wondered, as she lay in bed, unable to raise herself and make her way to the toilet, had she begun to make that same journey from her apartment in Rue Monge, along Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel to the gallery? When Georges, in his trenchant nostalgia for modernist art, had informed her that the early Mondrians would be on show at the Sarcon she had barely registered it. But the following day she found herself wanting to make her way there. And as the activity on the streets began to grow and she began to get more involved, her visits to the paintings became more and more frequent. This did not trouble her at the time, but now she began to see the connection between visiting the Mondrian dunes and her nostalgic talk at the restaurant of the pinasse.

  She turned in her bed, away from the curtained window. She had agreed to meet Georges and Gilles at the cafe and from there go across to Boulogne-Billancourt and the Île Seguin but she couldn’t move. Her body was like lead. She was horrified, conflicted, confused. If the layers of the city were finally being exposed in the streets outside, so too were the layers of her self right there in the darkened bedroom.

  †

  As far as I can ascertain from the contents of the boxes of FB’s archive, it was not then the case with either of them that they, to put it in the jargon of pop culture, ‘preferred his early work’. In different ways both FB and Mathilde’s reason for returning to the Galerie Sarcon to view the Mondrian dunes was more personal and specific than aesthetic. It is clear that in FB’s case he was studying dunes in order to stabilise antipodean roads, and these early Mondrian dunes, in their hovering at the midpoint between the figure and the abstraction of the figure, were, as Professor Lacombe had pointed out to him, almost unwittingly scientific. But it is also clear that Mathilde, having been born in the shadow of the Dune du Pyla, the largest sand dune in Europe, and having grown up on the shifting shores around La Teste-de-Buch and Arcachon, where the constant movement of sand reflected not only the nature of time but also the dynamic mutability of the culture and politics she was now experiencing, was homesick.

  Mondrian had painted the dune pictures in Domburg, a Dutch town on the North Sea which, a little like Arcachon, had once been an aristocratic spa town where people came for a nature cure. From 1908 until 1916 Mondrian made annual visits, finding sympathetic conversation with the members of an artist colony of Dutch Luminists centred around the Indonesian born painter Jan Toorop. Toorop had himself been attracted to Domburg by the fame of its charismatic natural healer, a certain Dr Metzger, and also because the wealth of its summer nobility created potential buyers for his work. Together Toorop and Mondrian had discussed spiritualism and painting and, specifically, theosophy and Catholicism. In such nourishing circumstances Mondrian spent days on end painting amongst the dunes which, ultimately, he used as a key motif of his evolution towards the abstraction of nature.

  The Mondrian dunes, as they were curated in the Galerie Sarcon, demonstrated clearly that it was amongst the dunes of Domburg, and in his conversations there with Toorop and other Luminists, that Mondrian began to integrate his theosophical beliefs with his painting techniques. He believed that naturalistic painting such as that with which he himself had begun was in fact a betrayal of deep reality in favour of superficial appearance. Thus he believed that naturalistic painters are often more interesting in their quickest sketches and studies than in their finalised paintings. This was because their intuitive or even unconscious aesthetic impulse contained more truth, and therefore more beauty, than their consciously finished, and therefore normalised, work. In a dialogue-essay Mondrian wrote many years after painting the dunes, and which I have been prompted to find a copy of since FB’s death, he has a fictional naturalistic painter cry: ‘Why did you discard all form?’ To which his fictional alter ego, a so-called ‘abstract-real’ painter, replies: ‘When “things” are in evidence this always limits the esthetic emotion. Therefore the object had to be excluded.’

  Mondrian’s Domburg dune paintings came early in his career. He is famous, of course, for paintings of vertical and horizontal intersections of primary colours, but before he had distilled his style down to the plastic originality that appealed to postwar America so much (remember the Partridge Family bus?) he dwelt for a time in a kind of conceptual littoral between idea and form. Therefore, or so it seems was the case as far as the owner-curators of the Galerie Sarcon were concerned, the dune paintings quite literally had it all. With their electric teals and tangerines, with their reduction of exterior expectations, they travelled out beyond naturalism; but with their retaining of the recognisable form of the dune in nature, they had not given up on the external appearance of the earth altogether.

  †

  She missed her rendezvous with Georges and Gilles, missed the demonstrations in the sky-high shed on the Île Seguin, as well as the slightly bewildered Australian handing out FLN leaflets near the Boulogne-Billancourt bridge. Instead she curled up in an armchair and read Nathalie Sarraute in a condition of torpor and shame.

  By midday the gulf she felt between the hubbub she could sense on the streets outside and her own malaise was becoming dangerously deep. What was it, she began to wonder, about herself amid the shutdown of the city, that made her so sick and sad? After feeling so involved through the last few weeks, even as Georges annoyed her and Gilles was a pest, and even as her friend Josephine, who lived above her family’s boulangerie on Rue Soufflot, had argued that it must all blow over and that they should get on with their studies so they would be well ahead when it all died down, she now felt as if she did not belong. The phrase that came to her mind was not one about whether the bird would fly now that the door of the cage had been swung open; it was more along the lines of where the bird would fly to now that freedom was in the air.

  Escape. Even as the streets of the city were finally providing exactly that, she wanted more. She wanted a double escape.

  †

  I saw that the earth had become nothing. And there was one tear. Never had there been such a tear. (This tear, for me, was the sea).

  Hélène Cixous

  What was missing was the singable, edible, detestable land . . .

  Hélène Cixous

 
9

  Pioneer Vegetation

  When FB had first arrived in Paris he still had the joke of his fellow violinist in the Moorabool Chamber Orchestra ringing in his head. Don Bryant was a Johann Strauss man, as unphilosophical as they come. He did, however, have a strain of dry humour that FB enjoyed and which saw them always gravitate towards each other during breaks in rehearsals. Once, when everyone, FB included, was very excited about reinterpreting Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Don Bryant whispered out the corner of his mouth to FB that he thought the music sounded like the soundtrack to a mass grave. When FB informed his friend that Bruch was a renowned anti-Semite, Don Bryant’s eyes had widened in mock indignation and he replied, ‘Is that right? Well, surely there’s no need to torture us gentiles as well.’

  In February ’68, the week before FB was to board his Qantas flight at Essendon, he attended what would be his last rehearsal with the sextet. As word had got out about his trip to France, the well-wishers amongst his fellow musicians were effusive. Everyone was flattering and envious, except for Don Bryant. As FB was shyly explaining over sherry and sandwiches after the rehearsal how his trip was being partly funded by a French government scholarship, Don Bryant quipped: ‘A foreign scholarship to go to sand school, eh? Sounds a bit like travelling to Scotland to study kangaroos. You do know there are a few grains of the stuff around here, Frank?’

  The other Moorabool musicians managed a laugh at the joke, but they were also quick to make sure their mirth didn’t go too far. The truth was that what Australians knew about France was confined to the vastly different feelings associated with, on the one hand, images of Paris as the beau monde, and on the other, the experience of war. Stories had been told, half told or gone untold in many families about the horrors of the winter quags of the western front in World War I and the generally perceived ambivalence of the French towards their occupiers in World War II. No-one much though had ever talked about sand. The idea of leaving the windy shores of Geelong, Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean to study sand in the shadows of Notre-Dame seemed rather unlikely. No-one however, except Don Bryant, had been impolite enough to point this out. And this was precisely why FB liked him.