"When did he get the commission?" "I think it was around the 11th of September, when everyone was saying, "Nobody ever thought of that!"" "Yes." "But you can't expect the word "think" to be understood in the same way." "More the opposite." "You learn the word "think,"" "or rather how to use it, under circumstances you don't learn to describe." "Ask someone to give a look of doubt or pleasure, and then hide his face so all you can see are the eyes." "The eyes are where the expression seems concentrated." "You'll be surprised at how differently the expression can be perceived." "You see emotions, even sadness, hidden joy, boredom." "But you can't reach any conclusion." "It's not the appearance that changes, it's the interpretation." "Look at that person, and picture him." "Representations depend on will." "Representations, not images." "Let's look at the difference." "Trying to see something." "Trying to picture something." "In the first case, you sort of say," ""Look right there."" "And in the second," ""Close your eyes."" "You could say that the sound you imagine is in a different space than the sound you hear." "Vaud is a country of passivity and a country of resistance." "Vaud forms a harmonious, complete whole." "It could live on its own, with no need for the rest of the world." "Vaud is a whole, a real country." "People say, "the Vaud country."" "It's better than a canton, or a province." "It's something else." "And that country's other half, its beloved..." " Its fiancée is France." "The other half, the opposite." "If you venture across the big puddle..." "If you venture across the big puddle or go up to Paris, like the people from Marseille in 1789." "You must take care not to forget anything." "You mustn't forget that the French were the liberators." "You must take care not to forget anything." "You mustn't forget that the French freed the country from the Alemanns." " Right." "With the left-over soldiers Napoleon had." "It was the only time the tyrant of Europe freed instead of enslaving." "Mainly so no one would touch his buddy Dufour." "Still, there were all those trees of freedom." "And even today, fatherland and freedom embrace on the flag." "So can we put the question now?" "I think we have to." "Why Aimé Pache, who is never mentioned in art history, and never will be?" "Why did the Expo people commission that big painting from him?" "You have to start at the beginning." "Take a walk at Granges-Sainte-Marie, past Métabief." "Yes." "So it's between the Orbe Valley and Granges-Sainte-Marie, where the border passes through fir trees along the future" "Lausanne-Paris railroad line..." " And Paris-Lausanne!" " Exactly." "...that the future painter of the big painting was born." "It still hangs in the back room of the Café du Marché in Rolle, at Manigley's place." "In those days cinema was dying." "In the villages, they still showed its last reels." "Aimé Pache's mother whose brother had run the "Eldorado" in Geneva clearly remembered the feeling that the picture was, above all, mystery." "The father was an ex-trade unionist from La-Chaux-de-Fonds who'd been in the Communist International, along with Humbert-Droz and old Forel." "After the Moscow trials, he gave up the workers' struggle and married the daughter of a railroad man." "A girl from Savoy." "He just said, "I'm leaving."" " She just said, "Take me with you."" "He just said, "The bed's narrow."" " She just said, "We'll manage."" "And the two of them lived humbly on the future Paris-Lausanne line." "I already said that." " Not exactly that way." "They immediately started to squabble over who'd watch the tracks and who'd go to the café." "Once Aimé Pache went to the Casino in Yverdon with his father." "There he saw his first naked woman, and that did something to him." "It wasn't the woman, it was already the painting." "Could be." "As an old revolutionary, the father didn't believe in the power of images, but more in words." "Father, I want to write to my girlfriend." "Go ahead." " I want to say..." "I don't know how to put it." "...that we missed the train, but we still had a good time..." "Write, "I don't know how to put it, but I want to say that we missed the train..."" "But that's what I said." " Exactly." "Is that how you write?" " Yes, that's how you write." "What if I run out of things to say?" "Then you stop writing." " But I have to finish up, say goodbye, that all's well." " So write, "I have to finish up, goodbye, all's well."" "Father, can you disguise a message?" " Sure." "What's the best way?" "Stick as close to the truth as you can." "Father, what's the best way of knowing if someone is trustworthy?" "You ask him, "What have you read?"" "If he answers, "Homer, Shakespeare, Balzac,"" "then he's not trustworthy." "But if he answers, "Depends what you mean by "reading',"" "then there's hope." "What does the wind do when it's not blowing?" "The past is never dead, but the years pass." "The father is buried at Tannay, the mother at Yvoire, on the other side of the lake." "Facing each other in death." "Freedom and fatherland." "All alone now, Aimé Pache starts painting in oils." "He doesn't know how, he's learning." "First, a tree." "And another tree." "Then fruit, then blood, the blood of the country, of Abraham Jean Daniel Davel." "Content and form." "Fatherland and freedom, as he saw them from his window, out over the rooftops." "The father here, the mother over there, and in between, the waterline he'll later learn from Rothko." "He thinks you have to do things the hard way, because experience is the only truth." "And you have to get it wrong a lot to not get it wrong