The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “Le Général will have to pay for this. In a short while he will declare an amnesty and release the Général Salan and other officers who are still in prison from the Générals’ Revolt in Algeria. But it is a small price to pay. They are not longer dangerous.

  “It is good news, no?”

  “It is,” I said. “It is also good to have a girlfriend who has the ear of the mighty.”

  “Ah, oui! It is what you Americans say an extra,” Martine smiled. She was already in the midst of cooking. “But you must remember it is a secret, hah? The deliveries of gasoline will not begin until in the night tomorrow night. They will continue all through Friday, so that the citizens will have sufficient gasoline for the weekend of the Pentecost. Of course the vacation will include the Whitsuntide Monday of the June 3. Nobody will come back till Monday night or Tuesday morning.”

  She grinned. “It is anticipated it will break the back of everything. It will prove the Government is still the Government and is in control. But you must say nothing. Not even to your friends the Gallaghers. Not until Friday.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t. But it is nice to know. I had begun wondering if I shouldn’t drive Madame Gallagher and the baby out to Brussels.”

  “Two days ago I might have said yes. But is no longer necessary,” Martine said crisply.

  She had bought us what in French is called petits poussins, what we would call spring chickens, but smaller than we use in the States, young birds not even half grown. She baked them in the oven with a black sauce made out of the giblets, then she pan-cooked them again in a skillet with the sauce, and they were delicious. I ate two entire birds myself. And Martine ate two whole birds also. I enjoy women who like their own cooking. I also like women who have a real and honest healthy appetite.

  As we sat down to table, after she had put on her loose-flowing robe split to the waist, I was thinking that I did not now need to talk to Harry about driving Louisa and McKenna out. In one way I was relieved. But in another way I was sorry it was not going to be forced on us, what with all the Samantha business. Also, there had been no word from young Hill as far as I knew.

  “So you’re going to be able to stay all night?” I smiled across the table.

  “All the night, Chéri,” she smiled. “The whole night.”

  19

  I WENT AROUND all the next day and night with my private information locked up inside me like a ticking timebomb. Every time I opened my mouth I shut it again and thought twice. There were so many people to whom I could tell what I knew and relieve their anxieties.

  But I kept my word.

  Everything turned out exactly as Martine had told me that it would.

  At three o’clock there was the Cabinet meeting, apparently. At four-thirty le Général went on radio and TV, pre-taped, with a remarkably strong address saying he would not resign but that he was dissolving the Assemblée Nationale and calling for new elections which would take place, as prescribed by law, in a certain number of weeks.

  The theme of the address was “Participation”—of the citizenry in Government, and of the workers in industrial management; and the keynote was the “terrible threat” of a Communist conspiracy that wanted to destroy la belle France. Particularly when compared with his feeble speech of a week before it was a powerful address.

  Nobody believed that stuff about the Communists, whom he did not actually name, but it was a convenient and dramatic handle with which to present his attitude to the French bourgeoisie, who had always feared the Communists, and were still the most powerful voting group in France.

  An odd fact about this address was that on TV there was no visual image, only a blank screen with le Général’s voice recorded over. I was told later by somebody that this was because the TV employees were oh strike against the Government’s policy of censorship of the Government-owned TV, but I do not know if this was true.

  That night, of course, I could talk. But who in life ever wants to hear anybody say, after the fact, that he had known before but hadn’t told? Anyway, that night the gasoline ploy was still a secret, since deliveries would not begin until some time around eleven-thirty or midnight. So I really could not tell my whole story anyway. In the end I kept shut.

  That afternoon, the afternoon of the Thursday of May the 30th, there was a huge, a massive demonstration on the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées in favor of the Gaullists. It went on before, during, and after le Général’s big speech, and it had people like Malraux, Debré, Roger Frey, Maurice Schumann, and François Mauriac leading it. The Government did everything it could to make it a success. They even provided Army trucks to haul people in from outside Paris for it. Not only that, for the first time since the last serious street fighting they allowed the independent stations Radio Luxembourg and Europe Number One to come back on the air to report it. The radio reporters were rather droll when they thanked the French Government for allowing them to recommence broadcasting and hoped that they would do the same for the student demonstrations in future.

  In spite of all that it was a pretty impressive demonstration. The Champs-Élysées was one huge living sea of people for de Gaulle, from the Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. An interesting note about it was that there were lots of American flags in the street, along with the Tricolor. In spite of le Général. Americans in the office buildings along the Champs waved their own little American flags from their windows and the French people in the streets cheered and waved their bigger flags in response. Certain sources, usually Government sources, claimed it was a bigger crowd than the student-worker march across town on May the 13th. Certainly it was a better-dressed crowd and a louder one. And surely it was a richer one. There was a much higher percentage of older people in it.

  At least I heard that, on the radio. I did not go to it myself, any more than I went to any of the big student-worker demonstrations.

