A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  When the young Australian had been walking to his first meeting with Professor Lacombe on only his second day in Paris, he held Don’s joke in his mind a little like the grey gum leaf he had placed in his wallet as a reminder of home. And now, as he crossed the Seine on the day of the mass demonstrations, he could quite literally again smell the gumleaf dryness in Don’s ignorant wit.

  FB could hardly move for the human traffic. There were no buses, no taxis, it was all a moving shift of colours. This was not something that Don Bryant’s dry humour could easily make fun of. It was not shopping, business, cowardice or tourism. This was a festivity of discontent. The general strike had only been called on the Saturday morning, with the injured of the night of the barricades still lying bandaged and sore in hospital, but somehow the short notice was necessarily in step with the urgency of the population itself. It was as if a hydrant had burst, spraying not water but people through the Haussmanian widths. An edifice of privileged comportment had been finally refused, and life had overflown its formats, spilling once again onto the streets.

  FB did have an intuition of an endlessly repeatable historical moment but didn’t of course properly understand the nuances of its eternal background. He stopped in a cafe in the Marais, stood at the bar and watched through the window as different tributaries of the crowd passed by on their way to the Place de la République, already with their banners and slogans up, with the spring in their step, the sun shining with pigeons flying over, and everyone sensing the time had arrived to put an end to the constriction of air.

  In the cafe itself the owner and his regulars seemed excited too. There was no phlegmatism in this small business, only a sense of what FB’s countrymen at home might have called ‘a fair go’. The cafe owner, a thin man of about fifty, with a strawberry moustache but dyed black hair, was speaking rapidly of how there had been no Japanese tourists today and the police who usually took a croissant and coffee there every morning had not shown. Instead, he said, students ventured over the bridges – and strangers, he added, nodding subtly in the direction of the young civil engineer whom he obviously placed in a slightly different category to your typical student. This was not before time, he told his trusting interlocutors, who were all nodding in agreement. There are students blinded from the tear gas of two nights previous, he went on, students with broken limbs, and all because they had the good sense to overthrow the ridiculous old ideas and defend the Sorbonne against Papon’s police.

  After an hour of watching and listening, always with his eyes open for Mathilde, FB paid for his coffee and made his way back out into the street. It was strange to be at the heart of something of which he had only a distant understanding. From far away Paris had always seemed to him the home of the free mind and the free body. But this had quite clearly not been the case. The younger generations and the various ethnic minorities in the city felt betrayed, not only by the government but by its opponents as well. It was clear to the student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (or ‘Danny the Red’, as he was known), and the students that communism, in all its sundry forms – Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism, even socialism – had sold out on the flexible dream of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The country was therefore in a moral and political narrow ditch. The surge of inevitable energy was finally bursting through.

  As he came into the vicinity of the official starting point of the march at the Place de la République, the size of the crowd grew larger, its density thicker, and he had occasionally to work just to stay on his feet. From where he stood now he could hear chants and songs coming from the place: ‘The Internationale’, and various chanted slogans which amused him with their good humour. ‘Guy Mollet, au musée’ was just brilliant to FB – that a former socialist prime minister during the Algerian war could be consigned so emphatically to the dustbin not of history but of culture, in such a witty way. There was more predictable fare as well, such as ‘Pompidou, démission’, or ‘A bas l’état policier’, but in general the inventive humour of the slogans, particularly those of the various student groups, were revelatory to FB, in both their confidence and the way their originality cut like a knife.

  He moved through the jostling streets until at around 5 pm, caught up in the progress of the main march as it moved towards the Pont Saint-Michel and the Latin Quarter, he began to accept that the chances of sighting Mathilde amongst such an enormous number of people – was it half a million, or a million? – were slim. At this point his mood began to change, his fascination with the excitement all around him began to wane, replaced instead by a claustrophobia within the crush of the crowd.

  But there was no getting out of the river just now. He was positioned right in the middle of the human stream as it crossed the bridge. But then, just as he was deep within the span over the Seine and about to step off with the crowd onto the Left Bank, the march stopped. Not knowing why, a slight rise of panic brought a sweat to his neck as his fear of the congestion of the crowd was compounded. Then the people all around him – to his immediate left a young man with wild brown hair and a t-shirt asking Who Killed JFK?; on his right a pair of middle-aged women who had been talking of hospital work as they had made their way along the route and whom, therefore, he assumed were disgruntled nurses; in front of him a gang of six or seven skylarking high school students; behind him a miscellany of smiling students – were all now bowing their heads, their expressions solemn. FB grew confused until, from up ahead, he heard through a megaphone that the pause was to pay respect to those who had been injured on the night of the barricades, those who lay in the hospitals even as the disruption continued, grew and blossomed. That was the word that was used in this solemn and unlikely pause; the dissent had blossomed, épanouie. The pain and suffering would not be in vain.

