The Foundling's War (14 page)

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I truly don’t know what we should do. Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other any more.’

There was so little conviction in her voice that Jean regained his courage and the sense of humour that had saved them from awkward situations before.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s definitely the solution. It’s such a clever idea, only you could have come up with it. I suggest we put it off a bit – only because to start this evening would be too easy – and definitely start in ten years’ time, when we’re completely used to each other and the separation would be really heart-rending … yes, heart-rending … and so romantic it would make a gravedigger weep.’

She offered him her cheek, laughing.

‘Go and sleep!’

In the stairwell, happy again, he ventured to ask the question.

‘Who came to see you this afternoon?’

‘My brother!’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

‘He smokes, doesn’t he?’

‘Ah, that’s what it was about, was it? Well, you’ll meet him one day.’

He jogged as far as Place Clichy before slowing down. His fitness was returning. Jesús had lent him his weights. They had a punchball and took turns at it, ten minutes each, wearing wool vests. Jesús insisted that it allowed him to do without women. There were, of course – at least for others if not for them – a variety of ways of solving that particular problem. La Garenne, seeing the fame of his gallery spread far and wide as whole coachloads of uniformed tourists began arriving to visit, intended to satisfy every taste, but despite his best efforts had not been able to find a painter who knew his way around homosexual subjects. A hissed word from a diminutive, baby-faced major with a glass eye had put him on the right track. ‘Photos!’ Why
had he not thought of that? He instantly set about adding the new line to his gallery.

‘Photography is an art!’ he explained to Jean. ‘A new art. The only new art invented since Phidias’s time. Yes indeed, Monsieur Arnaud, Nicéphore Niepce is as great an artist as Phidias, the divine Leonardo and the genius Picasso. The philistines think you just have to press a button, click!, and there’s a photo of Grandpa and Grandma and little Zizi with his hoop. The morons! When I say “morons” I’m being polite. As much composition goes into a photograph, Monsieur Arnaud, as into a still life by Chardin, and light plays as important a role in a photograph as it does in a Rembrandt. There is no phrase more absurd than the term “objective lens” when applied to the eye of a camera. Nothing is less objective than an objective lens. That transparent glass, which one imagines to be inert, is both a third eye and a brain but that eye, that brain must have a spiritual motor, which is the genius of the photographer, his vision of the world, his culture, his sensibility, his responsiveness. Painting is perhaps an expression of the human; photography is an expression of life …’

Jean assumed that this speech was a prelude to some new mischief-making by La Garenne, who always felt the need to dignify his muckiest transactions with the name of art. Thus his erotic drawings became, as he saw it, a means of psychological liberation for sexual misfits. He was even armed with a fine quote on that very subject by Freud that made of him, the purveyor, a benefactor of humanity, a saviour of inhibited couples and a generous supplier to lonely masturbators. His glibness, which never lacked conviction, was in every respect a match for his greed. The only question that remained was how he would spend the piles of money he had been amassing since the beginning of the occupation. There was no danger of it being wasted on women. Blanche de Rocroy was enough for that very restrained libertine, too
stingy even to treat himself to a tart. He was not a betting man and he spent nothing at his tailor’s, being always dressed in the same black suit of the tenth-rate painter who has called himself a bohemian for far too long, on top of grubby shirts that he wore until they fell apart with, for a necktie, a greasy black ribbon that might once, in its long-distant youth, have been an ascot. In the mornings he would appear in his shiny, crumpled, dust-flecked suit as if he had slept under a bridge the night before. In his office, on the door of which he had inscribed in large capital letters the only play on words he had ever deserved credit for – ‘The bosom of bosoms’ – he would remove his trousers and throw them at Blanche, who piously set to ironing them in the stockroom, as if this garment, rigid with unnameable grime, represented some sort of thaumaturgical vessel for the Holy Grail, while her master (what other word can we use?), in his long grey-coloured cotton drawers, scratched his crotch and explained his grand designs to Jean. No one knew where he called home. Did he even have one? It was doubtful.

