Zone (22 page)

sweet
, the way an old whore puts on a purple wig if necessary, ready to do anything to please you, Barcelona whispered
fiesta, fiesta
in the ear of the man from the North ready to do anything to have fun, stuff himself with sun and paella, drown in liters and liters of red sangria thick as the blood of the bulls on the Monumental whose ritual deaths gave taboo shivers to the French, the English, the Germans convinced by such a well-performed spectacle of a savage and mysterious Spain that they alone knew, you could even find absinthe for the incurable romantics, I remember there was a joint called the
Marseille
at the bend of a sinuous alleyway peopled with very ugly streetwalkers, a bar run by a bald German man, obese and antipathetic, a tavern stinking of filth, anise and cold tobacco, I went in with Stéphanie blinded by love and the
Hitchhiker’s Guide
, someone slid an absinthe over to us that would have made Van Gogh cry, along with a plastic bottle of water and a cube of sugar wrapped in paper, traditions are reconstructed, the tourists and native twenty-somethings stirred their sugar in the absinthe with a spoon like a café au lait, the magic green tasted depressingly of chartreuse, the music and voices were deafening,
sweet
, so alive, I thought about poor Francesc Boix and his Aragonese prostitute, the stars of the neighborhood were named Jean Genet and Pierre Mac Orlan, there was even a very chic seafood restaurant that prided itself in having welcomed them and proudly displayed the badges of tourist guides from all over the world, queer Genet the scrawny thief must not have eaten often in high-class restaurants, may his soul rest in peace, with his johns and his gypsies with their long gleaming knives, the smelly bald German ended up throwing us out because we weren’t drinking fast enough for him, a liberation really, who knows the grandson of one of Boix’s guards at Mauthausen might now be serving absinthe to the photographer’s great-nephews, Stéphanie was a little drunk and enchanted by the experience, she didn’t want to go back right away, we strolled around the harbor, where in 1569 Miguel de Cervantes had set off for Italy, two years before the Battle of Lepanto, for which they were building immense galleys in drydocks nearby, reconverted today into a Maritime Museum—Cervantes with his ruff sees the military ships on the beach pulled onto dry land, the slaves feasting not knowing that soon he’ll be on board one of these vessels, maneuvering an arquebus facing the cruel Turk, he looks for a while at the bonfires on the sand, it’s evening, he plunges into the little streets near the Church of Santa María del Mar to find a bar suitable for getting drunk in, where they serve the thick wine from the surrounding villages and, tolerably drunk, not long before midnight, he engages in an animated argument with a local gentleman: why they came to blows, I don’t know, they decide to go out, inflamed by alcohol and insults they draw swords on a small square nearby, Cervantes is a swaggerer but he’s drunk, the steel clashes twice, only twice and his foil flies away, leaving him disarmed at the mercy of the Catalan, who must have been a poet, who must surely have been a poet for instead of skewering him straightaway he decides to humiliate the man from Madrid, orders him to strip naked, at sword’s point, before having a solid beating administered to him by his men in arms and leaving him half fainting on the uneven flagstones in the cruel night—exhausted, aching all over Cervantes drags himself over to the wall surrounding the harbor, he’s still drunk, and he laughs, he can’t help laughing out loud at his own bad luck, decidedly there are no more knights or chivalry, man is naked, now, in the maze of modernity, he puts on the long johns his adversary had the kindness to leave him not without having first dipped them in the gutter, puts them on and turns back to look for a welcoming tavern where he can go on laughing and forget his bruises, shirtless, as undressed as Don Quixote the inspiration for whom will come to him later on, thinking about the Barcelona brawl, a drunkards’ brawl as is necessary in literature—with Stéphanie we went into quite a different bar, the modern, stylish side of the Catalan capital, a red-and-white place, sober, where customers drank standing up, in the artistic phantasmagoria of a video projector, cocktails in assorted colors: there were well-dressed men, elegant women, and the contrast was so great that we got the impression of a schizophrenic, or illusionist, city, on one side the squalid phony nostalgia and on the other the most avant-garde image of calm bourgeois modernity, far from Don Quixote, the two aspects each just as artificial as the other, it seemed to me, Barcelona’s identity must be hidden somewhere between these two images, just as Beirut on exactly the other edge of the Zone swung endlessly between gleaming modernity and belligerent poverty, a reflection, a symmetry with Barcelona, if you fold the Mediterranean in two over the central axis of Italy the two harbors of the East and West will cover each other exactly, in Beirut when I went there on a mission our guys from the embassy often took me to a nightclub with the strange name BO18, a huge depot behind the harbor in the Quarantaine district, where one of the first massacres of the civil war took place, in 1976 the Phalangists had sent Intissar’s Palestinians to the firing squad along with the Kurds who lived in this putrescent camp that was wedged between the containers on the docks and the town dump, and it’s at this exact spot of butchery that the owner opened his establishment, where a pleasant alternation of world music and Arab pop roared, during its most crowded period the ambiance was incredible, magnificent young women danced on top of rectangular tables, on the endless bar, the décor and lighting were dark and in good taste, in the explosive atmosphere of the overheated club everyone drank B-52 cocktails set on fire with a lighter by an expert bartender, everyone was pouring sweat, everyone was moving, at times a loud siren sounded, like the ones used during air raids and suddenly, miraculously, the mobile roof of the depot opened, the stars and sky of Beirut appeared over the dancers and drinkers and the songs, shouts, music rose to the skies like a column of smoke, spreading celebration and joy into the Bay of Jounieh, into the early hours of the morning, the opening of the ceiling was regulated automatically by the ambient temperature and protected the last customers from the coolness of dawn by closing gently, like a vampire’s sarcophagus, I was drunk at the BO18 it was almost 7:00
A.M.
it was broad daylight sprawling in a corner I watched the employees start cleaning up, in the huge empty room I looked at the arrangement of the tables, in parallel rows, blocks of wood, about two meters long all lined up like in a cemetery, tombstones, I thought in my drunkenness, the tombstones of the massacred ones of the Quarantaine, I looked closer and in fact each table bore a little bronze plaque on the side, invisible in the dark, with a list of names in Arabic, the customers were dancing on the symbolic coffins of the dead of the Quarantaine, war sirens resounded in the night, Beirut was dancing on corpses, Beirut was dancing on corpses and I don’t know if it was a posthumous homage or a kind of vengeance, a revenge on the war that prevented people from dancing in a ring, a kind of memorial also, a musical cemetery for those who had no grave, a smoking libation during a funeral banquet, funereal dances, one last cocktail before oblivion—the Lebanese are champions of design and interior decorating on that side of the sea, just as the Catalans are on the other, they put tragedy on display: in Beirut, you don’t find many monuments to the civil war, not many plaques, no memorial, each person bears his share of memory as well as he can, as Rafael Kahla the writer bears the memories of the Palestinian fighters, Intissar and Marwan, legends abound, like the mythic tales of Ghassan in Venice, the ogres of the Lebanese war, their deeds of prowess, the host of one lord against another, the dead the disappeared all that gets carried individually, it’s a personal story of tears and revenge, in Barcelona though on the other side of the sea the rediscovered democracy has proliferated homages and monuments, the streets were renamed, George Orwell the disillusioned Trotskyite militant even has a square in his name in the old city, true it smells of urine, but it’s a pretty little square surrounded by slightly sordid bars, peopled with Italian neo-hippies playing
Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao
on the recorder, another place that Stéphanie thought
sweet
, like nearby Avignon Street where I like to think Picasso received Inspiration in a brothel, his demoiselles d’Avignon were frail prostitutes in a Barcelona whorehouse, now an inn for tourists—Stéphanie armed with Proust and Céline liked everything, the pretty neighborhoods with the wide avenues where characters from the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the Opéra might have strolled, and the somewhat downtrodden historic district where Bardamu’s Iberian colleagues must have exercised, between twilight and dinnertime we’d stay at the hotel, after making love we’d read,
History of the Spanish War