anymore." "You could say, the eyes are freedom, the hands are fatherland." "A spot of color under the brush, then another spot beside it." "They sing together like the strings of a violin." "But they are too many for him, and too varied." "There are all sorts of colors in nature, but he still can't choose." "One night he dreams his mother returns him to his father." "He discovers an old school notebook with a mysterious sentence from an essay:" ""Neither the sun nor death look themselves in the face."" "Now that his parents are dead, he finally understands." "How?" "The notebook is full of scribbles, but this I can read:" ""A noun is proper when it has but a single sense."" "And a little farther down:" ""What makes the sun the sun?"" "And farther down:" ""The sun is an example of a supremely sensitive being, because it can always disappear."" ""Nature at its most natural has what you need to get out of yourself."" "And then:" ""Bring nature into the picture."" "Initially, he stuck with what Kandinsky wanted." "The image was primarily mystery and danger." "And then he goes away:" "Freedom." "And then he comes back:" "Fatherland." "And he goes away again." "The big city, the lights." "Following the example of his elders, Edouard Rod," "Cingria, Ramuz and Auberjonois..." "A performance in Lausanne of Sartre's "False Noses" made his mind up." ""Poor and lost, like flowers between the rails in the haphazard wind of journeying,"" "wrote Rilke, translated by Adamov." "In Paris he lives heroically." "Short on money, tall and skinny, cooking in a small hotel room on the Rue du Cherche-Midi." "Now and then the luxury of a boiled egg." "He goes to all the exhibitions." "In the Louvre, he copies the old masters:" "Delacroix, Chardin, the Dutch painters, Cézanne." "A picture you could put in a death cell, without it seeming horrible." "He mixes timidly with the younger generation." "He's seen with Fautrier, Hartung, Manessier..." "And with Wols, the poor devil." "In a Europe not purified, but corrupted, by suffering, not at all exalted..." "...but humiliated by its newfound freedom," "Aimé Pache discovers his own gifts." "He asks very simple questions:" "With reality shattered by Braque and Picasso, all that's left for the newcomer is colors, rhythms, bits of wreckage." "It takes strength to overcome philosophical storms and social violence." "You have to endure to be able to return." "Aimé Pache encounters light and focuses it on his darkness." "He walks a lot." "The disturbing moment when night descends, the eyes of the streetlamps opening with a blue shadow, in which more and more people mingle." "Aimé Pache finds himself in the prehistory of the visible." "One summer evening, after a Lamoureux concert, he notices a girl who looks like Annabella in René Clair's "14 July,"" "a long dress, taking the metro." "A young girl, in evening dress, alone in the metro." "Unheard of, such freedom!" "At that time." "But not an unheard-of freedom." "He asks for her hand, she gives him her arm." "A girl with a boy." "He decides to return home." "She accepts." "She rests her head on his shoulder, because love is a burden." "A girl with a boy." "O return to the homeland!" "O return of the one who no longer needs to be a guest!" "Aimé and his beloved move into the Pink House, still on the main rail line, but now on the other side of the tunnel." "Claire's beauty is Claire herself." ""Claire" is written on her face and in the shape of her arms." "What pleases me about her mind is visible on her lips." "I knew that by looking at her." "O universal time, when everything was ours and was returned to us." "O universal time, when nothing is mute for the eyes of the child." "The Pink House, the child, who Pache often paints as an infanta." "Note that he doesn't call his pictures anything." "Instead, painting calls him." "And then the little girl dies, bitten by a viper." "Gradually the mother loses it, as they say." "One afternoon, when Pache is in the village, she takes the boat and disappears." "Aimé Pache gives up painting." "For a time he takes refuge in the forest, because there the trees are alone and together." "Then he returns to the vineyards." "Finally at the water's edge, at a pastor's house." "Along the France road, as they say in those parts." "Sometimes he helps the roadmender." "It's the late '60s." "It was that summer that he began the big painting." "To be new, deep within that which is new." "What's reality, then?" "First he puts the children in, then the road, in one sweep." "Three paces back, three paces forward." "And the children appear out of the night." "The road accompanies them to the left." "Feet in the fatherland, eyes in freedom." "In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday night." "She's not beautiful, mocked, cursed and disowned by all." "But don't get it wrong, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind." "For there's a rule and an exception." "Culture is the rule, and art is the exception." "Everybody speaks the rule:" "Cigarette, computer, T-shirt, TV, tourism, war." "Nobody speaks the exception." "It isn't spoken, it's written:" "Flaubert, Dostoyevski." "It's composed:" "Gershwin, Mozart." "It's painted:" "Cézanne, Vermeer." "It's filmed:" "Antonioni, Vigo." "Or it's lived, and then it's the art of living:" "Srebenica," "Mostar, Sarajevo." "The rule is to want the death of the exception." "So the rule for Cultural Europe is to organize the death of the art of living, which still flourishes." "When it's time to close the book," "I'll have no regrets." "I've seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well."