He was winning! Bottles, poorly hidden under the couch behind books and boxes, their sealed necks protruding. Wonderful, stupendous, incredible! To be shot after getting wasted, at least that would be a worthy end. Alain popped a cork (with one blow of the cleaver) and greedily drank the Moselle, a pert little vintage ripened beneath the tender rays of peacetime which brightened your mind, revived your optimism, and reburnished the shine of your lucky star… He must have drunk too much, for fatigue began to sway in him, leaden and yet weightless. It would be risky to sleep here. The alarm clock marked five, and night would be a long time coming. The clock ticked away like all the timepieces in the world, indifferent to the colicky burpings of the cannon. They don’t bother me either, my plucky little robot, so tell me, what do you have to say about the flow of time? Imbecile, you count the minutes without knowing what they are, the miser counts his pennies, the general counts his bombs, the refugee counts his fleas, the executioner counts his victims, no one knows what it is…
Good song, that! Alain smashed the neck of another bottle and drank.
Off the mark, Baudelaire! Better not to remember. Esto memor, pain of death. I’m good, that is to say drunk, wine is good. The Solitary’s Wine, The Murderer’s Wine. We’re all solitaries and murderers, old boy. I’m as drunk as a drunken mule. I’ll piss on the carpet, can’t expect me to go hunting for a nonexistent toilet. Carpets, lieber Herr, gnädige Frau, are made to be pissed on the day of victory and if today isn’t the day of victory, I’ll piss as though it were the day of victory. And if you don’t like it, landlord, I’ll smash your face in, drink more of your wine, and piss again if I please.
The cleaver gleamed, last weapon of the last fighter of the last hour of the last battle of the last city… And the drunken man’s eyes widened, the scenery changed. Life is continuity, death is rupture, and between the two lies w-w-war — the whoosh of shells, the towers of mounting smoke, the mushrooms of clouds, the stupefaction of finding myself intact, in one piece, little me, in my own home on the rue de Fleurus. The proof? All I need is to put out my hand — really must wash my hands, so tired, I have the hands of a road worker! — and reach over to the bookshelf, like so, and pull out my Botticelli, here it is, and open it…
Good Lord, or is it Lucifer, I no longer believed it possible. Mathilde will have a fit when she sees me here. “Get those muddy shoes off the sofa!” she’ll scold. “You’re priceless, Tilde…” He opened a large, coffered book. Botticellian figures of long-necked women with candid eyes, wreathed in leaves and flowers, were coming toward him. Look, Tilde! What a draftsman… that loving vigor in every stroke, that clear-eyed vision elevated to the highest degree of purity. Real vision, ideally superior to reality, just as the essential and the eternal are superior to contingency. Is it Lionello Venturi’s book, or Jacques Mesnil’s? Both those writers understood him. It would have taken your sad-day pencil, Botticelli, to do the portrait of a Jacques Mensil… Mesnil is dead, Sandro. Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Botticelli, a name like a beautiful line of poetry. His power was not to express dreams but to achieve the synthesis of a golden-age dream and a purified reality: thus he encountered the marvel of truth. Faces tend to fulfill an archetype bequeathed by the millennia which themselves refined our human features. Material faces, asserting themselves in space, pick up all the bruises, deformations, blemishes, and blurrings that our flesh of clay is prone to, and every expression of misery adheres to them. They are more carnal, more social, than truthful. Sandro restores them to an eternally adolescent oval, youth knowing neither regret nor repression, with eyes slightly enlarged for the right visual effect, because Sandro is aware of the infirmity of our eyes which he heals. Learn to see in this way, love the healer of our eyes! The eyes of Botticelli’s figures bring peace — like the charm of flowers. His slim women remind us of tall young trees, pushing upward under the caress of sun and wind. No trickery here: Sandro draws his eyes by the rules, much more accurate than sight; he withdraws it from the flesh and from the abstract, this geometric magician! He puts true freshness into them, but rinsed off; he washes out your eyes from inside. Their expression is limpid, direct, they have the courage to live, they have the firmness of crystal and also a crystalline anxiety, for they have seen the mists of falsehood dispersed. They smile gravely, with darkness hidden beneath their clarity; they can look upon the tragic without blinking because spring lives inside them, their eyes untroubled by the tragedy they reflect. The fear that has been overcome but still lingers at the back of their pupils comes from knowledge and secrecy mastered by innocence.
Where’s my Etruscan Art? In God’s name what have they done with my Etruscan Art? I forbade these books to be lent, because who’d be fool enough to return them! He foraged among the spines, irritated, with stumbling fingers. Here was Kandinsky’s book, Abstract Art. Kandinsky begins by lifting from reality its colors, lights, and volumes, its essential substance, and that is doubtless a process of abstraction — but it’s even more a process of reduction to a concrete, rather than abstract, symbol, resulting in a densely simplified landscape. Pushing this procedure to the limit, Kandinsky arrives at a purely mental sign, as conventional as the algebraic X, which might with no loss of meaning be replaced by a triangle, an asterisk, or a dot, yes, a dot, the perfect unknown reduced to a minimum of visible existence. Abstraction, destruction. Straining to see beyond the visible, the artist is left with nothing at his disposal but a set of signs, no longer images or symbols, on their way to becoming number; hold it there, friend, you’re turning away from the earth, the lovely, living earth, you’re squandering the gifts of form, you’re betraying the real, you’re losing the eyes which Sandro had healed… Abstraction culminates in the black-on-white grids of Mondrian: straight lines, right angles, ingenious variations on the prison-bar theme. Then poor old Mondrian remembers about color, and fills in a corner of his jail with a minute square of wash, better than nothing, to be sure; but after that, how gorgeous, how unforgettable a red blouse looks or a richly patterned scarf! All that remains of art is an imprisoned whiteness. You’ll say it’s powerful, and I won’t deny it. Very powerful and very dead.
Prison for prison, allow me to prefer that painting by Raphael, the martyrdom of… who was it now? Here we go, this good wine is mixing up my martyrdoms and my deliverances, much the same thing as it may be, doesn’t martyrdom begin again after deliverance? That’s it, The Deliverance of Saint Peter, in the Vatican apartments — if the Vatican has not been bombed to smithereens in a hail of deliverance… In the foreground, the bars, the only part Mondrian would have thought worth keeping! Behind the bars, the group of warriors, jailers, and the angel, the source of celestial radiance, and old man Peter in chains, drooping, not understanding that deliverance is at hand; or understanding that it is darker than martyrdom in prison…