Just one life, long and mad like the century: one war, two continents, three loves

A few months ago, while riding the subway to work in Medellín, Colombia, my mum called me from France to give me the news. While the whole train stared at me and the strange foreign words my mouth was uttering, I was trying to process, and to comfort: at ninety-something, my grandfather had just died. He had been saying for years and years he wanted to get to a hundred: he wanted to beat the century, proud as he was.  The irony is, I think it was the first time in his long years, and obviously the last, he didn’t fulfill what he had settled to do. So I decided to tell the tale of his life, not as exposure but evidence, as well as homage. And not just because I loved him, but because he did so much, lived so much, that his story alone paints, somehow, the history of his country, of his century. His century that is already gone.

For as long as I can remember, my brother and I have said that Jean seemed to come out of a writer’s fanciful mind. The novel starts commonly enough… as they often do. Jean Clinet was born in 1919, just one year after the Great War; like so many others, for after a slaughter, people avenge their dead by creating life. (That’s called a baby boom.) He was born in a village of Normandie, in north-western France: Montebourg. After his mother’s death, a day after his eighth birthday, his father’s drinking problem got worse, and so did his rage fits; until father and son fought and threatened to kill each other. 

When he was thirteen, exhausted by the family misery, the violence; exhausted by school as well, which he loved and hated, too gifted, too cheeky, he ran away. He just left, thirteen years old, not a franc in his pocket, and started to work in a steel factory, Les Hauts Fourneaux de Caen. Life was hard then for a teenage worker, so he turned to the new faith of the times: communism. Remember: he was strong-willed, gifted, cheeky. By the time he was sixteen, he was delegated by the Communist Youth to meet the prefect of Normandie. 

When I was in high school, in history class, I was told about the mythical day when the Front populaire was created: the first coalition of all the left wing French Parties against the rise of fascism, which governed France from 1936 to 1939. The first time in French History that the Left was in charge, establishing the paid holidays and the forty hours working week, a world novelty. Well my grandfather, sixteen years old, was there the day of the Great Congress, in 1936. He was in the room, with Léon Blum and all the men from my history books. 

The euphoria of the new order, of a new, easier life, did not however last. On the 3rd of September of 1939, on the exact day when my grandfather, at twenty, was meant to enlist for his military service, France declares war on Germany. Showing off the electrician’s degree he had cheated to get, Jean manages to enroll in the Marines in Cherbourg’s port. His cruiser of suggestive name, La Gloire, sails to the French colony of Dakar, Senegal… but the glory is short-lived: after less than a year, in June of 1940, France, defeated and shamefaced, signs the peace. Jean’s service isn’t over, however, and the whole crew makes its long way on the burning African roads to another French colony: Casablanca, Morocco, where a military arsenal awaits. 

Jean is tired of the army. Scarred by the misery he knew as a child, he wants to work, to triumph, to be rich. As the months go by and his file is not dealt with, he goes to the army offices to make a fuss. He then learns, abruptly, that he is ill with tuberculosis, the monster that killed his mum, his aunts. The monster that killed thousands. He also learns he now has the status of disabled veteran, that he is finally demobilized… Great news, but who the fuck cares, when you’re going to die?  Well, he won’t. Let’s not forget: he’s wilful, he’s cheeky. He’s just too fucking angry, enraged, outraged to die, he knows it for sure. In the sanatorium he makes a friend, a wretched poet, a madman, who rants about the sickening world, and who years later will die in jail. Decades later, my grandfather will tell my mum, reliving these times, this illness that should have killed him: “I cured myself through rage.”  

Once recovered, Jean starts to work as a construction painter. Five years later the war ends, but he stays in Casablanca and creates his own company, Peinture-Maroc, and soon starts to get rich. He works for the American military bases, and thus learns English, as he learns everything else: by himself. In 1949, he meets Ginette Bouet, divorced from a nobleman, already a mother, who works for the colonial administration. Two years later Jean-Louis is born, outside of wedlock. A bastard son, with a divorced woman! Whether the scandal broke them apart I do not know, but it soon falls apart.

