by Alexis Jenni
He and a group of classmates sometimes went out. Going out in Lyon meant pacing up and down the main street. It is something that happens in gangs, girls on one side, boys on the other, with lots of giggling, winking and muffled laughter, punctuated by the fleeting heroism of a flattering remark that is quickly drowned out by the awkward restlessness of young men. A restless energy they exhausted by walking the length of the rue de la République, first one way and then the other; it is what everyone in Lyon does before stopping for a drink at one of the cafés with a canvas awning overlooking the square, the vast empty square that is the centre of the city. It would not occur to a seventeen year old from Lyon to do otherwise.
One of his friends from the streets and in the cafés – although ‘friend’ is an exaggeration – suggested he come to the life-drawing class. ‘Come and study the nude, you’re the one with the talent,’ he sniggered, raising his glass, while Victorien blushed and buried his nose in his own glass, not knowing what to say. The other boy was older, unkempt, artistic; he talked in hints and allusions, mocked rather than making jokes, and insisted that it was not possible to just walk into the life-drawing class.
‘My friend here has got real talent,’ he had told the teacher, slipping him a couple of bottles which Victorien had liberated from his father’s wine cellar. With a bottle wedged under each elbow, the bearded gentleman had his hands full, and by the time he had set them down to make full use of his limbs, Victorien was already sitting next to his friend – an overstatement – staring at a sheet of white paper pinned to an easel. Fair enough. The drawing teacher shrugged and affected not to notice the sardonic smiles this incident had provoked. Pencils in hand, with studied seriousness, Victorien began to study a lone young girl among these boys, the young naked girl who struck poses, poses he did not know were possible.
A large crowd had gathered so they might finally see a naked girl. His friend – an overstatement – had snickered as he described the scene and the intimate anatomy of young women, the boys with their eyes on stalks, the apoplectic expression of the teacher, whose beard quivered every time the young girl, her charms exposed, shifted her position. ‘For that,’ he added, ‘you have to pay. It’s obvious! What did you expect?’
But that was not it. A crowd had gathered to see a young girl nude, but that was not what captivated Victorien. The breasts, for example, the breasts of a naked, living woman are utterly unlike those of a statue or in the engravings he sometimes studied: real breasts are visibly heavier than one might think; they are less symmetrical; they have mass, they droop; they have a particular shape which follows no geometry; they confound the eye, crying out for hands so they might be better sensed. And hips, too, have creases and furrows that statues do not have. And skin is flecked with details, fine hairs, birthmarks, that statues do not have. Unsurprisingly, since statues have no skin. The skin of this young woman bristled with goosebumps and was tremulous with shivers, because the studio was cold.
Victorien had expected some sort of erotic spectacle. He had imagined going wild, cringing, drooling, at the very least trembling, but there was none of that: faced with this girl, with this flawed statue, he did not know what to feel, where to look. His pencil gave him composure. He sketched, followed the lines, smudged the shadows, and gradually drawing taught him the real weight of hips and breasts, of lips and thighs; and gradually the expected emotion stole up on him, but in a very different form. He wanted to take the girl in his arms, to search every inch of her body for warmth, for shivers, to lift her up and carry her away from this. His line became more and more fluid, and by the end of the session he had made some fine sketches, which he rolled up tightly and hid in his bedroom.
His consorting with art students did not last. One evening his uncle caught his friend – an overstatement – outside the café where they were lurking. He waited on the pavement, arms folded, one shoulder pressed to the wall. When the little gang emerged, laughing, he strode over to the lanky artist and slapped him hard, twice. The young man crumpled to the ground, as much from surprise and from the blows as from the alcohol he had drunk. The other boys scattered and disappeared into the alleys, all except Victorien, shocked by this sudden violence. His friend – an overstatement – lay sprawled on the ground, unable to pick himself up, sobbing at the feet of the uncle, who stood stock-still, looking down at him, his hands in his pockets. But even more than the downfall of a young man who but a quarter of an hour ago had seemed so invincible, so charismatic and so clever, what terrified Victorien in that moment was how much the uncle resembled his sister, his face utterly impassive as he towered over the young man at his feet, who had crumpled because he had slapped him. It terrified him, because he could not comprehend what they could possibly have in common, and yet the resemblance was undeniable.
The uncle led him back towards the shop without a word. He held open the door and waved the boy into the darkness beyond. Victorien shot him a quizzical glance. ‘Draw. Draw as much as you like. But have nothing more to do with that world, those people. Forget those boys, those mediocrities who call themselves artists, but can be cured of their vocation with a slap or two. He should have got back on his feet and knocked me out. He could at least have tried. Or hurled abuse at me, one solitary curse at least. But he did nothing. He blubbed. So forget about him.’
He pushed Victorien into the shop and closed the door behind them. It was dark inside. Victorien groped his way to his bedroom. He slept badly. In the darkness of his room, which was twice as deep when he closed his eyes, it seemed to him that sleeping was weakness. Exhaustion dragged him down towards the submission of sleep, but nervous energy soared, lifting him up, up to where he bumped against the low ceiling. These twin forces waged a civil war inside his body, tearing him apart. In the morning he woke up shattered, breathless and bitter.
Victorien Salagnon lived a foolish life, one that made him feel ashamed. He did not know what he might do when he had finished translating the antiquated texts that currently occupied his days. He could study accountancy, take over his father’s business, but the shop is hateful. The shop had always been horrid and now, in wartime, it seemed utterly vile. He could study, pass his exams and end up working for a French government that was actively collaborating with the Germans, for a company that was contributing to the German war effort. The Europe of 1943 was German. It was völkisch, every citizen was corralled within the Völk as into a prison camp. Victorien Salagnon would for ever be a second-class citizen, a loser who had had no opportunity to fight, for he was born that way. In German Europe, those bearing a French name – and his name was something he could not hide – were born to provide fine wines and elegant women to those with German names. In Nazi Europe he would never be more than a bondsman; this was written in his name and would endure for ever.
It was not that he resented the Germans, but if things carried on as they were his birth would determine his whole life, something he would never go beyond. The time had come to do something, to resist, instead of bowing his head and grumbling. He talked about this to Chassagneaux and they decided – or rather Chassagneaux enthusiastically accepted Victorien’s suggestion – that they should paint radical slogans on the walls.
It was just a start, and it had the advantage of being something they could do quickly and unaided. Such an act would show the French that resistance festered, even in those cities where occupying forces were most deeply entrenched. France is defeated, it is bloodied but unbowed: this is what their graffiti would proclaim, loud and clear.
They found paint and two large brushes. The Maison Salagnon had so many suppliers that it was not difficult to procure a large tin of gloss paint – good and thick, it covers well and it’s water-resistant, said the man giving it to Victorien, thinking he was doing a favour for the father. It was deep crimson, not white, but simply getting hold of paint in 1943 was an achievement; they could not be picky about the colour. It would do the job. They decided on the night, they practised writing slogans on scraps of paper w
hich they later swallowed, and spent several Sundays searching for the perfect wall. It had to be long enough to fit a whole slogan, smooth enough so it was easy to read. The location could not be too secluded, the slogan had to be seen in the morning, but it could not be a busy intersection or they might be interrupted by a patrol. In addition, the surface had to be white enough for the red paint to be legible. That ruled out adobe, cinderblock and drystone walls. This left only the factories to the east of the city, the long white warehouse walls that factory workers walked past every morning on their way to work. At night, these streets were deserted.
On the appointed night, they set off. By the light of the moon they crossed the Rhône and walked due east. Their footsteps echoing, the cold biting deeper, they picked their way using the street names they had learned by heart before setting out. The brushes hidden in their sleeves were cumbersome; the huge paint tin strained their arms; they frequently had to change hands and swiftly stuff the other hand into a pocket. By the time they came to the wall they had chosen, the moon had traced an arc across the sky. At every street corner they crouched, listening for the pounding footsteps of a patrol or the rumble of an army truck. They encountered no one and found themselves standing in front of the wall. It streamed in the moonlight like a roll of white paper. In the morning, workers would read the message. Salagnon had no real idea what the working classes were like, except that they were tough, bull-headed and Communist. But their common heritage would make up for any class difference: they, like him, were French and vanquished. The words they would read in the morning would kindle that spirit that had no place within a German Europe. The vanquished must rise up, because if they are subjugated by their race, they will never achieve anything. All this, needless to say, they had to convey in simple words.
