by Adam Thorpe
Sometimes we went into a crowded cellar bar in St Germain, but the smoke made my eyes run so much that we would have to leave before the music really got going and we would end up in the bright, clean Wimpy instead. My mother always gave me a saucisson and a Vache Qui Rit and a few francs ‘for the cinema’. My sister thought most films were part of a bourgeois plot to keep the people from ‘analysing the situation’, so the francs were usually spent on Wimpy milk-shakes for both of us. I do remember watching 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in an empty cinema in Montparnasse, though, with Carole beside me. Her mouth stayed open all through the giant-octopus attack, and she held my hand. I wasn’t scared, though.
Paris was always in a hurry, and there were more faces and voices than in Bagneux. Cars and vans tried to squash you and everything smelt of cabbage and stale water and something almost sweet underneath. I liked the boulevards and the cars parked along them. I liked the way, at night, the lights of the city were reflected on the cars, on their polished wheel-guards and hubs and bonnets. I liked the smell of the cars when someone opened the door as you were passing: a smell of leather and perfume and cosiness. I liked the way raindrops stayed on the cars’ polish like thousands of Os, without sliding off. The DS was my favourite model: I was almost in love with it. A rich friend of my sister’s owned a brand-new black one. It shone like liquorice, and had white sides on its tyres; we cruised about the city with him once or twice. Even when he braked too hard in the Place Pigalle and I was thrown forward in the back, cutting my lip on the front seat, I didn’t mind too much.
Carole’s friends mostly ignored me, though.
One of them had a beard following his chin, a flat cap, and a jacket just like Davy Jones rolling across the Wild West in his steam train. I asked him once, early on, if he drove the train to Bagneux, and made everyone laugh. He was, in fact, a Maoist, which made me think of him as a cat.
I asked my sister, one time, what petit-bourgeois meant.
‘Us,’ she said. ‘The Gobains.’
When they weren’t discussing angry things, Carole’s friends often rolled about on rugs, giggling like little kids. At this point I was usually deep in a Tintin or a Lucky Luke, straining my eyes: a lot of the rooms had bad light – the light-bulbs were painted green or there were only candles burning. It was annoying.
At home the lights were bright. Every month my mother would climb onto a stool and remove the glass saucers one by one to empty them of flies. The dead flies always made a little black pool below the bulb, burnt to a crisp by the heat. She and I would polish the saucers carefully with glass cleaner and put them back in their metal fingers and switch the lights on to test. I liked the slight smell that the newly polished saucers would give off the first evening, the heat of the bulbs evaporating the remains of the cleaning fluid.
I liked the brightness at home. It was only in the showroom that I preferred a gloominess (mainly because I didn’t want to be viewed from outside, as if on display, by passers-by).
My sister didn’t mind me staying up late. In fact, she didn’t seem to notice the time.
‘C’mon,’ she would say, in English, dragging me away from my album or comic very late at night, ‘let’s hit the road.’
Sometimes I went to sleep on the floor cushions, and then we just stayed put. I’d wake up with a blanket over me not knowing where I was and find her in another room, having had to share a bed with one of her friends because there weren’t enough beds to go round.
One evening we met an American tourist about the age of my uncle. He saw Carole’s badge about Vietnam and agreed with it. She was the first person he’d met in France who cared about Vietnam, he said. He bought us both drinks on the terrace of a café called the Deux Magots, which he said was famous. Carole couldn’t really speak English, I realised. All she had were phrases, like a parrot, which sounded nothing like the man’s English. The man called me ‘Gavroche’ and seemed to find it funny that I was up late, though it was not yet night-time.
I was proud to be friends with an American. He was wearing a thin rubbery raincoat with a belt like a stretch of tape on a packing-case, and was a fan of Baudelaire. He told us his name was Charlie, like in Chaplin. His French was good, so that after a while he stopped breaking into English with Carole.
Because we were not too far from the islands, he showed us where Baudelaire had lived on the Île St-Louis. The whole way there Charlie murmured in a low voice to my sister, who kept breaking into giggles. We had learned a few of Baudelaire’s poems by heart at school, and I nodded when he repeated some lines about the Seine flowing past. The house was on the Quai d’Anjou. The twilight made blue shapes on the river that kept wobbling and changing like intelligent globs from outer space.
