Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

‘No!’ Jean said. ‘We should go.’

‘I’m going to teach the old fool how to behave.’

‘No! Get on your bike.’

They rode away, pursued by the old man’s curses and youths armed with sticks who came running from a neighbouring field.

‘It’s the first time I’ve seen that in Italy,’ Ernst said. ‘They’re usually so welcoming.’

‘It was bad luck.’

‘Never mind! In an hour we’ll be in Parma.’

They arrived at Parma at the end of the afternoon. Unluckily the library was closed, and there were no Correggio frescoes to be seen.

‘Are you sure your friend Stendhal saw them?’

‘I think he exaggerated a good deal, but does it matter?’

On the outskirts of Parma they saw a fine, shady grove of trees with a stream running through it.

‘Let’s stop!’ Ernst said. ‘We can sleep here.’

‘But I haven’t got a tent or even a sleeping bag.’

‘We don’t need them. It’s a warm evening.’

He lit a fire, and they toasted bread and sardines splashed with olive oil. Jean pulled apples and sugar from his haversack and baked them in the embers.

‘Delicious,’ Ernst said. ‘Only the French really know how to eat.’

‘Who says any different?’

‘My father. He and my mother only ever argue about that one subject. She’s from Alsace, it has to be said, so she’s a bit French around the edges.’

‘What do you mean, “a bit French”! She’s completely French, even if she was born before 1914.’

‘Of course she was born before 1914, on German territory, in Strasbourg.’

‘Ernst, you’re pulling my leg.’

‘Pulling your leg? I don’t understand.’

‘You’re getting on my nerves! Now do you get it?’

Ernst was laughing.

‘I get it. It’s something I do. Now, listen carefully—’

‘No. We’ve settled the Alsace question. French territory.’

‘In Mein Kampf —’

‘Oh, stuff Mein Kampf. Hitler’s a crybaby. You only have to stamp your foot and he’ll back down.’

‘Stamp your foot. Go on.’

Jean pretended to stamp.

‘There you are, all over. No more Hitler.’

‘Well done!’ Ernst exclaimed. ‘Peace is declared.’

‘And there wasn’t even a war. Do you want another baked apple?’

‘Not for me. Let’s get some sleep. We can wash in the stream.’

Ernst was fixated with washing himself whenever he encountered fresh water. He soaped his pink and white body and rinsed himself in cold water, whistling the Horst Wessel Lied . Jean followed suit. Night was falling. A hundred metres away, cars roared along the road to Modena. They kept the fire going, to keep the mosquitoes away, and lay down side by side on the bare earth, sharing Ernst’s sleeping bag as a pillow. Between the trees they glimpsed patches of black sky, glittering with stars.

‘I’m happy,’ Ernst said. ‘We’re living through a great time. The world is ours. We must defend what we have, but let’s do it with a song on our lips, and if we have to die, we’ll die so that our children can enjoy a golden age.’

‘I’d be obliged if you would note that neither of us has children, so far, and no one is attacking us.’

‘Ach, you filthy French sceptic! You’re well fed, you don’t belong to an oppressed minority, and you have no idea what it’s like to hear your downtrodden brothers call to you for help when you’ve been disarmed and your hands are empty.’

‘Listen, Ernst, let’s talk about all that tomorrow. Tonight I’m ready to drop, and you’re aggravating me with your oppressed brothers. Go to sleep!’

At midday the next day they arrived in the centre of Bologna. For both of them it was their first great Italian city for art. Ernst stopped in a square to read his Goethe. ‘Venerable and learned old city …’ He wanted to climb a belfry to see the tiled roofs lauded by the poet. ‘Neither damp nor moss attacks them.’

‘What funny ideas he has, your Goethe! I wonder if anyone’s still interested in details like that.’

‘Goethe is a universal man. Nothing was alien to him. What does Stendhal say?’

Jean opened his little Beylian guide. ‘A few lines, no more. He went to two concerts here. He was introduced to some scholars. “What fools!” he writes. “In Italy you get either raw geniuses, who astonish by their depth and lack of culture, or pedants who haven’t the slightest idea.”’

‘Is that all?’

‘Absolutely all.’

Ernst appeared deeply disappointed. The levity of the French was incorrigible. He set about demonstrating as much to Jean, but Jean was not listening, half dreaming instead of the plump young man who dashed to hear eighteen-year-old singers and discuss music endlessly with other music-lovers, while Goethe, driven by sudden inspiration, shut himself away to rewrite Iphigenia auf Tauris .

That evening they wandered under the arcades, mingling with much less excitable crowds than those in Milan. The girls they encountered were in groups of four and five. Their teeth gleamed as they laughed. They smelt sweetly of soap, and their young, sumptuous bodies seemed happy to be alive in the rediscovered coolness of the night.

‘They’re pretty,’ Jean said.

‘But not very fit!’ Ernst remarked. ‘I can’t see any of them running the hundred metres.’

‘Who’s asking them to?’

‘Me! You have a completely retrograde conception of women, Hans, as if they exist for enjoyment, for the pleasures of the pleasure-seeker. In Germany women are our equal. Their womb is the nation’s future.’

‘Ernst, you are a sad sack. I don’t suppose your Goethe wrote anything about Italian women either.’

Ernst was silent. Goethe did not talk about women. He took no risks, unlike Stendhal. He was not a man to die from a badly treated dose of the clap. Ideas, poetry above all! And health!! Ice-cream and cake vendors were calling out their wares on street corners, and the Bolognese were outside to sample one of the last fine summer evenings, deserting their stuffy houses with shutters closed on narrow streets that shook disagreeably at the passage of a tram. Behind bourgeois parents skinny little maids from Emilia-Romagna, bareheaded and dressed in black with white aprons around their waists, attempted to restrain children who shouted and squabbled. There were no beggars to be seen; they were forbidden. From this spectacle Jean drew a number of conclusions: that Italians liked to live in the street, where they could use loud voices and expansive gestures; they all knew each other and loved to lavish magnificent Signors, Signoras and Commendatores on each other. They were satisfied. Business was doing well. An order reigned of which they were proud. In Ethiopia their legions had reconquered an empire. Many of them loved to recite Gabriele d’Annunzio’s poem, Mare nostrum. In Lombardy they were cold and prim, but the closer one got towards more human latitudes, the warmer they were and the more hospitable and curious about strangers. Ernst, on the other hand, felt uneasy at this loquacity, this good-humoured self-indulgence, this nation that sang so well individually and so poorly as a choir. The Hitler Youth had tried to forge closer ideological and military relations with the Fascist Balillas.9 Without success: Balilla leaders considered the Nazis johnny-come-latelies at the party, absolute beginners as Fascists.

Around midnight Ernst and Jean reclaimed their bicycles from the garage that was looking after them and pressed on towards Tuscany. They found the road hard going, stopped at a village, found a barn to sleep in, and set off again early. Alone, either of them would have taken three days to make it over the mountains, but together, riding in relay to lessen the airstream, they reached the Tuscan border in a day. Late afternoon had plunged the clean, ordered, garden-like landscape into silence, and it lay resting there in its dense, handsomely dark ochre soil on which trees wrapped in white ruffs stood out. As they came closer they identified the trees as olives, being harvested by women with poles. In sheets stretched out below, children gathered up the olives that were then taken away by men with heavy basket-weave hoppers on their back. Workers called to them to offer them bread moistened with oil, tomatoes and onions, and a light, graceful, flower-scented white wine.