Birth of Our Power (19 page)

Not far from the railway, an old town comes into view, with rounded towers, crumbling crenellated walls, old slate roofs, a great desolation all around. A town sleeping on the edge of life's highways, Hostalrich.

Another town, laid out along a dried-out
rio.
This stony, sandy riverbed, the color of burnt earth, is as gloomy as a dismal death under the desolation of the devastating and parching sun. Tall sun-baked houses gaze out over the drained river from all their little windows where wash is hanging out to dry. Old houses, old prisons, poor lives floundering on, each in its pigeonhole under crumbling roofs like thoughts under a wrinkled brow. The shadowy gaps of narrow streets led perhaps toward an arcaded square, calmed by the shade of tall plane trees where a good-natured tavern keeper would serve you the sourish local wine. An angular church tower, sharp gray stone, pointed belfry, town clock, looks over the town: and it is the only thing which points upward: an iron cross in the hard sapphire sky.

7
   Follower of Victoriano Huerta, during the 1915 Mexican Revolution.

8
   Followers of the liberal President, Venustiano Carranza.

THE ASSISTANT TO THE SPECIAL INSPECTOR OF THE BORDER IS A GENTLEMAN
full of good humor with rather short arms, and a rather large and rather red nose. I am certain that he can recognize good vintages infallibly at first taste. His house is white with green shutters; two big rosebushes on either side of the entrance greet him each morning with their wordless song: “How good it is to be alive, Monsieur Comblé! You have slept well, Monsieur Comblé, between clean lavender-scented sheets next to your satin-skinned blonde. You're going to have a good breakfast, Monsieur Comblé, and there is a chance, Monsieur Comblé, that you will get a promotion at the first change of personnel.” Monsieur Comblé savors the scent of a hollyhock, Color of My Mistress' Breast (“A horticulturist's success and poet's find”) and gaily answers his pet roses in the silence of his happy soul, so comfortably housed in an almost sound body (a little arthritis, alas): “It would be only just, exquisite flowers, that Monsieur Comblé's excellent services should be rewarded. Did I not arrest that little brunette spy with the funny little upturned nose whom my dear Parisian colleagues had allowed to escape this far? And if they are getting her ready for the firing squad at Vincennes, it's thanks to little me, thanks to little me …” His files are kept in an exemplary manner, like his little garden. There are ones for suspects, for international thieves, for expelled, wanted, and escaped persons; there is the secret file: a whole invisible flowering of crimes, sufferings, punishments, intrigues, and shadowy struggles shrouds these files. Without trembling, Monsieur Comblé plunges in a fat hand and pulls out an identification card:

“Got her,” he says. “Perfect.”

A slight, almost imperceptible clicking of the tongue is the sign, with him, of professional satisfaction, akin to gastronomic satisfaction. The blond floozy, accompanied by the two dark gendarmes, makes her way
with little hurried steps, with the poor nervous smile of a rabbit being slaughtered, toward two fat horizon-blue gendarmes who exchange a wink when they see her: “Not bad, that little broad …”

Monsieur Comblé, having unfolded my letter of transit, looks up at me with a cordial smile, borrowed from Albert Guillaume's pastels. He looks at me with the unrestrained sympathy he usually reserves for his roses (and, after a well-prepared lunch, for tiny Madame Comblé—“Little Dédé”—in their moments of great intimacy).

“What you are doing is a very fine thing, monsieur. Allow me to congratulate you.”

I take these congratulations flush in the face, like stepping into something slimy.

“You are returning at a time when so many cowards can think only of crossing the border …

Fortunately a broad, black hand holds out a square of cardboard in the air at the height of my shoulder: “Faustin Bâton, landowner at Grande Saline, Republic of Haiti.” The nails of that black hand cover a rosy pulp. The edge of a starched cuff exposes the deep brown of the wrist. The elegant Negro I caught a glimpse of while leaving pushes me gently aside. A paper with a consular letterhead informs Monsieur Gamble that Monsieur Faustin Bâton “who has distinguished himself by his generous gifts to the Red Cross is traveling to France in order to contract a voluntary, enlistment in the Foreign Legion there.”

“But that is admirable!” says Monsieur Comblé. To leave the Antilles—that must be quite nice, too, owning land at Grande Saline, Haiti—to cross the ocean to come to fight in France, that's really extraordinary, that's amazing. “A swell guy, the Zulu!” Admiration forces Monsieur Comblé to rise; he is on his feet, he is about to say a few heartfelt words to this Negro whose grave immobility has truly moved him … But Monsieur Perrache, that sourpuss of a bilious sacristan, has just appeared. Monsieur Perrache has that funny kind of overfriendly look whose meaning is altered by an undefinable hint of irony. “A treacherous look,” says Monsieur Comblé at times; “the look of an s.o.b.” say the men on duty. Monsieur Comblé's flabby hand disappears within the powerful black hand, its joints lithe and its muscles sinuous, of Faustin Bâton. The white hand is dank; the black, cool. Close to his own face, Monsieur Comblé sees a protruding jaw, thick wine-colored lips, huge eyes of white enamel and burnt agate which seem to be trying to recognize him, but without the warmth of friendship, with even a kind
of hostility as if they were saying to him: “What? You? So it's you, then, whom I've been looking for since Gonaïves? It's not possible … !” Monsieur Comblé attempts to smile and proffers an
“On les aura!”

Monsieur Perrache's glance envelops both of them in a strange coldness. A tired old customs inspector wearing the Madagascar medal has just come in; some Spanish workers are waiting outside the door. Faustin Bâton turns toward the door and suddenly feels terribly embarrassed, too well dressed, too tall, too black, too strong, too new, with his little too-bright suitcase, its nickel-plating gleaming like a happy man who has suddenly fallen in among old prisoners.

The hillsides are still green high above: flocks are doubtless grazing over there in the immense calm. The spine of the mountains outlines an ideal border. Hard, sharp, pure, this accessible peak, a majestic granite spire wounding the sky; if I could reach it, it would disclose an even wider expanse of peaks, of new borders to be overcome in order to know the world (or that part of the world which can be encompassed by the eye) … From every side the vertical fissures in the rocks fall toward the sea and toward this blue cove—a primitive drinking cup cut out of the coast. A tiny rounded cove with the semblance of a beach, thick gravel, fishermen's boats, nets drying on the pebbles, two cafés where customsmen sit half asleep in front of their
apéritifs
on the terrace—a tiny bay, surrounded by the vast blocks of the mountains with a huge vista opening into the infinite Mediterranean between two abrupt slides of granite. The sharp point of the headland slices into the sea and the sky at the same time; fans of foam break over its near-black stone in shimmering rainbows. Crystal-like laughter runs over the surface of the sea. The air is fair. The water below is so clear that you can see fleeting, shadowy commas of life flitting across a bottom of white and brown pebbles, sometimes green from algae.

My footsteps send lizards scurrying between the rocks. One of them, however, allows me to approach him: his green throat is throbbing, his round eye the eye of a curious old man, his wide thin mouth the mouth of an actor who has outlived all the vanities, his scaly clothes have the cool tint of a young plant dampened by the dew; this is not without its profound reasons. My glance falls from that triangular peak edged with tawny rust over there to this being suspended in flight. This faint tingle in the air, the radiance of these stones, this water, this tiny life
stationary in my path, this brilliance which doesn't cause the eyes to blink, this enveloping flame which does not burn, this transparent limpidity,
lucidity,
joy … The big white pebbles cause a pleasant burning sensation on your feet. The swimmer's feeling of plenitude, the cool of the water, the soft curves of the waves as you cut through them, mirrorings, breakings, suspensions of crystal and of a liquid dust which capture the rays of the light in mid-air in immaterial jewels. Powerful eddies, warnings from the depths, raise up the insignificant man who no longer has any weight to support but that of his skull: a little gray matter under the frontal carapace and those two minute dark chambers which contain the only image of the universe that exists. You are only able to know yourself, oh world, in our eyes: this lizard on the rock, myself borne on these pure waters, more ancient than these rocks but eternally renewed. Joy. Joy … It's more beautiful than cities, more beautiful than rains, more beautiful than nights, more beautiful than dreams. It's … I forget to think.—But an idea comes to the surface, the words cut out in striking relief:

“It would be so good: to live …”

“Helloo!”

Answer, echo, this ringing cry to my right. Like a dolphin sporting in the waves, Faustin Bâton is swimming with powerful strokes, disappearing completely, rising up to the waist streaming with foam; and I see him smiling. Joy lights up his face, shining with drops of silver.

We swim toward each other, laughing without any cause (but there is only this laughter, our laughter, the reflection of the play of the sea; and, later, I would be unable to imagine this moment without that laughter). We greet each other with our eyes, understanding without thinking that we are united by a friendship, vague, supple, and powerful like the lazy waves which pull us back toward the pebbly beach.

