X
the papal nuncio ambassador from the Holy See to Syria was a charming cultivated man from a good Italian family, it was Harout Bedrossian the Armenian Catholic who introduced me to him—curious the detours Fate often uses to land on its feet, once the suitcase was full I had to sell it, empty those thousands of documents of names and stories patiently gathered all around my Zone starting with Harmen Gerbens the Dutch torturer, documents collected over five years of endless investigations, of thefts of secret archival papers of cross-checking of testimonies, why those thousands of hours patiently creating this list, to fill the terribly empty life of the Boulevard Mortier and Paris, to give a sense to my existence perhaps, who knows, to end with a flourish, to win forgiveness for my dead, but from whom, to obtain the Holy Father’s blessing, or simply the money that’s worth any number of pardons, to settle down somewhere under the name Yvan Deroy my double shut up in his madness and violence, my papers are legal, real, like the ones I used to use to move around in the Zone, the Pierre Martins, the Bertrand Dupuis so simple that they immediately became real, I think little by little I left my identity behind in those pseudonyms, I split myself up, little by little Francis Servain Mirković dissolved into the real false papers to reconstitute himself like an atom in the thousands of names in the suitcase, regrouped into a single one, Yvan Deroy poor lunatic who has probably never seen the sea or caressed a woman, locked up forever, it’s so easy to appropriate an identity, to put your face in place of another’s, to take his life, born the same year as me, he had the same adolescence fascinated by violent ideologies, oscillating between the extreme right and the extreme left with a disconcerting ease, without any opinions, in fact, aside from his friends’, Yvan Deroy if he had gotten out of his hospital would have put up neo-Nazi posters, seduced by martial order and hatred, piling military training on top of military training and enlisting before being called up finally to become a man, a real man, as they say, eliciting admiration from his parents and fated for a splendid destiny, military service training in weapons, humbling oneself to the esprit de corps, the same esprit de corps that so fascinated Millán-Astray the founder of the Spanish Legion during his visit to the French in Sidi Bel Abbès in Algeria, the fortified village on the Oran plain deeply inspired the one-eyed general, the legionaries from all over Europe remade themselves in the barracks, they found a family a country in the Legion and more than France they served the Legion itself, my military service was instructive, slogging along while singing, my kit, my rifle and my comrades, camps, night marches, I liked that rhythm, that full life, the illusion of importance and responsibility a rank gives you, a Velcro patch on your chest, a command, a power, in the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes we bivouacked in pretty sordid barracks, having come down from the Larzac plateau in Corbières or somewhere with weapons and gear—target exercises, maneuvers, I of course didn’t know where we were camping, what these run-down buildings were, and who had been harbored in February 1939, then in 1942, then in 1963, in short all the possible uses of a well-situated military camp, close to the road, to the railroad and to the sea, a camp whose archival images I saw much later, I slept in a khaki sleeping bag where Spanish Republican refugees had slept, soldiers or civilians, Red or Black, who so frightened Daladier’s France that the French deemed it preferable to intern them then exploit their labor in weapons factories and hilltop fortifications until the Germans deported them to Mauthausen, most of them, among them Francesc Boix the photographer, born in Barcelona in the neighborhood of Poble Sec on August 31, 1920, interned in Rivesaltes then in Septfonds, enrolled in the Foreign Workers’ Companies and captured by the Germans he arrived in Mauthausen on January 27, 1941, stayed there four years, the blue triangle fastened onto his chest: his photos, stolen from the SS, document camp life, death everywhere, Francesc Boix testified at Nuremberg and at Dachau, he died in Paris on July 4, 1951, two months before his thirty-first birthday Francesc Boix dies of illness at the Rothschild Hospital without having seen Barcelona again, in Paris he lived in an attic room on Rue Duc on the corner of the Rue du Mont-Cenis, five minutes by foot from my place, we passed each other at the Rivesaltes camp, we passed each other on the slopes of Montmartre, he worked as a photographer at the paper L’Humanité, of course, why anything but humanity, I went to see the house where he was born in Barcelona, a quiet neighborhood on the side of a hill, with trees, a building from the beginning of the century number 19 on Calle Margarit, his tailor father owned a shop in the corner of his building, today there’s a bar, I drank a glass to the health of the young Spanish socialist who enlisted in the Republican army at the end of 1938, when the collapse was certain, when the Battle of the Ebro was lost and when Franco, Millán-Astray, Yaguë, and the others were hurtling towards Barcelona the invincible, propelling 500,000 soldiers and civilians onto the roads to exile, they crossed the border in Cerbère, in Le Perthus, in Bourg-Madame, many would end up going back to Spain or would choose exile in Mexico: Francesc “Franz” or “Paco” didn’t have that luck, he left Barcelona once and for all with his companions in arms, the Republic is defeated, Paco doesn’t lose his smile, he’s seventeen, he has hope, humor, joy, a passion for photography, and a little camera given to him by the son of a Soviet diplomat, a 1930 Leitz, thanks to which he published his first reports in the journal Juliol, when the Front was still holding up and the revolution was on the march, Francesc Boix will be the reporter of Mauthausen, I picture him in a striped uniform, in the terrible cold of Austria, for four winters, four long winters of suffering sickness and death that he fills by hiding photos, organizing the resistance, until the liberation—the Spanish liberated the camp themselves and hung a banner to welcome the Americans, Mauthausen and Gusen were overflowing with corpses, but so few compared to the 150,000 or 200,000 deaths in the camp complex, among them the massacred of the granite quarry, the gassed of Hartheim, those dead from hypothermia, immersed in freezing water for hours, the victims of medical experiments, the electrocuted, the hanged, the shot, the sick, the starving, the ones worn out by work, the