by Alexis Jenni
There was a management reshuffle at the company where I worked. My line manager had wanted only one thing: to leave, and he succeeded. He found another job and the vacant post was filled by someone else, someone who planned to stay, and he restored order.
My former manager’s questionable competence and desperate need to leave had protected me; his replacement’s ambition and IT skills scuppered me. Though he had never said a word to me, the two-faced bastard who had left had made a note of all my absences. He kept files recording attendance, lateness, efficiency; everything that could be measured he had itemized. It had kept him busy while he planned his escape, but he had never breathed a word about it. The obsessive-compulsive left behind this dossier; his ambitious successor was trained to cut costs. Any available information was useful; he inherited the dossier and immediately suspended me.
The Evaluaxe software presented my contribution to the company as a series of curves on a graph. Most of these languished at the base of the x-axis. One – a red curve – had been rising in jagged peaks ever since preparations began for the Gulf War, and still hovered in the upper strata. Far below, a dotted line in the same colour indicated the norm.
He tapped the screen with the rubber of a meticulously sharpened pencil he never used for writing, only for pointing at the screen, tapping to emphasize key points. Against such technology, such meticulous records, against software capable of producing such unassailable graphs, the ballpoint I had used to fake doctor’s notes was ineffective. I was, visibly, a weak link.
‘Look at the screen. I should fire you for professional misconduct.’
He went on tapping at the curves with his rubber, seemingly lost in thought; it sounded like a rubber ball trapped in a bowl.
‘But there might be a solution.’
I held my breath. My mood shifted from depression to hope; even when you don’t care, no one likes being given the boot.
‘As a result of the war, the economic situation has deteriorated. We have to lay off several members of staff. Everything will be done according to standard procedures. You’ll be among the redundancies.’
I nodded. What could I say? I stared at the figures on the screen. The numbers formed a graph that showed exactly what it was intended to show. I could clearly see my economic inefficiency, it was unarguable. Numbers pass through language without even acknowledging its presence; numbers leave you speechless, open-mouthed, panting for breath in the rarefied air of the mathematical sphere. I assented with a monosyllable. I was happy that he was laying me off according to standard procedures rather than firing me for gross misconduct. He smiled and spread his hands as if to say, ‘Don’t mention it… I’m not sure why I’m doing this. Now get out quick, before I change my mind.’
I backed out of his office, I left the building. I later learned that he pulled the same stunt on everyone he was letting go. He proposed overlooking their failings if they would agree to redundancy. Rather than protesting, everyone had thanked him. Never had a redundancy scheme gone more smoothly: a third of the staff stood up, thanked him and left; that was that.
They laid the blame for these cuts on the war, because wars have unfortunate consequences. There is nothing to be done, it’s war. Reality cannot be stopped.
That night I packed up all my belongings in boxes I got from the mini-mart and decided to go back to where I came from. My life was shit, so it hardly mattered where I lived. I’d love to have a different life, but I’m the narrator. The narrator can’t simply do what he likes: for a start, he has to narrate. If I had to live as well as narrating, I don’t think I would be up to it. Why do so many writers write about their childhoods? It’s because they have no other life: they spend the rest of it writing. Childhood is the only time when they could live without thinking about anything else. Ever since, they have been writing, it takes up all their time, because writing uses up time the way embroidery uses thread. And we have only one thread.
My life is a pain in the arse and I am telling it; I’d prefer to show; and for that, to draw. That’s what I would like: to just wave my hand so everyone could see. But drawing requires skill, an apprenticeship, a knack, whereas telling stories is a part of being human: you only have to open your mouth and let out your breath. I have to breathe, and talking amounts to the same thing. And so I tell stories, even if reality always escapes. A prison made of breath is not very secure.
A while back I had marvelled at the beautiful eyes of my girlfriend, this woman I was so close to, and I tried to depict them. ‘Depict’ is a word appropriate to narration, and also to my lack of ability as an artist: I depicted her and managed only a scrawl. I asked her to pose with her eyes open and to look at me, while my vivid, coloured pencils moved across the paper, but she looked away. Her beautiful eyes misted over and she cried. She was not worthy for me to look at her, she said, much less paint her or draw her or depict her; she talked to me about her sister, who was much more beautiful, who had magnificent eyes, gorgeous breasts, like the ones you see on the figureheads of old-fashioned sailing ships, whereas she… I had to set down my pencils, take her in my arms and gently stroke her breasts while I reassured her, wiped away her tears and told her over and over how I felt when she touched me, when I was with her, when I saw her. The pencils on my unfinished sketch fell still, and I told and told when what I really wanted was to show; I sank deeper into the tangle of storytelling, when all I wanted was to show how it was, and I was condemned again and again to narration to make everything right. I never did draw her eyes. But I remember the desire to do so, a desire on paper.
My boring life could easily be relocated. Having no ties, I was governed by the force of habit, which acts like gravity. In the end the river Rhône, which I knew, suited me better than the Escaut, which I didn’t know; in the end, meaning at the end, meaning for the end. I went back to Lyon to put an end to things.
