JACQUES BREL HAS DIED
Colette Delavigne, the Judge of Instruction, after pulling so many faces – judges hate all those experts, and Maresq had already imported a talkative Paris lawyer, a red-hot, the PJ would have called him a shit-hot, on procedural points – was content…
She pulled that corniest of all instruction-gags, a reconstruction. If they come off, lovely. The examining magistrate, ordering everyone around like a movie-director, saying more or less ‘Places everyone. Quiet. Sound. Camera!’ has a lovely time. And think of all the favourable publicity.
If they don’t come off, in ploughed fields in a drizzle of a February day, oh well, there was only one wretched photographer from the local rag.
She chose the same time of day, to get the light right, had the whole Cours la Reine cleared of traffic. Cops with crowd barriers. Castang doing Etienne Marcel, collapsing riddled with lead. Orthez driving the getaway car, Lasserre with that clumsy great forty-five Army automatic. Richard, who loathed Alfred Hitchcock, stood there with the Mayor, but said they were strangers on a train, definitely. The eyewitnesses, much drilled, did several different takes. The lawyers were very obstreperous. The Paris lawyer kept saying No doubt, Madame, No doubt; I fail to see why it should interest me.
The employees of the Banque de France had crowded to their windows and so had everyone else. You’d think you were outside the Santé, at five in the morning, in the good old Public Execution days, with le père Deiber doing his stuff.
Riotous success all round.
For the PJ, finished, save for that excruciating chore of having to give evidence in front of the Assize Court, a job no cop enjoys.
A month, two, or three had passed. It had faded and grown dim. More – six, and the trial was slated for the next sessions. Castang came home, of a dreary November evening. Vera was sitting on the floor snuffling drearily, tear-sodden, blowing her nose on a ghastly dishcloth.
"What has happened?" Lydia, good as gold, was on her tummy on the floor some distance away, banging with both fists and quite plainly happy. "Please tell me."
"You haven’t heard?"
"I’ve been in the country." Vera pointed wordlessly at the television set. Superimposed on a long, sad, horse face a reporter, overdressed as usual and with his national-mourning expression above his huge knitted tie, was saying, "Nothing, I believe, has so cut into us here," pointing at his well-filled waistcoat, "since Edith Piaf left us."
"Oh, God – no."
"Oh, God yes."
Vera cried buckets at the end of Verdi operas, and when she came out in a distraught daze, walked under trams. Castang the Boot, professionally insensitive, was not a weepie.
Now was different.
There are not enough poets. How many are good poets, and not just pop lyricists? How many go round the world? A Beatle once said ‘We are more important than Jesus’: he was mistaken, though forgivably.
Jacques had never thought of himself either in terms of importance or any resemblance to Jesus, but he was real, always.
No more would that voice say, with that dignity
‘It is late, Mister,
And I must be going home.’
Jef, stop crying like that in front of everybody. Shift your carcass, Jef. Mussels, Jef, and frites. And Moselle wine. And at Andrée’s, there are now girls. Come on Jef, it’s no longer the pavement – it’s getting like a cinema, here, with you crying.
It was only a false blonde, and three-quarters-whore at that.
‘Fernand…
Say he’s dead.
Say I’m alone behind.
Say you’re alone up front.
Fernand I’ll come to this whore of a cemetery
And we’ll drink silence
To the health of that Constance
Whose shadow meant as much to her as you did.’
And so much, so much.
The outrageous, glorious Jacky, selling boats full of opium, whisky made in Clermont-Ferrand, real old queens and false young virgins, and a bank on each finger, mate, and a finger in every country.
You were the poet, boy. A poet is for the people. Or to be polite, take Mr Eliot, stick him up his waste land. Real poets sing. They go round the world on an enormous kite. Shakespeare, tu connais? At the same time as they finish as broken-down tango-singers. For old biddies. In the rain, in Knocke-le-Zoute.
There are phoney ones. The phoney ones made more money. But they’re twisting slowly in the wind. While with what was left of your lungs you – you were bawling out a bawdy ditty.
Hands, stop trembling.
Remember them wet – you cried on them.
Hands, do not open.
Arms, do not stretch out.
You my hands and arms keep still.
You my girl Mathilde have come back.
Mathilde has come back.
"I’m all right," said Vera, burying herself in the dishcloth.
"I’m all right, I’m all right, I’m all right I tell you," as he got down on the floor and held her. "Mathilde has come back."
There we leave them: he undoing one boot, she struggling with the tight, wet lace of the other.