ones asphyxiated in the gas vans, the ones beaten to death, according to the long list of the Nazi modus operandi, I was eighteen I didn’t know about Francesc Boix’s fate when I played at war in the Rivesaltes camp, I don’t remember dreaming of the deportations there, that of the Spaniards or that of the foreign Jews who passed through there, on their way to death, or that of the Harkis that France put there in 1963 some of whom stayed there for over seven years before permanent housing was found for them—in those rotting barracks that were falling to pieces one after the other, no plaque, no monument, no memorial, Francesc Boix the photographer of the Erkennungsdienst of Mauthausen, the very young man from Margarit Street in Barcelona, the witness at the Nuremberg trial, what was he thinking about, after he testified, back at the Grand Hotel, he saw Speer, Göring, or Kaltenbrunner in the accused box, he commented on the photos stolen from the SS, taken by the strange artist officer Paul Ricken, creator, besides the official camp photos, of almost a hundred self-portraits, full-face, in profile, in uniform, wearing civilian clothes, armed, on horseback—maybe it’s him Boix is thinking about, that January 27, 1946, lying on his bed in Room 408 of the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, he’s thinking about one of Ricken’s photos, one of the most disturbing, where the Nazi snapped himself lying in the grass, arms alongside his body, in a suit, with a nice tie and shoes, in the same pose as the poor guys shot by the guards when, according to the Germans, they were trying to escape: Ricken has offered himself as an imitation of violent death, he arranged himself as the corpse he had photographed the day before, what could be the reason, Boix has copies with him, he looks at them, lying on his bed, he is preparing the second part of his testimony, what will the lawyer for the defense ask him? bah, wait and see, he thinks of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, so beautiful, he took her portrait for page one of Regards, they met in the wings, did they talk about Spain, who knows, Vaillant-Couturier wrote an article on the International Brigades, she to
o testifies about the camps, they say she went through the monumental entrance to Birkenau singing the Marseillaise, she is truly magnificent, I wonder if Boix was in love with her, if he desired her, his head was probably elsewhere, did he still remember his barracks in Rivesaltes, maybe the same one I slept in, almost fifty years later, I too in uniform, almost as young as he but destined for another fate: the idea of the documents in the briefcase came maybe from Boix the photographer from Barcelona, in any case the 296 images by Paul Ricken are carefully filed, digitized, in my suitcase, not the Mauthausen ones, but the ones from Graz, a sub-camp to which Ricken was transferred at the end of 1944, the report on the death march of the evacuation towards Ebensee, hundreds of dying people finished off with a bullet the minute they dropped from exhaustion, the photos of Ricken the austere are clean and artistic, he took his time, never a shaky blurred badly composed snapshot, just the opposite, a morbid body of work, self-conscious and precise, maybe he was trying to pierce a secret, Ricken the mad SS artist was condemned to life in prison at the Dachau trial in 1946, the 296 photos remained secret—296 close-ups, almost always framed the same way, where you see the killer’s face the instant he shoots, sometimes tense, sometimes relaxed, usually impassive, and the effect of the shot, at the same instant, a black cloud rising from the head of a man stretched out, a collection of executions documenting the massacre, how was Ricken able to convince the SS to let itself be photographed, I have no idea, Paul Ricken was a strange man, professor of art history member of the National Socialist Party from the very beginning, Boix and his Spanish comrades describe him as a pretty nice guy, not a brute, he never denounced his detainee “employees,” never manifested any violence, he was just a wee bit deranged, I think he was documenting his own moral collapse in his hundreds of self-portraits, he saw himself falling along with the world around him, falling into the bottomless night and it’s that night he photographed for a week during the death march, it’s a journey, an itinerary, like my own from the Rivesaltes camp all the way to the train to Rome, the disappearance of a man into a fascination with violence, his own disappearance and others—Francis Servain Mirković disintegrated in the same way Paul Ricken did, maybe I too wanted to document the journey, disappear and be reborn with the features of Yvan Deroy, if that’s possible, the train is moving forward, soon Bologna, then Florence and finally Rome, I suddenly have the strange sensation that something is going to happen in this car, something tragic like during the march of Paul Ricken the Nazi artist in eyeglasses, my neighbor is sleeping, his head back his mouth open the crossword-couple is conversing in low voices nothing new beneath the railroad sun temperature constant speed more or less constant so far as you can judge it on the black screen of the window where, from time to time, a sinister hamlet comes to life, we went to Rivesaltes by truck, old canvas-covered trucks that squealed whined rocked on their ancient shock absorbers, the drivers were also conscripts trained on-the-job in a barracks yard, their notions of driving couldn’t have been more military or abrupt, stand on the brakes on the descents, we were jostled like sacks on every turn, I felt these same sensations in other trucks in Slavonia or Bosnia except usually it was Vlaho driving, just as badly but with a smile, more than once the guy almost tossed us into the Neretva with our weapons and gear, stubborn as a mule it was as impossible to make him let go of the wheel as to teach him to use the engine for braking, for him shifting down would have meant demeaning himself, a kind of cowardliness, and even today, disabled, he descends Dalmatian hills at full tilt in a vehicle specially modified for his handicap, Vlaho the reckless Catholic wine-growing driver it’s been a long time since I saw him last, I confess that’s entirely my fault, too many memories, the shadow of Andrija, of our violent acts as conscripts, we’d talk about war, that’s for sure, I wonder if Francesc Boix liked to see his companions in deportation again, he probably didn’t want to be reminded of certain times, of the little daily base things of the concentration-camp world, you don’t survive for four years in Mauthausen without some low actions, without entering the grey