Memories of the Taste of Freedom

The author was one of three French hostages released in Beirut last May after three years as captives of a pro-Iranian Muslim fundamentalist group.

It was cosmically absurd that the editor of a magazine devoted to the fine wines of Bordeaux should have been held captive by fanatics for whom nabid, the very word for wine, is an abomination. Fate can be very whimsical. Unfortunately, I scarcely had the opportunity or the taste to appreciate the irony during my three years in captivity.

My kidnapers had flung me into a world which was exactly opposed to my previous existence. Bordeaux is open to the outside, alert, extremely civilized. It is earthy, drenched in aromas, its air purified by the river Gironde. For three years my sun was a 100-watt bulb which went out during every bombardment. Everything about my life was artificial, absurd. In this confined space, I could no longer capture the outside world. No more aromas. I was enclosed in a world of stone, of walls, of silence. I, who had learned to love the sweet-smelling shadows of the cellars, with their vanillic overtones of new oak casks, was destined to live for three years in a labyrinth of dark dungeons in a shadowy world of suffering.

Nevertheless, during my three years I never forgot the taste of wine. True, it was no more than a memory, a fugitive sensation, like a well-loved book one can no longer read. Sometimes in the deep dark well of reality, a miracle happened: The taste of cedar and black currant from the Cabernet-Sauvignon, the plummy aroma of the Merlot, returned to me.

How many times I trod the road up the Medoc past all the chateaux I had known so well. Every evening I opened the cupboard of memories, while in a neighboring cell our guards prayed and bowed low in memory of Hussein, the Shia martyr who died at Karbala. They were the images of a free man, for wine is synonymous with liberty. It is a free choice of one’s time, the right to choose, to decide for oneself.

It was Michael Seurat, abducted with me, who started me off on Bordeaux. We had no books, so we had to talk. In the dungeon, 12 feet square, where we were kept, we had to escape. He conversed about sociology while I spoke about literature and described the world of Bordeaux to him.

We forgot the menacing noise of the air driving into our cell from mysterious aerial orifices. At times, when a man being tortured cried out in the night, we stopped talking, our hearing alerted. The noise of chains, a few strange sighs, the creaking of heavy iron doors, our jailers’ footsteps, followed by the silence of the abyss. How could we then talk of the way the Gironde breathes on the vines of the Medoc, or Kant’s “ideal of the real”? We had to start again from the beginning.

On July 28 we were transferred to a windowless house not far from the airport of Khalde and started our descent into hell. I no longer remember who it was who said that it was better to visit hell in one’s lifetime than after one’s death. This particular hell did not burn us with the fierceness of its flames. Instead, we were stripped of being through a combination of the ridiculous and the absurd.

Camus was right when he said that stupidity is always insistent--a quality responsible for the death of my friend Michel Seurat. At the beginning of September, when he felt the first symptoms of his illness, our jailers never tired of repeating “ bassitta “--”it’s no problem.” It was the slowness and sheer thickness of our captors which killed him.

Around this time our warders wanted to talk all the time. They asked us unexpected--or simply puerile--questions. For example: “Do you drink wine?” “Yes I do,” I said. “But it’s forbidden,” they exclaimed. “Forbidden by whom?” asked Michel. “By the Koran, of course,” they replied. “You know we are not Muslims,” was our response. “But why aren’t you Muslims?” Every evening we performed this Ionesco-like farce full of mutual misunderstandings and dialogues of the deaf. We lived in a world turned upside down in a sort of parody-planet.

Two new personalities, happily very real, were introduced into this ludicrous world: Marcel Fontaine and Marcel Carton. It was a shock to see their faces marked by suffering. The fraternity of mutual misery now counted two new members.

By the end of September, Michel was really ill and kept quiet: “If you’ll excuse me,” he would say, “I don’t feel inclined to talk, but you must. I love to hear your discussions with Carton and Fontaine. I have the impression that life, the real life led by those living outside, goes on.”

The rest of the time we read, for reading and conversation were our only two expedients for escaping. The iron doors, the walls, the impenetrable silence broken by the almost nightly bombardments, the repeated lies, the uncertainty of our fate, created a complicated and tortuous net. After all, what is a nightmare if not a maze of situations and meanderings from which you cannot escape? In this tangle of buildings, of trompe l’oeil galleries, of false hopes, our memories, the tastes we possessed when we were free men, became our Ariadne’s thread.

