Linda Bimbi
Vera Feyder
in Hommage à Léo Matarasso, Séminaire sur le droit des peuples, Cahier réalisé par CEDETIM-LIDLP-CEDIDELP, Février 1999
Dressed in candid probity and white linen;
And, always on the poor side, dripping,
His sacks of grain looked like public fountains.
Boaz was a good master and a faithful parent;
He was generous but thrifty;
The women looked at Boaz more than at a young man,
For the young man is handsome, but the old man is tall.
The old man, returning to the original source,
Enter the eternal days and leave the changing days;
And you can see the flame in the eyes of the young people,
But in the eye of the old man, we see light.”
To this portrait, in verse and in rhyme, of Léo, by means of a poem by Victor Hugo, I must make a small correction, the only one that really differentiates him from the model of Boaz, when it is said: “he was generous even though he was thrifty”, because Léo was above all generous and never thrifty, even at his own expense.
I would say that the very principle of economy was totally foreign to him, and I would add that he had a sort of repugnance for this principle, as if he was always afraid of not giving enough of himself, of his time, of his knowledge, of his skills, of his experience as a man who knows a great deal, and who has the modesty never to make a show of it, but to keep it always ready to serve others.
A man who, in his youth, did not choose by chance to become a lawyer, to be on the side of the Law, of justice, to plead the cause of others, of individuals as well as of peoples.
I would add, which is more rare, that he was generous without hope or expectation of reciprocity of any kind, as if this were his most natural inclination, the one in which the secretive, discreet, wounded, tormented man that he was, best mopped up his own anxieties and thus those of others. And because this was his natural inclination, he considered it just as natural that others should derive pleasure, happiness, profit, and benefit from it.
This natural inclination of generosity without hope of reciprocity made him the strongest man – for it is a great strength to expect nothing, ever, from events or from others – but also the most deprived: deprived of personal ambition, titles, honours, movable or immovable property, apart from his passion for books – of poets in particular – and for painting.
I have often tried to understand the cause of this lack of personal ambition. When I met him in 1970, he was about to write a book that would have been the sum of his experiences, his fights for the cause of the peoples, his political refusals, and would have been entitled “Liberté Egalité Fraternité”. This book was never written, and when I asked him why, he answered that he was above all a man of the present; the past, he said, is the material of writers, and I am not one of them; in order to write one must constantly return to one’s past, cultivate nostalgia, or at least memories. And he was not a man of the future either, because he did not see himself as a Nostradamus of History, which is a perpetual chaos, elusive and unpredictable in its designs.
And I would perhaps say in conclusion, since to speak of someone, and especially of a man like Léo, is always to summarize him in a few sentences, to reduce him to a few words, I would say that it is the word “present” that would best describe him. Because being present in all places of appeal, of distress, of injustice, no matter how small, also implies a generosity of being, which is very rare, since it requires attention, an involvement of oneself at all times. In a world where we are all, for the most part, over-occupied people, Léo was someone who responded “present” to everyone and everything. It was as if his time was not counted and that he therefore gave it without counting the cost to others. He was present in his office at all hours of the day, when he was not at the Palais, defending his cases; he never took a vacation, yet he loved to travel; and the only trips he made were, I believe, almost always in the context of his fight for the freedom of peoples: in Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, the Sahara.
Now that he has been away for more than a year, he died on February 14, 1998, and that was his last coquetry, for he died on Valentine’s Day, dying as discreetly as he lived, as he did everything, with this concern never to disturb, We can say that we all miss the light he carried, because it was a light that did not “throw”, a light that flowed from him with that cooing, rocky Levantine accent that he had never quite lost. It was a light that gave everyone the feeling that, in his aura, all problems were abolished, all dangers averted, and that there was in the immense reservoir of his wisdom and knowledge a peaceful solution to all individual and other conflicts. An infinitely good will to come to the aid of any person in danger, of any people threatened with an attack on their liberties and integrity.
So it is all of this that we are deprived of today by his absence, and all of this, no doubt, that all of us here today remember. It should also be added that he was essentially a friend of painters and poets, considering that these too were minorities worth defending, something that the conscientious and attentive lawyer always did generously and freely.
Now I will read to you the text of Linda, who could not be with us today:
In memory of a great friend
Léo Matarasso, one of the Foundation’s great friends, died in Paris on February 14, 1998, at the age of 87. He passed away in silence, in the same silence and touching dignity that had seen him, a vigilant and solitary sentinel, during the long twilight spaces.
The news came to us very late, and the mourning in our hearts was all the more profound. We must now focus on this so that the trauma of the loss will have more meaning.
We see Léo again, present and active, at the side of Lelio Basso, at the time of the Russell Tribunal 2, on Latin America, he joined us just like Lelio, rich in the experience of the Russell Tribunal for Vietnam which he had animated with an irreducible opposition to the system of the strongest. Law was in his DNA, and his culture, his options, his passion had made him a brilliant lawyer, the lawyer of the weak above all. I remember his professionalism when he brought order to the often heated and sometimes tumultuous debates of the preparatory sessions of the Russell Tribunal for Latin America. These meetings were often held in his chambers on rue de Tournon, near Luxembourg, the same address as his small ground floor apartment where his closest friends would join him for dinner. It was at these times that memories of his long career as a political lawyer would spring to mind, especially from the time of the Algerian war, when he had defended civilian and military prisoners. I must admit that I thought it was urgent to record and transcribe his experiences before it was too late, and that they should not be lost. But unfortunately, I never found the time to do so.
His heart beat on the side of the peoples and it is therefore no coincidence that he was for a long time the active and creative president of the International League for the Rights of Peoples. He was also the vice-president of our Foundation, where he had established strong relationships with all the collaborators, whatever their task was.
I like to remember his 80th birthday, which we celebrated in a restaurant run by Chilean friends: after dinner, he joyfully opened the dance with his friend Vera, without his dignity suffering. Léo was like that, he loved life and took care of its seriousness and depth; he was passionate about the great struggles of his time, without ever sacrificing the tenderness of relationships to political commitment.
Linda Bimbi.
I would add that, working in radio, I very often tried to do interviews with Léo, precisely to try to capture what Linda says so well, but in fact he was not only the man of the present, but also the man of the instantaneous and the impromptu: preparing something with him, putting him in front of a microphone to talk about him, paralysed him as much as the blank sheet of paper. So I never managed to do it. But there are a few of you here who were able to enjoy, during those meals at the little house, his gushing memories that came out, that generously overflowed from him and where, all at once, everything was to be grasped, to be collected, but in the moment. Moreover, it was not for nothing that he practiced, in his profession, the oratory art of the bar, which, by definition, is volatile, and therefore ephemeral.
Feyder et Bimbi