Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘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.