Cantona (6 page)

However, when Cantona accepted Roux’s invitation to Auxerre a few weeks later, nothing had been decided yet. The Auxerre manager had behaved with typical subtlety in his dealings with Célestin Oliver. ‘One day’ Tico says, ‘Guy Roux called me, and said: “Have you got a decent player in your class?” I told him – Cantona. “Send him to me.’” Guy Roux is a very, very clever man . . .’ Éric was just to take part in a small, seemingly informal clinic. The date was 1 May 1981.

The memory of these first few days spent together brings a smile to Roux’s face. ‘We’d just finished our first year as a professional club. I was there, of course. There were quite a few of these youngsters: Galtier, Darras, Mazzolini, all these kids . . . and Éric Cantona.’ The atmosphere was more reminiscent of a holiday camp than of a test which could and did decide the future of these carefree teenagers. ‘They were larking about like toddlers, because we had a pool . . . well, a bath for the players, about the quarter of the size of this place,’ Roux says, gesturing towards the dining room of Au Petit Chablis, which would not have accommodated the larger kind of Bourguignon wedding reception. ‘But there were very few pools of that kind at the time. They were having such fun . . . I chatted with the lad, and, after a few minutes, he tells me: “I’d like a shirt”; at that time, a shirt was something . . .’ When Roux, cunning as ever, slipped a few jerseys in Cantona’s bags when time had come to bid him farewell, builders were still at work finishing the academy’s main hall. Its next recruit, filled with delight by the generosity of his future manager, still had to convince his family that the choice he had made in his heart would feel right for them too. This time, though, he was prepared to be his own man. The first decision he had taken on his own would prove to be one of the best in his whole life.

Now is as good a moment as any to interrupt the chronological thread in Cantona’s story, to address once and for all the comments his love of painting alluded to in this first chapter, attracted later in his life, when everything he said or did became a target for the cheapest kind of mockery. A footballer who paints – how comical, how ludicrous is that? In the macho world of football, and particularly English football, an artistic inclination, especially as genuine an inclination as Cantona’s, only ranks below homosexuality if ostracism is what you’re looking for. To his enemies, Cantona’s attachment to art brought another proof of his insufferable arrogance. ‘I paint’ meant ‘I am better than you’. This is a profound misunderstanding (one among many others) of the man’s personality. Vanity had nothing to do with the need he felt to look into himself in this way. Later in life, he always resisted the temptation – I would go as far as to say that he never felt it – to use his fame as a sportsman to stage public exhibitions of his work. Painting was a private pursuit, a means to relax, too, when he would take his paintbox and head for the garrigue – the wild coastal scrubland near his home – on his own, with no other company than his two dogs. He was also aware that if he possessed a real gift, his technical ability didn’t quite match Albert’s, and that it would be cheating to pretend that he was as much a genius with a brush in his hand as with a ball at his feet. Insecurity combined with his instinct for self-protection to keep painting an interest that could only be shared with people he trusted. He was not coquettish or ashamed of what he was doing, no; he might organize a private show of some works for the benefit of close fiends and members of his family, but not more than that. The few who had access to this much-spoken-about, unfairly ridiculed and hidden part of his world, and have spoken to me about what they saw, invariably stressed the dark, even ‘tortured’ nature of most of his work. They also insisted on its quality – Gérard Houllier in particular was struck by the originality of what he was shown. Photographer Didier Fèvre, who was among Cantona’s closest friends in the late eighties and early nineties, saw him experiment with supports other than canvas, cutting up photographs which he then half-covered with brushstrokes. It is clear that, moving into adulthood, Cantona was retreating in more ways than one from the Provençal idyll his father had tried to capture. He was also developing an increasing sense of his own mortality, as a hypersensitive footballer-artist could not fail to do; once he had reached the age of thirty, physical decline would precipitate his rapid ‘death’ as an athlete, a subject which became a recurrent theme in the interviews he gave late in his career, an awareness that contributed to precipitate the announcement of his retirement in 1997.

The language he uses when speaking of the artists he admires today is revealing. Of Zoran Music, a Slovenian painter who left haunting etchings and engravings of the Holocaust he survived: ‘It’s powerful, you feel a power . . . You feel that if he hadn’t painted, he’d have died [the French
crevé,
or
burst,
almost carries the stench of death, but has no equivalent in English].’ Of the Catalan Antoni Tàpies: ‘He gives another life to objects which are fated to die.’ His Picasso puppet featured on
Les Guignols de l’info –
the French equivalent of
Spitting Image –
was nothing but a gross caricature of the man’s sincerity and talent. It is to Cantona’s credit that he bore these cheap shots at his ‘difference’ with good grace. He genuinely enjoyed seeing his latex alter ego make a fool of himself on television with incomprehensible pronouncements (which, more often than not, concluded with his throwing his shirt away in disgust). And why not? He had long been aware of the absurdty of his public persona. The superb copy he threw away to journalists in his early twenties was littered with self-deprecating quips about his supposed ‘intellectualism’. Some got it, most didn’t. Caught between the urge to be recognized and the desire to be left alone, he laid shoals of red herrings on the slab, finding amusement, and a kind of security, in the willingness of others to gobble up his catch. Talking of which, sardines were not spared in a splendid advertising mini-feature – two-and-a-half minutes long – purportedly shot for the benefit of an electronics manufacturer shortly after the denouement of the Crystal Palace affair, in the spring of 1995. In that film, arms aloft on the top of a cliff, seagulls screeching over his earnest baritone, his whole body shaking in the presence of the Muses, Cantona laughed at Cantona. This was probably the finest acting performance of his career. He might not agree with this judgement. But he would probably smile at it.

Cantona and his ‘band of merry men’.

