The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  The mêlée of passengers jostles and pushes its way to the Métro, which greets them with its smell of burnt electricity and disinfectant. Claude holds Cyrille’s hand. Jean carries the two cases. He escorts Claude to her apartment on Quai Saint-Michel. Apart from the occasional German car, the streets are empty. Paris smells good. The chestnuts are in leaf. The booksellers have reopened their stalls and there are soldiers flicking through pornography or buying engravings showing little urchins peeing in the gutter while a girl with an upturned nose watches spellbound. The lift is out of order. Four floors.

  Claude pushes open the shutters and there is Notre-Dame, to which France’s government of freemasons and secularists filed on 19 May to pray to the Holy Virgin to save the nation. A Te Deum that fell on deaf ears. France has vanished but the witnesses to her past have remained: the Conciergerie, the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, and in the distance the Sacré-Cœur, as ugly as ever, the work of a pretentious pastry chef. Cyrille tugs off his socks and lies down on his bed among his favourite animals. Claude closes his bedroom door and walks back to the hall with Jean. She raises herself on tiptoe and kisses him quickly on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  As he goes back downstairs he reflects that so far he has not even held her hand. But his palm has kept the memory of her knee that he stroked for a second on the train. Where to now? He knows no one and has only a few francs in his pocket. He feels a strong urge to turn round and retrace his footsteps. He reaches the Opéra. On the terrace of the Café de la Paix there are green uniforms and women sitting at the small tables. Rue de Clichy is deserted and the Casino de Paris is closed. Paris looks like a city drowsing in the sun, unwilling to wake up because it feels too early and there is no sign of the familiar morning noises – the buses and their grinding gearboxes, the milkmen and newspaper sellers – yet different noises are audible, as if in a bad dream – the two-stroke engines of German cars, the distant rumble and squeak of armoured units driving through the city back to the north, and the whistle of dispatch riders’ heavy BMW motorcycles. Drawn by a Percheron, a charabanc passes, transporting cases of beer. And on the giant billboard above the entrance to the Gaumont a poster for a German film.

  Jean had thought he would never see Rue Lepic again, but here it is, and as he walks up it he recognises the Italian fruit-seller, the pork butcher from Limousin and the café-tabac run by the Auvergnat, though it is no longer Marcel behind the counter but his wife whose breasts are as large as ever. And finally the filthy, poetic building from which Chantal de Malemort escaped one morning, carried off in a Delahaye driven by that dandified thug, Gontran Longuet. Nearly all the shutters are closed, but two are open on the fourth floor. Jean climbs the stairs. Nothing has changed. He rings the bell. A sound of footsteps. The door opens wide. Jesús Infante stands with his mouth open.

  ‘Jean!’

  He throws his arms wide, seizes Jean and crushes him, knocking all the air out of his body and thumping him on the back, Spanish-style.

  ‘Jean!’ he repeats. ‘You are ’live!’

  On a bed behind him, draped with black satin, lies a girl with dyed blond hair.

  ‘Com’ in!’ Jesús shouts in a booming voice. ‘Make yourself at ’ome!’

  The girl gets to her feet to look for a dressing gown and finds a piece of cloth that she knots above her breasts.

  ‘Coffee, Zorzette! A real one!’

  Jesús is the same as ever, shirt unbuttoned on his hairy chest, five o’clock shadow, gold-filled smile. On his easel is a canvas of depressingly anatomical realism. He intercepts Jean’s gaze.

  ‘Yes, it’s revolting, I know. But i’ sells, i’ sells. You ’ave no ide’. I make one a day. So – tell me everything!’

  Jean tells his story quickly. Jesús’s reaction is decisive. Jean has nothing, so he must live with him. He has a camp bed he can put up in the studio. The Germans buy his nudes by the dozen. The gangster from Place du Tertre who sells them visits three times a day and has doubled his price. Anyhow, Jean’s not here for that. They’ll talk about it later. Jesús jerks his chin in the direction of Georgette, pouring boiling water into the coffee pot. She is not in on the secret. Jean studies her as she bends forward to fill his cup: she has a tired and listless face with smudges around her eyes. She bleaches her hair carelessly and smells of the same cheap scent as the girls from the Sirène. Jesús taps her on the bottom.

