Cantos, of Apollo’s oracle in 110 chapters, closed, esoteric, strange, which cover the past century in ten languages 800 pages and end in Rome, poem with these lines, Le chapeau melon de saint Pierre / you in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there, if I had the volume of the Cantos I’d use it now to read my cards, open it haphazardly and see where it sends me, to Gethsemani Kyoto Pisa New Orleans to the City of London to Paris no definitely not to Paris, Ezra Pound the godless prophet shouted anti-Semitic diatribes and insults at the United States his homeland over the waves of the fascist radio, I wonder what the Americans in the café car would think of him, maybe they’ve visited San Michele, Venice the surprising is probably the only city in the world where lovers and couples on their honeymoon go to the cemetery, Venice eats away at your soul as surely as nitre on a cave wall, it was Stéphanie who gave me an anthology of Ezra Pound, with a tender little inscription, to my favorite fascist and the date, I had told her about my youthful passions for raised-arm salutes and shaved skulls, bad acquaintances, the weight of heredity who knows, my devotion to Brasillach the martyr by whom I hadn’t read a single line aside from his prison poems and a few texts on cinema, in our very Parisian high school Yvan was the real fascist, the violent ideologue, in combat boots bomber jackets the whole end-of-century bad-boy uniform, he came from a real family of historic Nazis firm believers who scorned the rank populism of the Front National, Yvan detested the Catholic Church which had to be brought to heel, he hated with a fine fury anything that wasn’t him, Jews communists Arabs British fairies the swarming Orientals the perverted capitalists corrupt politicians an endless list of hatreds and disgusts motivated by the reading of paranoid screwball pamphlets decorated with swastikas, crosses paty, rosy crosses, every possible kind of cross imaginable except the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine, fasces battleaxes sheaves of wheat crossed spears brandished swords glaives dark helmets, photocopied on bad paper or venerable newspapers from the good old days that he had to cover in plastic to keep them from crumbling to pieces so much had they been handled, Yvan had a real passion, ardent and contagious, I let myself be convinced by his admirable rage, probably I was predisposed to it, despite my grandfather’s escapades in the Resistance: my father was worried about my new acquaintances, my politicization and my black shirts, my mother of course said to him youth will have its fling, it was Yvan who had me meet Bardèche the historic, it was a pilgrimage, a little journey of initiation to the land of the master, who what’s more was charming, he offered us tea and a lecture just a tiny bit confused about collaboration Jewish manipulations and the importance of The Charterhouse of Parma, I remember the old man had an upper lip that trembled, an uncontrollable tic, physical expression of resentment, from time to time a drop of shining mucus beaded on his nostril to end up falling on his dressing gown without seeming to bother him in the least, the great Maurice liked me, he asked me what I wanted to study, I replied “political science” and he smiled, I couldn’t really tell if this smile was ironic scorn for that noble subject or an encouragement, then the worthy Mussolinian writer gave us little gifts, a brochure denouncing “the farce” of the Nuremberg trial for Yvan and The History of the Spanish War which had just been reprinted for me, with a dedication, to Francis, wishing you the best for the future, with a slightly hesitant pen, the brother-in-law of Brasillach the Catalan added a commentary, it’s something, he said, this book is constantly being reprinted in Spain, we had immediately seen and understood the whole interest of this war, Bardèche and Brasillach inseparable Laurel and Hardy went many times to the Iberian peninsula between 1936 and 1939, to witness the democratic anarchy and the importance of Franco the savior, they saw Europe on the march in it, thanks to Mussolini’s troops, Hitler’s planes, the Reds destroyed by law and order, they demonstrated that the massacres attributed to the nationalists were inventions of Republican propaganda, that the real bloodthirsty ones were the rojos the Reds the great eaters of clergymen, they defended the greatness of General Yagüe the fine strategist, from Millán-Astray’s Legion, the Italians with the handsome black feathers, and thus began a long battle of numbers that Bardèche would continue alone after Brasillach’s execution, all the corpses are communist or Jewish propaganda, all the dead served the USSR or Israel, so they didn’t exist, or hardly mattered, Bardèche is the champion of the avenging scrawls on gravestones, you’re not so dead as all that in Badajoz, there aren’t as many dead as they say in Auschwitz, that’s all lies to hide the crimes of the Republicans or the Resistance, those are the real criminals, the ones who raped nuns with pleasure before sending them to the firing squad, the ones who tortured the middle class in the prisons of Madrid and Barcelona, today his blindness seems so obvious to me that he could only be guided by hatred, a fierce secret hatred for those who had taken away from him the man he loved, Brasillach the martyr, a hatred of the Jews so strong so powerful that he couldn’t even manage to convince himself of their extermination, pursued by Jewish ghosts into his grave, the old Bardèche, senile, convinced of the universal conspiracy against the Good and the Right, Yvan my friend also firmly believed in these theories as old as the world that declared international Jewry the enemy to be killed, despite all my efforts I had difficulty convincing myself of the danger a few philosophers journalists or psychoanalysts could represent for the nation, I was a feeble anti-Semite, a bad racist, Yvan said to me it’s because you don’t deal with Jews or Arabs, if you knew them you’d hate them immediately, I trusted him, even though my beloved history books on the twentieth century proved precisely the contrary, according to Yvan that was because all of history had been written by the Jews, which no doubt explained his deplorable grades and his lack of interest in the subject, Mr. Moussempès our teacher in senior year was a nice man from the Landes a native of Dax with a strong southwestern accent difficult to suspect of crypto-Semitism however, his Gascon fluency made him an extraordinary orator when it came to telling about battles diplomacy political intrigues it’s probably thanks to him that I miraculously passed the prestigious entrance exam for the Sciences-Po later, Yvan respected me mostly because of my Ustashi background and my family photos full of dark uniforms, adolescence is in love with images, images and strong friendships for life and beyond the grave secret oaths arms raised above a patriotic altar, Yvan’s madness showed through at times but only rarely as I remember it, sometimes he became fixated on a subject and spun in circles like a record on a gramophone, for days and days locked up in his room reading the same minuscule paragraph over and over without saying anything but