  Standing there in the middle of Pont Saint-Michel, FB checked the remaining couple of leaflets he still had in his shirt pocket from the Île Seguin. It was true. Two hundred Algerians had died right here, only seven years previous. In comparison, the wounded of the night of the barricades were surely inconsequential. He frowned as he read again what the leaflet had to say. And in his mind he saw the face of the man who had sprung from the crowd to hand him the leaflets as he had stood scanning the island for Mathilde. What would that man make of this solemnity on the Pont Saint-Michel, of this marking of only the most recent conflict?

  Suddenly he began to feel as if the whole day, the crowd, the historical momentum, was somehow childish. He looked to his left, past the boy with the wild brown hair. He looked right, across the profiles of the nurses’ bowed heads and along the line of solemn sunlit noses. But no matter how far he craned his neck, or twisted this way and that, he could not see the water, the river. He was caught in the middle of something but he couldn’t see beyond it. He was standing on the bridge right above it but he could not see it. There were just too many people.

  †

  From time to time, in later years, he would wonder how he had possibly walked away from it. It’s clear from his papers that one of the strands of his interest became what he may have described as Cynical Literature, starting right back with Diogenes and coming into the present through Houellebecq. Thus he went via Huysmans and Benjamin, Fourier, Baudelaire and even Xavier Herbert, in order to explain that streak in him. In truth, it was this cynical streak that also took him towards ‘the Thérèses’, the two saints, one of Lisieux, the other of Avila. Anything that would help explain how he had stepped out of the river of people, away from the spectacle of the great situationist moment, was of great personal interest to him.

  The feeling, the need that overtook him there on the Pont Saint-Michel, to squeeze his way laterally through all that human sunshine, to peel off through the various marshals of the various factional groups ushering the throng towards its destination at Place Denfert-Rochereau, was naturally bound up in attraction. As first his displeasure had risen at the ignoring of the two hundred dead Algerians, then because he couldn’t see
the water of the river, and then, finally, when this chagrin and desperation had congealed into a desire for what he could only describe as REALITY, it was then, and only then, that his sense of personal freedom found its emblem in the form of Mathilde.

  Through the whole day, until that moment, his desire to see her had been automatic: he had been attracted to her, and it had something to do with the sense of connection she gave him to the city where he had come to study sand, the sand that was not there in Paris, except in archives and children’s playgrounds. But now she was not there either, nor in the hours past, no matter how hard he looked. In her absence, she had loomed larger and larger in his mind so that, eventually, as he cast his eyes this way and that amongst the crowd crossing the bridge, he was not looking for her face any longer but for nature, for water, for the river that had brought not only the bridge but the whole city, and all those people, into being in the first place.

  Amongst the millions on the streets he searched for an opening between faces, t-shirts, slogans; an opening that would lead him to the one amongst the many, a narrow side street away from the rebellious momentum, that would lead him not to aperçus and protestations but to where he could carefully state the interior thoughts he was having on the accumulations of the city, where he could pile words upon words until they became in themselves a rebel’s barricade against distraction, a focus rather than an abstraction, a single kiss, a place in the city set free from those words by the silent moisture of a single pearl of saliva.

  †

  She likened it to the one day in history when she had stayed at home. When her mother was growing up in their well-off Pied-Noir suburb of Algiers, Mathilde’s Grand-père Serreau had been obsessed with the high literature of France and particularly with Proust. The old man loved nothing better than to speculate, after lunch on a Sunday, and in rather dire repetition, on À la recherche du temps perdu, and how he himself might have behaved differently if he had been inserted into various parts of the action as a Pied-Noir protagonist. Mathilde had never been tempted to read Proust because her mother – her father too, in fact – had always presented him and his famous book as an insufferable bore. No doubt in Mathilde’s mother’s case this stance was somewhat influenced by Grand-père Serreau and his monologous Sunday delectations, but in Mathilde’s father’s case it had more to do with de Gaulle’s rise to power after the war, and how the hypocritical maintenance of his power had forever infected the politics not only of remembrance, but of memory itself.

  The anecdote that had stuck in Mathilde’s mother’s mind from Grand-père Serreau’s Sunday repetitions – and which therefore had been passed down, albeit with a heavily grained family irony, to Mathilde – concerned that passage near the beginning of Proust’s novel where Charles Swann, with uncharacteristic and immediately regretted frankness, proposes a scenario whereby the pages of the daily newspapers would be filled not with the titbits, sensationalisms and feuilletons you might expect, but with the text of a great work of literature, such as Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. In this case, Swann declares, we would read literature every day of our lives, relegating the inanities of newspapers to the infrequency with which we might normally encounter great books – say, three or four times in our lifetime – and thus achieving a right balance between ‘information’ and ‘publicity’.

  A favourite game of Mathilde’s grandfather was to imagine the very first morning when, as Swann would have it, the text of Le Monde had been replaced with Pascal’s Pensées. In Grand-père Serreau’s variation on the theme, he, as a Pascal devotee and a man of impeccable literary taste, refuses on that very day, and for the first time in his adult life, to buy the daily newspaper, in exasperated protest against the vacuities it contains. He walks straight past the newsstands and tabacs with his nose held high. And thus, at the Sunday table in Algiers, his putative scenario ends with his hands slapped to his forehead in mock dismay as he rues missing out on the very moment he had not, in his years of superior disillusion, even dared to imagine.

