While the Gods Were Sleeping (16 page)

L
ESS THAN SIX MONTHS
later at least one in three of all the servants who greeted us on the evening of our arrival would be dead. I could list their names, erect on paper my private monument with the inscription “
Mort pour la Patrie
”, but memorials are leaden euphemisms: sacrificial dishes or garlands of flowers that we place on altars to drown out the stupefaction in all those bodies. I have always made it a point of honour to read the lists of names on each of those monuments, even the tiniest villages I visited, and invariably their orderliness left me with a wry aftertaste. They stood there, chiselled row on row in bluestone, an alphabetical litany, like the words in a dictionary, but without the slightest explanation, except for their year of birth, and the date of their death, which broke off their oh-so-young etymologies.

There should be mausoleums and extensive cemeteries for the torn-off limbs, the amputated arms or legs, the missing organs. Headstones should be carved under which rest, for example, the hands and feet of Sylvain Gaillac, youngest son of Mr and Mrs Gaillac, who right next to the town hall in my mother’s home village ran a wine and liqueur business and who dismissed with typically French nonchalance the fact that their good-looking youngest son was in favour with the girls at the fairs—till he came back without hands or feet. A suckling pig or sacrificial lamb ready for the spit, that’s what he looked like, a man-sized infant whom Maman and Papa had to push round in a wheelchair at fairs where not even a milkmaid would
give him a second look. He, Sylvain Gaillac, single-handedly responsible for several deflowerings in the undergrowth behind the roundabouts, late at night during the midsummer ball, now had to be fed three times a day as one feeds an orphaned thrush chick, spoonful by spoonful, mouthful by mouthful, and for the rest of his days couldn’t even wipe his own arse. There should be a burial chapel commemorating without inflated heroics the right arm of our groom Adelin Rivière, very popular because of the only talent he was able to develop before the front decimated him: his sensitivity during the freeing of a calf from the inside of a cow that threatened to die in calving, the clairvoyancy of his hands, as if, as my uncle said so often, that fellow could feel with his hands how the calf was twisted in her abdomen, and how to release it unharmed. And where is the grave for the left hand of his cousin Hubertin, who had no special merits and was only missed on a farm where manpower was always useful when that hand wasn’t there any more—and that was how the war gave countless men back: withholding an arbitrary percentage of flesh. It should have its own cemeteries, rows of tombs for arms, legs, feet, fingers, toes, or a wall for urns with, under small stone covers, for example the testicles of Olivier Douilhet, waiting to be reunited with the rest of Olivier Douilhet, who, it was whispered, took a feeble pride in the fact that some ladies were curious about his absent sex and sporadically rewarded a few by dropping his trousers and showing the fold between his thighs, and how he could make water with it like a woman. Olivier Douilhet grew old, since eunuchs are long-lived, and all through his long life he counted himself luckier than his mate Claude Outremont, for whom the same grenades that unmanned Olivier had spared his balls
but had mashed up his cock—there should be memorials for anonymous lumps of flesh, missing in action: bits of rump, thigh muscle, bum and prick, and ossuaries for the splinters of bone of men like François Hautekier, who was a son of the smith, ready to succeed his elderly father above the glowing coals and the anvil, but in whose hip the doctors artificially created a gaping hole so that they could easily cut away fragments of bone with forceps, when gangrene attacked the bone and the microbes reduced it to black mush.

In those cemeteries for fractions of bodies I wouldn’t erect a cross, or a statue of a grieving soldier leaning on a sword with head bowed. In a column or a wall I would insert in glass niches the eyeballs of everyone who has lost an eyeball, including at least four eyeballs from local lads, so that the past would continue to gape at us without a fringe of eyelashes ever closing over those icy stares—a grotesque, obscene memorial, certainly, but one which also commemorates, just not eloquently or in hushed reverence, but mockingly or cynically, silently shrieking.

I understand why my brother said later that those who were wounded were usually the lucky ones. I understand that their wounds—the cavities that may or may not have closed, the membrane of skin where jawbones had been shot away, the missing knuckles, the eye socket in which soft new flesh replaced the vanished pupil—left a mark in those young bodies, even if in the form of an absence, which had, as it were, hewn out a tabernacle in which they could house their disaster, just as in the medieval reliquary shrines the toenails of martyrs or splinters from the Cross were stored and on certain occasions shown
to the faithful. Their misfortune, to use my mother’s love of tautology for once, was their misfortune.

