They passed a big marchand de charbon coming out of his subterranean lair all sooty, like Pluto, with a sack of coal on his back. “Je viens chez vous ce soir,” the black giant said to Arturo. He delivered wood for their fireplace. They were called les bougnats—why, Arturo did not know—and were said to come from the Auvergne, like wet nurses from the Morvan. “Les enfants adorent ce bougnat.” Peter could understand that. When he was young, he confessed, he had liked the idea of infant chimney-sweeps—small agile black demons clambering down flues. His mother had read him a book called The Water Babies, about a chimney-sweep named Tom who fell into a brook; he could not remember the rest. He had been sad when she told him that they did not exist any more, on account of child-labor laws. “Les enfants-ramoneurs,” agreed Arturo. In his childhood, he too had liked the idea. “Oui, c’était pittoresque.” He made a sudden grimace of disgust. He pointed to the bougnat. “Un ivrogne.” They were all drunkards, he said, because of the unhealthy conditions they worked in. Soon there would be no more bougnats—survivals of injustice and inefficient specialization. “Won’t the children miss them?” said Peter. Children could not miss what they had never known, replied Arturo shortly.
Peter disagreed, thinking of blacksmith shops and barber poles and those country fairs his mother talked about. He felt sorry in advance for his children, who would never see the stoppeuse darning in the window on the rue de Grenelle or the gilders with their golden signs or the lens-grinder with the big eye over his shop or the cobbler with his wooden shoe.
He pointed to a palette hanging over the emporium of a marchand de couleurs. “Nice.” Bonfante gave a somber laugh. He asked whether Peter could guess why the palette was there. “For advertising, I suppose. I never thought about it. Does there have to be a reason?” “Oui! Il y a toujours une raison.” The explanation was that until the Third Republic the masses had been illiterate. You would not find such quaint signboards in les beaux quartiers, but here, where the poor lived, a few had survived. “Saintes reliques de l’analphabètisme du peuple!”He wrinkled his nose and stuck out his lower lip, the way all Italians did when they smelled something morally nauseating. “Mon cher, il faut toujours se méfier du pittoresque. Ça pue.”
Peter groaned. It was bad enough to know that everything he liked was doomed to disappearance without feeling obliged to be glad about it. And perforce that should include Bonfante. If he were capable of modernizing, he would be living in some skyscraper in a housing development and driving a new deux-chevaux, instead of standing here on the corner tall and gaunt, with his bare bald head, like one of the nicer prophets in the Old Testament, his overcoat flapping in the wind, his chin sunk in his old plaid muffler. He would never even be motorized. This fall when he had started driving-lessons, they had flunked him out of the auto-école.
When they parted, Peter felt another onrush of love. Maybe it was hopeless to shake Arturo’s faith in technology. Yet he had to keep trying. A world in which nobody could work except a machine would be horribly boring, he thought. He could not understand why the only people, besides himself, to see this were a few artists, who were prejudiced by the fact that they worked with their hands and enjoyed it. If the right to work became the privilege of a few, which might happen with automation, that would be just as unjust as having leisure the privilege of a few. What was good about the Middle Ages was that everybody had worked: the knight fought, the peasant plowed, and the lady cooked and made simples. Even a cat had a job—of catching mice. In a rational society of the future, the machine could have its allotted sphere, since it was here, as people said, to stay. Only it should be kept in its place. There would be no reason for everybody to write crummy poems or paint ghastly pictures, in order to feel creative, if they had the possibility, stolen from them by machines, of making something useful.
In an incautious moment, he had advanced this thought to his adviser, a sociologist named Mr. Small, who was probing him for his views on progressive education. Peter thought every child, starting in grade school, should be sent to learn a real trade, like shoemaking, under a master shoemaker, instead of fooling around with finger paints or making ceramics. The old guilds and corporations, with their distinctive dress and the system of masters and apprentices, had been an attractive feature of the Middle Ages, in his opinion; of course there was not much “upward mobility”—only a cycle of replacement and renewal, as happened in the animal kingdom with individuals in a species.
“What interests me about birds and animals is that individuals don’t count with them. That’s one thing I’ve learned this year. It ought to be obvious, but I never thought about it before.” Mr. Small industriously leafed through Peter’s file. “I don’t find zoology among your subjects.” “No. But you see I belong to this bird-watching group. We go out on Sundays. Birds don’t have personalities, except tame ones. They only have collective personalities, like the hermit thrush or the cuckoo or the thieving jay. Or goldfinches, which are gregarious. Maybe you don’t grasp the implications of that. But if I didn’t have what’s called a personality, I wouldn’t mind death.”
“You think about death a great deal?” “Well, yes. Everybody my age does, I guess, if you can judge by poetry. And of course there’s the draft. Anyway, it seems to me that in the past people had less personality and were happier for it. They were more like animals, more natural. I mean, it’s natural to die, after all. Rulers had personalities, like Charles le Téméraire or Saint Louis, but most people merged with their occupation and even took their names from it, like Miller or Baker or Skinner. My name, for instance, means priest. I would have been born a priest, literally—the way a bird is born to be a fisher or a flycatcher.”
