Vera Feyder

in Léo Matarasso, Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi

I met Léo through poetry. It was in the seventies. I was then a member of the Union des Ecrivains, which emerged from the turbulence of May ’68, and I was actively involved in the Professional Commission, set up to defend the right of authors to be recognised as workers, and I had just won the François Villon Prize for my collection “Pays l’absence”. It so happened that between the correction of the “proofs” and the final edition, the publisher had decided (without informing me) to modify the title, to write an aberrant text on the back cover, and even more seriously, to purely and simply delete the last ten pages (which closed the collection, in direct relation with the introductory text). So I spoke to some writer friends, mainly Bernard Pingaud, who directed me to Léo, saying that there was only one person in Paris likely to take up the cause of defending a writer (and any creator who has been exploited or cheated out of his or her work) against the abusive actions of a publisher.
So I met Léo at his office in the Rue de Tournon, I explained the facts to him, and in one hour of discussion, everything became miraculously simple, clear, obvious, on what to do, and it is together that we wrote the letter to the publisher, who was obliged to withdraw the falsified edition from sale, to ensure another one, restoring the text in its entirety, and such as it had received the “François Villon Prize” awarded by a jury.
From that day on, a great adventure of friendship began. Not only was Léo a recognized advocate of great causes (and of small ones on occasion), but he was a man of culture, a rare culture in his profession, a culture acquired through a precocious and natural curiosity about everything that fights in this world to bring out its truth, and artists – in their singular and solitary struggle – the very first, but a culture also due to his frequenting of poets, such as Joë Bousquet (whom he met during his years in the Resistance), Paul Eluard and Henri Michaux (among others): and it was enough, to be convinced of this, to explore his library, which in twenty years I have had plenty of time to do.
At the time I met him, Léo had been planning for a long time to write a book in which he would recount his life as a militant – in the party, in human rights, at the Russell Tribunal, at the Peoples’ Tribunal – his actions within the resistance, not to glorify himself, but only to bear witness to them, as well as his interventions in the Algiers trials (we know his role with Henri Alleg, and how he was, defying all the risks of such an undertaking, the patient, discreet, obstinate passer-by of “La question” until its publication by Jérôme Lindon, Editions de Minuit); He spoke to me at length about this book, which he wanted to call “Liberté Egalité Fraternité”, and it seemed to me that everything was very clear in his head. He was indeed clear, but writing it was also another matter, and as he was used to dictating his letters, to improvising his pleadings (carefully thought out and prepared), I suggested that he proceed in the same way with this book: he would dictate his text, I would transcribe it by typewriter, and he would only have to read it again and correct it as he wished. We had agreed to work on it at weekends when the office was quiet, and we tried it several Sundays in a row…but without satisfactory results for him. The words, when reread on paper, seemed to him frighteningly conventional, of a great banality, and perhaps even outdated in view of the course of events, and the light that with time one had of it.
In short, inconclusive trials of these laborious weekends that almost all ended in laughter, and… at the restaurant. I regretted it, and so did many of his friends, but not him. He used to tell me: “I am a man of the present, of the present word, not of the past. I don’t have nostalgia, and it’s nostalgia that makes us look back on the roads we’ve travelled. And it was true, both the volatile (but effective) speech of the pleadings and the ephemeral speech of the meals, where his generosity as a host was matched only by this profuse, generous speech where the smallest detail had its right note, its picturesque, and its equal part of humanity.
What I can add today, since it is for him that we are gathered here today, ten years after his death, is that the imprint he left on each of us is indelible. And time playing, as usual, its role of revealing (often with delay!) makes him even more present to us. And seeing the madness of the world as it goes, the tragedies, the exactions, the crimes perpetuated and increasing, we can perhaps rejoice that he is no longer here to see them, nor measure his impotence – which is ours – to fight them: a fact that could only have made him despair. But what I would like to say, in conclusion, is that Léo belongs to that race of men whose disappearance leaves a great empty hole, and that this hole is not only not being filled, but is on the contrary widening. Léo is someone who is sorely missed in the human landscape because he was a kind of light, not for himself, for he had a well-hidden, unacknowledged background of sadness, but which sometimes surfaced in his silences, when speech was withdrawn from him, but light for others. And all those who approached him received this light.
And Léo’s death was that too: a light that goes out. And where everything becomes more obscure, more uncertain the path to follow, and that he knew so well how to open for us, colder, and especially more fragile our certainties, attached to his, that a day would come when weapons and tears would no longer be the permanent and furious order of the day, and that there was not, in this world, and on any front, no matter how small, a vain struggle that could not, for a time, stop them.

Feyder, Vera

in:

<strong>Léo Matarasso,
Seminario del 6 dicembre 2008, Cedetim, Parigi
Milano, maggio 2009</strong>