Desert Storm got me fired. I was collateral damage from an explosion that no one ever saw, but which could be felt in the empty images on television. I was so tenuously connected to life that it took only a distant sigh for me to become unmoored. The butterflies of the US Air Force flapped their wings of steel, setting off a tornado in my soul on the other side of the world; it triggered something in me and I went back to where I came from. This war was the last event in my former life; this war was the end of the twentieth century in which I had grown up. The Gulf War reshaped reality and reality suddenly collapsed.
War took place, but what difference did it make? For all we know it could have been made up. We were watching it on screens. But it altered reality in some of its little-known areas; it changed the economy; it triggered my redundancy and was the reason I went back to what I had been running from; and, people said, the soldiers when they returned from those sweltering countries never truly recovered their souls: they fell mysteriously ill, insomniac, grief-stricken, and died from an internal collapse of the liver, the lungs, of the skin.
It was worth being interested in this war.
War took place, we knew little about it. It was for the best. Such details as we had, those we managed to glean, offered a glimpse of a reality better kept hidden. Desert Storm happened. Daguet, our little Bambi, frolicked alongside. The Iraqis were pounded by a quantity of bombs difficult to imagine, more than had ever been dropped. There was one for every Iraqi citizen. Some of the bombs pierced walls and exploded inside, others flattened floor after floor before exploding in the cellar among those hiding there; ‘blackout bombs’ emitted clouds of graphite particles that caused short-circuits and destroyed electrical installations; thermobaric bombs sucked up all the oxygen within a vast radius; still others sniffed out their targets like dogs following a scent, nose to the ground, pouncing on their prey and exploding on contact. Later, crowds of Iraqis were machine-gunned as they stumbled from their shelters; perhaps they were attacking, perhaps they were surrendering; we never knew because they died, there was no one left. They had been given weapons only the day before, becau
se the wary Ba’ath Party, having eliminated every competent officer, did not issue their troops with weapons for fear they might rebel. These scruffy soldiers might as well have been issued with wooden rifles. Those who did not manage to get out in time were buried in their shelters by bulldozers that moved forwards in a line, shovelling up the earth before them, sealing the trenches and burying everything and everyone inside. It lasts only a few days, this curious war that looked more like a demolition site. The Iraqis, equipped with Soviet tanks, tried to launch a vast battle on level ground like the Battle of Kursk, only to be ripped to shreds by a single pass of propeller planes. These lumbering planes, designed for ground strikes, bombarded the tanks using rounds of depleted uranium, a newly discovered metal as green as the colour of war, more dense than lead and therefore capable of piercing steel. The corpses were left to rot; no one came to peer inside the smoking tanks after the black birds which killed them had flown past. What did they look like? Like tins of ravioli torn open and tossed into a fire? There are no pictures and the bodies stayed in the desert, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere.
The Iraqi army collapsed. The fourth largest army in the world fled; a disorderly retreat along the motorway north of Kuwait City, a ragtag column of several thousand vehicles, trucks, cars and buses, bumper-to-bumper, loaded with plunder and moving at walking speed. The whole convoy was set ablaze by helicopters, I think, or maybe ground-hugging planes, that flew in from the south and unleashed sticks of smart bombs that carried out their tasks with a marked lack of discrimination. Everything was torched: tanks, civilian cars, men, and the treasures which they had plundered from the oil-rich city. Everything congealed into a river of molten rubber, metal, flesh and plastic. After that the war ended. The sand-coloured tanks of the Gulf War Coalition stopped in mid-desert, turned off their engines and there was silence. The sky was black and dripping with the greasy soot from the burning oil wells, and the foul stench of burning rubber and human flesh hung in the air.
The Gulf War did not take place, people wrote, to explain the failure of this war to register in our minds. It would be better had it not taken place, for all the dead whose number and names we will never know. During this war the Iraqis were stamped out like irritating ants, the kind that sting you in the back while you’re taking a nap. There were few Western fatalities; we know their names and we know exactly how they died – mostly accidentally or from friendly fire. We will never know the number of Iraqis fatalities, nor how each of them died. How could we? It is a poor country; they cannot afford one death each; they were killed en masse. They burned together and died, melted into blocks like some Mafia gangland killing, buried beneath the sand of their trenches, crushed into the concrete rubble of their shelters, charred amid the molten metal of burnt-out vehicles. They died in bulk, not a trace of them was found. Their names were not recorded. In this war, it dies the way it rains; ‘it’ is a state of affairs, an act of Nature about which there is nothing to be done; and ‘it’ kills, too, since none of the players in this mass slaughter saw who was killed nor how they were killed. The bodies were distant, at the far end of the missiles’ trajectory, far below the wings of the planes that had already disappeared. It was a clean war that left no marks on the hands of the killers. There were no real atrocities, just the great calamity of war, refined by research and industry.
We could choose to see nothing, to understand nothing; we could let words wash over us: it wars like it rains, it is fate. Narration is powerless, there is no way to recount this war; the fictions that are usually so vivid are, in this case, allusive, awkward, clumsily pieced together. What happened in 1991, what filled our television screens for months, is insubstantial. And yet something happened. It cannot be related using traditional storytelling, but it can be identified by number and by name. This was something I later understood through a film. Because I love film.
