Back to the twenty-first century. To the seventy years of the man. Photos. There, at twenty, in the Sahara as it happens, black trousers with white embroidery. Here, at forty, in Montreal, smoking a cigarette. And now? Now he draws near the mirror. What’s new? No comment. Simply, this word: septuagenarian! Everything is old. Saxophone on the radio. Sax of the sexa. Sex in sax. Tears in the fabric of the soul.
Had he noticed it before? In the street, the young do not look at the old. They stay within a landscape of the young. Their eyes meet only the gazes of their own age. If by chance a young person considers an old one, it is a little as though he were discovering some strange thing. A museum piece. An institution. A destitution. A ruin already present within a monumental architecture. As for the old, if they observe other old ages, it is to compare themselves to them. This one drags himself along. That one trots like an automaton. And yet he must be my age. This woman quivers with her overflows. Terrible! It happens, however, that the old follow with their eyes the youth that passes by. It passes, precisely; they know it. Youth is unaware of it. This unawareness is youth. The old, seeing it pass by, have the impression of washing themselves. Just as one washes oneself of a fault, of a sin. Or of too great a knowledge.
The pinewood boxes are in front of him. He knows what they contain: old photographs of times past. Not the times that have passed for him, but further off, times past for those who begot him. And those who begot these. Time past for those passed on. He hesitates to open the boxes. In fact, he hesitates not only this morning, but for several weeks now, ever since he took them out of that trunk where they were kept. So there they wait, before his eyes, without his being able to see those envelopes inside, whose existence he knows of and into which, meticulously, his father had placed the images of the family members. For each of them, its dwelling…
At last, he opens the boxes. But he cannot bear this arrangement. These envelopes in a row look as though they form the lanes of a cemetery. He opens the envelopes in their turn, letting these images tumble out at random onto more or less shriveled paper. Everything is on the table, in disorder, in little pyramids. And this disorder is healthy, it seems to him: it lets air through, a little freedom. A little life into all this death on gelatin in which he now rummages, composing figures that come undone, making juxtapositions that he immediately separates; wishing, it seems to him, in this heap of mysteries, to read the meaning of an enigma.
At random, therefore. Here, one of his grandmothers passing by. There, a distant uncle. A Sardinian nursemaid beneath her headscarf. So many faces he had not seen again since the end of childhood, when he left all at once, cutting ties with his family, refusing attachments, all those useless attachments. He had missed them, in truth, his loved ones; missed them, without admitting it to himself. Why had he persisted? Perhaps out of tenderness, after all. Out of fidelity to that childhood which the adult’s exile could only have betrayed. He had left everything just so. In the same state. As it should have remained. But it had shifted. He had moved away, but they too, those presences of bygone times, had shifted, shifted so much that they had departed, finally, once and for all, lock, stock and barrel. And so here he was finding them again today, discovering himself moved, surprised, by all this life become dead. Sorting all these snapshots of instants that are no more and that were but once. Wiping from the windowpane the mist that covers it.
*
Strangeness of death, redoubled by the image, so vivid, of this life since put to death. Beneath the man’s gaze, all this defunct vitality becomes a living death. He addresses it, questions it. In that world where they now are, the loved ones have grown distant. Would they wish to come back here? Here, where I am. Is it they who hold me here, alive, so that I may help them return? So that I may tell them what it could have been, the world of the living. You who stand there, they ask me, was it really like this when we were there? The scent of citrons? The arbor of the summer garden, near the beach, collapsing under flowers. The tamarisks swaying? The cap of Nardo, the gardener who came from Sicily, knotted into his gray suit, wielding the grafting knife? And the shutters, tell us, the blue shutters of the wholly circular dining room that gave the impression of being aboard a ship?
In truth, the man does not know whether these are the memories of the departed — or his own. But what is he to tell them, in any case? Nothing is the same anymore. Nardo has evaporated. The arbor, he has been told, collapsed long ago. On the shutters, the paint has flaked. They have been repainted beige. The tamarisks are there, that is certain. But for whom? No, one must not go back. One cannot. These years of separation are not in time. Not in space. These years are in destiny. So it is. The smoke of the uncle’s cigars, lovingly drawn from their case, is gone forever on the wind. The dry click of the game of backgammon is heard only in a sound of memory. The fragrance of the carnations. The shrillness of the birds’ cries. In the black night of the blue summers, the flying cockroaches, tumbling in a rush into the carefully tended hair of the aunt. And that evening lullaby, sung by the grandfather: “Al’letto, al letto, dice la farfala…” To bed, to bed, says the butterfly. Whoever does not go to bed sleeps on the straw.
