by James Jones
Inside, the famous court looked like some kind of Persian market. Booths made of card tables or old refrigerator boxes had been set up all over the place. Here the outside theme of increasing litter and dirtiness was continued, in trumps, but here nobody was trying to do anything about it. Each booth it turned out was the station of some particular political persuasion. There were Maoists, Ché Guevaraists, Stalinists, Leninists, Trotskyists, and I don’t know what all. Huge portraits of Lenin, Mao and Guevara had been plastered on the columns. Slogans had been painted in red paint just about everywhere,
“Society is a carnivorous flower,” said one. “I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desire,” another said.
They were all over the place.
“One pleasure has the bourgeoisie, that of degrading all pleasures.”
“Be a realist, demand the impossible.”
“Those who make a revolution by halves, dig their own graves.”
“A Philistine’s tears are the nectar of the Gods.”
“Acid is yellow!”
“Imagination power!”
“Sex power!”
“Cunt power!”
“Commodities are the opium of the people.”
There were hundreds of others. A steady stream of youthful comers and goers filed through the courtyard gate and milled about in the yard. Everybody had a happy, laughing, vacationing look. I went over to one booth and asked to buy a copy of L?nragé, a paper with fairly funny cartoons the Anarchist group had begun putting out. The longhaired boy at the booth stared at me coldly, decided I was not ridiculing him but was simply not one of the well-informed, sneered at me, and said, “They’re over there. Here we are Trotskyites. We don’t mess with their garbage.” I apologized, and sauntered away. I did not have the courage to try another booth. Anyway, I could buy the paper on the street in St.-Germain.
“Come on,” Harry shouted at me across some heads. “Let’s go see the amphitheaters.”
The amphitheaters did not appear to have changed any since Monday. They were jammed right up literally to the rafters, with students sitting on the statues and in the niches in the walls. The “NO SMOKING” signs had been mutilated and made to read “SMOKE!”, as if it were a general’s command. They could have been exactly the same students that I saw on Monday, and as far as I knew they were, so that I had the strange feeling they had all been sitting there without sleep, bowel movements or any other normal function for the three full days that I had been away. We did not go in but stood in the doorway. Some boy had the gavel up on the stage and while we stood there he recognized some girl with long stringy hair and extremely tight gray corduroy pants, who had some indistinguishable amendment to make to something. The morning papers had said that the students had already voted to boycott year-end exams, but this group apparently did not know this, had not voted yet and was still discussing the wording of the proclamation. Bottles of red wine, long loaves of bread and hunks of cheese and sausage passed back and forth from hand to hand. The more or less laughing uproar made such a din it was hard to hear anything that was said.
Harry motioned to me and we started away down the crowded, ringing corridor and ran head-on into Hill and some of his friends.
I must say they looked pretty grubby. Hill appeared to be starting a beard, but it may simply have been that he had not had time to shave for some days.
Anne-Marie was with them, as was Terri of the long hair, and bearded Bernard, but Hill had his arm well around another girl and it was pretty clear they were lovers, at least for the time being. Anne-Marie did not appear to mind, in her militant way. Thin and small as she was, she nevertheless moved along like a sturdy little tank, whose turret gun never stops turning and looking. Even the militantly clean Anne-Marie looked a little grubby. But I understood—whether Harry did or not—that none of them had had a chance at an honest-to-God bath since the Monday of the occupation, if not since the Friday night battle in the rue Gay-Lussac.
I guess Harry did understand it; about the no-bath beatnik, hippie look. At least, he played it all very cool. So did Hill. I thought then that Hill was desperately wanting to avoid any big argument with his father in front of his friends. I think Harry wanted to avoid the same thing. You might never have known that they had ever argued about anything in their lives, looking at them shake hands and say hello. “We just came over to look the Sorbonne over,” Harry smiled. “But I didn’t have any idea we might find you here, run right into you in the corridors.”
“We’ve been sleeping here since Monday night,” Hill smiled back, and he squeezed the little girl he had his arm around and smiled down at her, so that it was pretty obvious with whom he, anyway, had been sleeping since Monday night. “A lot of the kids brought their sleeping bags. It’s not bad at all.
“Actually, you probably wouldn’t have found me,” he said, “a day later. We’re moving our Cinema Committee over to the Odéon. It is felt that since we in Cinema are basically cultural it is better for us to be in the headquarters of the Cultural Revolution. Anyway, there’s a lot more room up in the backstage areas there than there is here in this jammed madhouse.”
“We understood the place had been thrown open to the public,” I said apologetically. “So we thought we’d look in.”
We were speaking English and Hill’s new girl suddenly answered, in unaccented American-English. “It has, it has, it has been thrown open. Wide open. To everybody in Paris. Workers, artists, everybody. We want everybody to come. We want to get acquainted with everybody, in a whole new way of life, of living.”
“This is Florence,” Hill introduced her. “She’s a new member of our Cinema Committee.”
It seemed pretty clear to me why she was a new member of the Committee, and I would have bet 50 dollars with anybody that Hill had certainly been her sponsor.