zone of the privileged, of the Prominenten fed better, beaten less than their comrades, docile subordinates, accountants, administrators or photographers at the service of the camp, who can blame them for having escaped the 186 steps of the stone quarry, the freezing baths or the pickaxe handles, for having come through and survived, the luxury prisoners were authorized to move freely throughout the camp, is there guilt in surviving, probably, in Venice by the edge of the black water when I was thinking about Andrija I was overcome with shame and pain, Andrija’s sad death, I am carrying his absent corpse wherever I go, it’s heavy, I move forward with his body on my shoulders suitcase in hand, all this is very heavy—in the beginning Lebihan my pimply boss thought my passion for archives and secrets was completely natural, he said to me you’ll see, it will pass, beginners are always enthusiastic, it’s normal, after all it’s one of the advantages of the job, this kind of knowledge, he helped me get information I would normally not have had access to, old records that no longer interested anyone but were still classified “military-top secret,” archive reports often microfilm, personal files, Lebihan said that this way of working was the best way to teach me the Service’s real way of functioning, to know how to get some piece of information or other, etc., his motto was “archives are the compost that grows information,” he was an old hand at the “human” touch, as they say, with him I was in good hands, when he retired he invited me out to lunch, oysters at the Brasserie Wepler, if you please, he was pretty happy, even though he told me he was going to miss it, all this, I picture him clipping newspapers in the countryside around Évreux or Vannes, checking the sources, filling binders with scissors and glue, unless he’s given himself over solely to his passion for biking, Lebihan told me as he gobbled up his plump fines de claires oysters on the Place de Clichy that when he started out, for another agency, he liked investigating the cycling world, we all have our hobbies, he added referring to my own, mine was biking, the leftists and anarchists in bicycling—there’s no such thing as a profession not worth examining, I thought, and many facets to national security—of course we didn’t find many, pinkos on bikes, that’s OK, but I dug up a few each time, especially sports journalists, heh heh, my bosses at the time would always say to me come on, Lebihan, go to the Sorbonne or Nanterre instead, that’s where they’re recruiting, so then I wandered around the university for a while to put up a front, but as soon as there was a chance to follow the Tour de France or a Paris-Roubaix race, I was there—today he must be caught up in the scandals and finances of his favorite sport, explaining the ins and outs of things to a wife with her mind on something else or to his buddies at the bar, of course I haven’t heard any news about Lebihan since our last handshake after brandy at the Wepler, he was moved, the old cyclist, think of it, he had trained me, and trained me well, he had made the style of my notes and reports drier, had taught me all the secrets of the shadowy trades, records and archives, enough to fill the suitcase, he suspected something, of course, but he was too close to retirement really to bother about anything, no need to saddle himself with possible annoyances, the affair with Stéphanie would make the rounds of the Service, or almost, “intimate relations” between functionaries were not encouraged, even if, at bottom, they resolved a certain number of security problems, at worst the possible leaks would remain internal and pillow-talk wouldn’t pass the Boulevard door: it was the end of the affair that got me a strategic “removal” into the distant reaches of the Zone for a while, so as not to see her every day, and this thanks to Lebihan’s scheming with the personnel department, thanks to the paternalist bicycle-loving boss—Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen loved bikes too, he covered the Tour de France from 1947 to 1950 for L’Humanité and Regards, on the back of a motorcycle, as required, Lebihan might have classified him as a “Red” at the end of the 1960s if he hadn’t died in 1951, poor Francesc dead of a strange illness of poverty or remorse he had contracted in the camp
, one of those inexplicable illnesses of which death is the only outcome, I can imagine where it can come from, one winter night in 1943 who knows Francesc Boix might have gotten a few bogus reichsmarks from the Mauthausen camp in exchange for his work, Paul Ricken has him for good, he got him to walk around the first barracks near the entrance, the brothel for prisoners, opened after Himmler’s visit six months earlier, a pass costs two marks, a few deportees from Ravensbrück worked there they were chosen by the SS they are beautiful they say, Boix crosses the main yard at night, the first time he went to a brothel it was in Barcelona, near the Parallel, in a murky neighborhood of stinking alleyways, an old-fashioned cathouse, red, full of velvet, the tiny bedroom smelled of lust and Doctor Cáspar’s prophylactic ointment, he lay down with a pudgy Aragonese, much older than him, the business was finished off very quickly, he put his pants back on in a hurry to finish getting drunk with his friends, he should have taken a picture of the young woman, a souvenir of her milky thighs and abundant pubic hair, which grew up almost to her belly-button, he will remember her, but maybe not really the orgasm, at least not as much as he’d like to remember it, pleasure is a lightning-bolt that leaves no trace, he crosses the Mauthausen yard the death-place to go find his friend Garcia at the brothel, final recompense of Nazi power for those who serve it well: Germany holds us by the balls, he thinks, Germany holds us by the balls and he laughs all alone, that morning fifteen Czechs and Yugoslavs were shot by the Gestapo right next to the identification office where he works, he was developing film when he heard the gunshots, he went out of his darkroom looked out the window saw the corpses sprawled against the wall there were four women among them, and now that night has fallen he’s going to the brothel where there’s a record-player with German songs, the “guards” of the cathouse are common-law criminals, sent here after the most terrible crimes, killers, rapists, these degenerates are the kings of the camp, their subjects the Jews, Poles, and homosexuals, the nobility are the German opposition parties, the Spanish Republicans, the typical Nazi hierarchy—Francesc Boix passes a few scrawny prisoners returning from a Kommando outside, he greets them with