  Mathilde’s mother used to recall this anecdote once every couple of years while the girl was growing up on the saltmarshes of La Teste-de-Buch, only to highlight the multiple layers of personal hubris to which Grand-père Serreau was prone. She did, in fact, loathe almost everything about her father and his colonial ideals. But now his granddaughter, all those years later, on the geranium-coloured armchair under the window above Rue Monge, with her bedclothes pulled across the floor and wrapped around her midriff and legs, a small bottle of Coca-Cola on the table beside her, and Nathalie Sarraute’s Martereau half read in her hand, revived the long-forgotten scenario in her mind. In actual fact, it came unbidden, almost like a family heirloom, in keeping with her own withdrawal from history.

  The atmosphere out on the streets below was unavoidably charged, the festive, strident air could be felt almost physically through the window glass. There was also that strange absence of bus engines or other heavy traffic going by. There must be thousands, she thought, perhaps even millions marching out there, singing, calling out De Gaulle, assassin! and Guy Mollet, au musée! They would be laughing, chanting, all along the route from the Place de la République to the Place Denfert-Rochereau, spilling out into the squares, gardens and boulevards beyond.

  And yet she, only she, stayed indoors. A young woman with her period, unable to bear the light; a young woman reading Sarraute in lieu of Pascal; a young woman mired and confused by her own memories; a young woman refusing the city’s dream.

  By the time FB had made his way with the crowd, moving again, down off the Pont Saint-Michel, she had stood up in her nightie and bedclothes and stretched her arms high above her head. As FB heard a small group crying Sartre, au musée!, he was slipping sideways out of the clutches of communal history, in favour of the side street of his own personal history. Meanwhile, she had swilled the last of the Coca-Cola and folded down the corner of the page of Martereau to mark her spot.

  We lived in a studio on the Rue de la Grande-Chaumière, that was a change for me after having had every comfort; we froze in winter and in summer it was like a furnace. But how we worked! And the fun . . .

  In the bathroom she changed her sanitary napkin and then washed her face in front of the bathroom mirror with a flannel.

  On Rue de l’Échaudé FB breathed more freely as he headed south-east towards Saint-Germain and beyond that to Place Saint-Sulpice.

  On the stairs going down to the street she felt her body’s weight like a horse feels its rider. She wanted to shrug it off but she knew from experience that the revolution of her insides was an inevitable process quite separate from the mind or feelings.

  As he approached Place Saint-Sulpice FB had the idea that, rather than return to his rooms, he should make his way to the Galerie Sarcon on the off chance it was open.

  He looked at his watch as the canopy of the trees on the place shadowed him. He considered it unlikely the gallery would be open – it was 6.30 pm, after all – but decided to go anyway, on account of the fact that this was no ordinary working day keeping ordinary working hours.

  She reached the street and stepped out into the soft evening light. Now she felt like a sleepwalker. Here and there people were coming away from the march, which was by now proceeding along the far diagonal of the Luxembourg Gardens. Here and there other people were walking towards it, perhaps trying to catch the speeches that would take place in Place Denfert-Rochereau. She turned left at Rue Notre-Dames-des-Champs, moving in the contrary direction. She could think of nothing else now but her pinasse and the winds blowing over the blond spits of the bassin. The ruffling of the water, the way the air created ribs of liquid, distressed her greatly. The beauty of her own past was returning to colonise her. She resisted, in her mind her heart her hips and womb, which groaned dully with every step. But she continued, moving further on her tangent away from the crowd. Sleepwalking. There was only one place she could go. To the place where the movemen
t of the westerlies allowed the water to mirror the sand.

  †

  For a time they sat on different seats on either side of the Saint-Sulpice church without seeing each other. FB certainly thought of Mathilde. But Mathilde? Did she allow herself even to consider the one who had single-handedly set in train her strange crisis? Where did she imagine he would be at that hour, on that day, in that year, and in that city so far from his home? Was he in the midst of the chanting, was he caught up in the heat and joy of the situation? Had he climbed up onto a parapet near the Luxembourg Gardens to observe what a revolutionary heritage really looked like?

  No, he was quieter than that, less intrepid on city streets, and even likely to be frightened by the sheer volume of humanity. She understood. And yes, he had taken up a position in the south of her mind, like a single pine whose resin she simultaneously savoured and abhorred.

  †

  They saw it separately and only talked about it afterwards when they dared to anatomise their shame.

  She rose from the warm stone of the bench beside the nave and set off amongst the flicker-flack of pigeons. She turned into Rue Palatine in order to hurry now to the gallery. She knew it was open until 8.30 pm normally but could not be sure, because of the strike, whether that would still be the case. She was winding her way through the streets, considering the dilemma of whether the gallery should remain opened or closed on a day of such collective freedom, when it caught her eye on the far wall of the street.