*
Sepia color. His maternal grandmother, here. With her daughter. They are happy. The one must be about thirty. The other is in her sixties. Pressed close to one another. Another photo, with this dedication: “Figlia mia, adorata.” To my adored daughter. But there, within this love, a suffering shows through. Like a presentiment, in the gaze, that one day it will be over. Light of paper. A smile passing by. Or else seated, Emma, a slightly weary spark in her eyes, a little mischievous too, head resting on her left hand. Or that older snapshot, Emma with her daughter, once again. She must be about thirty. Her daughter, less than ten. Italian, both of them. Italian to the very tips of their nails. Another photo, older still: his grandmother at twenty. Splendid! He would have courted her. An immense cloche hat. Face in three-quarter view, chin lifted. A broad smile. A small watch on a chain. Tartan fabric. It shows: for her, anything is possible. This life before one, she seems to say, is not so serious. On the back of the photo: “Emma Luisada, Genaio 1909.” Her maiden name. Two years later, she marries Giulio Finzi.
Round glasses, soft hat, the rectitude of the gaze, the elegance of attire, Giulio remains an enigma. He undertook ventures, founded factories, went bankrupt, started over, fell again, began anew. All his life long. What is to be guessed in his eyes is something other than weariness. Like a heroic skepticism. His twin brother, Beppino, was thinner. Resembling him, but with a more resolute air. With an uncertain smile. Skeptical heroism? Giulio, in his old age, had founded a flour mill. Beppino, a printing house. Nourishment of the body. Food of the mind. The man remembers it: when, as a child, he visited the flour mill, everything was white, the color of flour. When it was the printing house he passed through, everything was black: from the lead in the matrices to the faces of the workers, from the inks to the rotary presses.
There was the other grandfather, too, on his father’s side. A small conquering man, hat pulled down over his brow, white scarf. Simon had a lively gaze. In a very old snapshot, in the company of his fiancée, he was straightening his torso. She topped him by a good head, hand placed on his shoulder. But he, white shoes, sporting a mustache, cigarette in his mouth, bow tie, with that air of those who charge ahead where everyone else dozes off, seems to say: “I forge ahead. I manage. I’m a tough one.”
Small, but stubborn. Magnificent eyes. Those of a lion. Passing from a flash of stern kindness to the fires of a pitiless pride. And yet pitiful, this man, in that last snapshot where one sees him sick, emaciated, eaten away by cancer, in striped pajamas, his eyes glassy, immeasurably enlarged. He is a being drawing to a close, who looks before him. Who bids farewell through that gaze which remains there, present, in the hands of a septuagenarian grandson.
*
To find one’s own again. One’s loved ones. But they are so distant! Removed in the procession of the ages. And besides, how far back does one find them? Does one succeed in grasping again what was — but could never again be? The man has a movement of recoil. This desire to find one’s loved ones again remains a mystery. A human mystery, probably. The animal lives the absence of its companion. But hardly sets off in quest of its presence. Because it senses it: this quest is impossible. Man lives this impossible. Wishes to live it.
What one finds again, in truth, are boxes. Chests forgotten in nooks. Sometimes, yes, in the boxes, it is photos that one discovers. But after that? In cemeteries, it is graves toward which one returns. They are arranged in shaded lanes. One draws near them. But then? What lies behind? Each time one is not unaware that there is nothing other than oneself. Than oneself thinking of the other. But it is enough that one be there — facing the face on the paper, facing the inscription on the marble — to imagine that the other stands there too: thinking of the one who thinks of him. The departed in the tomb, a few feet beneath the earth, does he not see an angel pass? Does he not see it because we are there? And that almost-effaced face that we make out in its effacement, does it not look at us for the very reason that it senses our gaze resting upon it?
We are not so naive. But still! We know well that the departed does not think. That those tiny eyes, in a black-and-white photo, cannot see. But all the same, lacking the ability to admit any such reciprocity, we tell ourselves — without daring to formulate it clearly — that it may be that somewhere, something vanished turns toward us, so much do our thoughts linger upon the traces of the vanishing.
