Birth of Our Power (21 page)

A bad day. I ran all over Paris, from Montrouge to Bercy, from Levallois to Montparnasse. My addresses are running out, and time is moving on. Despite Letter of Transit #662–491, a feeling of insecurity creeps into my bones along with the fatigue—a dull ache. In a hotel, Letter #662–491 would probably not prevent me from being arrested. Where to find a roof tonight? A few hours under shelter, time to recharge my nervous equipment, and the future is saved. I knocked at Julio's door on a deserted
quai
in Bercy. A fat woman with tired eyes opened up with hesitation. At the name of José Miro her face cleared up: “Julio is
in hiding; we're being watched; the business of the Marseille deserters, you know.” I don't know anything, but already this commonplace room with its rickety sofa oppresses me. Hmmm … Someone behind me on the
quai.
Let's get rid of this doubt in which fear is lurking.
Métro.

The oar bangs against an iron bridge; the greenish Seine mirrors the pure sky so well! The odor of dust and asphalt, crowds, soldiers. A twenty-five-year-old officer, his face divided by a wide black bandage beneath the eyes—no nose, probably, an artificial jaw—is talking softly in his murdered-man's voice to his blond
marraine,
who looks as though she had just stepped out of a page of the rotogravure. This monster adores you, Mademoiselle; you'd better close your eyes or look into the distance. At the end of the green avenue the Carpeaux fountain raises an aerial globe imprisoned by the metal of which it is made:

Rue d'Assas: nobody. “That gentleman left last week …” I think things over on a café terrace. Six o'clock: only one more address. I saw, a young man in front of me being accosted: “Your papers?” There is a sort of unseen manhunt going on among the waves of passers-by. I practice trying to spot policemen. The newspapers clamor of war. Noyon, Soissons, Reims, bombardment. Posters clamor of war. Australians rub elbows with Serbs. That little brunette at the next table, powdering her nose, after having judged me at a glance (“Nothing doing”), knows at the age of twenty how twenty races make love. I can hear her telling her girl friend that last night, during the alert, she was with a slow, torturous Japanese who didn't care a thing about the alert. “It wouldn't have been funny to get killed at a moment like that … I was thinking about it, you know. Seems they have gasses that freeze you up right on the spot … What would people have said, the next morning, when they found us …” The idea of that ridiculous death, braved by lewdness and “work,” sets off pearly laughter.

Let's go try our last chance at the rue Guénégaud. This Paris crowded with men is for me still a wasteland. How to recognize ourselves in these multitudes? The comrades have burrowed themselves into their narrow lives or only come out disguised like everyone else. If we exist in this city, it is as termites, invisible, gnawing at the high dike which the waves can't overwhelm. A seventy-six-year-old Jacobin whose Tatar's head has already acquired the tones and shadows of a death's-head is muttering into the white bushes of his mustache that we should declare total war, move the f—ing government to Charenton, send Caillaux to the firing squad: bring on dictatorship, the mailed fist,
a few more tons of blood to be drawn from this foundering France,
“et nous les aurons!”
(and we'll have them!). Then he is moved to pity over some poor slaughtered buggar in the front lines. His youthful rebellions have soured, and he has turned reactionary. He is full of the obstinate lust for life—he who already has one foot in the grave in this time of mass slaughter—the lust for victory—he, the old man in the rear who knows everything of life for having used it up—while the virile men at the front—their veins empty, who aspire only to keep breathing but know what victories are worth, with what they are paid, and the filthy profiteer's face they wear—would like to send the whole thing packing off to the devil. Bread rationing, anemic children, two hundred thousand women turning out shells in the factories; a million proletarians, pliant human machines imprisoned by steel cogs, working the metals, the gasses, the leathers, the provisions, for the war, the war. Gaunt, impoverished Berbers collect the garbage at dawn. Tubercular Annamites guard the prisons. By means of a marvelous alchemy, one hundred thousand businessmen transform pain, courage, faith, blood, shit, and death into streams of gold, National Defense Bonds, solid issues, de luxe autos, and de luxe whores … the rue Guénégaud wears the same face it wore ten years ago, twenty years ago. It's a proper little old lady in a lace bonnet.

… If he is not there, what will become of me tonight in this enemy city? A sixth-floor door. I knock sharply in the silence, like someone throwing dice: odd or even—the sudden clarity of chance. No sound—but the door opens wide, all at once, framing the unknown comrade: close-cropped hair, big triangular nose, the double shaggy brush of mustaches—a dour type.

“Monsieur Broux?”

“That's me.”

He is wearing a soldier's tunic and an old pair of black corduroy pants. Behind him, in a glassed-in bookcase, yellow and green books are lined up (Alcan collection, science, philosophy). We stare at each other for a moment in the half-light; it is the instant when, somewhere in the depths of a being, that ineffable warmth, confidence, is born—or, that tiny cold blue flame: mistrust. “I'm so-and-so. Here's a note from Marie. And regards from Lejeune as well. I have been mobilized but … there are several important
buts.
My papers are only halfway in order, if not less …”

“Of course. I suspected as much,” says Broux.

And, in spite of the darkness, I can see his dark-brown glance, friendly perhaps, yes, timid: the glance of a man who is a little afraid of men.

“It's all right. You're in luck, my friend, for the place isn't very big. I don't know what we would have done if there were three of us. But my girl friend walked out on me two weeks ago. You'll be all right here. I have an excellent reputation; you can sleep with both eyes shut. Wait a moment while I turn on the light.”

We move into the white brilliance of an acetylene lamp hanging above a table covered with white oilcloth. The books speak quietly under their
glass. Les Feuilles d'herbe, Le Chemin de velours, L'Éthique:
thus contemplation rises up, from a blade of grass to the empyrean. The hum of Paris comes in through the window opening onto a horizon of roofs. Here we are, alone, two comrades among these four million men. Black coffee steams in bowls. We break bread like a couple of good companions, chance-met, sure one of the other, on the side of a road. Life is that road, and the war moves along it pushing gray legions toward the shadows.

