Jean Rouaud - Of Illustrious Men

Usually, it’s only war that can redefine a landscape so violently. History does indeed record a war during those years, but it was on the other side of the Mediterranean, and it was only its faint echo that reached us. Or was it a shock wave, caused by the last world cataclysm and arriving twenty years later? Or again, triggered by our century, which has accustomed us to perform acts of destruction, was it a sort of anonymous, diffuse, clandestine model for times of peace that nevertheless claimed its victims? Because, all things considered, we felt it would be easier to understand if we could blame a war, however innocent, for the death of our forty-one-year-old father.

It was during these days of disaster that the traveler kept watching the number of kilometers mounting up on the odometer. For quite some time he had been preparing himself to cross the line of a hundred thousand, a symbolic equator both for the car and for its driver, who had just traveled, in no more than two years, with neither accident nor major breakdown, the equivalent of two and a half times the circumference of Earth. These were somewhat unusual circumvolutions, though, as they were wound, like a ball of wool, around a tiny little territory, as if Magellan had gone in for coastal fishing and, though having spent the same number of days at sea, instead of in the famous Strait, had merely offered the world a modest portolano describing places he had already visited a thousand times. To get a better idea of the prowess of the Peugeot 403, you had to measure it against the performance of its predecessors. The blue-gray Renault Juvaquatre, which dated from the period immediately following the war and therefore had limited resources, had been valiant — a sort of packing case on wheels bought, in those days of shortages, without tires, which were later acquired by bartering ration coupons and American army tank crews’ goggles. But since it held the road as if it were running on cakes of soap, it would have had great difficulty in tackling, like its successor — a black and chrome Peugeot 203 van — the tortuous reliefs of the Massif Central, the roads in the Limousin in which the grass pushed its way up through the cracks in the pavement, or the high Pyrenean passes in the days when Father was traveling on a circuit as vast as half of France, including the French-speaking part of Belgium, canvassing primary schools in an attempt to sell educational wall charts, a series on various themes illustrated with ten plates: Anatomy (with a cutaway diagram of a body strangely lacking in genitals), Natural Science, Great Discoveries (from a hairy man scraping away at a flint on top of a little pile of dead leaves to Pasteur observing rabies at the bottom of a test tube), Geography (two series: France and The World), History (the whole of Michelet in ten plates: Vercingetorix with his mustache in the shape of Napoleon’s cocked hat, Clovis and his baptism, Saint Louis washing people’s feet between crusades, Jeanne d’Arc and her fringe, Jeanne Hachette looking like a pale imitation of the earlier Jeanne, Louis XI and his little hat drawn in section like a flying wing, Sully and his two breasts, Louis XIV posing as a fashionable fencer, the Battle of Fontenoy and its courteous dead, the Bastille and its storming, Bonaparte and his Bridge of Areola, the Duke of Aumale and Abd-el-Kader’s retinue, Gambetta and his hot-air balloon), not forgetting the biblical series, especially produced for Christian schools with the aim of capturing a new market but which, despite an extremely modest Eve veiled by her hair a la Lady Godiva, didn’t sell, because right-minded clients suspected the publishers of having Communist sympathies (some of them had even seen a resemblance to Marx in the bearded, long-haired portrait of Moses brandishing the Tablets of the Law, and claimed that instead of the Ten Commandments they represented the dogmas of dialectical materialism, and instead of Israel, the promised land of the Soviets). This was how the publisher of the educational charts went bankrupt, and why we still had dozens of reproductions of our red Moses in the garden shed. Father had even papered his workshop with them. An occasional carpenter, our Joseph did his odd jobs surrounded by his refuseniks.

Why did he need to travel so far for such poor returns? He was away for weeks on end, sending us a postcard from every town he stayed in. We made a collection of them, which constitutes an erratic itinerary and at the same time a kind of pointillist log book — San Sebastian and its long sandy beach: “Shoes aren’t any cheaper in Spain, and it’s raining”; Amiens and its cultivated marshlands (a flat-bottomed boat on a canal bordered with reeds): “For my great big father who likes boats so much” (what sort of a father is this, who calls his son his father?); Reims and its smiling angel to his younger daughter, who is so very lively: “The angel is pleased, a little bird told him to tell me that you are very sweet”; the Millevaches (or “Thousand Cows”) plateau, to his big seven-year-old daughter: “Now that you can count up to a thousand, how many cows are there on this plateau?” (we turned the card every which way, but we couldn’t find a single cow either in the trees or in the clouds); two cards from Brussels, one of the Grand’ Place, the other of the Manneken-Pis, that impudent little fellow twenty inches tall, stark naked, urinating from his pedestal into the basin of a fountain: “Don’t copy him”; Rodez, a panoramic view of the town in Ektachrome, in which he talks about money, of how much he has promised himself he will earn (he won’t come home until he has reached the target he has set himself), of the money order he’s sending us, part of which is to be spent on repaying Monsieur X and the rest on paying the two outstanding bills in his desk drawer. This is the postcard on which in his delicate, individual handwriting he confesses how much he misses his family; it is clear how very weary he is, he sends all his love to his wife and three children, and it is obvious that he is working himself to death, that he deserves a far better life than the one fate had had in store for him, and that he had probably not managed to work out the proper way to lead such a life; — it was as if he were mainly spending his time in spending his time.

He had adapted the back of the 203 so that the charts could be stored vertically and would slide effortlessly along rails ingeniously fixed top and bottom. In fact, that was what fascinated him — the possibility of using any sort of situation to put his powers of invention to the test.

Perhaps he had even accepted the job in order to have to solve the problem of storing the charts. And once he’d sorted that one out, there was nothing to do but go looking elsewhere, around Quimper way, where another problem arose: how to stow suitcases of different sizes, not in a van anymore (the 203, having had its day, was sold to a builder, who got a bargain when you consider that twenty years later it was still to be seen driving through the streets of Random) but in an elegant four-door sedan, a brand-new model that unlike its predecessor didn’t make you think of work.

Halfway through the “Trente Glorieuses,” now that things were looking up after the necessities had been provided for, we were able to make concessions to aesthetics. And they were big concessions. With its flowing and rather soft lines, all its angles systematically rounded, its ivory-colored molded plastic dashboard with its red and green lights, the Panhard Dyna was like a portable transistor radio. Everything, except the weather, made you feel like laying a beach towel down beside it — which in any case would have been useful for looking under its chassis when, after a few weeks and only very shortly after the breakingin period, it began to shed oil and nuts and bolts. But in any case it wasn’t in the nature of the Dyna to be silent; its designers probably thought that an engine that could be heard a long way off added a sporting touch, like the young men who disconnect the exhaust pipe of their mopeds, stick their heads down over the handlebars, and keep changing imaginary gears. But as the Dyna went on playing Tom Thumb, it became impossible to carry on a conversation in it, since its assorted noises made the engine’s powerful voice the only thing that could be heard. So rather than yell, we concentrated on the landscape. When we were on a journey, the driver would point out the sights without saying a word. We turned our heads to the right: a menhir, a calvary; to the left: a ruined castle, a horse. If his finger pointed upward: an airplane. The explanations came later, when we took a break. So it wasn’t an airplane, but a glider. A glider? That’s to say an airplane without an engine that is carried in rising currents of hot air. Without an engine? We glided with it in a vertiginous silence.