Opening the paint tin took some time. The lid was stuck fast and they had forgotten to bring a screwdriver. They tried to prise it with the brush handles, but they were too thick and skittered off; they bashed their knuckles, the blood pounding through their veins made their fingers tremble, they sweated as they stared at this paint tin they could not open. They slid a flat stone into the groove and wrestled with it, muttering curses, and finally they prised it open, spilling it over the ground, all over their hands and the brush handles. They were bathed in sweat. ‘Phew!’ they whispered softly. The pungent smell of turpentine wafted from the open can; in the silence, Salagnon could hear his heart. He could hear it as though it were not his. All at once he felt a powerful need to piss.
He crossed the street, which was particularly wide at this spot, ducked behind the corner of the wall. Here, hidden from the moon, he pissed against the base of a concrete post. He felt a wave of relief, almost of exhilaration, he would be able to write; he was looking at the stars in the cold sky when he heard a ‘Halt!’ that made him jump. He had to grip himself with both hands to control the stream of piss. ‘Halt!’ That word whistles through the air like a bullet: the word itself is an action understood by every living soul in Europe: the ‘h’ propels it like a rocket engine, the clipped ‘t’ hits the target: ‘Halt!’
Salagnon, who had not finished pissing, turned warily. Five Germans running. The moon glittered on the metal of their helmets, their guns. The paint can sat, still open, next to the wall, under a large daubed ‘N’, whose solvent stench reached even his patch of shadows. Chassagneaux was running, his footsteps echoing against the walls, becoming more high-pitched as he got farther away. A German shouldered his rifle and fired, making a sharp crack, and the footsteps stopped. Two soldiers dragged the body back by its feet. Salagnon did not know what to do – carry on pissing, run for it, put his hands up? He knew you were supposed to raise your hands when captured, but perhaps what he was doing exempted him. He did not even know whether he had been spotted; he was cloaked only by shadows. He did not move. The Germans laid the body under the ‘N’, put the lid back on the tin, exchanged a few words, gruff syllables that would for ever be engraved on Salagnon’s mind, liquefied by fear and shame. They saw nothing. They left the corpse underneath the letter and marched off in an orderly file, taking with them the paint tin and the brushes.
Salagnon was trembling. He felt naked in his corner. There was nothing to hide behind. The soldiers had not seen him. The shadows had concealed him. Absence is a better defence than walls. When he buttoned himself up, his flies were all sticky. He was trembling so hard that he had smeared paint all over his dick. He walked over and looked at Chassagneaux: the bullet had hit him right in the head. Red pooled beneath him and spread over the pavement. Salagnon headed back, moving west along the streets that would lead him home, taking no precautions. A rising mist meant he could not see or be seen. Had he encountered a patrol, he would not have run, he would have been arrested; streaked with paint, he would have wound up in jail. But he encountered no one, and in the early hours, having cleaned his prick using industrial cleaner, he slipped into bed and slept for a while.
A vehicle was sent to collect the body, but no one removed the daubed letter and the pool of blood was left on the pavement. The Propagandastaffel guys decided that leaving behind the symbol of resistance would demonstrate how quickly it had been crushed. Or perhaps no one thought to send someone to scour the wall and wash away the blood.
The body of Robert Chassagneaux was put on display in the place Bellecour; the corpse was splayed out on its back, guarded by two French police officers. The blood had blackened; his head lolled against his shoulder; his eyes were closed, his mouth open. A printed sign stated that Robert Chassagneaux, seventeen, had breached curfew and had been gunned down while trying to escape a patrol that had caught him painting hostile slogans on the walls of a factory of strategic importance. Regulations regarding curfew were reprinted below.