  There weren’t many of us at the Gallaghers’ that night at seven. Harry was out filming the Gaullist march for the student film. The UPI boy and the TV commentator Fred Singer were both out reporting it. The American businessman with the string of Left Bank girls was either out demonstrating or stuck in his Champs-Élysées office. But Samantha Everton was there. And Weintraub. And old Ferenc. The lady painter was there, too. She was obviously rather infatuated with Ferenc now. I figured they had done the dirty deed. I hoped so.

  When we all left this time, Samantha hung back again. She did not make it obvious, but I noticed it this time. Outside, Weintraub asked me to have dinner with him someplace in the Quartier.

  I declined but said, “Haven’t you got anything better to do than eat with me?”

  He made a wry smile. “Sam told me to fuck off. She’s busy, she said. And she intends to remain busy.”

  “But isn’t Harry out shooting?”

  “Yes,” Weintraub said. “Yes, he is.”

  We walked along.

  I looked at my watch. It was nine P.M. My ego got the better of me. After all, what harm could Weintraub do if he knew?

  “Listen,” I said. “Did you know that by morning this city will have sufficient gasoline for the entire Pentecost weekend?”

  “What?” he said. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Or at least a lot of it,” I said, wanting to be absolutely honest. “And by Friday night there’ll be all the gas anybody could want.”

  “But that will be the end of everything!” Dave said in an odd panicked voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can’t tell,” I said. “Can’t tell who, I mean. But it’s what I consider a reliable source.”

  “But that’s the end of the Revolution and everything,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Probably.”

  “How the hell did they do that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “But shouldn’t we tell the kids at the Cinema Committee?”

  “I’m
not at liberty to,” I said. “I only told you in a moment of ego weakness. Anyway, there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”

  “Yeah!” he said, drawing it out like a sigh. “So— He’s won.”

  “I always said he would,” I said. “He’s an old fox.”

  “Whoever thought that one up for him deserves a medal,” Wein-traub said.

  “And he’ll probably get one,” I added on.

  “Do you think the newspaper stories about him going to see Massu and Hublot in Mulhouse are true?” Weintraub asked.

  “That’s what I hear,” I said.

  “Then it’s all over,” Weintraub said.

  “Pretty nearly, I would imagine,” I said.

  “Now, how the hell did you find all that out?” he said, in a kind of wondering tone.

  “Not at liberty to tell,” I said.

  I left him on the quai at my corner.

  But I didn’t much like myself. Damned ego. But what he had said about Samantha had set me to thinking. Was Samantha giving up her little friend and Weintraub? For Harry? Or was Louisa getting through to her and making a straight girl out of her or something? Louisa certainly had been mothering her. And I remembered what she had told me. This made the second—or was it the third?—night that Sam had stayed behind when the rest of us had left. And if so, my God what would that do to Harry?

  I thought about this while I had my first, and then my second, Scotch-soda looking out my windows at the empty Left Bank quais. I didn’t find any answer. I wasn’t even looking for one.

  Anyway, it looked like de Gaulle had won. And that Louisa was wrong.

  Poor, dear, darling Louisa.

  Harry showed up at the Odéon that night.

  He was with his “principals” and his two student crews, and his own volunteer cameraman, a professional who was on strike like the rest of them and who was scouting the Odéon hoping to shoot for Harry some short scenes there in the Cinema Committee offices. He was a likeable guy, politically as uneducated as Harry or Hill, or me, or any of the rest of us.

  De Gaulle was the one who was politically educated. There was an awful cloud of gloom over the kids’ offices. And I assumed the same was true of the Sorbonne. They had come up against a professional of long experience and been bested. And I think by then, that Thursday night, May 30th, they all sensed it.

  When I could, I got Harry off by himself. “What do you make of it, Harry?”

  He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “I think he’s got it made. If he doesn’t use any more violence, if he gives the idea of being patient, I think they’ll follow him.”

  “Do the kids know it?”

  “I think so,” Harry said. “Christ, can’t you smell the misery around here?”

  “I thought I could.”

  “He’s really such an old fox,” Harry said.

  “That he is. That he is. He told them that, as a matter of fact. In effect. He said don’t mess around with the pros until you’re dry behind the ears and know your business.”

  “Are you pro-de Gaulle?” Harry said.

  “I’m not pro-anything,” I said. “I’m an observer. I write a Review. You know about the gas,” I said.

  “What? No.”

  I looked at my watch. “Right this minute trailer trucks are unloading gas in every filling station in Paris. By tomorrow noon there will be more than enough gas for the Pentecost weekend. By tomorrow night there will be unlimited gasoline.”

  Harry squinched up his narrow eyes, and suddenly looked excited. “By damn! Then it really is over.” He was silent a moment. “By God, I’ve got to shoot that!”

  “How will that affect your film?”

  He stared at me. “It won’t affect it at all. We’ll have to hurry up a little, that’s all. When I said it’s all over, I did not anticipate that there wouldn’t be a few more riots. We’ll just have to catch them all, that’s all.

  “Oh, by the way. Saturday I’m taking what film these kids have got out to the Boulogne studios to get it developed. The guys on strike there all belong to my union, or a subsidiary. I’m arranging for the striking technicians to develop it for me. Would you like to go along?”

  “Hell, yes. Sure. Why not?”

  “I’m arranging the actual appointment tomorrow. I’ll call you and let you know the actual hour. It will probably be early.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I always sleep late.”

  He grinned.

  It was just then that Weintraub came in and came over to us.

  “Hello, Dave,” Harry grinned, in a gimlet-faced way.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Whadda you mean? I was the first one in this,” Weintraub said.

  “That is true,” Harry said. “On the other hand, you better make your hay now, Dave. I told you, I’ll likely be through shooting in a day.”

  This was a direct lie, because he had just told me he expected he would have to be shooting whatever riots were remaining. I said nothing.

  Weintraub took a little while to answer. And before he did he gave me a long cautionary but unreadable look which I did not understand. “Well,” he said finally, and grinned, “I’m just tired, if you want to know. I can’t take it any more like I used to. I’m plumb wore out.”

  Harry threw back his head to laugh. “I can appreciate that. I get the shaky knees myself, now.”

  Weintraub’s grin was courageous, probably one of the most courageous I’d ever seen. “We aint none of us getting no younger,” he said.

  I left soon after that. There weren’t many cars at the filling stations I passed on the way home, but there was at least one trailer truck at each of them pumping away, and sometimes there was an extra one waiting.

  20

  ONE OF THE THINGS General de Gaulle announced to the nation in his extraordinarily tough address on Thursday was that “civic action” must be immediately and everywhere organized. He added that to achieve this the local préfets would, in fact must, return “to the functions of commissars of the Republic”.

  I do not know the derivation of that term, but this was the actual term le Général had used when he returned to France during the end of World War II, when all of France including the Resistance organizations was in the throes of local lynch law and civil strife. By backing the local, duly elected law enforcement agencies he had been able to head off civil war and at the same time head off a Communist takeover, which at that time was a serious threat.

  Now he was evoking the same process. It was this that caused the Leftist leader Mitterrand to call his speech a “call to civil war”.

  Well, M. Mitterrand could not have been more wrong.

  On Friday morning, while the massive gasoline deliveries were still going on, almost the whole of Paris headed happily for the country for the long weekend. It was a marvelous bright sunny day, as if even the weather were conspiring to aid de Gaulle. Hordes of people filled the highways and Autoroutes in their newly reactivated cars. It was an exodus almost as great as the great annual August vacation rush. Since practically nobody was working that day anyway they did not even have to wait till the end of the working day and by mid-afternoon Paris appeared as empty as it did in August. About the only people left were the students occupying the Latin Quarter, and the cadres of workers occupying their plants—and the politicians holding feverish strategy sessions about whom to run for the various Assembly seats in the elections scheduled for June 23rd.

  It seemed all the big unions, including the Communists, wanted no direct political confrontation with the General. Without exception they issued statements withdrawing the political demands of two days before and seemed pleased to settle for purely economic ones. It seemed that, like children, they were all glad to have the heavy paternal hand of le Général there still in power.

  It appeared it was all over but the shouting, as my old grandfather would have said.

  A “Back To Work” movement was said to have started, although nob
ody seemed to know quite by whom. Probably it was a deliberate Government leak. That was what all we cynics thought.

  M. Pompidou announced the line-up of a new Cabinet, most of whose members had merely changed places as in musical chairs. But a few of the old ones were dropped, and without exception they were replaced by men who were a clear conciliation gesture to the Left, to get more Leftist votes for the Gaullists. In general, old fox de Gaulle appeared to have won again.

  There was a fire in the attic of the occupied Sorbonne on Friday, which burned away a fair portion of the roof on the rue des Écoles side before it was brought under control by firemen. This incident seemed to increase the feeling among the people that the students had about had it. I heard one man in the street saying, “How do they think they can run a Government when they can’t even wipe their own asses?”

  This seemed to be pretty much the general opinion.

  All in all, it was a quiet weekend, the first in a while. There was some strike-breaking by the police, but usually in the Government post offices, and the sit-in strikers all left peacefully. There was a general change in ambiance everywhere.

  There was still no news of Hill Gallagher.

  While all this change and rearrangement went on in the May Revolution noisily, it seemed a lull had developed in the Gallagher family’s story. Harry was out shooting all night almost every night and slept in the day. Sam was spending the evenings quietly with Louisa. Hill was gone. It was not likely Harry would be seen too much at the little hotel in the rue St.-Louis-en-l’Île. It gave me a feeling of hope that Samantha might leave, or be got out of, Paris in time. Maybe no Hiroshima explosion was necessary. No more, anyway, than had already happened between Harry and Hill.

  It was on the strength of this hope, plus the hunch that I might catch her in if I went before one P.M., that I bestirred myself Friday morning and went down to the little hotel on the rue St.-Louis-en-l’Île to see her. I wanted to talk to her.