Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

Stefano had had a carafe of grappa brought. He filled two glasses to the brim. The spirit unleashed friendly and protective feelings, and he set about demonstrating to Jean that Fascism was rejuvenating nations and would save an exhausted Europe from its decadence. Even so, it was important to make a distinction: only the Mediterranean revolutions would bear fruit. Everything being cooked up north of a line from the Brenner Pass to the Loire could be left to the Teutons. The Italians had shown the way with the march on Rome. The Portuguese had rallied to the banner of Salazar. The Greeks were marching behind Metaxás, the Turks behind Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And at last the Spaniards were waking from a nightmare: last 18 July, their generals had crossed the Rubicon. What was holding France back from adding its voice to history?

Jean did not know how to answer this question. He nevertheless possessed enough common sense not to want to be shot down for parroting his father’s solution. Having encountered authoritarian ideas in troubled times, he had also been impressed, without being able to see very clearly where the flaw in the argument lay. It was obvious that Ernst’s Nazism and Stefano’s Fascism had little in common, except that both appealed to an instinct for revenge among populations that had been bled white by the last war. People’s thinking would evolve in time.

Stefano was getting carried away. He was now speaking only Italian, and Jean was surprised to understand him so well, trying to remember who Joseph had quoted when he said, ‘The Italians are the French in a good mood.’ Oh yes, Cocteau. He smiled to himself, and Stefano, seeing his expression, stopped talking and said, ‘You makin’ fun of me?’

‘No, I was just thinking about something a French writer once said.’

‘Oh? What was dat?’

‘That the Italians are the French in a good mood.’

‘Yes, dere eez a lot of truth in what Cocteau sez.’

Jean raised an enquiring eyebrow. It was clear that driving was not a profession of ignoramuses. First Salah, and now an Italian trucker quoting a French writer whom Jean himself scarcely knew.

‘How do you know Cocteau?’

‘Oh, you know.’

Trying to look modest Stefano poured himself a second large glass of grappa with a steady hand, grasping the the neck of the carafe with calm strength. Jean had discreetly emptied his glass into a flowerpot in preparation for his morning training session. He felt ashamed not to be as fit as he had been. What you lost in a few days took weeks, even months, to catch up, if you weren’t a force of nature as Stefano was. Sitting opposite, his shirt open on his hairy chest, his powerful forearms resting on the table, with his enormously thick neck, he was a man who had been brought into the world to stop charging bulls. Yet Jean was allowed a secret smile because Mireille was cheating on that man. In the strongest among us there is always some pitiful weakness, an Achilles heel. An interesting lesson, Jean said to himself as Stefano, finishing his panegyric to Mediterranean Fascism as the sole bulwark against Teutonic heaviness and Slavic lifelessness, stood up without showing a sign of drunkenness, even though he had drunk, on his own, a full half-bottle of grappa. Truckers were the lion-hearted knights of modern times. At the wheel of their trucks they thundered across nations, imposed their own laws of the road, aided the poor (Jean), mocked the rich in their sports cars, flouted customs inspections and, when they stopped, jumped into bed with creatures they whipped into such a state of passion that at dawn they left them panting on unmade beds in rooms that reeked of the heavy smells of diesel and axle grease. Signs indicated their secret trysts, little restaurants where waitresses tucked these weary giants up in their beds; and when they woke, day or night, they set off again across the highways of Europe, passing each other with deafening greetings. Occasionally one of them, imprisoned in his cab like a paladin in his armour, would send up a flare, lighting the nocturnal landscape with a glow that could be seen for many leagues around, summoning other wandering knights to him. What a magnificent life!

Jean admired Stefano even more when he could hear through the thin floor, from his camp bed in the pantry, the strange warbling sounds that the driver was drawing from Mireille. Nothing like the noises that he, Jean, elicited from the patronne. He had the impression that a wild, animal force was crushing and transfixing Mireille. Stefano handled his instrument like a virtuoso. When the performance ceased, a loud snoring ensued, and Jean imagined Mireille naked, exhausted, unable to sleep, staring wide-eyed into the darkness of her bedroom. What was she thinking about, as sleepless as he was? Jean called to mind the wonderful sequence of pleasures he had had in a single night with Antoinette, the shiver that ran through her all the way to her lips, her thighs suddenly as hard as wood, her eyes filled with tears, half-open to gaze at the inquiring face above her. Love took so many forms that one could not always recognise it. Why did Chantal de Malemort, when, alone in the night, he imagined her (because one day it would happen, he felt an absolute certainty), why did Chantal leave unanswered the same question asked of her?

Stefano left the next day, and the prefect telephoned. He sent a car to pick Mireille up and bring her to join him at a chalet near Peïra-Cava. Jean found himself alone and began a long letter to Joseph Outen.

First of all, one very important thing to say, dear Joseph: I’m not jealous. If I were, I’d really have something to think about. The patronne also sleeps with the whole world. It’s given me a bit of rest for the last three nights and I’ve got back all my lost press-ups: 180, then 190, and then 200 this morning. I’m getting fit faster than I expected, and at the same time I’m thinking. I’ve bought myself a notebook where I’ve started making a few notes:

a) Duplicity: absolutely necessary for a life without dramas. You have to harden your heart. I need to be capable, without blushing to my roots, of sleeping with a woman and then being a jolly decent chap to her lover or her husband. This is essential. Without it society would be impossible.

b) Physical love is something you learn. I know nothing. Antoinette gave me one key, Mireille is offering me another. There’s a world between them, even though both of them are nymphomaniacs. It’s quite likely that every bit of totty’s a different case. Absolutely imperative to vary my experiences. Sadly, for the moment there’s no prospect of that! But I still have a lot to learn from Mireille.

c) I shan’t go to university, or to a technical school. I want to earn my living straight away. My parents are old and apparently in difficult circumstances. It’s time I helped them.

That’s it for today. I’ll keep you informed about my thoughts. Thanks for the books. This time you weren’t pulling my leg. I’ve started Journey to the End of the Night. It’s marvellous. We’re nothing compared to a man like Céline. I’m learning what misery is from a book. It will help me to recognise it and to put up with it when I encounter it in my life.

Greetings and brotherhood,

Jean the baker’s boy

Mireille returned from Peïra-Cava with passion oozing from every pore, and Jean was expected to rise to the challenge. After her short immersion in republican-masonic polite society she had become a little snobbish, and in order not to have to sleep with a scrubber of pans she promoted Jean to waiter. He learnt how to serve dishes, change plates, take customers’ orders. The waitresses, three girls from Menton, giggled at him behind his back. He wrote in his notebook: