Birth of Our Power (24 page)

Joy comes at will. I began my day well with this meeting. Was it, later, on, Sam's good mood, in spite of the disastrous news from the camp of La Courtine? Was it the meeting with three comrades in a Charonne café where truck drivers drink at the counter? Marthe had brought some rather poorly written handbills from a Billancourt factory. She
told us about her trick of posting them in the washrooms or of slipping them into girl friends' pockets in the locker room. “Let 'em look! Let 'em look!” she said. “Unseen and unknown. There are four of us out of four hundred, but they think we're everywhere.” Marthe, her nose aquiline, her mouth large, teeth healthy, round breasts straining the satinette of her bodice, hands masculine but cool as if they had just come out of fresh water; Marthe and her way of walking like a blond mare with cropped hair … Next to her, Pellot, of the ditchdiggers, still wanted by the police, low-slung, flourishing mustache, jovial, digging into words and things with the same rhythmic movement of his whole being with which he digs up great shovel loads of earth at the construction yards. “What we should hope for,” he was saying, “is a big push from the German side, with a break-through and everything. It'd all go sky high, like in Russia. It'd be splendid!” Was it, finally, these four lines of scrawlish writing from El Chorro: “The party was not a success, but we'll try it again. Gusano sends his best.” Grim communiqué on three days of street fighting (seventy dead?).

“Would you like to come for a walk, Broux?”

“No. My legs have already done ten miles today. I'd rather read.”

He sat down at the window; his low, stubborn forehead, his large straight nose, and his bushy mustache were silhouetted against the backdrop of a saffron-colored sky. How could I know that we would never see each other again?

“Really feels good, eh?”

The threads of ideas we have pursued together in this room come together in my mind, blowing gently in the breeze of this brisk parting like spider webs shimmering in the wind. With his worn-out lungs, his obstinate self-effacement, his bookish timidity, Broux is nonetheless a strong man; by means of his awareness of how impossible it is to live, he raises himself precisely to a higher possibility of living, to an endurance which is more sure of itself because it believes it has nothing more to lose. From his weakness he was able to create a strength; from his despair, an acquiescence; from his acquiescence, a hope … I rapidly descend that staircase which I usually find tiring. Broux's image fades away, absorbed into a saffron-colored sky in which I imagine cranes with great flapping wings, flying. The flight of a bird traced in delicate strokes across a translucent porcelain vase. Fujiyama in the background. Faustin, appears for an instant and crosses a landing with me. Where is he, Faustin, stray, unself-conscious force wandering mindlessly like a
spear thrown through dense foliage? Well, what does it matter? I shall follow the street until the
quai,
then the
quai
up to the Pont des Arts.

Two gentlemen are conversing with the concierge in the narrow hallway. On the sidewalk a flash of gold, infinitely delicate, reflection of the nuances of the sky more imagined than seen.

“Pardon me, monsieur,” I say.

And I comprehend instantaneously, pinched between the walls and two hulking shapes, that everything—this bright sidewalk only six feet away, the Pont des Arts, Broux's steady voice, the two white-maned portraits, our meetings—is completely finished. All of that was suspended on a shimmering thread: and now it has snapped. And everything comes falling down, down. An animal caught in a trap resists, bites against the steel, struggles for a long while before comprehending. But I understood immediately. The bulkier of the two men, heavy with wine, has a strange high-pitched voice which squeaks out from under his heavy, curved mustache stained around the corners of his mouth.

“… You're not armed?”

My pockets are already being frisked with deft hands by his companion, a pock-marked man wearing yellow shoes. I have an enormous weight in the pit of my stomach. I close my eyes for a second. All you can ever say to yourself is: “Let's go,” as if you were jumping through a trap door blindfolded with your feet tied together. Here I go. Was that all?

I know all about this drudgery of searches and interrogations in advance. These premises, these men, these questions are the same in every country of the world: and afterward you always have the same feeling of coming out completely dressed, but soaked to the skin with dirty water.

“Move on ahead,” the pock-marked man in the yellow shoes says to me.

We are alone in a corridor painted chocolate up to eye level, cold as a cellar. Staggering drunkards, unnerved murderers, disconsolate pickpockets, querulous demonstrators with staved-in ribs have followed this route toward the dark bench on which I will sleep.

The pock-marked man slows his step; so do I. I clear my throat. He opens door number 3. A cell like any other. Why is he taking so long to lock me up? He vacillates for a moment. I can see the grease spots on his vest. His face is yellowed, faded. His round straw hat cuts across his forehead. Narrow eyes under wrinkled eyelids, the wide, thin, slightly
protuberant mouth of an aging toad. He pulls a copy of
L'Intransigeant
and a packet of Marylands out of his pocket and hands them to me:

“Take these; they'll help you pass the time.”

Then I notice his gray and wrinkled hand, which is probably cold. I'm about to yell: “Get the hell out of here, will you, and leave me in peace!” but my glance falls to his flabby feet in their yellow shoes and they seem—I don't know why—pitiful to me. I take the newspaper and the cigarettes without a word. The pock-marked man heaves a sigh.