People filed past the body in the square. The officers guarding it kept their heads down, avoided looking at anyone; their guard duty weighed heavily on them; they could not bring themselves to look anyone in the eye. On this too large, too quiet square, roiling all winter with fears and mists, no one lingers. People pass with heads bowed, hands thrust deep into pockets, quickly retreating to the shelter of the streets. But around the young dead man, small groups began to cluster, housewives with shopping baskets, and old men. Silently they read the printed sign and stared down at the face, the mouth agape, the hair plastered with blood. The old men drifted away again, muttering to themselves; some of the women shouted at the police guards, trying to shame them. The officers did not respond; they kept their heads down, mumbling ‘Move along! Move along!’ in a barely audible tone, like an exasperated click of the tongue.
When the corpse began to stink it was returned to the parents. It was buried as quickly as possible. That day, all the pupils in his class arrived wearing black armbands on which Fobourdon refrained from commenting. When the last bell sounded, they did not get up; they remained seated, staring at Fobourdon. For two or three minutes, no one moved. ‘Gentlemen,’ Fobourdon said finally, ‘tomorrow is another day.’ And so they got to their feet, without scraping their chairs, and filed out.
Like everyone, Salagnon asked about the circumstances of the death. Rumours were rife, exaggerated stories that many felt had the ring of truth. Each time, Salagnon nodded in agreement, and he repeated the stories, adding details of his own.
The death of Chassagneaux needed to be seen as an example. Salagnon produced a letter purportedly written by the boy on the night he died. A letter of apology to his parents, of farewell to his friends, and of tragic determination. He had carefully forged his friend’s handwriting and crumpled the paper slightly to make it seem more authentic. He showed this letter around, gave it to Chassagneaux’s parents. They invited him in, asked endless questions and wept profusely. He answered as best he could, inventing what he did not know, casting everything in a favourable light, and this simply made them all the more ready to believe him. They thanked him, walked him to the door with numerous courtesies, dabbing at their red-rimmed eyes, and said the
ir goodbyes. Out on the street he set off at a run, his cheeks flushed, his hands slick with sweat.
For several weeks he did nothing but draw. He honed his technique, copying the Old Masters, standing in front of paintings in the Musée des Beaux-Arts or sitting in the library surrounded by piles of open books. He drew the human body in various poses, first ancient nudes, until he tired of them; he reproduced dozens of naked Christs, every one he could find, and then invented new ones. He strove to reveal his nakedness, his suffering, his surrender. When some artifice hid the private parts behind the folds of a shroud or a spray of leaves he drew nothing. He left a blank space, because he did not know how to draw testicles.
One night he stole the little mirror his mother used for her make-up. He waited until everyone was asleep and got undressed. He set the mirror between his legs and, tensing his thighs, he drew that organ the statues lacked. Now he could finish his drawings. To his drawings of women’s bodies he had copied, he added nothing, simply closing the line, and that seemed to be that.
This went on for much of the night. Drawing kept him from sleep.
How did other people live? Elsewhere, boys of the same age, the same height, the same build, boys who had the same preoccupations when left to their own devices, were crouching in the snow, hoping they would not fall asleep and praying that their machine guns did not ice over; or in the desert, filling sandbags to shore up foxholes, beneath a blazing sun one cannot imagine unless one has experienced it; or crawling on their bellies through the foul mire of the tropics that moves of its own accord, clutching their rifles, which jammed all too easily, above their heads, but careful not to raise their heads, so as not to present a target. Some died with their hands in the air, stumbling from burning blockhouses only to be mown down in serried ranks like nettles being scythed; others vanished without trace, in a flash of light, in the hammer blow that follows the whistle of shells that are fired together, slashed the air and fell together; others died from a simple knife wound, a slash across the throat that slices through the artery, leaving the blood to spurt until there is no more. Still others waited for an explosion to tear through the steel walls protecting them from being crushed in the depths of the ocean; some lay on their bellies, peering through bombsights, waiting for the moment to unload their deadly cargo on the houses flashing past; some waited for death in wooden huts ringed by barbed wire that they would never leave. Elsewhere life and death were intimately entwined, while they were sheltered by La Grande Institution.