respect, he knows he’s lucky, that the few Spaniards employed in the camp administration services are privileged, that the prisoners are succumbing one after the other, exhausted, broken down by slavery and the guards’ sadism, he also greets Johannes Kurt the SS officer who’s accompanying them, not one of the cruelest, not one of the best either, among the detainees there are also former SS officers deserters from the Eastern Front, they never escaped any chores any heavy labor, they won’t last much longer, they have failed, they don’t deserve to live, they have betrayed the homeland and its aggressive Führer, Francesc arrives at the door to the brothel, he goes in, takes off his beret, in the antechamber an ex-warder converted into a pimp is slumped in an armchair, his eyes are gleaming, the room stinks of potato-peel alcohol, there’s music, guten Abend, Spanier says the man, he makes the sign to pass, in the women’s room there are women in civilian clothes and men in striped uniforms, voices amiable conversations laughter in the midst of the noise of wooden clogs on the hard floor, a dozen whores, double the number of inmates, Boix catches sight of Garcia deep in conversation with one of the ladies, he goes over, cap in hand like a shy child, the women are speaking German, Garcia introduces him, he hastily tries ich heisse Franz. Wir gehen? in his contraband German, they make for one of the adjoining rooms, Francesc holds out his two reichsmarks, the girl takes them, lets her dress fall to the ground, her skin is covered in bruises and scars, she signs to him to go over to the washbasin, she lowers his striped trousers washes his private parts examining them carefully to make sure there are no lice, the water is freezing he feels as if his tool is retracting into the base of his pelvis, he’s a little ashamed, he remembers Barcelona here he is silent, he catches hold of one of the woman’s drooping breasts she gives him a frightened look he closes his eyes thinks about his Aragonese whore about the photograph he did not take the German woman pulls him by his member to the bed she lies down spreads her legs Francesc stretches out over her she stinks of sweat and barracks her name could be Lola or maybe Gudrun he moves as much as he can with no result she emits carnival cries he pretends to come gets up smiles at her she is ugly neither of them has fooled the other—Francesc Boix goes back to the main room a smile on his lips Garcia gives him a tap on the shoulder, that’s better, isn’t it, he says, and Boix replies without lying yes, that’s better, that’s better already and soon it will be even better, at what instant does he know he’ll get out, he’ll survive, at what instant does he make the decision to survive? they say that the prisoners knew, saw the ones that had a chance and the ones that were going to die, Manos Hadjivassilis one of the Greek resistants from ELAS who ended up in Mauthausen after quite a tour, escaped twice, recaptured almost a thousand kilometers from Salonika, in the neighborhood of Gorizia in the company of Yugoslav partisans, scarcely had he returned to the camp, while he was still waiting in the identification line, already destroyed by what he saw around him, seized with the certainty that it was the end, Manos suddenly broke out of rank began running towards the electric barbed wire fence to throw himself onto it, the electricity contracted all his muscles made him bleed from his nose and mouth in a smell of ozone and burnt flesh he was still alive when a guard finished him off with a reverent volley of gunfire, exit Manos Hadjivassilis the Greek communist from Macedonia who had traveled the Epirus and crossed the Balkans on foot rifle in hand, the image of his corpse photographed by Paul Ricken will appear in Francesc Boix’s developing bath, then it will be hung on a clothesline to dry, in the meantime Manos’s body will already have disappeared into the crematorium, to end up in the heart of Austria’s filthy sky, let’s hope that Zeus the patient made that grey cloud rain down on Olympus, Boix will get out of the camp, and will even go to Greece to cover the civil war for communist publications, a respite, a brief reprieve before the Rothschild Hospital and the Thiais cemetery, Francesc was already dead, he was already dead in Mauthausen which you don’t leave, he was dead in the arms of the German prostitute, one night at the brothel of Barracks No. 1, in impossible contact with that Gudrun or Lola, his soul fallen between their two bodies, that’s where he contracted the illness, there, in the impossibility of finding anything but more or less putrid flesh, no other contact possible, no consolation, an eternal solitude caught hold of him, he would float over the world without touching anything, like Paul Ricken documentarist of deterioration, stricken with the same affliction—if I think about it, my attempts at escaping the Zone and memory are part of the same syndrome perhaps, what happened, in Venice with Marianne, in Paris with Stéphanie the brunette, in the harlot bars in Zagreb or the sordid cabarets in Aleppo, what happened in Bosnia, what is waiting for me at the end of this trip, in Rome, in the distant tenderness of Sashka and her apartment, what’s waiting for me under the name Yvan Deroy the mad, will I be able to rid myself of myself the way you take off a sweater in an overheated train, in the black despair of the Bolognese night, suburbs without end, I tremble at the memory of Stéphanie’s face, I see her portrait thrown out yesterday with the rest of the apartment’s useless objects, maybe a homeless man will recover it for its frame or for the shoulder-length dark-brown hair, the few spots of red on the nose and cheeks, the very calm half-smile, sure of herself, the black polo-neck, a three-quarter-length portrait with the Hagia Sophia and the Bosporus behind her, from the window of our last hotel room, a portrait of a dazzling beauty, maybe the tramp going through the trash is also falling in love with her, he sees her and immediately he swoons, he’ll keep the photo to keep himself company, he’ll talk to it, invent a name for it a life a passionate love story, if he only knew, if he knew Stéphanie Muller the brilliant strong dangerous Alsatian, I saw her before she left on a job, before she went under the drainpipe, as we say in our jargon, to be under the drainpipe means to leave on a job abroad and hence to get a rain of cold hard currency on your head corresponding to three