“… Really feels great!”

“Helloo!”

Like the lizard on the rocks, we dry ourselves in the sun before getting dressed. The light sculpts my companion's outstretched body into hollows and reliefs, shadows and metallic reflections. The dark grain of his skin, rather brown tending toward coppery red, is naturally sharp. The purity of flesh.

Hello, there's somebody, over there. A breach between the rocks suddenly reveals the next beach, an old house, a barrel, a bench, and on the bench, a man. Can he see us? Slumped down rather than seated, his
back against the wall, propped up on crutches, skeletal hands: the heel of one frail leg is dug into the fine gravel; the other is cut off well above the knee. A cap flattened out over the side of his head seems ready to fall off; and that face, at this distance, is so colorless that it almost seems to blend in with the wall, already halfway absorbed by the stones, not really pale but the color of flesh returning to the earth. Does this man see us—Célestin Braque, fisherman by trade, twice gassed, right leg amputated, Croix de Guerre with palm-leaf clusters, decorated by order of one army for his exploits in the Haudremont Woods where he may have dealt a fate similar to his to some fisherman from Swinemünde whom I imagine sprawling at this very hour in the same position before the Baltic and its soft, slate-gray reflections? We see him as an accusation.

FAUSTIN BÂTON BELIEVES PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING HE READS. THE UNMIXED
heroism of the
poilus,
the historic last words of dying men, the articles of General N—, of M. Gauvain, of M. Bidou, of M. Lavedan, and of all the armchair strategists in editorial rooms who never tire of analyzing communiqués, the claptrap designed to raise morale in the rear, from the story of the German babies being born without hair or nails because the Boches' bodies have already been so badly weakened to the one about the man who was wounded four times crying on his hospital bed in front of the pretty, peroxide-blond nurse because he is not yet able to go back to the front. All this absurd prose makes a great impression on the naïve soul of this great-grandson of slaves who bowed under the master's stick on the plantations before holding it in their turn; grandson of partisans, perhaps grandnephew of some black emperor (Faustin the First: Faustin-Robespierre-Napoléon Soulouque …). He believes everything in the way certain drunkards drink any kind of alcohol indiscriminately. And it's not that he's stupid. If he were stupid he wouldn't have this profound capacity for believing, he would be better able to discern the big lie; the clever subtleties would be less effective on him; fewer ideas, fewer words would be interposed between him and reality. Perhaps it would have been enough for him to have opened, one after the other, a pro-German and a pro-Allied American newspaper to have thrown them both in the same garbage can; the same lies, the same sophisms in one as in the other, the same hooey. At times, in my mind, I call him an imbecile, for it is really too much to take the counterfeit coins of so many humbugs for coin of the realm, but I know that I am unjust. He possesses the lively intelligence of simple and vigorous beings who are able to flesh out even false notions. From that point on, an imaginary world made up of a terrible jumble of words rises up solidly between his sharp mind and things as they are. He is a newcomer
on our dunes; he walks along them with great strides, accustomed to the solid earth, not seeing that he is being swallowed up. Literal comprehension and an open mind are not sufficient for finding your way in our old labyrinths; you also have to be inured against error, trickery, illusion, the past, desire, other people, and yourself. You must become mistrustful, arm yourself with critical method, arm yourself with doubt and with assurance, become wary of words, learn to burst them like those marvelous soap bubbles which, fallen, are reduced to paltry artificial spittle. “Faustin, my friend,” I say, “the art of reading our newspapers is a much more difficult one than that of tracking the fox through our forests …” We have become friends; he confessed to me from the very first the great confidence he is ready to offer any man expert in the splendid play of words and ideas. Certainly no swindler could ever have made him take a worn-out horse for a sound one, a low quality bicycle for a good make. Faustin Bâton, landowner at Grande Saline, Haiti, is not one to be bamboozled in that kind of deal, but it is possible with the help of Right, Civilization, History, the Holy War, the War of Liberation, to make him cross the Atlantic, put the latest model grenade in his hand, and send him to his death. I know that he will be the first one to leap out of the trenches, dauntless, held so erect before the danger by his feeling of heroic duty that it will take a few moments for the warrior's instinct of his ancestors, who went into battle hunched over with springy feline steps, to awaken within him … And besides, those few seconds will be enough; a magnificent target, he won't go any further.