Photographs, then, began to be added to the stock of drawings in hell. Mostly they depicted young boys with erections. Their creator, an antifascist refugee called Alberto Senzacatso, lived in an artist’s studio on the top floor of a respectable building in Rue Caulaincourt. His models were occasionally to be encountered on the stairs, mostly the sons of the other residents, cheeky boys with roving eyes. Truth compels us to add that Alberto was not the sort of man to inspire repugnance, and might have resembled a fruit and vegetable wholesaler more than a maker of pornographic photographs if it had not been for the way his face lit up in a faintly mad way whenever he talked about his models. As a boy he had been force-fed with castor oil by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, and from the severe diarrhoea that had followed he had been left with an anal obsession that verged on mania. His models, all volunteers, emerged tight-lipped from their posing sessions and returned to their families on the floors below. Alberto’s customers sometimes bumped into them on the landings
and recognised the models who were the subjects of the very special photographs they had just purchased.

Their excitement can be imagined. The Italian lived alone in a studio stuffed with books and paintings. Open-minded and curious, he was writing a history of Mannerism which, after years of contemplation, he was hoping to reduce to three volumes of five hundred pages each. He counted a number of writers among his regular customers, whom he referred to only by their Christian names – Monsieur André, Monsieur Roger, Monsieur Julien – recognisable even to the uninitiated from the odd detail slyly slipped in by the garrulous photographer about their propensities. Two or three times he had been within a hair’s breadth of getting arrested, and Jean would find out later that he had succeeded in avoiding arrest by passing on details about his buyers. The police turned a blind eye and added to their files. Alberto showed no remorse. That was life, and staying in Paris was worth the occasional piece of information that in most cases was never used, the parties in question being protected by their standing and their periodic contributions to the
Revue Littéraire de la Préfecture de Police
,
10
or in some cases their status as patrons of a non-profit-making organisation known as the Amicale des Gardiens de la Paix.
11

Alberto was a good judge of character and understood straight away how disgusting Jean found his business. Handing over an envelope containing around twenty photographs in exchange for a sum of money, he would move quickly on to another subject, for preference one of his choosing, which at that time meant Il Bronzino, whom he referred to familiarly as Agnolo and with whose painting he had a relationship that can only be described as love. He even claimed to have unearthed a very late sketch for the portrait of Jean, the son of Eleanor of Toledo, at the flea market. This modest canvas sat on an easel, mostly concealed under a piece of velvet. He uncovered the picture to talk about Bronzino, as though he was inspired by the inquisitive gaze of the child with the round face, and the plump hand laid upon the brocade dress of the beautiful Eleanor. Listening to him,
Jean realised that, underneath his crude, kinky exterior, innocence and passion remained, that it was unfair not to give him some credit for such feelings, and that clearly life demanded, if only out of a sense of justice, as much indulgence as Manichaeism. But what about La Garenne? A full-blown shit, without the slightest outward sign of anything that might be considered a redeeming feature. And yet there was one.

Sometimes in the afternoons, stifled and sickened by the gallery’s atmosphere, Jean slammed the door behind him and escaped to stroll the streets of Montmartre village, to breathe fresh air and banish the accumulated fetid vapours of hell. What he found most unendurable was not being able to see how he could get away from a society so fearfully turned in on itself. In Paris he knew only Jesús and Claude. And Madeleine, in her new life of affluence and suspect relations. The situations vacant in the newspapers were starting to offer work in Germany, but the world at war required specialists, die- and toolmakers … And to take the first job that came along, for the sake of being dramatic, would mean parting from Claude, which he could not bear. What would a single day without her be like? He would die of loneliness and fear of losing her, convinced that her charm and naivety would render her easy and innocent prey, forgetting in his blindness how much that lovely and tempting being had preserved of her own defences. But what she gave to him – however small it was – would she not give it to others? Did she really have a brother? One doubt led to another in a process that would be irreversible if he did not retrace his steps back to the start, to his trust in her candid and natural features. When, too unhappy to bear such thoughts alone, he opened his heart to Jesús, the Spaniard consoled him in his own way.