“You’re anxious about the career choices open to you,” Mr. Small noted, gazing out the window. “The junior year abroad is often elected as a decision-making device. A retreat and period of stock-taking. The individual is ‘closed for inventory,’ in business parlance. You’re confronted with a bewilderment of choice, the concomitant of an open society. This naturally produces anxiety and evidently, in your case, a wish to regress to a closed, traditional pattern. Your rejection of individual freedom is so extreme that it leads to the fantasy of becoming an animal.”
Peter gulped. “You can look at it that way, I guess. It’s true, I have this thing about the past. But I always have had. It didn’t come on just now. And it’s partly because I care about the future. I don’t mean mine. I mean humanity’s. I keep thinking all the time about the direction we’re going in and trying to figure out escape routes. Don’t you get scared occasionally?” An eerie blaze lit up Mr. Small’s little green eyes; his pale-red lashes blinked angrily. “Scared? I can’t think of a more challenging time to be alive in for an American. All our options are open. No society in history before our own has given so-called mass-man such opportunities for self-realization.” “To me, everything is closing in,” argued Peter. “If I were a Russian or a Pole, at least I might have the illusion that things would be better if there was a revolution. Or even gradual evolution. But here evolution just means giving everybody more of the same. Take a simple example: the Paris traffic.” “Use the Métro.” “I do. Or I walk. But I can’t help worrying about those people stuck in cars.”
It was true. Some unkind fairy, finding his brain unemployed, must have set him the gruesome task of coming up with a solution for every current woe. And the Paris traffic problem was a much tougher nut to crack than the reorganization of society. So far, each of his idées géniales, such as the common ownership of all vehicles within the city circumference—you picked up a car, free, when you needed it and dropped it when you were through at one of a series of underground parking lots—ran up against some vested interest or was liable to abuse. “Go on.” “Well, every time I see a traffic jam, my mind automatically starts milling out plans to offer General De Gaulle or the mayor of Paris, if there is one. For instance, they could prohibit trucks from delivering except at night-time. That would help some. Bu
t then the trucks would keep people from sleeping. …”
“Have you ever considered having psychiatric treatment?” “No.” Not waiting for Mr. Small’s gaze to return from its bourne—the distant dome of the Panthéon—Peter donned his jacket. “Excuse me. I just remembered. I have an appointment.” Small watched him fumble with the zipper-fastening. “Very well. But keep in mind that the learning-process is not conducted exclusively or even mainly in the classroom. You come to me protesting that the instruction is boring. Well, widen your contacts with people. Talk to them in cafés, in museums, on the street. Don’t brood in your room about the world’s problems. Meet them, face to face. If you can come out of your protective shell, you’ll look back on this year’s experience as richly rewarding.”
“Ha ha.” Peter laughed sourly to himself this afternoon, recalling that dialogue des sourds. In fact, a lot of the kids here used words like “rewarding” and “enriching,” as though they were writing paid testimonials to “My Junior Year Abroad.” Some, like the Smith girl, whom he still occasionally saw, figured that France was teaching them to appreciate America. “It’s been very educational,” she repeated in a cold smug little voice when complaining about French boys (they wanted her to pay her share if they asked her out), about the bad manners of postal employees (they made her lick her own stamps), about her landlady, whose only interest in her was collecting the rent (“She doesn’t think of me as a person”). Many insisted that they were learning all by themselves to enjoy art: “Paris has so many opportunities, Peter.” As though they had never heard that there were art galleries and museums at home, most of them free to the public, unlike the Louvre, which made the big concession of giving half-rates to students.
Others were bugged on the cinémathèques, like Makowski, who spent his days at the rue d’Ulm and the Palais de Chaillot discovering old American movies. “You can do that in New York,” Peter remonstrated, “at the Museum of Modern Art.” Peter was tired of Makowski, who had somehow obtained his address and kept dropping around to take a bath or go to the toilet, where he would camp for hours; he lived in a chambre de bonne. In principle, Peter did not mind being treated as a comfort station, except that Jan gave nothing in return. When Peter begged him to go to Autun with him one weekend to look at the sculptures of Gislebertus, Makowski could not miss a Buster Keaton movie that was playing on Saturday night. He had practically stopped going to his classes at the Institute of Oriental Languages, saying that he got more language-training eating at Chinese restaurants.
The principle seemed to be that the less you got out of your courses, the more you claimed to be soaking up on the side. It was pathetic, really; even the types who had given up totally on French and passed all their waking hours at the American Center on boulevard Raspail and engaging in oyster-eating contests with each other on the day they got their allowance felt they were getting an education. At nineteen or twenty, Peter supposed, nobody, least of all an American, could face the idea of having made a bad investment of a whole year of their lives.