*
Where did they all come from — his grandparents? Where did the family come from? From what family — coming from where? — did the man come? From the Mediterranean. Always that one! It had been decided at the end of the nineteenth century. The Jewish colony of the city of Livorno, in Tuscany, must have been, at the time, in search of work. Or in want of adventure. Had not one of the ancestors found himself in Tunisia, fleeing the Italian monarchy because he favored the cause of Garibaldi, the bard of the republican ideal? The fact is that Tunisia, at the time — its virgin lands, its palm trees, its dromedaries — must have appeared, more or less, in the eyes of the city-dwellers of Livorno, as a sort of Wild West. This emigration would be one of bourgeois: surgeons, jurists, astronomers, businessmen, men of letters… Some thirty years later, a poorer emigration would follow, coming from the south of Italy, creating in Tunis the working-class quarter of “la Petite Sicile” (Little Sicily).
Three of the man’s grandparents came from Livorno. The last, the paternal grandfather, had followed a different trajectory. He had arrived from Algeria, where he was born, where his own father, coming from Meknes, in Morocco, had previously immigrated. Before that, no one knew anymore. There was hardly any civil registry. Perhaps Spain. Perhaps, quite simply, a Jewish community ancestrally settled there, in Berber country.
Now, the great-grandfather’s passage through Algeria had unexpectedly made him French. A decree had just been enacted by the French Republic, into which Algeria was then integrated, making the country’s Jews full-fledged French citizens. Thus the Jews, it was reckoned, would not ally themselves with the Muslim communities, one day in the future, on the occasion of nationalist demands. The colonial power kept a watchful eye.
And, consequently, the paternal grandfather — sprung from the poor Jewishness of the Maghreb — carried in his bag, without having willed it, a Frenchness that he could pour as a dowry into an Italianness more bourgeois, certainly, but ill at ease, ill situated ever since Tunisia, having become a French protectorate, found itself subject to the laws of those whose ancestors, it was asserted, were Gauls. And it was thus that the man had found himself French by birth, although Italian was spoken at home, although he himself had hardly spoken Italian until primary school, learning at that point, in French, that his ancestors — unlike those of his Arab friends beside him — were therefore Gauls.
Culture had followed. It had done the rest. His references, later, would be named Voltaire, Diderot, Descartes, Montaigne, while he would not learn the Arabic language. He would be, in the end, a segment of that bizarre, discriminatory cosmopolitanism, in that city of Tunis where there rubbed shoulders, without mingling, Spaniards, Italians of the North, Italians of the South, Maltese, Maghrebi Jews, Jews of Italian origin, French pieds-noirs, French from Corsica, French come from “la métropole” — that is, hexagonal France — designated by each and all by the nickname of “francaouis”.
*
The man smiles. It has been a long time since he last uttered that word: francaouis. With it, in his memory, a whole era returns. A climate. An impregnation. For try as he might to say then, try as he might to recite: “O rage, O despair, O enemy old age…,” or else: “For whom are these serpents that hiss…,” try as he might to marvel at the clear-sightedness of the Enlightenment, to know that his uncles were Freemasons, that rationality was France and that the ideal was reason, try as he might, then, he remained, through his senses, through his feelings, an Italian of the Maghreb and a Jew indissolubly mingled with a culture of the street, of food, of music, of laughter, fundamentally Maghrebi.
If one went back a generation or two beyond the grandparents, these were some of the cities concerned by the family genealogy: Livorno, but also Pisa, Marseille, Errera in Portugal, Meknes, Annaba in Algeria, Algiers. If one evoked the first names of the ancestors, there were, for the women: Messaouda, Rachel, Clothilde, Pia. For the men: Judas, Israël, Giuseppe, Joseph, Vittorio, Cesare. If one spoke of the surnames, then it was: Zaradès, Parenti, Kach Kach, Hazan, Parentè, Valensi, Finzi, Tedeschi, Funaro, Luisada. Fine Gauls indeed! Moses, for once, would have been Vercingetorix. And it was there, moreover, that a wound had remained. There? Between Vercingetorix and Moses? At that point, at least, where Jewishness anchored itself in this man’s history. This anchorage point had been covered with veils. Forgotten in the name of reason, of emancipation. For a long time, the man had felt hardly anything but a dissatisfaction: he was Jewish through the knowledge of the persecutions undergone by his people, through the horror of the extermination camps, through the humiliation of his own, through the claim to a personal and collective dignity, but nothing else. It was much and it was little. Now, something had awakened in him, and it hurt, because an uncertainty, raw, remained at work.
