The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  ‘Seeing these students makes me feel young again,’ Urbano said. ‘I studied law here myself once.’

  Jean no longer wondered whether Urbano was more than a simple border official stamping passports. An older student than the others came into the restaurant, slumped at a table and suddenly caught sight of the man from the PIDE.

  ‘Urbano!’ he called. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

  The two men thumped each other vigorously on the back.

  ‘I see, João,’ the young policeman said, ‘that you’re still not in any hurry to finish your exams. How much more have you got to do?’

  ‘Why should I be in a hurry? I like life in Coimbra. If I fail a few more exams I can probably stay here till I’m at least thirty.’

  Some students who had finished eating crowded round them. Urbano explained that Jean was a Frenchman passing through. They sat, keenly interested, bombarding him with questions: what was life like in Paris, in the free zone? What did the French want to happen? Had the universities reopened? Jean responded to their thirst for information as best he could.

  ‘It’s a shame we have so little time,’ Urbano said. ‘We’ll have to come back. Portugal is a friend to France.’

  ‘France has few friends when she’s on the winning side, but she’s lucky enough to have plenty when she finds herself in the shit.’

  João burst out laughing.

  ‘Shit! Shit! And they taught me at school that French is a refined language, the language of diplomacy! You’re right, but we all cried in 1940 when Marshal Pétain requested an armistice. But he did well. They say here that he’s distracting the Germans while General de Gaulle – his favourite pupil – is preparing, alongside the Free French, to drive them out of the country …’

  The other students protested that they did not share his view. Dropping out of French, which they spoke well, they began an excited discussion that would have been interminable if Urbano had not called an end to it.

  ‘We need to be in Lisbon this afternoon.’

  João ordered a bottle of wine that they drank standing, to France’s health.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, raising his glass for the last time to Urbano, ‘that they were lying to me when they told me you’d joined the PIDE.’

  Not missing a beat, the young policeman raised his glass in turn.

  ‘They were lying to you, João. I’m a civil servant. That’s all.’

  ‘Then,’ João said, ‘long live the Republic and long live Coimbra!’

  For the first time Jean heard France being talked about from outside the country. The perspective was very different from what could be said in Paris. Urbano was especially keen to know what Jean thought of a confused situation, to which optimists attributed a Machiavellian intent (unfortunately non-existent). For his part, Jean was shocked that Urbano had lied about working for the PIDE. As they left Coimbra the policeman sought to justify himself.

  ‘I didn’t lie, I dissembled,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, no student likes the police, and it’s not my job to shout my credentials from the rooftops. Many ways are open to me to serve my country. I chose this one. It’s not the least interesting by a long way …’

  They spoke little for the rest of the journey. On the outskirts of Lisbon Urbano suggested he drive Jean to a small hotel run by a friend of his.

  ‘Not too expensive and very comfortable. She’ll give you a good room. The hotels are full … there are so many refugees, people waiting for a ship to America.’

  Jean assured him that he was not short of money. His ‘uncle’ had given him enough for any eventuality. Anyway he preferred big hotels. You could come and go unobserved. Urbano laughed.

  ‘You sound as if you think I want to keep an eye on you!’

  ‘But you do. Admit it!’

  ‘Not exactly. And Lisbon’s a big city. You can disappear for twenty-four hours without the PIDE catching up with you.’

  ‘I don’t see why the PIDE should be interested in me.’

  Urbano did not look embarrassed.

  ‘Oh, I won’t deny that you interest us. Foreign powers are exerting pressure on us to keep spies under surveillance.’

  ‘I’m not a spy.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not. Even so, admit it, it’s hardly usual for a man of your age, living in a France occupied by Hitler’s Germany, to get hold of a visa for Portugal on the pretext of paying a banker a visit.’

  ‘It’s true that it’s not very likely.’

  They were coming into Lisbon. It started raining heavily and the old Chrysler had to slow down, its worn tyres skidding on the wet asphalt. Urbano stopped at a large hotel and accompanied Jean to the front desk. Contrary to his prediction, there was a room available. Jean thanked him, convinced that the policeman had taken the opportunity to point him out to the doorman. His movements would be watched. He did not care. In any case they would not be able to stop him being at his meeting with the bank the following day. He was delighted to have been so unmysterious. There was nothing so calculated to disconcert the police or, if not the police, then the foreign service for which Urbano laboured discreetly to augment his modest salary.

  The next day Jean kept his appointment with the banker whose name he had been given in Paris. He was introduced to a cold, offhand individual whose expression was hidden behind sunglasses and who spoke to him at first in German.

  ‘No,’ Jean said, ‘I’m not German. I’m French.’

  The banker fell silent, took off his sunglasses and cleaned them with a silk cloth. His eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘I suffer from conjunctivitis,’ he said. ‘Before the war I was treated by an ophthalmologist from Leipzig. He’s in Russia now, amputating frozen feet.’

  Jean commiserated but did not smile. The banker put his sunglasses back on. He was no longer the same man with the wet, blinking gaze.