“She’s half-American,” Hill said. “But she was born and raised in France. She only returned from the States a few days ago, by accident. Without knowing anything at all about the Revolution.”
“Well, I guess she’s finding out now, though,” Harry smiled.
“She sure is,” Hill said, and squeezed her again smiling down.
“I’m loving it,” Florence said.
“I’m about to be elected Chairman of the Students’ Cinema Committee of the Sorbonne and Odéon,” Hill said. “We’re having the meeting this afternoon, if we can find an empty room. Otherwise, we’ll wait and do it after the move to Odéon.”
“Well, I think that’s great, Hill,” Harry said.
“So do I,” I said.
The others stood silently smiling at us that peculiar innocent smile, Terri of the innocent face, and bearded warm-eyed Bernard, all of them except Anne-Marie. It is not true that Anne-Marie did not smile. But her smile, while equally innocent and pleasant, was so superior and openly contemptuous of us “Older Generations” that for me at least it did not seem a smile. It was more like a smirk. Probably she did not even know it.
“But the best news,” Hill said, “the best news, is about the Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt. Don’t you think? We’ve had our boys out there talking to them since Saturday, almost a week. And now they’ve finally closed up shop and seized the plant. At Flins, too. We are all going to march out to Boulogne-Billancourt late this afternoon and hold a solidarity meeting with the Renault workers in front of the gates.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” Harry said, pleasantly enough. “What about the police?”
“Strike while the iron is hot,” Hill said. “We’ve got the whole bunch of them on the run, now. I don’t think the police will bother us. But if they do, so much the better for us and worse for them.”
Harry was still smiling. “Come on, Jack,” he said suddenly. “We’ve got things to do and things to see. We didn’t mean to bother you, or upset any of your timing or plans.”
“Oh, you didn’t bother us,” Hill smiled. “It was good to see you.”
He did not offer to shake hands now, and neither did Harry. Hill turned away and with his arm still around his little half-American girl led his group off down the hollering, reverberating corridor.
“Dumbass kids,” Harry said, as we started off the other way. “They’re monkeying around with dynamite. It’s one thing to close down a couple of universities. Nobody really gives much of a damn, and nothing much is really hurt. But it’s an entirely different thing to close down all the major industries of France. That’s something else again. They do that and they’re going to find their heads in a noose.”
We were almost at the great front door now, that opened onto the rue des Écoles and the back view of the old Musée de Cluny across the street. A sandwich, coffee and soup kitchen had been opened up by the students in the big main hall near the front door. You didn’t pay. You could contribute if you wanted.
“I think I’m going to leave you here,” Harry said suddenly as we went between the columns and down the steps. “I just remembered I’ve got a producer-director’s meeting with some guys. Over on the Right Bank.” His face suddenly looked all pinched up. “Anyway, I don’t want to see any more right now.”
“Dynamite,” he said again as he left. “Absolute dynamite.”
I walked home alone through the buzzing, swarming Quarter.
Harry certainly appeared to be right. That night M. Pompidou went on television for the second time. General de Gaulle of course was already in Rumania on his six-day state visit which he refused to cancel, had left in fact on Tuesday. He would address the nation in a few days, the Prime Minister said in his speech. We all of us watched it, the same gang of Americans, at the Gallaghers’ apartment.
There was no placating of the students this time, and in fact the speech was announced only go minutes before the Prime Minister spoke. It appeared the whole Government had become first terrified, then furious at the prospect of the workers closing down their factories and following the students. M. Pompidou declared that he was prepared to use force if necessary to stem the student rebellion, to keep it from spreading to French industry. “This Government will do its duty,” he said. “Its duty is to defend the Republic. It will defend it.”
And this time the Government tried a new wrinkle, one which appeared to be caused by desperation, and which also appeared to have backfired. The Government permitted the student leaders on TV for the first time. For maybe 15 minutes before M. Pompidou spoke the three boys, Sauvageot, Dany Cohn-Bendit and Alain Geismar held a dialogue with a group of Government-selected correspondents, and made absolute fools of them with their charm, good humor and good sense. Cohn-Bendit was especially good. He had a particular charisma. You could not help but like him. “We just do not like the society which we are forced to live in,” he said over and over, smiling. “We just do not want to live like that any more.” That was the first time that that particular student theme was ever given public voice, as I remember.
And after them the Prime Minister seemed very anticlimactic.
I looked over at Harry over the heads of the others, and he nodded.
“This could mean anything,” he told me later privately at the pulpit bar. “Those kids beat him hands down. It could mean a generalized nation-wide illegal strike by everybody—and a continuing one, without any time-limit for stopping. The Unions have completely lost control over their younger element. But for God’s sake, don’t tell Louisa.”
I walked home alone that night very thoughtfully.
Neither Weintraub nor young little Samantha had shown up that night, either.
