by James Jones
“Why that kid chooses to stay with me in my little one room pad—
“Anyway, we stayed there from Sunday night through Thursday night and did not leave for town till Friday morning.”
I simply couldn’t resist. “But if you were out there all that time, how could she make all those phone calls to—” I stopped myself.
He peered at me narrowly. “To who? Not to you. To old Harry? Hell, all she had to do was to step into some temporarily vacant room and pick up the phone, man. Life’s freebeesville out there, man.”
“How did you know they were to Harry?”
“She told me,” Weintraub said.
“Did she tell you what they were about?”
“No. She didn’t. I didn’t ask her.” There was a slight pause. “How did you know about them?”
“Well, Harry told me. Naturally. What else?”
Weintraub shrugged and slugged back more booze. “She sure is some strange kid.” Another pause. “I asked her about why she chose to stay in my grubby little pad and she said, Weintraub you are naïve if you think knowing a few rich orgiasts is going to get me to Israel. She had no desire to become some cat’s property, she said. And nobody was going to put her up in a place when they knew that as soon as she got enough loot together she was going to cut for Israel.”
“She could hustle for it,” I said sourly.
“Sure she could. And knowing her, I certainly aint believing that would ever make her feel bad, or guilty. Like I said, I think she’s just having too good a time to want to move on.”
I thought it was time I made myself another drink. I certainly had no answer, no riposte, for that.
“But let me tell you about the kids,” Weintraub said proudly.
I will spare you his dialogue. On the Friday morning after returning he had gone around to the Sorbonne to look up Hill and his group. He was becoming seriously attached to them, and to their ideal. He found they had moved the day before to somewhere in the vast backstage interior of the Odéon. Sam was at his place, sleeping it all off, so he had gone over there to try and find them.
Well, you had no idea what it was like until you had been in there. In the first place it was so crowded around the entrance by people trying to get into the 24-hour-a-day marathon dialogue in the amphitheater itself that you could hardly get in the place at all. Once you did get in, and up through the marble staircases and columns to the first floor where the red-plush entrances to the old amphitheater itself were, you were completely blocked off from any entrance to the backstage area by gangs of young toughs, blousons noirs kids, with thick chains hanging around their necks. The chains apparently served as both their badge of office, and as weapons if necessary. They were guards, hired, or at least acquired, by the students. Certainly none of them could pass for University students. In fact, most of them appeared never to have finished primary school, let alone lycée. They were everywhere, and they were adamant about not letting anybody pass who did not have a Laissez-Passer card. Finally Weintraub had got one of them, a huge, broad, fat muscle-boy with an evil grin but an apparently ready sense of humor, to go up into the dim labyrinthine backstage interior and bring down Hill Gallagher, who got him through. And that was how Weintraub finally became a bona-fide member of the Comité du Cinéma des Étudiants de la Sorbonne. He took out of his pants pocket his permanent Laissez-Passer card and showed it to me.
What he finally found when Hill led him up through five or six crowded grubby floors was a tiny room under the eaves crowded with one table-desk, one large refrigerator box containing cans of film, and 13 or 14 rather smelly and not well-washed students, all talking at the same time. One of the floors they passed had been set up as a provisory hospital, where young boys and girls in dirty white coats often with bloodstains on them ran in and out saying “Shh!” to everybody. You could hear the moans and groans of the wounded, presumably students, as you passed it.
What the 13 or 14 students were arguing about Weintraub never did find out. Despite his excellent French the student patois coupled with a lot of argot made it difficult for him to understand, and besides as soon as he entered he immediately began to sweat profusely which distracted him further. The entire little room, which had only one small skylight, felt like a hot-house for orchid growers. The Chairman who had been elected over Hill, sitting behind the table-desk, was, or claimed to be, a Swiss student and had never been registered at the Sorbonne. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses, and looked and acted like a genuine Commissar. Two doors led off from the small room, in addition to the entrance door. Behind one was apparently a temporary kitchen which had been set up as a place for them to get something to eat occasionally, and beyond the other was a place a few of them at a time at least could snatch some sleep. Weintraub had spent all of Friday, Friday night, most of Saturday and all day today with them.
It was on Saturday that the great crise came, when they thought they were going to be raided by a flying squad of riot police and had transferred all their cans of shot film out of a rear door and spirited them all to Weintraub’s one-room pad in his pension, where they remained hidden even now. Though, it developed, the police raid did not materialize after all.
“I’m pretty proud of that,” Weintraub grinned at me across Harry’s bar. “They really do trust me, those kids. You ought to come along with me and see it. It’s something to have seen.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“As a matter of fact,” Weintraub smiled, “I am commissioned by the Committee to request you to come.”
“Me? Really? But why?”
“Well, I’m trying to introduce them to certain different stars and directors I know who might help them. Burton. Harrison. And when I mentioned you, the idea was brought up immediately that you might be the right one to write the commentary for their film for them. A lot of them read your Review, you know,” he added as an obvious flattery.
I thought about it for a moment. “All right. I’ll come with you one day. I’d certainly like to see it. When can we go?”
“Why not go tonight?” Weintraub grinned. He looked around Harry’s crowded living room. “We can go as soon as we leave here.”
“Tonight?”
“Sure. Why not? They’ll all be there.”
“What about Sam?”
“She’ll go with us. She’s been going ever since Saturday morning. She’s got her own card. She loves it up there.” He paused to suck at his cigarette, and grinned. “You’re liable to see some pretty strange sights up there. So be prepared.”
I looked around Harry’s quiet living room myself. At the moment everybody was drinking and waiting for the curry, whose delicious odor drifted in to us from Louisa’s kitchen. “Okay. Why not? What have I got to lose?”
“Not a thing in the world,” said Weintraub cheerfully. “Oh, by the way, I think I better tell you that Hill voted against having the Committee to ask you to come.”
That took me back a little. “But, why?”
Weintraub shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess because you’re such a close ‘relative’, so to speak. I guess he felt it would be like them asking his dad to come help them.”
“That irritates me,” I said.
“Don’t let it. He was way outvoted. So we’ll go? After?”
“Yes.”
We took a back way route that mounted the rue Cardinal Lemoine and passed up and around the Panthéon. Apparently there was fighting again tonight at the Carrefour St.-Michel. As we climbed the hill toward Contrescarpe I could still taste Louisa’s curry, and sucked at my teeth and gums appreciatively. We turned at the rue Clovis. Lots of people were out tonight, and a heady excitement floated on the air. But the Panthéon itself was deserted, and nearly dark. At least seven or eight big camions of CRS were parked square in front of the Panthéon, in the Place there, loaded with men and ready to move. There was a Commissariat on the opposite corner, and uniformed policemen moved in and out the door continually. Every few seconds a helmeted moto
rcycle cop roared up, or roared away. We took the rue Cujas down the far side. When we crossed the Boulevard St.-Michel to rue Monsieur-le-Prince, we could hear the roar of the fighting, way down at the Carrefour. The street was jammed with people craning their necks and looking. There were no cars.
I had seen the Odéon once with Harry on Thursday, but I was totally unprepared for the crowding and hysteria we encountered as soon as we turned into Monsieur-le-Prince off the Place Edmond Rostand. We cut left on Vaugirard, and before we turned back right on the rue Corneille beside the Odéon building we could see a huge cordon of CRS or Gendarmes Mobiles blocking off the entirety of Vaugirard in front of the building that houses the Senate. The low little walkway under the low thick arches that surrounds the Odéon building was so jammed with exultant students that we kept to the street, but the street was almost as crowded. The great majority of the crowd did not seem to be students.
When we got to the great front doors under the colonnade, it was hard to get close enough to the door guard to get admitted. The porch was mobbed by people trying to get into the talkathon in the amphitheater, and a lot of them were socialites. I recognized the Countess Something-or-other, and saw the Baroness de Whatcha-ma-call-it, whom I had met a few times, both of them with fairly large groups, the ladies all in their furs and escorted by tall handsome men in dinner jackets. Preferential treatment was obviously being given to celebrities of this type.
Once we were in and up the not-crowded marble staircase to the first floor I recognized Dave’s great fat muscle-boy, who wore a bight of bicycle chain three feet long with both ends open and dangling near his waist. The armpits of his half-open jersey shirt gave off an odor that spoke of years of insufficiently washed-away sweat still lingering in them. He grinned and let us through when Weintraub explained who I was. “But be sure you get your pal a card for hisself, hunh?” he called after us in French.
On the back stairs and in the corridors, through half-open doors, every cubbyhole and room seemed filled with a committee of students violently discussing something or other and the cigarette smoke was thicker than fog. The corridor floors were filthy with ash marks and rubbed-out butts on the once-red carpet. But then the whole place looked like it hadn’t been washed in over a 100 years anyway. We were properly “Shh!”-ed by the dedicated white-coated workers of the hospital, then after two more flights we were in the little room under the eaves already described to me by Weintraub earlier.
Terri of the beautiful hair was there, so was bearded Bernard, so was Anne-Marie of course, and so was the half-American girl Florence, who for some reason now seemed to have attached herself to Weintraub. Hill was there, too, but after an embarrassed perfunctory handshake he backed off into a corner and said little.
The first thing we took care of was my card. With crisp dispatch the Chairman, who was called Daniel, seized a white card and on it wrote:
ODEON—COMMISSION CINEMA LAISSEZ-PASSER PERMANENT—and then looked up at me through his steel-rimmed glasses. I had already been introduced as Monsieur Hartley.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Why, Hartley,” I said.
“No. Your first name.”
“Jack.”
He wrote it JACQUES on the card, in red ink this time, explaining as he did it, “We never use last names here, on anything we write. It is a precaution. It is a safety measure, for you, as well as for the Committee. Should this card by any accident fall into the hands of the police, you know.” His French had a slightly strange accent to the ear. He signed it with an illegible flourish and handed it to me and I put it in my left front pants pocket. Like Weintraub. I somehow appeared not to want it in my wallet, with my passport and my credit cards.