‘It’s true that the women are easily turnin’ into the ’ores!’ he said. ‘It’s subleemly true, and it’s a stupidity to make a man weep. En we, wha’ are we, the men? The sons of the ’ores, for sure!
Claro!
The women are in ou’ imáge! You, you is a good imáge. The wimmen in you’ life, they will be like you …’

‘What about Chantal?’

‘That one, se sowed ’erself to be a ’ore without knowin’ it. Don’ speak to me of ’er …’

Jean could not quite believe that Chantal had been a whore. The idea wounded his self-esteem, despite everything being over between them. No, she had lost her head, like a little country girl, and now she was making amends the fashionable way, going back to the land, and when all was said and done that was a laudable way to atone for a moment of madness with a gigolo in a red Delahaye convertible. He must not think about her. Not ever, despite all the memories lurking in the lanes of Montmartre that he kept stumbling across, surprised to find they were still so vivid.

When he returned from his brief forays away from the miasmas of the gallery, he would be greeted by La Garenne looking furious, but the gallery owner had kept his fury bottled up ever since he had been reminded that it was upon his salesman’s welfare that Jesús’s continued goodwill depended. It was Jean, too, who took care to deliver the fake Picassos and Utrillo from Jesús’s studio himself. Rudolf von Rocroy admired them and requested a few days to think about the purchase. When he returned to the gallery he was accompanied by a tall, severe-looking and haughty person. Jean learnt that this was Émile Dugard, an art critic who was highly regarded, whose services the German had enlisted. Dugard, showing no enthusiasm, examined minutely the signature and the composition of the sky over Rue Norvins and declared that the painting was a Utrillo from his early period, when he was still living under his mother’s influence. Subsequently, as he explained to Rocroy, who was listening attentively, Utrillo had weaned himself off alcohol but in the process had lost part of his genius and begun peopling his canvases with the famous little couple who walked hand in hand through the pale streets of Montmartre. As for the Picassos, there was absolutely no doubt about them either; they belonged to the so-called Synthetic Cubism era, almost monochrome, with different shades of brown playing off against each other. Rocroy 
left with the paintings. The following day Dugard presented himself at the gallery to collect his commission. Raised voices were heard coming from La Garenne’s office, and Dugard pretended to flounce out. If he had not achieved everything he had demanded this time, at least he had succeeded in agreeing the terms of his future services.

Louis-Edmond felt the critic was robbing him blind and bared his soul to Jean with unfeigned indignation, forgetting that his listener knew better than anyone where the paintings had really come from.

‘Ponces and crooks, art critics, the lot of them! Sons of Barabbas, selling themselves to both sides, taking from every honest party. That Dugard is the worst, with his high and mighty airs. And tell me, young man, tell me if there’s a single man on earth who has the right to criticise Art? Eh? “Art critic” – it’s so pretentious you could die laughing. All ponces, I tell you. In my day … How old are you, actually?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘I’m two and a half times your age … I was around when this buggers’ century started … I tell you, they were full of it. It was going to be the triumph of civilisation, humankind delivered out of servitude by machines. And the sum total: two wars … Yes, in my day, Monsieur Arnaud, artists and their public had no need of bribed intermediaries – yes, you heard me, bribed – to reach each other. The spark jumped between them
on its own
. There were still patrons, truly inspired art lovers then. Now it’s all speculation, percentages – do you hear what I’m saying? Beggars with their hand out! A real racket, as the Americans say.’

He waved his arms like a scarecrow to chase away the predators who wanted to wheel and deal in Art with a capital A. Blanche listened to him starry-eyed. She did love her Louis-Edmond! Especially when he let fly with a good rant, belabouring the middlemen, chasing the moneychangers from the Temple. His honesty would condemn him to poverty for life. But the defence of Art was a long ascent to Calvary, and at its summit one could not even be certain of seeing one’s efforts
recognised. She would climb the path of that Calvary with him, bent beneath the world’s opprobrium, stooping to gather up crumbs of genius and the bitter tears of ingratitude.