  ‘Go an’ get dress’. ’E’s finish’ for today.’

  She goes to change behind a screen.

  ‘What time tomorrow?’ she asks.

  ‘Today, tomorr’, we celebrate Jean. I le’ you know. An’ fuck the painting!’

  She shrugs and holds out her hand. He puts money in her palm and she vanishes. Jesús tells Jean about his ‘war’, which has been as simple as can be: he has stayed exactly where he is. The only one left in the building, he went to the Étoile to watch the Germans march past, their band leading the way, in front of General von Briesen. Life has slowly returned to something like normal. Jean, remembering his friend’s strange eating habits, asks if he can still find peanuts and red wine. No, there are no more peanuts.

  ‘The peanut supply line ’as been cut!’ Jesús says, imitating Paul Reynaud, former president of the Council and much given to vainglorious announcements.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I eat wha’ I find! War is war. You ’ave to survive.’

  His face takes on a sorrowful expression. There is a question on the tip of his tongue, but he is hesitating. Finally he speaks.

  ‘An’ ’ow is Santal de Malemort?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jean says.

  ‘You forgive ’er.’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it.’

  ‘You ’ave to forgive.’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from you!’

  Jesús puts his hands together. He would like to swear but there is no God, so Jean will have to believe him. This is the truth: he, Jesús, never slept with Chantal, although it is true that she came to see him when Jean was working nights and offered to pose for him. Jesús would not have dreamt of touching her. He hadn’t known how to say it to Jean, and then afterwards he realised the misunderstanding.

  ‘I don’t care,’ Jean said. ‘And you’re a chump not to have screwed her.’

  ‘You is telling me that I’m chump?’

  ‘A very big chump.’

  ‘Okay, I’m chump. She was a girl who like’ to show ’er tits …’

  Jesús wants to know everything. Why did she go back to Malemort when Gontran Longuet was offering her the high life, sports cars, hotels, travel? Women were incomprehensible; in fact they were completely mad. An Andalusian philosopher, a man from Jaén, Joaquín Petillo, declared in the eighteenth century that female seed came from another planet. An unknown object, smaller than a whale and bigger than a sardine – but in the shape of a fish – had several thousand years ago deposited an unknown seed on the surface of the earth. Until that moment our fathers (and mothers), all hermaphrodites, had lived happily and immortally together.

  ‘So how did they reproduce?’ Jean asks.

  ‘By the masturbación, dear Jean, the masturbación, mother of all the virtues.’

  Unfortunately the seeds of this strange planet, so remote it took a hundred years at the speed of light to get from there to here, had mingled with those of the men who had been calmly masturbating as the sun passed its zenith, and so the first women had been born, bringing discord into an idyllic world. From these strange and remote beginnings they had retained a quality of mystery that even the greatest seers had never managed to unravel. They were incomprehensible, completely mad, acting with a total lack of masculine logic, and you ended up asking yourself if they were not somehow ruled by an interplanetary logic evolved by their seed during the long voyage through space, a logic purely and exclusively feminine and incommunicable to any human not possessing ovaries.

  ‘Even
a transvestite can’ understand it!’ Jesús declares, raising his finger. ‘Tell me abou’ your friend Palfy, who interes’ me …’

  Jean tells him that Palfy badly wants to come and live in Paris. Unfortunately his papers are not in order. He is waiting for clearance from the Kommandantur, which is investigating his past. Palfy has no alternative but to wait: the Côte d’Azur is closed to him, London likewise. He needs fresh pastures and a clean slate for his great schemes.

  ‘Madeleine will ’elp ’im!’ Jesús says.

  ‘Have you seen her? Is she doing business again?’

  ‘You mus’ be barmy! She lives with the colonel who is commanding the cloths!’

  Jean is baffled. His understanding was that colonels commanded regiments. But no, this is a German colonel who occupies an office on Rue de la Paix. Buying stocks of available French cloth for the Wehrmacht. Of every type; even organdie, jersey and satin. The German army is an exceptionally chic fighting force, which conceals beneath its aggressive flag a passion for frothy and seductive undergarments. The important thing is that Madeleine has not forgotten Palfy and Jean. Only last week she was voicing her anxiety that they had been taken prisoner. If it were true, she would move heaven and earth to have them released.

