‡In 1998, the French government acknowledged that a massacre had taken place but placed the death toll at “several dozen”; in La Bataille de Paris, Jean-Luc Einaudi estimates that 325 were killed. The most comprehensive study of the “battle of Paris,” Jim House and Neil MacMaster’s Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory, concludes that “a conclusive or definitive figure . . . will never be arrived at.”
THE STONE FACE
To Edith
Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.
JOHN 3:15
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
EXODUS 2:22
PART ONE
The Fugitive
I
1
HE LEANED forward on the edge of his seat, his chin in his palms and his elbows on his knees, rocking imperceptibly to the movement of the train. It was evening, and in the fading light beyond the window the flat green-and-brown French farmland hurried by. He found his lips almost forming a prayer; not in words, not to a God, but in an emotion reaching out to the earth, the sky, to the world in general.
He was just under thirty and a Negro, and his name was Simeon Brown. He had only one eye; a black patch covered the socket of the other. He was tall and slender, with nervous, sensitive hands.
The others in the compartment chatted, but Simeon did not join in. His mind was beyond the train, outside, in the spring air, already in Paris.
A long journey, Simeon thought. America was behind him, his past was behind him, he was safe. Violence would not be necessary, murder would not be necessary. Paris. Peace.
2
He stood excited and shy in the long line waiting for a taxi. He felt the memory of his shyness in crowds and he automatically straightened his back, raised his head, stuck out his chin. Tall, wiry brown pirate with kinky hair and a black patch. As a child, before the protective patch-mask, Simeon had tried to overcome his shyness by a self-hypnotic chant: You are a prince, you are a prince, you are a prince! With his back straight and his eyes proud and level, the shyness would fade; he would walk like a prince, feel like a prince. Sometimes people said, “What a conceited boy, walks like he owns the world!” Razor words; but he had succeeded in concealing his shyness.
It was a warm evening in May 1960, and the streets near Gare Saint-Lazare were filled with people. Simeon was an amateur painter; he painted for his own amusement, and now he explored the passing faces to discover the characters they revealed. That Frenchwoman is dry, pinch-faced—unloved and therefore unloving, unhappy, destructive. This round flabby-faced man with startled eyes is lost—in a city, a world, a universe he does not understand. Torn by fears, petty ambitions. Trapped like most men in the hell of routine, never stopping to ask those maddening questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going, and why? This young girl with swinging arms, darting eyes and health-flushed cheeks is alive; her face is a face of harmony. And these men, walking toward him in a group, with crinkly hair and skin which is not quite white but surely is not black? They had sullen, unhappy, angry eyes, eyes Simeon knew from the streets of Harlem. Baggy pants, worn shoes and shabby shirts. They glanced at Simeon unsmiling, and something strangely like recognition passed between him and them. Then they went on by him and disappeared.
3
Simeon found a room on the fourth floor of a small hotel on the rue de Tournon. He wanted to make no friends for a while. He explored the boulevards and small, twisting streets of the Latin Quarter, discovered the cafés where old men played cards all day. He admired the light in the spring sky, particularly at dusk, when the blue filtered through a silver haze.
One afternoon as Simeon sat at the Rhumerie Martiniquaise his eye was caught by the radiant face of a dark-haired young woman a few tables away from him.
For the first time since his arrival, Simeon felt lonely. It would be pleasant to talk to the woman, to try out his rusty college French. But his shyness returned at the thought of approaching an unfamiliar woman, white to boot.
Simeon stared at her. Suddenly she turned her head and her eyes met his. He felt hot and embarrassed. She looked at him with serene eyes and then, smiling faintly, turned the eyes away.
Shyness and desire warred in him. He hurried down his drink to give himself courage, then stood up abruptly and walked to her table. An absurd, frozen smile was on his lips.
“Pardon me,” he said in halting French. “It’s such a lovely day—I wondered if you would permit me to buy you a drink.”