Something else that he could not name… He had begun to read, but it was not enough. He knew more, yet remained ignorant. He knew the spiritual, historical, anthropological reasons for the existence of certain rites, but found himself incapable of practicing them. When he happened to enter a synagogue, he did not know how, in the proper form, to place his tallith upon his shoulders. As for the tefillin, there was no talking about it: that was a riddle. He did not know Hebrew. Could not follow the prayers. Understood nothing of what was being said. Did not know whether one should stand or sit during the service. Felt excluded by reason of his own incapacities. Felt himself in exile, in the end, in the very place where he would have thought he could feel at home. On the day of Kippur, even when he happened to fast, he always told himself that he was not fasting in the right way, that he must be making mistakes, and would end up concluding that this day of “Great Pardon” was the one on which there was no pardon for being a Jew in the way that he could be one.
Little by little, he had given up these practices. He had not mastered the gestures! Nor the conviction, probably. To be Jewish, for him, he acknowledged, would be to remain at the gates of Jewishness and, paradoxically, to be it all the more crucially in that he would remain at the gates. Moreover, his relation to the question of belief in God had always remained problematic.
There too, he stood as though outside a circle without being able to enter it. He did not deny the existence of this circle nor its fundamental importance — he even admired those who found themselves certain of dwelling within it — but he, he would remain outside. In the grip of the dilemmas of agnosticism. And he was becoming aware of it: this uncertainty could not but intervene, in return, upon the terms of his Judaic identity. If you do not practice, he told himself, you are not Jewish. You cannot be it totally. Yes, but to practice, one must believe. Otherwise, it is a sham. And, consequently, if you do not believe in God, does that mean that you are not Jewish — although you are?
*
So, he had returned to his first loves. The beauty of the world. The splendor of a sunset. The sensuality of bodies. Was it conceivable that one could not represent the human face, nor even reproduce the image of any form of life? That is what Judaism, in principle, forbade. Of course, there were relaxations. But the heart of it remained. Chagall, in his youth, had known something of this. Was it necessary, then, in order to draw near the Eternal and, thereby, to draw nearer to oneself, to have to cut oneself off from the world? Did one have to exclude oneself in order to feel included: a stakeholder in the communal body and, more profoundly, in the pact of the Covenant?
The man refused this. Just as he refused to have to feel guilty for having admired the vaults of that Romanesque church. Just as he felt no less Jewish because he loved the Missa solemnis. In a word, for him, beauty came before belief. It was even beauty, he mused, that could build bridges between different beliefs. Who could be insensible to the splendors of Hagia Sophia, whether it be a basilica or not? Insensible to the mosque of Córdoba, become a cathedral? No! Beauty transcended these prohibitions. It stood beyond all these theological beyonds. If one had to believe in something, the man told himself, it was in that beauty. If humanity could have a meaning, it was through its search for beauty. Not necessarily the accomplishment of the masterpiece, of the unique, irreplaceable, unsurpassable monument, but the beauty of the gesture quite simply, the one that gives to the pottery its curve, to the table its elegance, to the woman her seductiveness, to the walker his bearing. Beauty without quality, but all the more precious for being instilled into the smallest details of life.
*
This appeal to beauty, was it a flight? An escape? No, thought the man. Rather, a taking of a position. The work, was it not that by which the human species could best realize its condition? Poetry, literature, music, dance, architecture, sculpture, painting, this was what remained of its incarnation. The rest passed away: the worst along with the best, the cries along with the joys. What remained of Upper Egypt? Of Rome? Of the Aztecs? After the battles, the exterminations, the subjugations of every kind, after the ephemeral lives and the joys of a moment, what held, what bore witness, was the work. And of what did it bear witness? Of that part of the divine that is found in man: that particle of transcendence, that refusal of finitude, of contingency, of imperfection, of disappearance.