“If you only knew how sick I am of all this!” he says clumsily.

The pause which follows lasts perhaps a second; but it is singularly heavy and futile.

“Do you know who turned you in?” resumes the pockmarked man. “It was Fil-en-quatre. A bastard.”

And he backs away all at once, like a spring unwinding. The door clangs shut; the key turns twice in the lock.

THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE, AFTER STUDYING LETTER OF TRANSIT
#662–491, told me that he was signing my release. I already feel like a stranger in this cell. I am better able to notice the stench of rancid filth rising from the straw mattress. Somewhere in my skull I can hear the word “freedom” ringing protractedly. Like a stone falling into a deep well, a bottomless well, rebounding from one wall to the other.

Our expectations are rarely fulfilled, almost always interrupted. The door swings open like a blast of wind.

“Get your things together.”

I follow the guard with the easy step of a free man. I already begin to look at things through a spectator's eyes. “Halt.”

We are standing in front of a metal door from behind which a strange muttering can be heard. The guard, his nose pimply, his neck brick red, opens this door slowly. The door to the outside world, no doubt. I calculate the time it will take to get through the record office. Twenty to thirty minutes. Then the street. Do you know that there is something wondrous in each step you take in the street? …

The room is as spacious as the waiting room of a small station, but hardly resembles one with its enormous columns, its Romanesque arches, and this drab impoverished light of a large prison. It could be a Piranesi prison. Prison of all ages, court of miracles, blind alley. Places with no exit are all alike and all unlike any other places. Emaciated figures wander through a semi-transparent fog. An old Jew—long overcoat, filthy bowler, flossy beard, obliterated from front, side, and three-quarters profile by poverty's sores like a postage stamp whose effigy is completely blotted out by greasy ink—is pacing mechanically up and down. Poor wretches out of Goya are squatting toward the rear, in a dark corner; some suspicious-looking beggars seem to be dragging themselves toward me and I suddenly find myself surrounded by them.
They have sly, cunning faces, shapeless jackets, dirty necks, grimy hands. “Where do you come from? Who are you? Vagrant or deportee … ?” One of them could be a well-thrashed Sancho Panza; he is biting his nails and staring at me like a beast chewing its cud. His fresh-colored cheeks are covered with a reddish fuzz. Suddenly the swarm of vermin divides and a handsome pale man with a sailor's beard and eyes like burning coals, a kind of pirate, presents himself with outstretched hand. I am unable to catch his guttural name, but the rest is clear:

“… citizen of the United States. Deserter from the
Oklahoma,
big American ship. Deportee. And you?”

“Me,” I say mockingly, “citizen of the world. Free.”

The pirate bursts into wild laughter. His laughter seemed to put bats to flight under the eaves.

“O-o-o-boy! We're all free here. Mister Pollack (that's the old Jew who is now passing in front of us, stroking his beard with a diaphanous hand) for the past forty-seven days; Mister Nounés of the Argentine Republic (that's Sancho Panza), a good fellow, the old rascal, for the last fourteen. The others average from five to thirty.”

Then Stein, the Alsatian, comes up. A saber wound received in the Taza Pass gave him a harelip which is now half-hidden under a thick stubbly beard. He says:

“Five years in the Foreign Legion. Wounded three times. I've been ‘free' like this for six months now. Seventeen days in the big room. Eaten alive by cooties; take a look.”

With both violent, hands he tears open the collar of his dirty black shirt and reveals a hairy chest covered with sickly red stripes from the itch.

“Make yourself comfortable,” resumes the sailor from the
Oklahoma
quietly. “Come on. There's a very nice spot in my corner.”

In the evening they throw the straw mattresses down from a height of several yards, in a cloud of dust, to groups of men thrashing about and swearing. We stretch ourselves out on ours and talk. Jerry Jerry, citizen of the United States, tells me, slowly, with energetic gestures, in satisfactory French mingled with guttural English, the story of his travels through Colorado and Utah before he became a sailor—after a rather unexpected and very unpleasant adventure about which he says nothing but whose memory silences him for a moment.

“Listen to this. Once—
une fois
—at Alamosa near the Rio Grande …

He tells of Indian reservations, of rivers between the high cliffs of the Grand Canyon, of the Rocky Mountains, of double-dealing innkeepers,
of the easy money you can make in land speculation, of the joyful bankruptcy of one of his friends; of the insurance business … In the opposite corner, some men are shooting craps. The dice are made of dried-out bread crumbs. An ill-tempered little Spaniard has just lost his jacket. He tears it off and throws it angrily into the winner's face. Stein, bare-chested under his jacket, is patiently pulling the ticks out of his shirt: although he is six paces away, I can hear the insects cracking under his thumbnail. The electricity is so poor, the room seems filled with yellowish smoke.

The old Jew is stretched straight out asleep, with his bowler over his eyes and his hands folded across his chest: the whiteness of those old hands seems vaguely luminous.