He was trembling idiotically. You’re a prince, he told himself desperately, but he was too old; the fantasy no longer worked.
The smile flickered at the edges of the girl’s mouth and eyes. Without looking up at him, she replied, “Thank you, no, Monsieur.”
“I thought . . . I’m not trying to make advances. It’s just such a lovely day . . .”
“No, Monsieur.”
Simeon was mortified. He was certain that everyone on the terrace and on the street was staring at him. He was alone and naked on a stage, a blazing spotlight on him. The waiter appeared to be watching from the doorway of the café. Face burning like a torch, Simeon bowed stiffly and turned to walk back to his table. On the way, he tripped over the leg of a table and sent some glasses and bottles clattering to the floor. The young woman suppressed a laugh.
When he sat down again, Simeon cursed himself. Slowly, against his will, the old insidious thought came to him, the conditioned reflex. Racism. It was omnipresent. It was here in Paris, too. He turned the idea over in his mind, driving it into himself like a knife. There was an ache in the socket of the missing eye. He now detested the girl, with her mocking smile. He detested all of the people on the terrace who, he was still sure, were gloating over his humiliation.
Suddenly, the young woman’s face lighted as she looked toward the street. She jumped up. A tall African, black as anthracite, walked smiling up to her. They embraced and kissed. The people on the terrace continued to talk, to sip their drinks, ignoring this scene as they had ignored the scene with Simeon.
The African and the young woman left the terrace arm in arm. As they passed Simeon, who could not help staring, the girl looked at him with a broader, mocking smile, and winked.
4
Simeon stood before the easel at the window of his room and dabbed with his paintbrush at a portrait he knew he would never finish. He had started the portrait over and over again. It was the massive head of a man sketched so harshly that it looked as though it had been carved out of stone; the jaw was clamped tight, the mouth was a compressed bitter line, the skin was deathly pale, the eyes were flat, fanatic, sadistic and cold. It was an inhuman face, the face of un-man, the face of discord, the face of destruction. As he stared at the portrait—the face of Chris, of Mike, of the sailor, he felt his old inescapable torment of emotions—horror, disgust, fear, hatred, and a desire to kill. It was this face that invited him to murder, that had almost sent him to the electric chair.
Let the peace of Europe be a medicine for me against this face, he thought.
He went downstairs. It was a warm, sunny afternoon. He passed a black woman who walked with easy gait holding hands with a Frenchman. Newspaper headlines shouted: MOSLEMS RIOT IN ALGIERS. FIFTY DEAD. A tramp lay in the gutter, his chin flecked with filth and stubby beard, his skin plowed like a field by drink. Death and misery walked the earth, but this Paris summer sun shone brightly. The tourists carrying cameras were gay. Simeon thought of the portrait and of America. “The child is father of the man.”
A middle-aged man with swarthy skin and long crinkly hair pushed a cartload of fruit and vegetables. He looked like the group of men Simeon had seen outside the Gare Saint-Lazare when he arrived. Could these men be Algerians? Perspiring under the weight of the cart, the man looked at Simeon with eyes which were neither friendly nor unfriendly, only curious. Simeon, for reasons he did not fully understand, felt a sudde
n flash of guilt.
As Simeon walked on he remembered how, at fourteen, he too had worked as delivery boy in a grocery store, pulling wagons of food through the streets of Philadelphia. He had worn sneakers with holes in them and old hand-me-down shirts and knickers torn at the knees. He remembered how groups of white people had stared at him—and how he had stared back, sullen, defiant, detesting their nice clothes and leisure and lazy, inquisitive eyes.
“Hi, daddy-o!”
The greeting, in a rumbling bass voice, was addressed to him by a black mountain of a man with a moon-shaped face sitting on the terrace of Le Tournon Café.
“Hi,” Simeon answered.
“Take a seat, man. Relax the legs. Repose the buttocks. Enjoy the passing parade. Have a drink. You new over here, ain’t you?”