Then we launched into a hot and heavy and long-winded discussion about my writing the Commentary for the film they wanted to make. Weintraub was certainly right when he said it was hot in there. Would I be interested in writing such a Commentary? Yes, I certainly would. But I couldn’t very well write it until I had seen at least rushes, and preferably a finished copy, of the film they would make. Here someone else broke in. Well, of course, that was the trouble at the moment. They had no way of getting developed the film they had already shot. Whoever the boy was, he indicated the refrigerator box and the cans of film in it. The police were watching every shop and company that developed film in Paris, both still photos and ciné, and any student film that was turned in would certainly be confiscated. Well, I was willing to wait, I let them know. But I certainly couldn’t write or even begin to write a Commentary for them until I could see some film. And anyway, I pointed out, the Revolution wasn’t finished yet. Would I be willing to write and print some articles about them and their aims and the aims of the Revolution in my English-language Review? I was asked. I certainly would, and gladly. They would be willing to give me a boy, or a girl, to work closely with me on them. When did I expect the next issue of my Review to appear? I was asked sharply by Daniel. I explained that that depended on a number of things. I had an issue about ready to go, but my Review was printed in Holland, because it was so much cheaper there, and that presented a problem about getting the material up there, since the transportation and mail strikes. I needn’t worry about that, I was informed by Daniel.
He grinned at me. “We—that is, the students, not the Cinema Committee alone—have cars going to Holland all the time. We could deliver the material for you. And by boys without long hair.” His own hair was cut short, I noted. “We feel,” he looked around, “at least, I feel that the sooner the articles on us are on the stands in Paris and in America the better it is for us, and for the Revolution. Does anyone have any discussion on that?”
Instantly there was a babble of voices that made my head really ache. They certainly did have a thing about discussion. I had noticed from the moment I entered that this thing of democratic discussion was as much a sacred ritual with them as some other ritual might be with a church, and it was beginning to give me a pain in the ass. Also, I found I was taking an active dislike to Daniel the Chairman for some reason I could not isolate or name. It was hot as hell in there, I was sweating, and the whole thing had been in French, which, though I speak it well enough, tires me when it is done in a climate of emotional excitement. And now Weintraub and that little girl Florence appeared to have disappeared somewhere.
Just as if he had actively read my thoughts, Daniel smiled at me and said, “Let one of us show you around the rest of our establishment up here, why don’t you?” He then plunged right back into the discussion, which by this time had turned from the delivery of my Review through to Holland to something having to do with various shooting assignments the various teams were competing for for tomorrow.
The boy who took me around had long hair, and his long hair could have stood a good washing. He was called Raymond. The first place he took me was to the right, into the “cooking” area, which was in fact slightly larger than the “office”. It was nearly empty, the floor was dotted with rather ripe-looking blankets, and over a tiny butane cooking apparatus one boy was heating himself some canned soup. And over in one corner Weintraub was fucking that half-American girl Florence.
The boy Raymond, he was quite short, did not turn one greasy hair. “Would you like to take a look down at the theater? We have our own special balcony,” he told me quietly in French.
“Why, yes,” I said. Neither Weintraub nor Florence looked up from their locked embrace, and as far as I could tell, without actually peering, did not even break their rhythm.
So Raymond led me past the boy, still concentratedly heating his soup, down the narrow room to another door at the far end. When we opened it and stepped through, shutting it behind us, we were on a tiny darkened balcony right up under the roof of the theater itself. Seven floors below us the nonstop dialogue which had been going ever since the students occupied the Odéon four days ago was in full cry. A tall blond boy on the stage who was chairing the debate with a large gavel, and doing it well
, had recognized a citizen, obviously not a student, and certainly no executive, in other words a worker, who was asking to large numbers of angry boos whether the developing general strikes might not be doing more harm to the French people than good. Amidst lots of derisive shouts the man stuck to his point and developed his argument, which was essentially that what France really needed was more inflow of American capital investment, which according to him would automatically change the antiquated French capitalistic structure and bring it along to the more modern American corporate system and in so doing would both quietly and peacefully do away with the old entrenched French Patronat which was the root of all the trouble anyway. He sat down red-faced to a smattering of applause and a great number of derisive boos. The blond boy beat his gavel and recognized someone else, who rose to refute the first man. We went back in. I could hardly help seeing that Weintraub and Florence were still at it.
“Would you like to take a look at the sleeping quarters?” Raymond said politely.
“Why, yes. I would,” I said. I hoped it sounded cool enough.
We went back through the “office”, still vibrating with some democratic discussion or other, and through the other door. This room was narrower but considerably longer than the “cooking quarters”, darker, its floor covered with sleeping bags, greasy mattresses and the same sleazy-looking blankets, and on one of these Hill Gallagher was humping Samantha Everton. The blanket didn’t cover much of them, and Samantha, who was not a tall girl at all, appeared to have very long and lovely legs—as pretty as Louisa’s in fact, which were the handsomest I’d ever seen.