  ‘You understand,’ he said, ‘that we’ll have to make some checks …’

  ‘I realise that. When will you give me an answer?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  Jean left with a receipt in his pocket. He set out on foot through the city. He did not feel he was being followed and he was disappointed. It would have been fun to keep on intriguing Urbano and his superiors. Perhaps they had lost interest in him. The thought mildly annoyed him. He walked around Lisbon as, when he was much younger, he had walked around Rome and London. To be a stranger in an unknown city for the first time is a marvellously heady feeling. You lose yourself in the name of discovery, and your head is filled with a new world in which you are the savage. Jean knew nothing about Portugal. He could, like Valery Larbaud, have shut himself up in a hotel room and learnt Portuguese ferociously in a week, but he much preferred the distance that separated him from a warm, well-lit city in which the sound of people’s voices surprised him and reminded him at every moment of his difference. He admired the attractive, soft gaze and amber-coloured skin of the women, and the asceticism of the masculine faces. He wandered the streets and strolled around the museums. From the Castelo de São Jorge he surveyed the terraced city and the mar da palha crisscrossed by small, heavy lateen-sailed boats. He liked the azulejos of Estrela, the Manueline doorways and the marvellous way the Portuguese had of covering the exteriors of their houses, which they kept closed to the light, with flowers. He would certainly come back to share this jewel of peace and grace, but who with? In the last three months he had despaired of ever seeing Claude seize hold of reality again, and if she did there would still need to be peace for them to be allowed to leave and forget everything. Nelly? Even if she enlivened life and quickened it with her generous spirit, he didn’t think he could count on her company to spend hours wandering around a beautiful city. She loved poetry and the theatre because they sprang from words; over the rest she cast an indifferent gaze. Besides, what good was dreaming? He could see nothing in front of him except, if he was utterly honest, complete uncertainty. In the evening he went to Estoril. At the casino a
crowd that talked in many tongues pressed around the gaming tables with an eagerness that defied the rest of Europe at war. It was a euphoria he did not share.

  The banker confirmed the sterling purchase at the advertised Lisbon rate. A numbered account was opened. Jean had another opened for himself and deposited his commission. He would leave it there until the war was over.

  ‘You’re very sensible,’ the banker told him. ‘The escudo is a healthy currency that will weather the storms of this devastated world well. I had rather expected a young man of your age to stuff his pockets and spend it all on parties.’

  ‘I don’t feel like that.’

  ‘In a way I know what you mean.’

  They shook hands. Jean went back to his hotel and did some sums: he had never had so much money at his disposal. He was surprised not to feel any pleasure, any heady feeling. The telephone operator had a call for him from Urbano.

  ‘Good morning, Monsieur Arnaud. I have an idea that you’re about to leave us.’

  ‘Yes, this evening.’

  ‘I hope you liked Portugal. You forgot to visit the Jerónimos.29 You must come back.’

  Jean could no longer doubt that his every step had been followed since he arrived.

  The hunting lodge was deserted. In its current dilapidated state it was beyond habitation. Wind, rain and hail had torn down the waxed paper that had covered the broken panes. A yawning hole in the roof exposed blackened beams. In its neglect, postponed no longer by a clumsy handyman, the lodge had acquired a kind of smashed grace more in keeping with its past of hunting meets in the forest, and the halt of tired horsemen after their pursuit of the stag. Jean glanced inside, putting to flight some rats nesting on a mattress. He circled the building. Foxes had scattered the rubbish left by the kitchen door. He was surprised to see empty bottles of spirits, mouldy bread covered in fungus, empty tins. Before he left, Blaise Pascal, nature lover and vegetarian, had regained his appetite for intoxicants and processed foods.

  On the way back, from the path that led out of the birch forest, he caught sight of the tall, well-muscled figure of Jesús still sawing wood in the courtyard. With his torso bare in the sunshine, the Andalusian woodcutter exiled to the Île-de-France cut a fine figure, his brow glistening with sweat, his hairy upper body gleaming in the light.

  ‘I am workin’ for the winter,’ he said. ‘The famous General Winter who wins all the battles, who will eat Hitler up. ’Ave you been for a walk?’

  ‘Just to Blaise Pascal’s lodge. The man in the woods isn’t there any more. Have you heard anything of him?’

  ‘No’ much. I think ’e ’as returned to normal life.’

  Jesús picked up an axe and started attacking a trunk. Chips flew around him.

  ‘Did you see him again?’

  ‘Yes, a few times. ’E started washin’. ’E didn’t smell so bad.’

  Laura stood in the doorway in an apron.

  ‘Lunch is ready.’

  She had returned to her place at Jesús’s side, driving from Paris each evening and staying on Sunday when Jean spent the day with them before going to the clinic to see Claude. Since her return from Germany she had not talked about her brother or her parents, but Jean had a feeling that she had also made a resolution she was keeping to herself, one that profoundly affected her internal life. Everything seemed to be a secret to this introverted woman with her closed features, wholly absorbed, it appeared, in her love for the bristly devil whose extravagance and bohemian character she had domesticated, and whose artistic life she had succeeded in ordering without smothering it. It was possible that she liked Jean, but he was unsure, or perhaps she tolerated him in a diplomatic way, because after having isolated Jesús so that he could work, it made her anxious to see him so alone during the week, dwelling perhaps on regrets of his life of joy and pleasure that he had left behind at the studio in Rue Lepic. In fact she was wrong: Jesús did not regret anything and gave himself so totally to his painting that he aspired to nothing more, apart from a little friendship with Jean and his nights spent with her, nights that he talked about with his customary fierce lyricism. For with a disarming naivety and amnesia for his expedient philosophy of the past, Jesús had turned himself into an apostle of monogamy, expatiating solemnly on the months and months needed for a man and a woman to perfect their pleasure in each other. He was so sincere in his naivety, and so ardent in his proselytising, that Jean kept to himself the sarcastic quips he might otherwise have directed at his friend. And wasn’t Jesús ultimately right? His lyrical way of expressing himself might have masked a bald truth, but bald truths also have a hidden meaning we cannot ignore. Jean’s own memory of lovemaking with Claude was awkward and remorseful. He remembered only an exasperated pleasure too quickly taken, too sudden, the kind a young man feels at his first experience of sex. Had he satisfied her? No, he couldn’t have, in the unbalanced state she was in. Then it was a failure, ridiculous, yet another mistake after such a long wait, a shattered mirror in which, looking at each other, they would only see their disfigured images. Yet if he compared Claude to Nelly, he felt he had honest excuses. Nelly approached pleasure with a romantic tenderness he had hardly expected from her cheeky, inconstant character. They knew each other well now and were connected by a delightful bond that was impossible to classify. In each other’s arms they rediscovered both the solemnity and the sudden giggles of childhood. Jealousy, lies and hypocrisy were unknown to them. They were open with each other and never talked about tomorrow, not from reluctance but simply because they didn’t imagine there would be one or, rather because they were both too young to commit themselves when life was so rich in splendid uncertainties.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Jean said to Laura, ‘that Blaise Pascal had come back again. Actually I’d almost forgotten him, our troglodyte of the forest. He amused me.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ she said.

  ‘You don’ like anyone, excep’ Jean and me.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You’re right.’

  Laura seemed to want to say more about Blaise Pascal, but she waited until Jesús was busy uncorking the bottle of champagne Jean had brought.

  ‘I know what was wrong with that man,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was afraid. He hid in the woods because he was afraid of the war, the bombs, the bullets. He’s a coward. And to lie to himself he invented a philosophy of the nature lover who hides in the woods, which is a lot nobler than fear. I won’t deny that after a while he probably ended up believing in his philosophy, but in the beginning it was all about fear.’

  She spoke tersely, with a rancour surprising in someone so shy. Jean was sure she knew more than she was saying and was refraining from saying it because of Jesús.

  ‘You’re exaggeratin’, Laura. He knows abou’ paintin’ …’

  ‘He’s a sycophant.’

  Jesús turned to Jean, opening his arms to show his impotence.

  ‘She is stubborn.’

  ‘I nearly forgave him because I thought he was Jewish,’ Laura said, ‘but he isn’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I made some enquiries about him. He’s moved to a country hotel near here under his real name. He’s shaved off his beard, cut his hair, and plays backgammon and belote with the people in the village.’

  Jesús exclaimed, ‘She knows everythin’. Absolutely everythin’!’

  He admired her with such sincere enthusiasm that it was touching. Jean told himself that reciprocal admiration was also a form of love, and not the least nor the most foolish. These two beings carried each other. Realising it, he envied them and loved them more. In truth he had only them and Nelly, forsaking all other friendships, so much did the world he lived in inspire instinctive distrust in him. He nevertheless suspected Laura of creating a void around Jesús while Jesús himself, at his best, loved the whole world. Did he have to pay such a price? He doubted it.

  ‘I ask myself,’ Jesús said with his mouth ful
l, ‘why you aren’t livin’ at Rue Lepic. My studio is empty …’

  ‘I will, I will, but not now. When Nelly chucks me out.’

  Jesús scolded him for defeatism. You don’t let yourself be chucked out. You leave first.

  ‘It isn’t that,’ Jean said with a frankness that surprised him. ‘It isn’t that … The truth is, I’m very bad at being on my own. It’s a sort of panic. When I was a boy I borrowed three books from the library at the lycée by Camille Flammarion, the astronomer: Where Do We Come From?, Where Are We? and Where Are We Going? I’ve worked out where I came from. I still need to find the answers to the two other questions, even if I half know the answer to the third, since death is obviously where we’re going …’

  ‘Listen … you know nothin’ about thir’ question neither. When the anarchists of the POUM launched an attack durin’ the civil war, they shouted, “Viva la muerte!” ’E’s not so stupid. Death is the other life, the beautiful one, and I believe in my death and in all those people who will think me an ’andsome genius when I am dead.’

  ‘You, yes. Not me. I won’t leave any paintings or sculptures behind, not a page, not a child. I’ve only got one life, and at this moment I feel I’m using it up. And Claude’s still mad.’

  Laura got to her feet to cut more bread and said, ‘She can still get better.’

  Jean no longer believed it. In the afternoon he walked over to the nursing home. Each week he both looked forward to and recoiled from the visit, which upset him even though he could not do without it.