Three books accompanied us in our captivity, diverting us from our woes, from our despair: the Bible, “War and Peace” and the Pleiade edition of Sartre’s novels. I had barely read any Sartre, not liking didactic novels. And then I discovered that he loved claret. How many times did I reflect on this phrase: “They can kill you, they can deprive you of wine for the rest of your life; but this last time wine slips over your tongue, neither God, nor man can take it away from you. It is the purest of happenings.” One scene particularly attracted me, partly because the characters were drinking Chateau Margaux. I remember that in the course of our discussions, Michel Seurat, who was becoming something of a connoisseur, regretted the fact that Sartre had not indicated the vintage.

In “War and Peace,” Count Pierre also drank Chateau Margaux. I’m very fond of Count Pierre, but he was no connoisseur. He was rich, he “drank the label” and did not concern himself with the sensations involved. The sad truth was that he got drunk on Chateau Margaux. This lapse in taste invariably shocked me. Was that the reason I preferred Prince Andre, who is more refined, more cerebral? He would certainly have appreciated claret, but Tolstoy neglected to give him anything to drink.

The first time I talked with Ellie Hallak, the Lebanese Jewish doctor who had also been taken hostage and tried to save my friend Michel, he declared: “Ah, you love claret. You must initiate me into its mysteries when we are freed.” I never had the opportunity of teaching Ellie Hallak about wine; in February, 1986, our captors announced that this medical hero had been killed. Ignoring his own fate, he looked for every means to comfort Michel in his agony. When I met his widow, Rachel, in Paris after I had been freed, I offered her a present--a bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1981.

Reflecting today on these two friends who have gone forever, I realize how apt a symbol wine is of life, for it represents sap, vigor, vitality, continuity. Punctuated by bombardments and the monotonous drumming of heavy machine guns indicating that we were near the Palestinian refugee camps in South Beirut, respect for wine permeated our darkness, chasing away fear and inclining us to the sweet communion of like minds. One had known for a long time that it was not necessary to drink wine, that merely to talk about it is enough to maintain that sociability which for us was a form of survival.

During these three nightmare years we talked about wine practically every day. It was our last link with the world of the living. Hungry, cold, hot, fearful, we never stopped talking about wine. About claret to begin with, but we were not choosy. Many of our fictional pilgrimages took place in Champagne. At times I devised crosswords for Marcel Fontaine without ever forgetting the lovely town of Ay, an obligatory stopping point for every crossword lover. And how should you open a bottle of champagne? By grasping the cork delicately in the hand or shooting it right across the room? Such were the subjects of our discussions, while all the time there was death in our souls. When a guard came into our cell, cocking his Kalashnikov or screwing on his silencer, we would interrupt these interesting discussions for a few moments.

Every day I kept my memory in trim by reciting the 1855 Classification of the great wines of the Gironde. I reconstituted the list on envelopes made from packets of Cedar, the infamous Lebanese cigarettes which they gave us to smoke at the rate of two or three a day, when they didn’t deprive us of them. I lost my list every time we were moved--18 times in all.

In the end my memory started playing me tricks. And then, to be frank, believing that we had been forgotten, I started to despise the world outside. Everything that reminded me of civilized life had been expunged from my thoughts. To survive in the nightmare I had to root out everything that reminded me of happier days. At the end of 1986 my mind went blank on a number of Fourth Growths, almost always forgetting Pouget and Marquis-du-Terme, both highly estimable wines. A few weeks later I could not remember all the Fifth Growths. In between times they had taken away my pencil. No longer to be able to remember by heart the famous classification saddened me; had I become a man without civilization? Was I becoming a barbarian? In any case, I imagined myself as Diogenes lurking at the bottom of his barrel. Enslaved by my chain, almost subjugated. Nothing in the outside world existed any longer.

During the three months after my liberation, I did not drink any claret. I had made a vow. One day in 1987 I was left for 12 hours in one of the iron coffins that our kidnapers used for the clandestine transfer of prisoners. That day I thought I was going to die.

I believed that my warders had abandoned me in a disused quarry where I heard only the sound of drops of water dripping in the silence. I was trembling with cold and sheer terror. So I prayed to the Lord: If I get out alive from this nightmare, I’ll never touch another drop of alcohol. But then I thought better of it: Was life worth living without claret? So I compromised on three months, proof that even in this moment of extreme privation, my soul was not totally desolate.

So there are now two more claret lovers. But that’s no reason to put out the flags: Two are missing from the roll call. I would dearly love to finish with a flourish. Impossible. I shall never fully recover from their absence.