by Brasillach and Bardèche for me, which the old fascist had given me when I was still in high school and which seemed to me the best book, along with Orwell’s reminiscences, for an escapade in Catalonia, Stéphanie was beside herself, that makes me sick she said, you should be ashamed of lugging around those Nazi monstrosities here, I tried to explain to her that this version of history had been the official one in Spain until the end of Francoism, the bad ones were the Reds, the good ones the others, and that there were still a few “historians” who defended the argument according to which Franco had saved Spain from Stalin and the anarchists, who were even worse, Stéphanie wouldn’t budge, that’s no reason, she said, to read fascists and Nazis, so I’d use another argument, a low blow, I’d say and what about Céline? wasn’t Céline an anti-Semitic fascist? she’d get upset, would answer it’s not the same, it’s not that simple, I agreed completely, it’s not that simple, and we left it there, it wasn’t that simple, in fact it was quite complex, Stéphanie Muller brilliant French intellectual geopolitical analyst for our strange Service began tickling me in revenge, and the political argument would finish in feathers and mattress noises, I think she could have forgiven Brasillach if he had written one single great book, but for her he was a mediocre writer who didn’t deserve any leniency, he had been pumped full of lead at the Liberation, and voilà, purified—France was purified, Stéphanie tickled me and Barcelona shone with all its modern European festive Catalan lights, and didn’t want to remember that it had gotten richer especially in the 1960s, when Francoism was in full swing, that the local middle class had very quickly adapted to the dictatorship and had made a fortune exploiting tens of thousands of migrants from all over Spain: poor Orwell, in his hotel room near the Plaça de Catalunya, today a stone’s throw away from the Fnac store, the local Galeries Lafayette, and a cosmetics store, pursued by the Stalinists after the war in the war of May 1937 that pitted them against the POUM and the anarchists, forced to flee to avoid repression, the handsome Orwell in his room understands the battle is lost, and this was almost two years before the end, before the long route that will lead Boix to Mauthausen, terminus, the North—Stéphanie the gentle loved revolutionary myths, the raised fists and
no pasarán
slogans, she preferred Orwell’s memoirs to the ideological ravings of Bardèche and Brasillach, Brasillach the Catalan from Perpignan loved to go fishing by lamplight on the Collioure side, in his cousin’s boat, gleaming anchovies, pudgy sardines, was he already anti-Semitic, had he even met a Jew yet, had he already succumbed to the ease of paranoia and conspiracy, he who often passed by the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes, where, after the Spanish soldiers, a good part of the foreign Jews rounded up in unoccupied France were concentrated, Brasillach approved of these deportations, according to him Jews had to be gotten rid of down to the children, but that’s not why De Gaulle had him shot, that morning, February 6, 1945, in the freezing dawn of the Montrouge fort, Brasillach shouted
Vive la France
like the Resistants sent to the firing squad before him, De Gaulle the noble had rejected Brasillach’s appeal for clemency for obscure reasons, hatred of homosexuals maybe, maybe to appease the communists, maybe out of laziness, or maybe, as Stéphanie thought, because Brasillach wasn’t all that great a writer, but certainly not for anti-Semitism, if he had just been an anti-Semite Brasillach would have been pardoned, witness his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche who was liberated after a few months in prison or Céline himself, repatriated after months freezing his balls in a cabin in Denmark: the bitter little doctor was a supporter of Zionism and the state of Israel, supposed to rid Europe of its cumbersome Jews, those hybrids, those unclean stateless people, and Stéphanie thought deep down inside that he was right, that actually exile was the only solution to the Jewish problem, the answer to the Jewish question and Israel was a practical closet to put away these cumbersome flotsam and jetsam from the Mediterranean, Central Europe, or France, these debates depressed me, I thought about Harmen Gerbens the Dutchman and about his apartment, about the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria who came through Spain in 1967, about all those movements in the Zone, ebb, flow, exiles chasing other exiles, according to the victories and defeats, the power of weapons and the outlines of frontiers, a bloody dance, an eternal interminable vendetta, always, whether they’re Republicans in Spain fascists in France Palestinians in Israel they all dream of the fate of Aeneas the Trojan son of Aphrodite, the conquered with their destroyed cities want to destroy other cities in turn, rewrite their history, change it into victory, in other places, later on, I thought about a page from the notebook of Francesc Boix, the Barcelona photographer, one of the pages of the lost manuscript of his memoirs,