33 Days (2 page)

But Portugal was trying to believe in happiness, keeping its place—and its Chinese lanterns and its music—at the table. In Lisbon they played desperately at being happy so that God might be willing to believe it.

But, above all, the ones who made Lisbon so sad were certain refugees, not the outcasts in search of some temporary safety, but those who were repudiating the misery of theirs to become expatriates forever.

Unable to find accommodations in the city itself, I was staying in Estoril, near the casino. I survived intense warfare, given that my group, which had flown missions over Germany nonstop for nine months, had lost three-quarters of its crews in the lone German offensive. Returning home, I’d experienced the grim atmosphere of slavery and the threat of famine. I had lived through the pitch-black night of our cities. And here, just steps from my place, every evening the casino in Estoril was filled with ghosts. Noiseless Cadillacs, with the pretense of going somewhere, deposited them on the fine sand at the main entrance. They had dressed, old style, for dinner. They showed off their ascots or their pearls. They had invited one another to the bit players’ dinner, where they had nothing to say to each other.

Then, depending on their wealth, they played roulette or baccarat. Sometimes I went to watch them. I felt neither indignation nor irony, but a vague anxiety. What disturbs you at the zoo facing the survivors of an extinct species. They set themselves up around the tables. They squeezed against a stern croupier, trying to feel hope, fear, despair, envy and jubilation. Like the living. They gambled fortunes that perhaps, at that very moment, had become meaningless. They used currencies that, perhaps, were discontinued. Perhaps the securities in their safes were guaranteed by factories already confiscated or, threatened as they were by aerial bombing, already being destroyed. They were drawing funds from Sirius. In resuming the past, they were trying to believe in the legitimacy of their excitement, the validity of their checks, the perpetuity of their contracts, as if nothing on earth had begun to collapse several months ago. It was unreal. It was a dolls’ ballet. But it was sad.

No doubt they felt nothing. I left them. I went for a breath of air along the shore. And the sea at Estoril, at this resort town, this domesticated sea, also seemed part of the game. It pushed a single, feeble wave, glistening brightly with moonlight, into the bay, like an inappropriate ball gown.

I met my refugees again on the ship. The atmosphere on this ship also exuded a mild anxiety. The ship was transferring, from one continent to another, those who had been called back to life. I thought: “I’d gladly be a traveler; I don’t want to be an emigrant. I learned a lot of things when I was young. I want to use them.” But here are my refugees pulling little address books from their pockets. The remnants of their identities. They were still pretending to be someone. They were clinging with all their might to some meaning. “You know, I’m so-and-so …,” they said, “… from such-and-such city … the friend of so-and-so … Do you know so-and-so?”

And they told you the story of some friend, or some position, or some misdeed, or any other story that could connect them to anyone. But, because they were expatriating, none of this past was going to be of use to them any longer. It was still very warm, very fresh, very alive, like the memories of a love affair are at first. You make a bundle of letters, tie them together with great care. You add a few souvenirs. And, initially, the bundle develops a melancholy charm. Then a blonde with blue eyes walks by, and the bundle dies. Because the friend, the position, the hometown, the memories of the house fade too when they’re no longer useful …

They felt that keenly. Just as Lisbon pretended to be happy, they pretended to believe they were going to return soon. The prodigal son’s absence is easy: it’s a false absence because, behind him, his home remains. Whether someone is absent in the next room or on the other side of the planet isn’t important. The presence of someone apparently far away can become more substantial than before he left. That’s what happens in prayers. I never loved my home more than in the Sahara. Never was a woman more present to others than the fiancées of sixteenth-century Breton sailors rounding Cape Horn and weakening against the wall of headwinds. From departure, they already began coming home. It’s their return they were preparing when hoisting the sails with their thick hands. The shortest route from the port in Brittany to their fiancée’s house went through Cape Horn. But here my refugees seemed like Breton sailors whose fiancées had been taken from them. No Breton fiancée lit a humble lamp in her window for them anymore. They weren’t prodigal sons. They were prodigal sons without a home. That’s when the real journey outside oneself begins.

How to reconstruct yourself? How to remake the dense fabric of memories inside yourself? So this ghost ship was full, like limbo, of souls to be born. The only ones who seemed real, so real we’d have liked to touch them with a finger, were those who were part of the ship and, dignified by real functions, carried platters, dried pans, polished shoes. And, with a certain contempt, served the dead. It’s not poverty that earned the refugees the crew’s mild disdain. It’s not money they lacked, but substance. They were no longer the man of such-and-such a household, with such-and-such a friend, such-and-such a position. They pretended to be, but it was no longer true. No one needed them, no one was going to ask them for help. How wonderful that telegram is that upsets you, gets you up in the middle of the night, sends you to the train station: “Hurry! I need you!” Friendships are made quickly with those who help you. They’re made deliberately with those who ask to be helped. Certainly, no one hated my ghosts, no one envied them, no one importuned them, but no one loved them with the only love that mattered. I thought: they’ll be busy from the moment they arrive with welcome cocktails, consolation dinners; they’ll get the most helpful reception from a generous America. There one can knock on any door, ask and receive. But who will knock on theirs asking to be taken in? “Open up! It’s me!” A child must breastfeed a long time before he demands. A friend must be cultivated a long time before he claims friendship’s due. Generations must ruin themselves repairing a crumbling old château to learn to love it.

II.

So I was thinking: “The main thing is that what we have experienced resides somewhere. So do the customs. And the family celebrations. And the house with memories. And so on … What’s most important is to live for the return.” And I felt threatened to my very core by the fragility of those distant poles on which I depended. I risked experiencing a true desert and began to understand a mystery that had long puzzled me.

