Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

With the butts out of sight Jean felt calmer. They belonged to a bad dream, whose scenes Claude had swept away in a single gesture. Her power was very great.

‘It’s over!’ Jean said. ‘You’re with me again.’

‘Was I not with you?’

‘No. I’m an idiot, aren’t I?’

She was silent for a moment, absorbed in thought that she tried, as she always did, to articulate with a precision and clarity that gave her more serious conversations a faintly bookish tone.

‘Do you somehow imagine,’ she said at last, ‘that this situation is only hard for you?’

It was true that he had never thought about it from her point of view. In fact the truth seemed to him so glaring and his egotism so awful that he felt ashamed and threw himself at her feet, burying his face in her lap. And could she have made a sweeter indirect confession? He looked up at her. Her eyes were wet with tears, and she smiled with the same indulgence she showed when Cyrille had done something silly.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I truly don’t know what we should do. Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other any more.’

There was so little conviction in her voice that Jean regained his courage and the sense of humour that had saved them from awkward situations before.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s definitely the solution. It’s such a clever idea, only you could have come up with it. I suggest we put it off a bit — only because to start this evening would be too easy — and definitely start in ten years’ time, when we’re completely used to each other and the separation would be really heart-rending … yes, heart-rending … and so romantic it would make a gravedigger weep.’

She offered him her cheek, laughing.

‘Go and sleep!’

In the stairwell, happy again, he ventured to ask the question.

‘Who came to see you this afternoon?’

‘My brother!’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

‘He smokes, doesn’t he?’

‘Ah, that’s what it was about, was it? Well, you’ll meet him one day.’

He jogged as far as Place Clichy before slowing down. His fitness was returning. Jesús had lent him his weights. They had a punchball and took turns at it, ten minutes each, wearing wool vests. Jesús insisted that it allowed him to do without women. There were, of course — at least for others if not for them — a variety of ways of solving that particular problem. La Garenne, seeing the fame of his gallery spread far and wide as whole coachloads of uniformed tourists began arriving to visit, intended to satisfy every taste, but despite his best efforts had not been able to find a painter who knew his way around homosexual subjects. A hissed word from a diminutive, baby-faced major with a glass eye had put him on the right track. ‘Photos!’ Why had he not thought of that? He instantly set about adding the new line to his gallery.

‘Photography is an art!’ he explained to Jean. ‘A new art. The only new art invented since Phidias’s time. Yes indeed, Monsieur Arnaud, Nicéphore Niepce is as great an artist as Phidias, the divine Leonardo and the genius Picasso. The philistines think you just have to press a button, click! and there’s a photo of Grandpa and Grandma and little Zizi with his hoop. The morons! When I say “morons” I’m being polite. As much composition goes into a photograph, Monsieur Arnaud, as into a still life by Chardin, and light plays as important a role in a photograph as it does in a Rembrandt. There is no phrase more absurd than the term “objective lens” when applied to the eye of a camera. Nothing is less objective than an objective lens. That transparent glass, which one imagines to be inert, is both a third eye and a brain but that eye, that brain must have a spiritual motor, which is the genius of the photographer, his vision of the world, his culture, his sensibility, his responsiveness. Painting is perhaps an expression of the human; photography is an expression of life …’

Jean assumed that this speech was a prelude to some new mischief-making by La Garenne, who always felt the need to dignify his muckiest transactions with the name of art. Thus his erotic drawings became, as he saw it, a means of psychological liberation for sexual misfits. He was even armed with a fine quote on that very subject by Freud that made of him, the purveyor, a benefactor of humanity, a saviour of inhibited couples and a generous supplier to lonely masturbators. His glibness, which never lacked conviction, was in every respect a match for his greed. The only question that remained was how he would spend the piles of money he had been amassing since the beginning of the occupation. There was no danger of it being wasted on women. Blanche de Rocroy was enough for that very restrained libertine, too stingy even to treat himself to a tart. He was not a betting man and he spent nothing at his tailor’s, being always dressed in the same black suit of the tenth-rate painter who has called himself a bohemian for far too long, on top of grubby shirts that he wore until they fell apart with, for a necktie, a greasy black ribbon that might once, in its long-distant youth, have been an ascot. In the mornings he would appear in his shiny, crumpled, dust-flecked suit as if he had slept under a bridge the night before. In his office, on the door of which he had inscribed in large capital letters the only play on words he had ever deserved credit for — ‘The bosom of bosoms’ — he would remove his trousers and throw them at Blanche, who piously set to ironing them in the stockroom, as if this garment, rigid with unnameable grime, represented some sort of thaumaturgical vessel for the Holy Grail, while her master (what other word can we use?), in his long grey-coloured cotton drawers, scratched his crotch and explained his grand designs to Jean. No one knew where he called home. Did he even have one? It was doubtful.

Photographs, then, began to be added to the stock of drawings in hell. Mostly they depicted young boys with erections. Their creator, an antifascist refugee called Alberto Senzacatso, lived in an artist’s studio on the top floor of a respectable building in Rue Caulaincourt. His models were occasionally to be encountered on the stairs, mostly the sons of the other residents, cheeky boys with roving eyes. Truth compels us to add that Alberto was not the sort of man to inspire repugnance, and might have resembled a fruit and vegetable wholesaler more than a maker of pornographic photographs if it had not been for the way his face lit up in a faintly mad way whenever he talked about his models. As a boy he had been force-fed with castor oil by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and from the severe diarrhoea that had followed he had been left with an anal obsession that verged on mania. His models, all volunteers, emerged tight-lipped from their posing sessions and returned to their families on the floors below. Alberto’s customers sometimes bumped into them on the landings and recognised the models who were the subjects of the very special photographs they had just purchased.

Their excitement can be imagined. The Italian lived alone in a studio stuffed with books and paintings. Open-minded and curious, he was writing a history of Mannerism which, after years of contemplation, he was hoping to reduce to three volumes of five hundred pages each. He counted a number of writers among his regular customers, whom he referred to only by their Christian names — Monsieur André, Monsieur Roger, Monsieur Julien — recognisable even to the uninitiated from the odd detail slyly slipped in by the garrulous photographer about their propensities. Two or three times he had been within a hair’s breadth of getting arrested, and Jean would find out later that he had succeeded in avoiding arrest by passing on details about his buyers. The police turned a blind eye and added to their files. Alberto showed no remorse. That was life, and staying in Paris was worth the occasional piece of information that in most cases was never used, the parties in question being protected by their standing and their periodic contributions to the Revue Littéraire de la Préfecture de Police ,10 or in some cases their status as patrons of a non-profit-making organisation known as the Amicale des Gardiens de la Paix.11