I have always watched war movies. I enjoy sitting in the dark, watching films with helicopters, to a soundtrack of cannon and the rattle of machine-gun fire. It’s Futurism, as beautiful as a Marinetti, it is thrilling to the little boy that I have always remained, little, a boy, pow! and pow! kapow! It’s as beautiful as primitive art, as beautiful as the kinetic art of the 1920s, but with the addition of a thunderous soundtrack that pounds, that heightens the images, that thrills the viewer, plastering him to his seat like a gale-force wind. I have always loved war movies, but this one, the one I saw years later, sent cold shivers down my spine, because of the names and the numbers.
Oh, how well movies show things! Look, just look at how much more can be shown in two hours of cinema than in whole days of television. Image after image: framed images spew forth a torrent of images. The fixed frame projected on to the wall, as unblinking as the eye of an insomniac in the darkness of the room, makes it possible for reality to finally appear, by virtue of its slowness, its intensity, its pitiless permanence. Look! I turn towards the wall and I see them, my queens, he would say, this man who stopped writing, this man who still has the sexual habits of a teenager. He would have loved the cinema.
We sit on cushioned seats that cradle us like shells, the house lights dim, the seat backs hide our actions, hide our thoughts and gestures. Through the window that opens up before you – and even now, sometimes, a curtain is raised before the images are projected – through this window you see the world. And slowly in the darkness I gently slide my hand into the cleft of the girl with me, and on the screen I see; I finally understand.
I no longer know the name of the girl who was with me then. It is strange to know so little about the people you sleep with. But I have no head for names and we mostly made love with our eyes closed. At least I did; and I don’t remember her name. I regret that. I could force myself to, or I could make one up. No one would be any the wiser. I would pick a commonplace name to make it seem real or maybe an unusual name to be cute. I hesitate. But inventing a name would change nothing; it would not change the fundamental horror of the mental blank and the fact we are unaware of that mental blank. Because this is the most terrifying, the most destructive cataclysm of all, this blank one does not notice.
In this film I saw, this film that terrified me, this movie by a famous director which was shown in cinemas, released on DVD, this film the whole world saw, the action takes place in Somalia – nowhere, in other words. An American Special Ops unit has to cross Mogadishu, capture some guy and make it home. But the Somalis fight back. The Americans are fired on, and they fire back. There were dead, many of them American. Every American’s death is shown before, during and after the event; they die slowly. They die one by one; each has a moment to himself as he dies. The Somalis, on the other hand, die as in a trap shoot, en masse; no one troubles to count them. When the Americans retreat, they find one of their number is missing; he has been taken prisoner, and a helicopter flies over Mogadishu, blasting his name over a loudhailer cranked up to maximum volume to let him know he is not forgotten. The closing credits give the number and names of the nineteen Americans who died, and mentions that at least a thousand Somalis were killed. No one is shocked by this film. No one is shocked by this disproportion. By this imbalance. Of course not; we are used to it. In unequal wars – the only wars in which the West takes part – the ratio is always the same: at least ten to one. The film is based on a true story – unsurprisingly, that is the way these things go. We know this. In colonial wars we do not count the fatalities on the other side, because they are not dead, nor are they enemies: they are natural obstacles that must be overcome, like rocks or mangrove roots or mosquitoes. We do not count them, because they do not count.
After the destruction of the fourth biggest army in the world – a fatuous piece of journalese that was repeated like a mantra – we were so relieved to see almost everyone come home that we forgot those deaths, as if the war really had not taken place. The Western fatalities died by accident, their names are known, they will be remembered; the others do not count. It took a movie to teach me this: a
s bodies are massacred by machine, their souls, unnoticed, are erased. When no traces of a murder exist, the murder itself disappears; still the ghosts pile up, we simply cannot see them.
Here, right here, I would like to raise a statue. Bronze, maybe, because bronze statues are solid and you can make out the facial features. It would be set on a small pedestal, not too high, so that it is still accessible, and surrounded by lawns where anyone is allowed to sit. It would be erected in the middle of a busy square, a place where people pass, meeting, then head off in all directions.
It would be a statue of a little man with no physical charm, wearing an unfashionable suit and a pair of huge glasses that distort his features; he would be depicted with a pen and paper, holding the pen out so that someone could sign the piece of paper like a pollster in the street or an activist trying to persuade you to sign a petition.
He is not much to look at, his pose is humble, but I would like to erect a statue to Paul Teitgen.
There is nothing physically impressive about him. He was weedy and short-sighted. When he came to take up his pose at the préfecture in Algeria, when he arrived with others to take control of the départements of North Africa that had been abandoned, indiscriminately, to personal and racial violence, when he arrived, he shuddered in the doorway of the plane from the heat. In an instant, he was bathed in sweat, despite the safari suit bought from the shop for colonial ambassadors on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow, removed his glasses – which had fogged – in order to wipe them, and in that moment he could see nothing: only the harsh glare of the runway, the shadows, the dark suits of the welcoming committee. He considered turning around and going straight home, then he put his glasses back on and went down the gangway. His suit was plastered to his back and, scarcely able to see a thing, he stepped on to the tarmac, into the shimmering heat haze.