Éric’s parents didn’t share his enthusiasm for moving 600 kilometres north of Marseilles – to put it mildly. He had just celebrated his fifteenth birthday; it was one thing to board a few nights a week at Mazargues, quite another to find himself among people he knew nothing of, with only the telephone to link him to the clan. ‘Why not Nice?’ they asked him. ‘We could come and see you every weekend.’ Jean-Marie, the most even-tempered and ‘reasonable’ of the three brothers, also advised him not to pack his suitcase for Burgundy. But Éric stood his ground. Some of the arguments he used when the family discussed his future showed him to be rather more than a stubborn, hot-headed teenager who could be bought for a few shirts. He wouldn’t be the first child of Les Caillols to seek success a long way away from the Provençal sun, he said. Five years previously, René Marsiglia had left SOC for Boulogne-sur-Mer when only thirteen years old, and was now an established professional with Lille Olympique Sporting Club. It was well-known that southern clubs had a perverse tendency not to look after their own, and that local fans easily turned against footballers who had grown up in the same streets as them – as Marseille fans would when Éric joined their club in 1988.

Éric had a profound respect for Monsieur Roux. He felt at ease in the unprepossessing atmosphere of Auxerre, where he had had such fun splashing about and training with what he knew instantly was an exceptional group of youngsters. Crucially, AJA trusted their young players to represent the club in the third division championship, where the reserves played, whereas he would be likely – no, certain – to be ignored by the management of haughty Nice for such games. And how could he improve if he didn’t play? Thanks to Henri Émile’s recommendation, he had recently been called up by the French under-seventeen national squad. This meant two things: his qualities were now recognized within the game, but he would also need to fight even harder to survive in the football world. Auxerre would provide him with a chance to measure himself against tougher opponents in a competitive environment. Little by little, Éric won over his family. Albert took his son’s decision with good grace in the end. Auxerre wasn’t the end of the world after all.

So Joseph and Lucienne drove Éric to Burgundy, where they enjoyed lunch with Guy Roux on the banks of the River Yonne. ‘When we were served dessert, I told them, “But you just have to come back to see him!” His Italian grandfather replied, “Oh, Auxerre is far, I’m old, I don’t know . . .” “Listen to me,” I said. “When he plays for France the first time, you’ll have to come and see me.” Well, he was nineteen when he played against [West] Germany – and the grandfather hadn’t forgotten.’

Within a matter of weeks, the recruit had become a full-time apprentice, the youngest in his age category, and was training with the reserve team. The summers spent in the shade of Joseph’s and Lucienne’s
cabanon
belonged to the childhood he had left behind; should he return to the Côte Bleue, it would be like opening, briefly, a window on his own past. But Éric felt sure he could live with the brutality of this break with his former life. He wasn’t cowed by his new surroundings, quite the contrary, in fact. Was it because Albert and Eléonore were not there to keep him in check any longer? The ‘difficult’ teenager turned into a genuine hellraiser. Célestin Oliver had seen in him a ‘born leader’; but maybe not of the kind of gang that soon congregated around the imposing youth. Their misdemeanours were confined to the club – for the most part. Basile Boli has recounted how this ‘gang’, which Roux called ‘Canto and his band of merry men’ (on that occasion, Cantona, Prunier, Vahirua, Basile and his brother Roger), would buy clapped-out cars and organize ‘rodeos’ – lifesize dodgems – in the local rubbish tip. Roux never knew about this, thankfully; had he done so, the punishment would have been severe. A strict disciplinarian, he thought nothing of fining trainees who earned barely anything. Once, several of the youngsters, who’d taken part in a remarkable victory over the reserves of St Étienne, were spotted in a nightclub after the game. Roux was told by one of his many spies, and dug into the culprits’ pockets to buy a billiards table for the academy, which was referred to as the ‘Boli-Cantona’ table for years afterwards.

On the whole, however, the merry men kept themselves to themselves. They did not vandalize phone booths or terrify the good burghers of Auxerre. But they played pranks, wreaked havoc in the dormitory, and generally brought the coaching staff close to a communal nervous breakdown. ‘These kids were very close to each other,’ Roux told me. A brief pause, then: ‘They were also up to no good most of the time. Daniel Rolland, a lovely man who adored them, and who was probably the best educator in French football at the time, just couldn’t cope with them.’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘Me? I was the court of appeal. Éric came to my office when Daniel Rolland just couldn’t bear it any more. Éric was very violent, in his language too. But also charming when he could keep his temper in check. Generous, and hard-working, with a really good heart behind all the excesses. Tell me – between a nicey-nicey lazybones with no talent and a super-worker with an awful temper on him, what would be your choice? Mine was quickly made.’

Something had struck me: to qualify Cantona’s ‘awful temper’, Roux had used the adjective
caractériel.
It is a very strong word indeed, one you wouldn’t use to describe a naughty child – a disturbed one, rather, who might need medical attention. Was it really the word he had meant to use? Roux looked me in the eye and said: ‘Yes.’

Thankfully, most of Éric’s horseplay was ‘naughty’ rather than
‘caractériel’
, and Roux noticed a marked improvement once the wrench of being parted from brothers, parents and grandparents was gradually blunted by the comradeship he developed with his new teammates. In that respect, Auxerre had been a wise choice, as no other elite club in France had a better claim to call itself ‘a family’. A husband-and-wife duo took care of the youth team at the time (Roux gave me their names, but omitting them might spare a few blushes, even now), a couple of ex-factory workers who looked after their meals, their kits and, sometimes, their sorrows. Once a week, Mrs X— left home after dinner to attend a late gym class in town. Mr X— did not waste much time in switching on the television and slipping an adult film into the video player. Word got round the academy of what was going on at the X—s’ home, and it became one of the week’s highlights to clamber over the dormitory walls and watch both Mr X— and watch what he was watching. What could Guy Roux do but smile?