Simeon sat at the table, facing the street, and stretched his long legs in front of him. “I’ve been here two weeks.”
The mountain chuckled, a warm, friendly chuckle which boomed up from the cavernous stomach. “Can always tell you boys just come over from the States,” he said. “You walk around lookin’ all startled-like and freshly shaved in your well-pressed baggy-pants American clothes. My name’s Babe Carter.”
“Simeon Brown.”
“Simeon. Funny name. But then our people got just about the funniest first names in creation. And then, how come we’re all named Carter, Brown, Smith or Johnson? Some of them friggin’ slave-owners musta really messed up! What you drinkin’? Beer? Garçon! Une bière! Glad to see you over here, Simeon. Like to see the boys get out from under. One less victim. Wish we could move the whole black population out of the States. How long you plannin’ to stay in Europe?”
“A year at least.”
Babe chuckled. “If you stay a year, you’ll never go back.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Ten years. And when I came over I just meant to stay two months.”
Babe roared with laughter. His massive good humor was engaging, and intelligence shone through his tiny, sly, merry eyes. He was about forty, easily the biggest man Simeon had ever seen. He was well over six feet tall and gave the illusion of being just as big horizontally, yet he was not flabby. His gigantic arms and chest seemed on the verge of bursting through his thin white T-shirt. His coarse hair was clipped almost to the scalp, accentuating the roundness of his face.
“Ten years!” Babe roared triumphantly. “Seen ’em come and seen ’em go, as old Gibbon might say. Great town, if you don’t weaken. If you can stand up under the drinkin’ and the screwin’ and the good food and wine.” He sighed. “The things I’ve seen! Nice delicate little American fay chicks straight out of Barnard College who go down, down, once the brakes are off. Seen crackers become Negrophiles—at least, while they was here. Seen boys from rich famous families turn into bums because they couldn’t keep away from women and wine. Seen bums turn into respectable people, too. Paris is a catalyst . . . it’ll break you or make you. Tell me, what brought you across the sea?”
Simeon looked at the black giant with a slight smile, then unexpectedly told the stranger what he had told no one else. “I left to prevent myself from killing a man.”
Babe looked at him in astonishment. When he saw that Simeon was not joking, he rolled his eyes upward and raised his arms toward the sky. “Oops!” he said. “I ain’t said a mumblin’ word. Them’s the kinda things I don’t ask no questions about. Learned that lesson in the Harlem school of how to stay alive.”
Simeon enjoyed watching Babe’s mobile face. The man was obviously very much at home in Paris. Ten years. How long would he, Simeon, really stay? Would he go back to America afterward?
“Why did you come to France?” he asked Babe.
“Me? I came over to get out from under. Them people and their prejudice was on the verge of making me thin! So one day I just said, ‘Okay, feet, let’s get movin’, this ain’t no place for me.’ You and me, we ain’t the only ones. There’s a new Lost Generation over here, lots of dark cats from the States who’re here in Paris or in Copenhagen or Amsterdam or Rome or Munich or Barcelona, come over to get out from under that pressure, know what I mean? Ain’t never going back, either. Some days when you walk down a street you see so many American Negroes you think you’re back in Harlem.”
Simeon drew on his cigarette and was startled by the sight of a tall long-legged girl with dark glasses, short-cropped black hair and an impudent walk who was crossing the street toward them. What jolted him was the luminosity of the handsome girl, who must have been in her early twenties; an aura of smoldering energy, a sort of electric field surrounded her, her face and bare legs glowed with health. She was very much aware of her beautiful body, exaggerating its movements like a child playing with a new toy. She seemed to dance as she moved toward the door of the café; then she saw Babe and smiled. She disappeared into the Tournon.
Simeon whistled softly. “Nice friends you’ve got Babe.”
Babe chuckled. “You’ll meet her. Name’s Maria, she’s Polish, come here on a trip from Poland to try to get into the movies and become another Brigitte Bardot. She damn sure is built like Brigitte. Everybody’s tryin’ to make her, but no dice. She sits around with a bunch of Polish refugees inside the café. They’re friends of her family, and they watch her like hawks.”