11
MY MISTRESS CALLED ME and came by that Thursday evening of the 16th. I was relieved that she did. I did not have a dinner date that night. And I did not feel like going out and dining alone in some restaurant. The French are excessively rude about staring at lone diners. Somehow it seems to menace them, and they aren’t careful about hiding their disapproval. Normally I am quite capable of handling this and am good at staring coldly back, but tonight I was pensive and I didn’t feel up to it. Neither did I feel like slapping something together and wolfing it down at home alone. I was feeling low and depressed. It was one of those lag periods, one of those spells that come, when a bachelor’s life doesn’t seem all that good after all and you are inclined to start asking yourself what the hell it all means, and what the hell is it really worth? That was no kind of mood to have living alongside the dark, flowing river Seine twinkling oily under the tall quai streetlights. And yet I knew I would be drawn helplessly to my windows, to stare at it, and its dark, masked, massive indifference to my death. It was going to be that kind of night.
So I was glad she called.
Besides, I had been wanting to ask her what she thought about what was going on. Martine was sort of my barometer about everything French: economic; social; political. I had never known her to be wrong. She had for example predicted to me several weeks in advance le Généralde Gaulle’s vicious attack on the dollar. Through this I was able to make myself a small piece of change on the Bourse through my illegal money man Monsieur Jardin. Naturally I was anxious to know what she thought about the Revolution. But our ground rules were that I was never to call her; never, under any circumstances. She was always to call me.
I could hear the phone ringing as I came up the one flight of stairs and I hurried with my key, and ran to get it. A few minutes, and I might very easily have missed her.
“Yes?”
“Cheri?”
“Martine! I’ve been wondering—”
“I can not talk now,” she said guardedly. “But you will be home tonight? Yes? You do not have one other date? No?”
“No. I don’t have. But if I had, I’d cancel it. I—”
“I can not talk now,” she said again. “I will come at nine-fifteen. I will cook tonight. I bring everything. He has to be out for Ministerial affairs. By-by, Cheri.”
I started to say goodby but the phone had already clicked dead in my ear.
I sat and stared at it a while. I certainly did want to see her about the Revolution. And my cafard, my fear and hate of the river were quite suddenly gone. The river could be very romantic, even gay, at times.
As I’ve said before I’m apparently a low-keyed man sexually. That is to say, I can take it or I can leave it alone. It does not really bother me when I don’t have it, as it does some people. I was that way even when I was young. But I hadn’t seen Martine in over two weeks. And Martine had a private special habit of always cooking in her underwear. I contemplated the empty telephone and thought about this with considerable pleasure.
The reason she did it was purely practical. She did it to protect her wardrobe. She spent almost every dime she had on her clothes, and she took a great deal of thought and care with her outfits. She was not about to get grease spots on some thing, not even on a robe de chambre. She was not about to have her things permeated with cooking smells. So she cooked, at my place anyway, in her underwear.
I didn’t care what the reason was. I enjoyed watching the result. By underwear I mean her bra and her panties. She had a fine behind, and lovely breasts. She also wore her high-heeled shoes, on her bare feet, after carefully taking off her stockings. Apparently she seemed to feel grease spots would not seriously hurt her Mancini shoes. And kitchen floors are sticky.
Somehow the shoes added quite a flair to the whole thing. Don’t ask me why, but they did. And I was the observer. I would pull a chair around, and sit in my living room, and watch her, down the short hallway, concocting whatever dish it was she was making. Once in a while, rarely, she would turn her head from where she bent over the oven and peer at me with an amused smile and say, “Et toi! Et voilà, toi!” She preferred to keep her cooking and her sex separate. She was truly a fabulous cook.
Why she originally took up with me I have never figured out. I once asked her this and she grinned that funny, tough-as-nails grin the Southerners have, and said, “That is why, Jean.” She always called me Jean, French-style
. I sort of got the point, which was not flattering, but it never really answered my question.
She was a blonde Southerner, Martine. There is a race of them. God knows where they came from, maybe their origin is Tuscan, but they have the aquiline nose and same high cheekbones as the dark ones, only their skin is fair and their hair blonde. Even their body hair is blonde. It makes a striking contrast—I mean, that Roman nose and cheekbone with all that blonde skin and hair. And they were just as tough-headed as the dark Southerners, when it came to bargaining or buying. Maybe even tougher, if that’s possible.
I had met her at a literary cocktail at Magdalen McCaw’s, a type of function she absolutely never went to. But Maggie’s husband George, who was with O.E.C.D., had had to pay off some social debts to minor Government people, and had invited Martine’s, ah,—well, friend. God only knows why he brought Martine instead of his wife. Maybe he thought Maggie and George, Maggie being such a famous American lady writer, were Bohemians—which only shows how little he knew Maggie.
I must say, Martine stood out at that literary cocktail. She was tall, statuesque, broad shouldered, big breasted, wore lots of eye make-up, and she was blonde, long-haired blonde—all that blondeness on one whose features openly proclaimed that she ought to be dark like a Mediterranean type. She looked immensely sexy there. There just wasn’t anybody at that literary cocktail like her. Or at any other Paris literary cocktail I have ever been to. Within five minutes after I started talking to her she had written down secretly my phone number. All around her were people like Maggie, with her hair skinned back, and her toothy smile, which I have always found innocent and charming, though many others have called it sharklike. The males were at about the same level, as was I myself: tweedy, hirsute, pipe-sucking. Why she picked me I have never found out. It could just as well have been one of the others.