In 1956, Morocco and Tunis are the first French colonies in Africa to win their independence; three years later, at his tennis club, Jean meets a Frenchwoman raised in the Moroccan capital, Rabat. Françoise Comparat is eleven years younger; her father was the tutor of Hassan II, the future king, and she grew up next to the palace, sharing the games of the princesses. Morocco is all she knows. She is as generous, as joyful as Jean is harsh, demanding; naturally, they fall in love. In 1960 their union is celebrated at the French Consulate; Jean sells his company and the newlyweds leave Africa to settle in Aix-en-Provence, in south-eastern France. Close to the Mediterranean coast, where Françoise won’t get cold...

In the century-old house they buy, my mum, aunt and uncle are soon born. Jean buys a drugstore and then another, and soon, lands to settle his offices. He is a tough father, severe, demanding, subject to rage fits just as his father used to be, but the family makes it through: her light balances his eclipses… “The sun has a date with the moon”, or so the old song goes. Until, in 1987, Jean, freshly retired, leaves again. My mum was twenty-six and tells the story thus: one morning, my grandmother went down to the kitchen. There she found her husband and two suitcases: he was leaving her for another woman, Anne-Marie, an upper middle class divorced mother who he’d met playing cards and who he’d love, and hate, for the rest of his life. That was, after all, the only way he knew how.       

As the new millennia is born, Jean, at eighty-four, abruptly loses his eyesight. For the self-taught, knowledge starved working class man, obsessed with books and art, a thousand worlds go dark at once. And, because of the guilt that has hounded him since as long as he can remember, because of his self-condemned and many crimes; abandoning his little brother to his troubled father’s hands, abandoning his first-born son, his wives, his mad friend dead in jail; because he curses himself for his tempestuous temper, his many shortcomings, and because his catholic credo has always been as demanding as himself… he reads this second illness as a final, a just sentence.  

A stranger to sympathy as much as self-pity always, he fights alone. He tries several unapproved treatments, fails and fails. The paintings he loves so much are lost to him, but he persists in reading with a huge, steam punk looking magnifying device. He persists in reading Francois Villon and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, his wretched poets, his terrible prophets, and dozens of scientific publications. I recorded a whole book for him, when I was a kid. He just wants to know, to understand. All there is. 

A few months ago, heavy with a hundred fights, a hundred victories and a thousand regrets, Jean Clinet died. To us, his grandchildren, he left the century-old house in Aix-en-Provence, the cheekiness, the willpower, the tempestuous temper. The hunger for knowledge and beauty. He left a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of paintings, gifts from his painter friends in Morocco. For he was a lovable and fierce friend, and in Africa had made great encounters, who later became renowned artists… and whose paintings I saw, as a kid, on the walls of his successive flats, oblivious to their price and worth. I was just used to them, the naked black woman lying on a sofa, by Jacques Majorelle, the seascape and, above all, my grandfather’s severe face, rendered by Félix Bellenot.

I remember him saying, laughing, that he had made Felix’s portrait and Felix had painted his, but that Felix was gifted and he was not. But he did have a gift; he painted with words. He was a born storyteller, and though he never told the worst, the tragedies of his life, he told everything else: how he had cheated to get his degree, how he used to fight in Casablanca’s streets, how he carried a strapped-on gun. I used to love to listen to him; I worshiped his obvious intelligence, his irrational appetite, his dwarfing charisma. I laughed for hours at his jokes, his puns, his old, oh so old slang. At ninety-something, he still cracked up his nurse; for though inside he always fought insomnia and all the devils that come with it, he never wished to be a tragic character. He loved to laugh, to read, to play cards. He loved women. 

Jean Clinet was born in 1919. For decades the doctors told him he would die young, that the tuberculosis would one day take its toll. He didn’t beat the century as he wished he would, but… He lived to tell a war, two continents, three loves. The 20th century whole. Just one life, long and mad like our history.

 

My name is Diane. I was born and raised in south-eastern France, in the blue and golden light of the Mediterranean. These past few years, I've been living in lush, gorgeous, infamous Colombia. Obsessed with words, I'm a freelance journalist and apprentice poet. This was my first date with Steemit, so I started at the start...