They sat in silence then, drinking their beers and watching people stroll by. Simeon felt he had gone through his initiation now, this was his city. The old tension like poison had already begun to seep out of him, and he could feel himself growing strong and whole. He would become a new man. He wondered what that man would be.
Babe said, “What did you do in the States?”
“I was a newspaper reporter.”
“There’s a problem over here—making a living. You got any ideas?”
“I’d saved some money. Also, I’ll be writing feature articles for a magazine called He-Man. You know, sex, sports, sex, auto racing, sex, guns and sex. The editor thinks I should find a lot of stuff to write for him in Gay Paree. . . . And you?”
“I got a little shop, a little bookstore. You’ll see it later. Now, come on inside. Meet some of the people in the café.”
5
Maria was just inside the door. She was playing the pinball machine with great intensity, her hips swiveling as she thumped the machine. She paid no attention to Simeon.
The café itself was a garish splash of green, yellow and red. It was crowded, noisy, smoke-filled, with huge murals of the Luxembourg Gardens on the walls. Babe apparently knew everyone. They stopped before a group of tables where eight or nine young men and women sat, about half of them Americans.
“Meet Simeon, another refugee,” Babe said.
Simeon shook hands all around. The people were dressed casually and most of them needed haircuts; their faces were pleasant, though the eyes of some were faintly red from lack of sleep or too much drink. All of them were white.
“Take a seat, join us,” said a man named Lou. He had olive skin and intelligent eyes. He was playing chess with a girl.
“I’m from New York,” he told Simeon. “I play jazz trumpet over here. Paris is a state of suspended animation. I really want to compose. I’ll go back to New York in a year or so and settle down to serious work.”
Another man Clyde, with a red face and dusty blond hair and mustache, was shouting at his wife, Jinx, in a heavy Southern accent. “Go ahead, keep it up, ruin yourself if you like. But don’t go bringing no diseases home to me!”
Jinx, a New Yorker, had a harshly beautiful face with small, close, hysterical gray eyes and long hair she wore in a horse-tail that cracked like a whip about her shoulders.
“Darling, stop panicking in public. Besides, children are in the vicinity, my sweet.”
Their six-year-old daughter, Jane, stared at them silently, then she left her parents and came to stand in front of Simeon,
looking at him with cool sophistication.
“What happened to your eye?” she asked.
“It was a sacrifice.”
“What’s a sacrifice?”
“An offering. I gave it in exchange for something else.”
“What did you get in exchange?”
“All the rest.”
Simeon’s eye was caught by Maria, the Polish girl, as she slapped her hip hard against the side of the pinball machine. She whirled, angry at the machine, and walked toward the rear of the café. She stopped when Babe called to her.
“Maria, come meet a newcomer—Simeon. He just got in town.”
She stood in front of Simeon’s table and Simeon, rising, held out his hand. She stared at him strangely, seeming undecided about something, and did not take the hand. The moment was long, Simeon feeling ridiculous with his hand in the air. Finally she flushed, as though in anger, shook his hand, and without a word turned abruptly and walked away.
Simeon was flabbergasted. Babe whistled softly, then grinned, his sly eyes narrowing. “Man, you been hiding things from ole Babe. What did you do to her?”
Simeon laughed, still dazed, and shook his head. “Damned if I know. Never saw her before in my life.”
6
Maria was playing the pinball machine when Simeon went back to the Café Tournon the next afternoon. A group of Brazilians Simeon had met at the Alliance Française were playing guitars and singing in the rear of the café. Simeon stopped beside Maria and said “Bonjour.”
She glanced up at him from behind the smoked glasses, then looked down at the machine again without saying anything. She wore a close-fitting black dress and he was fascinated by the curved long line between her hips and armpits. Her skin glowed like phosphorous.
The Stone Face Page 3