Yet they had a point; old Pangloss, his adviser, had a point about the so-called learning-process going on independently of any actual studying. Whatever his parents might think, he had made some progress here, for which he could thank Bonfante rather than his moldy classes. The only “intensive French” he got came from Arturo, who would not let him talk Italian with him. He was also picking up some basic Russian from Elena. And if, in the higher realms, he could observe a little growth in himself, he owed that to the Bonfantes, who were real intellectuals, he decided, unlike the academics he had been exposed to most of his life.
There were times when he could not help contrasting Arturo and Elena with his own parents, all four of them. Take that little thing called “respect.” Up to now, the only respect he could remember getting had come from tiny children. His parents would be amazed if they saw the way he was deferred to in the Bonfante household. More than that. “On t’aime, Peter, tu sais,” Bonfante had told him today, his bright eyes softening, when they finally parted at the entrance to the Cour de Rohan; evidently he feared that he had hurt Peter’s feelings. Peter had to admit that he found a declaration like that “supportive.” When the babbo hurt his feelings by not taking him seriously, he was never even aware of it: “Why is the boy sulking?” he used to shout at his stepmother.
Still, a person had to be careful about letting anything positive that happened to him abroad influence him negatively about his own country and his home or homes. For one thing, the positive was so rare here for a foreigner that you felt like falling on your knees and kissing the hem of the garment of anybody who was kind to you, like the girl in the post office (he had been telling Arturo about her) who put new string for him on the messy Christmas package he brought to the window to mail to New York. Coming on an oasis in a desert made you tend to depreciate the well-watered pastures at home.
He entered his building. The curtain moved in the concierge’s loge. A veinous hand extended. “Votre courrier.” There were four letters for him. One from his mother, one from his father, one from his former roommate, and one in a strange handwriting, with a Paris postmark on the envelope. He opened it. An invitation to sing Christmas carols next week at the house of some people whose name he did not recognize. On the bottom was written: “At the kind suggestion of Miss Roberta Scott.”
His heart nearly stopped. He had made up his mind to go to Rome for Christmas, to get away from Paris and its clammy, unhealthy climate at least for a couple of weeks. The Bonfantes were taking their kids to ski in the Savoie during the vacances scolaires. That meant that if he stayed here he would be all alone over the holidays. He could make a call to his mother from the central post office on Christmas night, and that would be it.
If he went to the carol-singing, which was scheduled for the twenty-second, he would have to give up the project of riding his motorbike down through Provence and along the Riviera to Italy; he had studied the route on the map, to skirt snow-covered mountains, and, allowing for sightseeing, it looked as if it might take him a week to reach Rome at this time of year. Of course he could go by train, in a couchette, second class, again breaking a vow to the motorbike, but probably it was too late now to get a reservation—the Bonfantes had had theirs for a month. Every Christmas, they said, as soon as the schools closed, there was a mass exodus from Paris.
Even if he could get a place on the train, there was something else to consider. What if Roberta was staying here through the holidays instead of going off with the mob? He had not seen her now for nearly ten days. It would be madness to forgo the chance of having her all to himself in the empty city. The Institut Pasteur, where she worked, might not even have vacations. He halted on a landing and drew a deep breath. He felt the promise of Rome crumbling, like the plaster on the walls of the exiguous service staircase, and almost wished he had never got the invitation. At least he would have been spared what Mr. Small, he supposed, would call the decision-making process.
If he could just be sure that Roberta would be staying here, he would gladly renounce Rome. Obviously, he could call her up and ask her, and, if she said no, he would shoot over to American Express and try for a couchette on the train that left the twenty-third. That would be the rational approach. He fingered a jeton in his pocket, started slowly back down the stairs, vacillated. His whole upbringing fought against a rational approach. To boldly find out and act on the finding would be cheap. As his mother always said, you had to be willing to sacrifice. … But how much? Furiously, he ground his teeth. Nobody ever told you the specifics; you were just urged not to play it safe, Peter. He continued the ascent to his apartment.
At this stage in his life-history, Roberta’s company ought to be worth more than all the churches of Borromini and the Sistine Chapel. Except that he could count on the Sistine Chapel’s being there, which was more than he could say for Roberta. He would be glad to play it safe if he knew what safe was. If some friendly jackdaw were to fly down his airshaft
with her pocket agenda in its bill! It was a case for a supernatural agency. Maybe he should consult his horoscope in the evening paper. Hating this bargaining his soul was doing with itself, he decided to toss a coin.
Joy to the World
IN HIS FIFTH-FLOOR stronghold in the Albergo dei Re Magi, Peter put his eye to the keyhole and took a quick reconnaissance. The door of the WC, diagonally across from his room, was now ajar. He sped out of his room, shutting the door behind him without stopping to lock it, though he had left his wallet on the bed. There was not a second to lose. Even as he shot across the hall, other doors could be heard opening. If he had stopped to lock up, as the maid was always warning him to do, someone might have got there ahead of him, despite the favorable position his room occupied.
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