  ‘She will fin’ you work!’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ve the means to work. Unless someone pays me weekly. I haven’t got a sou to my name.’

  ‘Sous, I’m making plenty o’ them. We share. This nigh’ dinner is on me …’

  Jesús, then, is assuming importance in Jean’s life, having been in the first part of this story no more than a face glimpsed between two doors. The author is well aware of how irritating it is to see reproduced phonetically the words of an individual afflicted with such a strong accent. We get tired not just of the accent, but even more of the crude, overblown caricature a foreigner speaking our language imperfectly feels obliged to give to the least of his ideas, as though the nuances are likely to be completely missed because their refined and distinguished French equivalents (as we like to think) are lacking. Make no mistake though: like Baron Nucingen jabbering his execrable French, dunked in low German like bread in soup,6 Jesús, sucking his way through a French as beaten and twisted as a Spanish omelette, is no fool. As a young man he fled the mediocrity of a petty bourgeois Andalusian family, shopkeepers in the torrid city of Jaén, to breathe a different air that, even befouled by occupation, he continues to call the air of freedom – not political freedom, about which he does not give a damn, and will continue not to give a damn to the point that, when France is finally liberated, he is still a member of the Communist Party, but freedom to shock, sexual freedom, of which his own Spain at that time has not the slightest idea. In truth, his great dilemma – about which, out of embarrassment and naivety, he dares not speak to anyone – can be expressed in four words: where is painting going? Impossible to discuss it with other painters, especially those who have made it. The only talk he hears from them is about money, girls and food. With Jean it is different. Jesús can unburden himself without fear of ridicule: Jean is not an artist and will not retaliate with sarcastic remarks that conceal all the jealousy, envy and contempt with which his contemporaries are riddled. To Jean and Jean alone he can confide, without being mocked or scoffed at, his unspeakable misfortune in having to prostitute himself in order to survive and keep his hopes alive. Despite the difference in their ages – Jesús is thirty and Jean now twenty-one – they are children from the same stock: friendship is the only asset they possess. It is quite true that Jesús did not sleep with Chantal de Malemort. He could have, but did not want to. Preserved by his disinterested ambitions, Jesús will never grow up, whereas Jean will become an adult in small steps that will each break his heart a little more. Oh, what price must a youth not pay to become a man one day! Jean, back in a Paris it sickens him to return to, possesses neither love nor friendship enough to keep his courage alive. Fortunately Claude is there, and in her presence nothing is inevitable, everything is simple, and there is no shade of ambiguity from the beginning. I would not like to say more at a time when Jean himself still knows nothing. Let us attempt, in some measure, to act as he does, and feel our way towards this woman whose smile will light up two of the four dark years to come.

  *

  Jean recoiled from meeting Madeleine. In two days and as many journeys across Paris on foot he had taken in the reality of the occupation: the parades at the Étoile, the signposts, the flags of the Third Reich stamped with the swastika flapping in Rue de Rivoli. Small signs, yet they sufficed to stop him forgetting and to allow him to guess that an iron fist existed, gloved in velvet for now but an unspeakable and indeterminate threat in the sky of the future. The free zone could play its games of smoke and mirrors, parade with its bands blaring and its comic-opera army of a hundred thousand men, unfurl all the modest pomp of a new regime, but the undeniable, naked, crushing truth was here, in Paris.

  Next morning Jesús introduced Jean to the director-owner of the gallery who sold his grotesque and obscene nudes at Place du Tertre. This person, who before the war had mocked the Spaniard with merciless sarcasm, nicknaming him ‘Papiécasso’ for his unsaleable collages, had spotted in the defeat a new and much more interesting clientele than the American and English tourists of the inter-war years. Short, fat, blue-eyed, his neck pinched by a celluloid collar, his cheeks red and his short legs swamped by trousers even more voluminous than his backside, Louis-Edmond de La Garenne claimed to be descended from a crusader who would have covered himself in shame had he seen one of his descendants keeping a shop. Jean was deeply put off by his lack of eyebrows and his jet-black hair (with its unnatural reddish glints) which clashed with a face that was smooth, chubby and apparently completely hairless. Jesús had forgotten to warn him that Louis-Edmond wore a wig, ever since a strange illness that had robbed his body of all hair. Louis-Edmond de La Garenne looked Jean up and down.