or four times a Parisian salary, Stéphanie destined for a great future is probably in Moscow at present, I’m supposed not to know where she is, I shouldn’t have thought about her again, it must be very cold in Moscow, a little like in Alsace, not at all like here in gentle Mediterranean Italy, I shift in the seat, I want to get up, take a few steps to chase away the image of Stéphanie with the perfect body, the perfect voice, the keen intelligence, Stéphanie to whom I told the story of Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen during our trip to Barcelona, how can you care so much about such stories, she said, she was reading Proust and Céline, nothing but Proust and Céline, which gave her, I think, the cynicism and irony necessary for her profession, she was rereading the Journey and the Recherche she called them by those abbreviated names, the Journey and the Recherche, both in the Pléiade editions, of course, and she filled me with jealous admiration, I hadn’t managed to finish the Recherche, the stories of Parisian aristocrats and bourgeois bored me almost as much as their narrator’s complaining, and the Journey depressed me terribly, even though the wanderings of those poor guys had something touching about them all the same, when we left on vacation or for the weekend Stéphanie put in her bag either one of the volumes of Proust or the first volume of Céline, you don’t change perfume brands, she didn’t change her book, her Chanel and her Marcel, and voilà, ready to go, her only concessions to novelty were books about Proust and Céline, separately or together, which she skimmed, critically, and these essays comforted her in her monogamy, encouraged her to return to the Text after the commentary: listen, she said, notes and reports land on me all day long, I write analyses, I have a right to a little relaxation, the right to read well-written things, it’s a change for me, Stéphanie is a specialist in what we call the risk-countries, she worked for a while in the Strategic Affairs Department before passing the test for our magnificent barracks of shadows, before it was suggested to her that she pass the discreet administrative test instead—in Barcelona city of banks and palm trees I looked for the traces of Boix, republicans, anarchists, militants in the POUM, Stalinists from the PSUC, she talked about tapas, the Picasso Museum, Miró, she said it’s sweet, this restaurant is very sweet, the neighborhood is really sweet, Gaudí is sweet, she was so beautiful, with her sunglasses by the harbor, watching the ferries leaving for Majorca and Minorca, her hair down to her shoulders, her hand in mine, I forgot my Zone, my suitcase, I became a tourist, which is the pleasantest of conditions when there are two of you, when you have money and you want to make love all the time, she told me again stop thinking about those war stories, why don’t we go back to the hotel? we’d go back to the hotel and wouldn’t emerge until nightfall, to plunge into the carnival of little streets in the center of Barcelona that looked as if they were made by the tourists themselves to make them sweet, the way an old whore puts on a purple wig if necessary, ready to do anything to please you, Barcelona whispered fiesta, fiesta in the ear of the man from the North ready to do anything to have fun, stuff himself with sun and paella, drown in liters and liters of red sangria thick as the blood of the bulls on the Monumental whose ritual deaths gave taboo shivers to the French, the English, the Germans convinced by such a well-performed spectacle of a savage and mysterious Spain that they alone knew, you could even find absinthe for the incurable romantics, I remember there was a joint called the Marseille at the bend of a sinuous alleyway peopled with very ugly streetwalkers, a bar run by a bald German man, obese and antipathetic, a tavern stinking of filth, anise and cold tobacco, I went in with Stéphanie blinded by love and the Hitchhiker’s Guide, someone slid an absinthe over to us that would have made Van Gogh cry, along with a plastic bottle of water and a cube of sugar wrapped in paper, traditions are reconstructed, the tourists and native twenty-somethings stirred their sugar in the absinthe with a spoon like a café au lait, the magic green tasted depressingly of chartreuse, the music and voices were deafening, sweet, so alive, I thought about poor Francesc Boix and his Aragonese prostitute, the stars of the neighborhood were named Jean Genet and Pierre Mac Orlan, there was even a very chic seafood restaurant that prided itself in having welcomed them and proudly displayed the badges of tourist guides from all over the world, queer Genet the scrawny thief must not have eaten often in high-class restaurants, may his soul rest in peace, with his johns and his gypsies with their long gleaming knives, the smelly bald German ended up throwing us out because we weren’t drinking fast enough for him, a liberation really, who knows the grandson of one of Boix’s guards at Mauthausen might now be serving absinthe to the photographer’s great-nephews, Stéphanie was a little drunk and enchanted by the experience, she didn’t want to go back right away, we strolled around the harbor, where in 1569 Miguel de Cervantes had set off for Italy, two years before the Battle of Lepanto, for which they were building immense galleys in drydocks nearby, reconverted today into a Maritime Museum—Cervantes with his ruff sees the military ships on the beach pulled onto dry land, the slaves feasting not knowing that soon he’ll be on board one of these vessels, maneuvering an arquebus facing the cruel Turk, he looks for a while at the bonfires on the sand, it’s evening, he plunges into the little streets near the Church of Santa María del Mar to find a bar suitable for getting drunk in, where they serve the thick wine from the surrounding villages and, tolerably drunk, not long before midnight, he engages in an animated argument with a local gentleman: why they came to blows, I don’t know, they decide to go out, inflamed by alcohol and insults they draw swords on a small square nearby, Cervantes is a swaggerer but he’s drunk, the steel clashes twice, only twice and his foil flies away, leaving him disarmed at the mercy of the Catalan, who must have been a poet, who must surely have been a poet for instead of skewering him straightaway he decides to humiliate the man from Madrid, orders him to strip naked, at sword’s point, before having a solid beating administered to him by his men in arms and leaving him half fainting on the uneven flagstones in the cruel night—exhausted, aching all over Cervantes drags himself over to the wall surrounding the harbor, he’s still drunk, and he laughs, he can’t help laughing out loud at his own bad luck, decidedly there are no more knights or chivalry, man is naked, now, in the maze of modernity, he puts on the long johns his adversary had the kindness to leave