But what is one to do with the others, the apparently unharmed? What mausoleum, for example, would be suitable for young Etienne Leboeuf, who took part in—perhaps I should say sat out, the way we sit out a storm that overtakes us in the open—almost every campaign behind that scar of trenches and barbed wire between the coast of my fatherland and the Swiss border without getting so much as a scratch, and changed his soldier’s tunic for the same grey peasant’s smock that he had taken off in the summer of 1914 like so many, millions, to obey the order of the generals, the ministers and the posters on the market square, where that word was suddenly there, unattainable and virginal, not yet pierced by definitions or my own breathless memories: “
Guerre
…”

Etienne Leboeuf, twenty-four, with his brown curls and his blue eyes and a blunt, touching, turned-up nose above his eternally scabby lips; Etienne Leboeuf, whose small, compact frame was indeed slightly reminiscent of a bull calf, and in whose eyes something of the passivity of calves shone; Etienne Leboeuf, who never spoke a word about the war and was not very talkative anyway—I imagine him in the trench with the stubborn passivity of a bull calf sheltering under a tree during a storm. Not realizing the risk it is running, it stands there rubbing against the trunk, apparently unmoved by even the most powerful lightning or the most violent thunderclaps; it blinks, shakes its head, waves its tail and flaps its ears to keep the rain off. I think of what my brother, equally tight-lipped, told me very occasionally, about the most silent death you could witness
in the trenches, when the forager with his tins of provisions for the men in a forward post nearby slipped off one of the
duckboards
and found himself in the sucking mud of a crater full of quicksand—the silent conflict of someone who knows that if he dares call out he will attract the attention of the enemy and endanger not only himself but especially his mates, and at the same time feels himself sinking, and every swing of his trunk or arms in order to free himself gives the mud the opportunity to suck him down even deeper. “All we could do was listen,” said my brother, “grinding our teeth, crying, cursing under our breath, I experienced it at least three times or so, once so close I could hear the lad breathe, the doggedness with which at the last he grabbed the mess tins and the soup tins in his vain attempts to gain a hold—I can still hear the tin of the lids and handles tapping as he pulled our food basket towards him, the breath in his nose, more hectic and violent as the situation became more acute and he tried to scoop away the mush, but with every gesture simply hastened his end. My little gazelle,” said my brother, “I actually prayed then, dammit—and the restless breathing, the cough and the retching at the first gulp of mud in the throat, and the last, almost disappointed sigh before the brown goo reached his lips and nostrils, and the pool closed over him. I don’t know how many met their end through stupid accidents and not even through the bombs.”

Etienne Leboeuf never drowned in the mud, rather the reverse: it is his small, compact body, the body of a bull calf, which sucked up the mud into itself. I imagine him in the trench during a howitzer attack, passively silent, pressed against the wall of his hiding place, under the rattling corrugated iron which makes
only a thin division between his squat figure and the hell above his head. Etienne Leboeuf must have seen pagodas of clods of earth, the short-lived Maya temples of earth and old corpses, tree trunks and roof tiles and foundations and cadavers that rose up where the projectiles landed and exploded with a force that no one could imagine, not even Etienne Leboeuf himself, who, passive as a calf during a storm, sat out the tempest, crouched in his hollow in the ground, and did not move, just squeezed his eyes against the seething earth or the splodges of intestine of the man—the only incident Etienne Leboeuf ever talked about—whom he literally saw blown to pieces next to him.

Etienne Leboeuf counted himself lucky when my uncle took him on as a hand on the farm after the war, excited as we were about anyone who still had all his organs, and he was grateful to my uncle that, unlike lots of other farmers, he didn’t worry when he sometimes took off during threshing or when one of the horses was being shod with chilly hammer blows—sometimes, during the food break, outside at the long table during the harvest, Etienne Leboeuf would drop his knife or spoon onto his plate and run to the barn, during churning or the beating of the threshing machine in which the stalks were ground up. He left everything behind and disappeared for a few hours. Who will point the finger at the girls, the young widows, the others, all those women, who eventually found out where he hid and strolled furtively across the farmyard to the hayloft, climbed the ladder and only had to see the blanket of dry grass under which the lad had hidden shivering under the juddering that seized his limbs, the tremors with which the war, his war, offered itself in vain to his memory, wanted to rid itself of his tissue
and blood vessels to be finally born in language—the flesh that weeps and trembles before the word, but the word that cannot deal with that quaking fear.