Broux, a convalescent, escapes twice a week from the Vincennes camp. He talks about men despairingly: “What a collection of brutes!” and of his soldier's life with a resigned disgust: “The art of living consists in thinking. There are a few good moments: that is when, book in hand, you can lie down in the grass for an hour …”

The comrades? The names and faces appear in our memories as on a screen. In prison. That other one in prison too. Vanished, perhaps a deserter. Mobilized. At the Front. Many are at the Front. Several are dead, heroes in spite of themselves, without believing in anything, full of helpless desolation. A few are making it. Some ex-counterfeiters have the Croix de Guerre. “We” no longer exist. Wages are high in the factories; the women are hiving fun with all the soldiers in the world. Nothing doing. Nothing.

“No kidding, you really thought you could take the city? Honestly? You're not trying to pull my leg a little?”

Here, a few anarchists, a few syndicalists, some humanitarians … In Germany a Liebknecht; one Liebknecht out of millions of men, bespectacled, pushing his Sanitation Department wheelbarrow. An Adler in the prisons of Austria, alone in the clink, like Don Quixote, for having tilted at windmills …

“And the Russians, what do you make of them? That torrent? Kronstadt in mutiny?”

Broux shakes his head. They will be crushed. How should they not be crushed?

We are smoking, leaning out the window. The night comes in like a cover of blue gas. Suffocating sounds, pointed resistance of lights. Lamps light up under the mansard roofs. Behind some geraniums, a hanging lamp illuminates a family's supper. Kids calmly eat their soup, unaware that the world is in peril. In the sky a star moves out of the constellation of Andromeda and descends slowly toward the horizon, steel cockpit bearing two watchers like ourselves, armed with a machine gun. They see the Seine rolling by, a blue eel with shining scales laid out between rectilinear stoneworks.

Let us wait; let us wait for the future, even if we are not here to witness it. I have come from a country where the flame is smoldering under the ashes and, at moments, flaring up. I am going toward a country in flames: just yesterday it was the land of the greatest passivity. All is not lost, since we are here, you and I, with our certitudes, even when close to despair. Are you really so, sure that those two men, up there, in their star of death, are not nourishing the same hopes as we? Do you know how many men, tonight, in the trenches, confusedly desire the same thing we desire? If, all at once, they could rise up, what a clamor!

A LARGE EMPTY RECTANGLE ON THE TAPESTRY OF THIS LEGATION WAITING
room betrays the absence of a portrait of the Emperor. I consider for a moment that canvas turned against the wall somewhere in an attic storage room among broken-down umbrellas and faded screens. Two colonels are chatting quietly under the bare tapestry. The voyage of this canvas, by way of the service stairs, may prove rather troublesome to their destiny. Several young officers in high boots greet each other with precise bows and clicking of heels: magnificent suppleness, these vigorous bodies. St. George Crosses, cigarettes held in slender fingers, disdainful glances falling sharply in the direction of our corner. What are we doing there, in fact: me, a printer dressed up in his Sunday best and my neighbor, who introduced himself unceremoniously: “Fleischmann. And you?” More than shabby, Fleischmann: moth-eaten, and, almost, broken down. But, not quite—thanks to the old steel spring he carries somewhere in him in place of a feeling heart. The jacket, four years ago gray and well-tailored, no longer has any shape or form. Both pockets bulge: one round with a half-head of Holland cheese, easily recognizable, the other square with a book containing several bookmarks, themselves marked up in turn in a scrawling hand. His detachable celluloid collar displays a combination of rancid yellows and dubious whites bordering on yellow. A three-day-old shave, a pair of comical pincenez shored up in the middle with a piece of that black cord (known as gendarme's thread), perched slightly askew above a Galician nose; large eyes, underlined with wrinkles, veiled by the parchment-like lids of an old night owl concealing an extraordinarily preoccupied, mobile and tenacious gaze that sticks to you, strips you bare, insistent, and then suddenly turns away. A penniless Jew, well past forty: twenty years of struggles, of poverty, of lectures in the co-operatives of the rue Mouffetard and the clubs of Whitechapel, of illegal correspondence
with the homeland. I am guessing at this past, for our conversation is practical. I am “going home” too. I want to go home in order “to fight,” an official formula which fools no one. We will be fighting in any case, but not in the manner in which these old colonels understand the word. So we are in agreement: Let's have them receive us together.

Four paces across the carpet and the décor changes. Décor, for here everything is as in a stage play, from the sober politeness of the officer offering us his leather armchairs with a gesture to our circumspect manner. The officer listens to us amicably, his gaze gliding over my necktie and Fleischmann's in turn, which probably remind him of the realistic details in naturalist novels. A handsome chronometer marks the times of his appointments on his wrist. The harmony of style between his silver epaulets and his American-style mustache, trimmed every morning, is obvious. St. George Cross. Harmonious timbre of a charming conversationalist's voice: “Gentlemen, or rather
comrades
…” (The mocking tone echoes inside me against El Chorro's rough voice:
compañeros
… ) Here it is: our case is a difficult one. England, exercising control of the seas, is not overly willing to authorize the return of repatriated people. Fleischmann and I, in these leather armchairs, confront the great power on which the sun never sets. “We have no intention, I say, of forcing Admiral Beatty's lines …” The best advice this comrade can give us is to have ourselves inducted into the corps fighting in Champagne: it shouldn't be too difficult. With what prepossessing airs you open the door of the trap for us, Comrade Do-nothing, Comrades-with-handsome-silver-epaulets! Let's stay serious, however. “I'll think about it …”