him not without having first dipped them in the gutter, puts them on and turns back to look for a welcoming tavern where he can go on laughing and forget his bruises, shirtless, as undressed as Don Quixote the inspiration for whom will come to him later on, thinking about the Barcelona brawl, a drunkards’ brawl as is necessary in literature—with Stéphanie we went into quite a different bar, the modern, stylish side of the Catalan capital, a red-and-white place, sober, where customers drank standing up, in the artistic phantasmagoria of a video projector, cocktails in assorted colors: there were well-dressed men, elegant women, and the contrast was so great that we got the impression of a schizophrenic, or illusionist, city, on one side the squalid phony nostalgia and on the other the most avant-garde image of calm bourgeois modernity, far from Don Quixote, the two aspects each just as artificial as the other, it seemed to me, Barcelona’s identity must be hidden somewhere between these two images, just as Beirut on exactly the other edge of the Zone swung endlessly between gleaming modernity and belligerent poverty, a reflection, a symmetry with Barcelona, if you fold the Mediterranean in two over the central axis of Italy the two harbors of the East and West will cover each other exactly, in Beirut when I went there on a mission our guys from the embassy often took me to a nightclub with the strange name BO18, a huge depot behind the harbor in the Quarantaine district, where one of the first massacres of the civil war took place, in 1976 the Phalangists had sent Intissar’s Palestinians to the firing squad along with the Kurds who lived in this putrescent camp that was wedged between the containers on the docks and the town dump, and it’s at this exact spot of butchery that the owner opened his establishment, where a pleasant alternation of world music and Arab pop roared, during its most crowded period the ambiance wa
s incredible, magnificent young women danced on top of rectangular tables, on the endless bar, the décor and lighting were dark and in good taste, in the explosive atmosphere of the overheated club everyone drank B-52 cocktails set on fire with a lighter by an expert bartender, everyone was pouring sweat, everyone was moving, at times a loud siren sounded, like the ones used during air raids and suddenly, miraculously, the mobile roof of the depot opened, the stars and sky of Beirut appeared over the dancers and drinkers and the songs, shouts, music rose to the skies like a column of smoke, spreading celebration and joy into the Bay of Jounieh, into the early hours of the morning, the opening of the ceiling was regulated automatically by the ambient temperature and protected the last customers from the coolness of dawn by closing gently, like a vampire’s sarcophagus, I was drunk at the BO18 it was almost 7:00 A.M. it was broad daylight sprawling in a corner I watched the employees start cleaning up, in the huge empty room I looked at the arrangement of the tables, in parallel rows, blocks of wood, about two meters long all lined up like in a cemetery, tombstones, I thought in my drunkenness, the tombstones of the massacred ones of the Quarantaine, I looked closer and in fact each table bore a little bronze plaque on the side, invisible in the dark, with a list of names in Arabic, the customers were dancing on the symbolic coffins of the dead of the Quarantaine, war sirens resounded in the night, Beirut was dancing on corpses, Beirut was dancing on corpses and I don’t know if it was a posthumous homage or a kind of vengeance, a revenge on the war that prevented people from dancing in a ring, a kind of memorial also, a musical cemetery for those who had no grave, a smoking libation during a funeral banquet, funereal dances, one last cocktail before oblivion—the Lebanese are champions of design and interior decorating on that side of the sea, just as the Catalans are on the other, they put tragedy on display: in Beirut, you don’t find many monuments to the civil war, not many plaques, no memorial, each person bears his share of memory as well as he can, as Rafael Kahla the writer bears the memories of the Palestinian fighters, Intissar and Marwan, legends abound, like the mythic tales of Ghassan in Venice, the ogres of the Lebanese war, their deeds of prowess, the host of one lord against another, the dead the disappeared all that gets carried individually, it’s a personal story of tears and revenge, in Barcelona though on the other side of the sea the rediscovered democracy has proliferated homages and monuments, the streets were renamed, George Orwell the disillusioned Trotskyite militant even has a square in his name in the old city, true it smells of urine, but it’s a pretty little square surrounded by slightly sordid bars, peopled with Italian neo-hippies playing Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao on the recorder, another place that Stéphanie thought sweet, like nearby Avignon Street where I like to think Picasso received Inspiration in a brothel, his demoiselles d’Avignon were frail prostitutes in a Barcelona whorehouse, now an inn for tourists—Stéphanie armed with Proust and Céline liked everything, the pretty neighborhoods with the wide avenues where characters from the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the Opéra might have strolled, and the somewhat downtrodden historic district where Bardamu’s Iberian colleagues must have exercised, between twilight and dinnertime we’d stay at the hotel, after making love we’d read, History of the Spanish War by Brasillach and Bardèche for me, which the old fascist had given me when I was still in high school and which seemed to me the best book, along with Orwell’s reminiscences, for an escapade in Catalonia, Stéphanie was beside herself, that makes me sick she said, you should be ashamed of lugging around those Nazi monstrosities here, I tried to explain to her that this version of history had been the official one in Spain until the end of Francoism, the bad ones were the Reds, the good ones the others, and that there were still a few “historians” who defended the argument according to which Franco had saved Spain from Stalin and the anarchists, who were even worse, Stéphanie wouldn’t budge, that’s no reason, she said, to read fascists and Nazis, so I’d use another argument, a low blow, I’d say and what about Céline? wasn’t Céline an anti-Semitic fascist? she’d get upset, would answer it’s not the same, it’s not that simple, I agreed completely, it’s not that simple, and we left it there, it wasn’t that simple, in fact it was quite complex, Stéphanie Muller brilliant French intellectual geopolitical analyst for our strange Service began tickling me in revenge, and the political argument would finish in feathers and mattress noises, I think she could have forgiven Brasillach if he had written one single great book, but for her he was a mediocre writer who didn’t deserve any leniency, he had been pumped full of lead at the Liberation, and voilà, purified—France was purified, Stéphanie tickled me and Barcelona shone with all its modern European festive Catalan lights, and didn’t want to remember that it had gotten richer especially in the 1960s, when Francoism was in full swing, that the local middle class had very quickly adapted to the dictatorship and had made a fortune exploiting tens of thousands of migrants from all over Spain: poor Orwell, in his hotel room near the Plaça de Catalunya, today a stone’s throw away from the Fnac store, the local Galeries Lafayette, and a cosmetics store, pursued by the Stalinists after the war in the war of May 1937 that pitted them against the POUM and the anarchists, forced to flee to avoid repression, the handsome Orwell in his room understands the battle is lost, and this was almost two years before the end, before the long route that will lead Boix to Mauthausen, terminus, the North—Stéphanie the gentle loved revolutionary myths, the raised fists and no pasarán slogans, she preferred Orwell’s memoirs to the ideological ravings of Bardèche and Brasillach, Brasillach the Catalan from Perpignan loved to go fishing by lamplight on the Collioure side, in his cousin’s boat, gleaming anchovies, pudgy sardines, was he already anti-Semitic, had he even met a Jew yet, had he already succumbed to the ease of paranoia and conspiracy, he who often passed by the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes, where, after the Spanish soldiers, a good part of the foreign Jews rounded up in unoccupied France were concentrated, Brasillach approved of these deportations, according to him Jews had to be gotten rid of down to the children, but that’s not why De Gaulle had him shot, that morning, February 6, 1945, in the freezing dawn of the Montrouge fort, Brasillach shouted Vive la France like the Resistants sent to the firing squad before him, De Gaulle the noble had rejected Brasillach’s appeal for clemency for obscure reasons, hatred of homosexuals maybe, maybe to appease the communists, maybe out of laziness, or maybe, as Stéphanie thought, because Brasillach wasn’t all that great a writer, but certainly not for anti-Semitism, if he had just been an anti-Semite Brasillach would have been pardoned, witness his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche who was liberated after a few months in prison or Céline himself, repatriated after months freezing his balls in a cabin in Denmark: the bitter little doctor was a supporter of Zionism and the state of Israel, supposed to rid Europe of its cumbersome Jews, those hybrids, those unclean stateless people, and Stéphanie thought deep down inside that he was right, that actually exile was the only solution to the Jewish problem, the answer to the Jewish question and Israel was a practical closet to put away these cumbersome flotsam and jetsam from the Mediterranean, Central Europe, or France, these debates depressed me, I thought about Harmen Gerbens the Dutchman and about his apartment, about the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria who came through Spain in 1967, about all those movements in the Zone, ebb, flow, exiles chasing other exiles, according to the victories and defeats, the power of weapons and the outlines of frontiers, a bloody dance, an eternal interminable vendetta, always, whether they’re Republicans in Spain fascists in France Palestinians in Israel they all dream of the fate of Aeneas the Trojan son of Aphrodite, the conquered with their destroyed cities want to destroy other cities in turn, rewrite their history, change it into victory, in other places, later on, I thought about a page from the notebook of Francesc Boix, the Barcelona photographer, one of the pages of the lost manuscript of his memoirs, the path changed, the ruts were full of corpses and the shadows of corpses, the road no longer follows the same bends, the sky seems heavier as if the clouds were still
grinding and chewing on who knows what ideas, ideas that want nothing more of us, with Estrella a long time ago, her fingers closed over my wrists like handcuffs made of flesh, the smoke-filled air of the crowded café didn’t even make her eyes cry, not one tear, nothing, just that aquamarine clarity that you know promises more than it can fulfill, Miguel and Inés were there too that night, we had decided not to reshape the world but to add a few absurdities to it, spots of incongruity so as to shade its cruel leaden color, my pockets were full of bills that were no longer in circulation, I walked around with one finger over the flame of tenacious little candles, Estrella spoke to me about that illness that had almost made her into a little frozen body slipped under the earth, about the drunken doctor who had succeeded, by no one knows what chance, in diagnosing her ailment and giving her the means to recover from it, and as I listened to her I couldn’t prevent myself from feeling each of her illnesses, from following the moving curve of her pain, I became the memory of each of the drops of sweat that appeared on her skin, I was the fever, her fire fed from the ice in her eyes, all this Estrella told me by half-hints, between sips, between sighs light as feathers, everything always being done in the space between, a parody of twilight, I understood then that I would spend the night in Estrella’s arms, that it was not a question of either choice or desire, the city was bathed in an implacable glow, you heard engines growling and drunkards yelping, as if the city were dreaming it was the country, at night certain squares could have been fields, and suddenly Estrella got up, an ascension, a miracle, her chin showed me the door, Inés and Miguel followed us for an instant then disappeared, they stopped existing or returned to a state before existence, everything seemed to dissolve then Estrella’s breathing became more irregular and I knew we were running, not really, but in our hearts, in our flesh, a staircase presented itself to us and ten minutes later she threw me on a bed, the city had the delicacy to absent itself behind the windowpane, all noises contracted into an infinitesimal echoing fist, I wanted to forget the seconds as they unfurled before my eyes, I couldn’t have endured it if they’d accumulated, formed a deposit, conspired against me, I wanted to stay fragile and volatile, but Estrella was like mercury, she rolled over me, twisted around me, I couldn’t manage