Who will speak ill of the women who stripped Etienne Leboeuf from the hay like a newborn infant from its membranes, and took his head in their hands, close to their sultry bosoms, and cradled him, and stroked his forehead, and kissed his turned-up nose, and at the same time ran a hand over his belly and unbuttoned his fly to knead his sex until it was purple and throbbed in their palms, and pulled up their skirts and sat astride him in order to rock the deaf-and-dumb wound in his body to sleep in themselves—Etienne Leboeuf, who fed on sex like an infant on its mother’s milk. Who knows how many times his life was saved by copulating, in the barn, behind the fence or in a stall where a girl perhaps found him hiccupping with fear under the limbs of a cow, half slumped on the milking stool, fingers frozen round the udder? It happened to me more than once that I quietly retraced my steps because in the dark, under the low beams among the cattle, I heard stammering, groaning, the whispering voice of the woman who pulled his trousers down over his buttocks there against the feeding trough and with her hand took him inside her—and who knows in how many spots, hidden or not, furtive or not, the same thing happened? Countless times probably, the crucifixes or holy water fonts merrily bouncing along on their nails in the wooden attic wall with the pounding head end of the bed beneath, on which one body found protection in another body, the dance of two terrified monkeys.

My brother said later: the brothels are doing even better business than during the war—the whore was the last refuge for the man without a leg or hands, or the dribbling Cyclops who was once the best-looking man in the street. Who will deny him the consolation of knowing himself squeezed by warm, wet flesh, and dare to find it ridiculous that the poor man grasps the all in all far more divine trembling before his glands empty, and seizes the short moment of oblivion, as gratefully as Socrates his cup of hemlock? I know what I’m talking about, in that respect I have not fought without glory—there should be monuments for them, for the countless men like Etienne Leboeuf and their consolers, Etienne Leboeuf who, as it happens, later married one of his mistresses and in his fear fertilized her no less than nine times. I still see him coming out of church on Sunday in the village where his family lived, his wife on his arm and surrounded by his family: girls who look like their mother and sons with the same squat body, in their eyes the same innocent calf’s melancholy as their father, around whom they throng to wheedle a few cents for sweets—and Etienne Leboeuf himself, who at that moment sees me standing under the lime trees in the church square and greets me shyly from behind his bastion of children: still just as taciturn, but calmer, because safe.

It should be a warm, pulsating monument for him and his motherly mistresses, and all those they represent: a memorial that honours the ecstasy and the slightly laughable banality of our copulations; and anyone who threatens to find this suggestion obscene should ask himself which one he chooses of the two reactions to which that stupid war led, for which the bed and the war cemetery can happily serve as symbols. When that
deluge of ammunition and mud and rubble finally ebbed, it left shipwrecked people behind for whom the world had collapsed and who had understood the message: that it’s better to seek salvation by crawling away from history, either in calm happiness, or in the wombs of the masses, the sweet anaesthesia of the collective. That is the land I saw being revealed after the blood and destruction, and fortunately this time God was wise enough not to stretch a rainbow over the new earth.

Obscene is the word that I reserve for the view of a market square where, after the bang of the fatal impact has died way and the worst of the groaning has fallen silent, the sparrows are copulating again on the shoulders of the statue, and in its fixed place in the sun, on the window sill of a bourgeois house, above the smudges of blood on the pavement, the cat licks its coat clean as if nothing has happened. Obscene the rows of soldiers’ helmets that I see on a dyke in the first few months after peace breaks out. My husband helps me through the omnipresent mud. He warns me to put my feet where he has first put his and not to deviate from the slippery path of planks, under which I can hear the sodden earth sighing at each step. He carries his camera on his shoulders and looks to see where he can place the tripod. The water that flows past under the dyke has the same grey vocabulary as the landscape through which it is seeking a path: ochre-coloured, dull green, dull brown under a cloudless, obscenely brilliant sky—it doesn’t seem like water, but like gastric juices, fermenting under the lead weight of the sky in earth shot bare. Nowhere does a roof line or row of trees disturb or punctuate the horizon. Everything that could delight me about that countryside has gone: the long, long
processions of poplars, the trunks and tops bending obliquely with the wind like a procession of the blind leading the blind, and the shy villages that huddle around the church towers like piglets searching for their mothers’ nipples.