I spent three years in the Sahara. Like so many others, I fantasized about its strange powers. Whoever has experienced life in the Sahara, where everything appears to be nothing but solitude and destitution, nonetheless mourns those years as the most beautiful they’ve lived. The phrases “nostalgia for the sand, nostalgia for the solitude, nostalgia for the space” are nothing but literary formulas, and they explain nothing. Yet it’s here, aboard this ship teeming with passengers piled on top of each other, that for the first time I felt as if I understood the desert. Certainly, the Sahara offers nothing but flat sand, or more precisely gravel, as far as the eye can see, for dunes there are rare. There, nothing visible is moving. There, you are separated from everything you love. You wallow endlessly in the atmosphere of boredom. And yet invisible divinities are there building a network of routes, gradients and signs, a secret, living musculature. Uniformity doesn’t exist. Everything is oriented. Even a silence there doesn’t resemble another silence.

There is a silence of peace, when the tribes are reconciled, when the evening cool returns and it seems as if you were putting in, sails furled, at a quiet harbor. There’s a silence at noon, when the sun suspends all thought and movement. There’s a false silence when the north wind flags and insects appear, ripped away from oases in the interior like pollen, presaging a sandstorm from the east. There’s a silence of brewing plots, when you know that some distant tribe is simmering. There’s a mysterious silence when the Arabs gather for their indecipherable confabulations. There’s a tense silence when a messenger is late returning. An acute silence when, at night, you hold your breath to listen. A melancholy silence if you’re remembering someone you love.

Everything has its focus. Each star sets a true course. They are all stars of the magi. They all serve their god. One points the way to a far-off well, hard to reach. And the distance that separates you from the well looms like a castle wall. One points the way to a dry well. And the star itself seems dry. And the distance that separates you from the empty well is all uphill. Some other star serves as a guide to an unknown oasis that nomads have rhapsodized about, but which rebellion makes off-limits to you. And the sand that separates you and the oasis is a field of fairy tales. One points the way to a bustling city in the south, delightful as sinking your teeth into fruit. One, the way to the sea.

Still-more-distant poles magnetize this desert: a house in France that remains a vivid memory. A potluck long ago with comrades. A friend you know nothing about except that he exists.

Thus you feel fraught or invigorated by force fields that draw or repel you, that you approach or resist. You are well-based, well-oriented, well-positioned at the center of the cardinal directions.

And since the desert offers no tangible splendor, since there is nothing to see or hear in the desert, you are forced to recognize that, far from being lulled to sleep, your inner life grows stronger and that man is animated above all by invisible structures. Man is ruled by spirit. In the desert, I’m worth what my deities are.

Whether in the Sahara or not, space is always animated for us by vital currents. Just as in the desert if I have the feeling of distance, it’s the influence of a far-off well, and if in the mountains I have the sensation of an abyss, it’s gravity pulling me downward, so if I’m rich in magnetic poles aboard this depressing ship, it’s thanks to Léon Werth’s house, among others. For Léon Werth is my friend.

France is not an abstract deity. France is not a history textbook. France is not some ideology. France is the flesh that sustains me, a network of connections that rules me, a collection of axes that are the foundation of my affections. That’s why I need those to whom I’m attached to outlast me. To be oriented, I need them to exist. Otherwise, how would I know where or what to return to? That’s why, Léon Werth, during my crossing I so needed to reassure myself of your presence in that house in the Jura that I knew so well, so that one of the cardinal points of my world would be preserved. Only then, while wandering distantly in the empire of your friendship, which has no boundaries, could I feel like a traveler and not an emigrant. For the desert isn’t where we think it is. The Sahara is livelier than a capital, and the most crowded of cities becomes a desert if the essential poles of life are demagnetized.

33 DAYS

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

It was the time when they were “correct,” which preceded the time when they gave us “lessons in politeness.”

I

FROM PARIS TO CHAPELON.
THE CARAVAN

On June 10th, at eleven o’clock in the morning, I meet Tr. on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. We decide to go as far as the Hotel Continental “to get some answers.” In the middle of the avenue, a laborer with a jackhammer is digging up a few cobblestones. Street repairs or defense against tanks? Meanwhile, a sprinkler spreads pearls of water over the turf of a lawn. This sprinkler makes us think childish thoughts, it gives us confidence: “If things were that serious, they wouldn’t think of watering the grass …”

“Godspeed,” I say to him while leaving. “In wartime,” he tells me, “God exists …” This is not an expression of faith. He means to say that neither he nor I have any power over events, that history is being made without us.

Rue d’Assas, my street, is empty. The usual motorists, those who park their cars on the sidewalk while they have lunch, left long ago. I’m in no hurry to leave. The wisest, most competent advice has not persuaded me. This is not a matter of reason. My certainty and security are rooted in a deep part of me that neither strategic calculation nor reason can reach. “Paris is Paris, and it’s impossible that the Germans would get in.”

Nevertheless, during the night, A. gave me a friendly, brotherly order to put sixty kilometers between the Germans and us. I decided to obey, but almost out of kindness. I think his friendship is anxious,
as mine would be in a similar situation, and that he’s at great risk and yet is afraid only for us.

Like every year, we take the road for Saint-Amour, which is our base within the Jura, Bresse and Lower Burgundy. We leave on June 11th at nine o’clock in the morning. We think that without pressing we’ll arrive around five o’clock in the afternoon. Still, a strange departure. Paris is covered by a funnel of soot. I never knew what that black cloud was. Smoke from burning reservoirs of gasoline in Rouen? Some means of warfare devised by us? By the Germans?