  ‘I know my way around men,’ he boasted. ‘I’m never wrong. The first impression is the only one worth having. Afterwards you get bamboozled into all sorts of feelings and nuances. You’ll do. Do you speak German?’

  ‘Not a single word. Only English.’

  ‘Perfect. Our clientele at this time is exclusively German. It demands flattery. Either these imbeciles imagine they speak French or they will address you in the language of our hereditary enemy: English. You’re the man I need. You’ll start straight away. I’ll give you five hundred francs a month. With tips you’ll do very nicely for yourself.’

  ‘Louis-Edmond,’ Jesús said, ‘you take us for stupid bastards who is workin’ for nozing. You give Jean two thousan’ francs an’ a commission on what ’e sell ’imself.’

  ‘Jesús, no one is indispensable.’

  ‘No, is true. No’ even you. Especial’ you. You understan’ me?’

  ‘You’re ruining me. I accept only to give you pleasure.’

  Jesús treated him to a vigorous thump in return.

  ‘You are intelligen’, Louis-Edmond. Very intelligen’, you old sweendler.’

  Jean discovered that the gallery already possessed a salesperson, a middle-aged woman with a dignified but ravaged face named Blanche de Rocroy, the last of her line, beggared and humiliated at every turn by La Garenne, suffering his criticisms in silence as she had suffered since childhood, the only daughter of decrepit and déclassé aristocrats whose one remaining pride was the name they carried. Her fiancé had been killed at the front in 1918. What chance did she have of finding another when she looked like a battered, abject old owl with no bust? La Garenne had slept with her once during her period of greatest misery and still requested, in a tone that brooked no refusal, minor services from her which she provided in his office after the door had been locked behind her. For the first few days Jean could not get a word out of her. He tried to reassure her that he had not been taken on so that La Garenne could get rid of her, but because only a man could deal with customers interested in canvases of nudes. She
half believed him and for a long time continued to look as gloomy as the rural landscapes that she sold with barely disguised apathy. Business boomed. Soldiers on leave in field-grey uniforms crowded outside the gallery windows, shoving each other with their elbows, smothering their guffaws, embarrassment and curiosity pressing them together. Their NCOs walked past, ramrod straight, eyes front, outraged in the name of the Reich at the sight of these bottoms, nipples and pussies, the very symbols of the moral and physical corruption that had led France to its destruction. The officers, on the other hand, strode in, leafed through the gallery’s catalogue and asked to see what Louis-Edmond proudly called his ‘hell’, a collection of pornographic prints, licentious drawings and Jesús’s most daring canvases. It was understandable that Blanche de Rocroy should feel uncomfortable displaying such horrors to male customers who were in the habit of screwing monocles into their eyes so as not to miss the smallest detail. Jean’s days were therefore mostly spent in ‘hell’, with Louis-Edmond only appearing when a customer started haggling too much. Moving from honeyed charm to outright disdain, and from disdain to perfectly pitched indifference, he would close the sale with his ineffably glib tongue. The examples of extreme erotica sold fast. Jesús began to be unable to satisfy the demand, and La Garenne started to look for new artists. He found a few, but their work did not sell: talentless and sleazy, they failed to meet La Garenne’s customers’ exacting requirements. From Jean Jesús learnt what was happening and slammed the door on his dealer. Jean laughed. Louis-Edmond, frantic at the idea of running out of merchandise, sent him back as his ambassador, bearing a very large cheque.

  ‘Tell ’im to come ’ere hisself,’ Jesús answered. ‘I wan’ to see this shit climb my stairs on ’is ’ands an’ knees.’

  The dealer came, and climbed. Jesús let him off the hands and knees, though La Garenne was ready to submit. Puce-faced, perspiring, so breathless he could not speak, he listened without protesting as he was called every name under the sun, his head bent, twisting his plump hands with their filthy nails. When Jesús ran out of insults La Garenne sobbed, ‘I am a wretch.’