That is why he preferred to believe in man. Before having the pretension to believe in God, he held, men would be well advised to learn to believe in the human being. For there, everything still remained to be done. What had to be understood is that, in spite of the devil crouching in every member of humanity, ready to spring, to bite, to deceive, a virtuality of surpassing stood there. Evil lay, certainly, in the act of destruction, in the will to enslave, to humiliate, to mar life. But at the opposite pole, God could only be desire for life, for creation, for procreation, for accomplishment.
Besides, if something touched him closely in the Jewish religion — touched him personally — it was indeed this point. He was convinced that for the Jews, God is life. He had understood this on the occasion of a Seder, at the opening of the Jewish Passover: Pessah. The family was there, gathered. More than a family, less than a tribe, a clan. A cohort. Some fifty people. The officiant was serious. Severe. He belonged to the new generations that were returning to the strict rules of the observance of the law. The elders were more relaxed. The officiant therefore went on with the reading of the prayers, punctuated by ritual gestures evoking the days of the Exodus.
The family, around the officiant, was happy. Unbridled. In the warmth, it found itself again. Fused anew. It followed the service, of course, but with a grain of salt, as though to mock itself for following this service. Laughter burst out. Jokes were exchanged. There was noise. Disorder. A tender anarchy. To manifest this exuberance of living, was it not, in a sense, the man wondered, to pray? To draw near to God by manifesting to Him one’s own existence? By offering it to Him?
*
The man was reflecting. He was no theologian, certainly, but all the same, he could not fail to ask himself those questions which, more or less clearly, one day, present themselves. God is life, he told himself. Life, totally: with its moods, its blood, its violences, its consciousness. But then, if it is so, life can only be God. Life within Creation. Life as a moment of this Creation. As a reflection lost somewhere, almost anywhere, in the cosmic incommensurability. God is the existent. If He is, then it is also that the epidemics, the cataclysms, the famines, the exterminations are part of Him. God, perhaps, does not play dice? But in that case, it is the dice that play God.
At every instant, it is chance that decides: the lottery. Depending on whether one is born here or there, under such a climate, in such an era, under such a government, it will be given us to rot, stumps in the air, in the absolute putrescence of a suffocating, pitiless city, or else to take, in the cool, at the edge of a swimming pool, the refreshments we afford ourselves. So goes life. Filth on this edge of the existent. Luxury and voluptuousness on the other. At random, totally at random, one will be designated — by whom? — as having to make one’s life on this edge or that other. It is indisputable. Not even a take-it-or-leave-it. It is to be taken, whether one wishes it or not.
So then, God? The man knows it. Forever — from the depths of human anxieties — the question has been posed: ever since Job upon his dunghill. Does this spare him from coming again upon these questions? No. He is like the others. Does not understand. Now he is at the age (or at least, so it is claimed) when one would like to believe that a plan exists. That one day, someone will tell you somewhere: “Yes, there is a plan. All this was not here for nothing. Without reason. Every blow of fate, every stroke of luck, was part of an equation that was itself nothing but an atom in the composition of a supreme equation.” Yes, you were wrong that day, when you asked yourself: “What game is God playing?” Don’t you remember? You had just learned that a young girl had died, killed by a reckless driver. She was coming out of a fairground. It was evening. From a telephone booth, she had called her father to reassure him. “I’m coming home.” While she was speaking, the car had rushed at her. The father had heard her scream. That is what remained to him of his daughter. Forever. Every night, he heard her cry. Every night, he wondered who, then, had thrown the dice.
Who? The man prefers to believe that there is no one. Nothing and no one. Or rather, that there is something; but something like nothing. If God exists, he meditates, it can only be at the scale of His Creation. According to the amplitude of the Universe, beyond the planets and the stars, beyond the galaxies. So then, the Earth, in all this? Lost in a corner of a galaxy, itself lost in some cluster or other? And on this Earth, this precise place? And in this place, these men? And among them, myself? Derisory! Incongruous! What importance can it have whether I am here or not; whether I can believe or not? God is indifference. Presence of a radical absence. Faced with this, what matters is to be. With the means at hand. With one’s consciousness. As well present oneself worthy of oneself: worthy of that consciousness, precisely. In the meantime, let us love what is beautiful. The gaze of a newborn. The Earth seen from space. That fragile sculpture in the back of a museum. That passing smile. It is the only faith possible.