Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘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.