to unfasten her clothes, my fingers got bogged down in the countless buttons on her sweater, my eyes were closed and I felt as if I could see the inside of my body, a landscape in constant transformation, peopled with panting machines and frightened monsters, it was the alcohol, of course, but also the exhaustion of a man dedicated to losing himself in the beauty of the other, there was a moment when I felt her taking me inside her, and the blood in my temples sang like a drumroll, my nails dug in, my teeth sought her bones, somewhere in a neighboring room a gramophone liberated an opera aria, a woman’s voice conquered but furious began to speak to us, about what we would become if we made the mistake of changing these gestures into habits, these cries into promises, space into time, then everything shattered, everything stopped, I was by the harborside and I was smoking a cigar, I was old, very old, people passed in front of me floating, there were two suns in the sky, I think I had just perfected such a powerful bomb that even the seas would catch fire, a telegram told me at the last instant that my evil project had been found out, I had to give myself up to the authorities, but instead of that I tried to jump-start a stolen car, the starting crank refused to turn, children were making fun of me and anxiety ended up snatching me from that bad dream, Estrella was sleeping right up against me, she was smiling in her sleep, both her hands rested between her thighs, it must have been 5:00 in the morning, I went out without leaving a word, the seal of her lips on my neck, more whole than the day before, a little older, too, as if there were still unsuspected virginities to abandon to life, said Boix, five years after Mauthausen remembering Barcelona today a pearl of the Mediterranean capital of triumphant Catalunya full of the arrogance, the haughtiness of the new nationalist conquerors, proud of their economic victory over Castilian oppression, where the good ones finally triumphed, obtained the posthumous revenge they wished for: hand in hand with Stéphanie we would stroll on the beach and the seafront that had been recently remodeled, modernized, rid of their greasy spoons, planted with palm trees, torn away from George Orwell and Francesc Boix, hustled towards Cannes Genoa or Nice with huge tourist investments, ready to receive the masses of Scandinavians coming to thaw on the sand, around 7:00 P.M. the Ramblas was covered with an inexorable wave of bikinis and beach towels wrapped around exhausted flesh red from the sun, hurried buses released their clouds of amateur photographers in front of the Sagrada Familia, tons of paella were defrosting in ovens, Stéphanie bought herself shoes, dresses, costume jewelry—I managed to convince her to go to the end of Diagonal Avenue, when it meets the sea so dear to promoters and modern town planners, to see an immense worksite, a vacant lot strewn with bulldozers and cement mixers, at the base of elegant buildings, with a view, among the most expensive and modern in the city, this lot swarming with workmen used to be called the Campo de la Bota, Boot Camp, and the Falangists picked it out for an execution place, where people were shot, 2,000 innocent men, anarchists, union members, workers, intellectuals, massacred under the windows of today’s luxury apartments, summarily condemned by a distraught and overworked court martial, then handed over to a distraught and overworked firing squad, before their memory was once and for all buried by distraught and overworked immigrant workers: at the scene of the carnage with the 2,000 corpses the Barcelona town hall built its Forum of Cultures, Forum for Peace and Multiculturalism, on the very spot of the Francoist butchery they raised a monument to leisure and modernity, to the fiesta, a giant real estate operation supposed to bring in millions in indirect revenue, tourism, concession stands, parking lots, and once again to bury the poor conquered ones of 1939 forever, the downtrodden, the ones who can only resist the excavators and backhoes with the endless list of their first and last names, Stéphanie was suddenly indignant, but there’s no monument? no plaque? I replied don’t worry, a brilliant architect will find a way to hide a vibrant homage inside his work, even if it means putting a few false bullet holes in a concrete wall, today the Forum of Cultures is used mainly for concerts, they dance on corpses as in Beirut, as in BO18 on the Quarantaine in Beirut, but instead of a dance of memory it’s that dance of oblivion that only state-controlled memory allows, which decides where it is good to remember and where it is better to put a parking lot, much more useful to a European city than cumbersome remembrances of people who are dead, in any case, dead today from old age, bedridden, insane or sick, their children and their grandchildren are happy, they have motorbikes tramways and bicycle paths, beaches to put tourists on, a few thousand Francoist bullets aren’t going to change things, you can’t live sitting there sniveling over corpses, it’s the way the world turns, I thought about the cheap buildings that clutter the former Bolzano camp today, they don’t beat their wives any more there than elsewhere, I suppose, ghosts unfortunately do not exist, they don’t come to pester the tenants of the housing projects in Drancy, the new inhabitants of the ghettos emptied of their Jews or the tourists visiting Troy, they no longer hear the cries of children burned in the ruins of the city: in La Risiera in Trieste I passed a group of high school students on a field trip, in the middle of the barracks near the crematorium they were very busy murmuring sweet nothings to each other, furtively smoking, elbowing each other, under the severe gaze of an emotional history teacher, here so many people have suffered, she said, and this sentence had no meaning for them, or so little, that’s normal, it will come to have less and less, just as today the monuments to the dead of 1914 in France don’t affect anyone anymore, the poilus sit enthroned on flower-covered roundabouts in squares opposite solemn churches, leaning on their stone Lebel rifles their haversacks beside them their helmets on their heads a curiosity a decorative item, just as the Marathon column no longer wrings the heart of any tourist, no more professional mourners at Thermopylae in front o
f Simonides of Ceos’s epitaph, stranger, go tell the Spartans that we died to honor their laws, Leonidas the Spartan is a Belgian brand name today, I’d happily devour a chocolate bar to the health of the king killed by the Persians, a little sweetness melting in the train that’s approaching Bologna
Zone Page 10