I sat on the quay’s low wall. The stone was cold. Charlie put his arm around my sister’s waist. My heart started to thud. Although I was quite used to the sight of my sister kissing and cuddling her boyfriends, Charlie wasn’t a boyfriend. She let out a burst of giggles, his voice murmuring on and on. He had a voice almost as deep as my uncle’s and had drunk several cognacs in the café. I suddenly thought of him as dark, although he was very pale, with pale eyelashes and a thin, blond moustache like a scar.
I slipped off the wall and started to walk away, wanting to break whatever was happening. Another couple were kissing on the quay below. Their heads weren’t moving, they just had their faces glued together. I turned round where the street curved out of sight and realised that neither Charlie nor Carole had noticed.
I went all the way back to them and coughed loudly. My sister looked down at me over Charlie’s arm.
‘Are you OK?’ she said. She sounded annoyed.
The American glanced round, his neck folding as if it was made of the same rubber as his raincoat.
‘Something wrong, Gavroche?’
‘I think I’m ill,’ I said. ‘I feel funny.’
My sister tutted. ‘What do you mean, you feel funny?
‘What I said, I feel funny.’
A little girl skipped past. She leapt the gutter and skipped back again.
‘Funny sick, or just funny funny?’
Charlie wasn’t looking at me, now. His free hand was scratching in his moustache.
‘Funny sick. I feel really sick. I’m going to puke up.’
I hadn’t felt sick at all, but now I was beginning to. My sister pushed Charlie’s arm off her waist and I was bent over by her as if about to be beaten. The little girl had stopped and was staring at us from behind the bonnet of a parked van. She had a white skirt and white socks and I wanted her to go away. Charlie was asking whether I was ill. I was bent over a gutter, which was wet and stinky. Bits of paper were wrapped against the grille. On the kerb next to it lay a torn page from a magazine showing a woman dancing over a bottle of perfume. Carole sighed, her hand on my neck. I sicked up some sour fluid, spitting it out onto the woman dancing over the perfume.
My sister gave me her hankie from her sleeve and we walked back in silence. Charlie the American walked a bit in front of us, as if suddenly embarrassed. The hankie was warmly sweet, smelling of my sister’s cotton top and her skin; I held it over my mouth, breathing in the scent and thinking how this was what Charlie had smelt, his face pressed against her bare throat.
‘Is he generally sick?’ he asked, as we got to the main quay.
‘Oh no, he’s never ill,’ said my sister. She seemed to have lost interest in Charlie.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I get migraine.’
‘There are not many fish in this river,’ Charlie said. ‘The poet Verlaine lived over there, on the corner.’
He pointed towards a street on the other side of the wide road.
My sister didn’t reply. I mumbled something about learning Verlaine at school. Then Charlie went on about Verlaine taking hashish and shooting Arthur Rimbaud with a pistol.
‘People knew how to be artists in those days,’ he said.
My sister started to hum and flap her hand about
as if swatting flies.
‘I’m painting a picture out of air,’ she said. ‘No frames. Only pictures in air.’
Charlie turned to her and nodded.
‘Yeah, no pictures. But what do you do about the pictures in your head? My head’s full of pictures. It’s full right up.’
He propped himself on the low wall of the quay and told us in a soft mumble that was still loud, because he was American, how he had fought in the war, in Normandy. He had gone to college afterwards and found in Rimbaud’s poems exactly what he had felt with all his friends getting shot up around him in the fields and hedges of Normandy. I kept trying to remember the poem by Rimbaud I’d learnt last term, about a dead soldier and crows, but couldn’t. He seemed to grow older as he was telling us, all bent over with his hands on his knees, talking to the ground. The river went on sliding along behind him, wobbling the reflections of the curved streetlamps and windows and the lights on the boats. The water in between was dark blue but still brighter than the sky overhead.
‘Everything begins and ends with the laughter of children, that’s what the guy said. Rimbaud. You know? Everything. In the laughter of children. So much shit.’
Charlie went on a bit more about his own kids, his accent getting stronger and stronger so that I hardly understood his French. He rubbed his eyes with his palms. A bus swept past, its tyres flickering over the cobbles, and someone shouted at us from the open platform at the back.
‘Well,’ said my sister, ‘if you miss it you can go to Vietnam. Right?’
Charlie looked up at her, a sad smile on his face.
‘Gavroche’d best go home,’ he said, looking at me. ‘Where’s home? That’s the question. That’s the big question. Very very big.’
He held his hands out like a fisherman boasting of his catch, then sighed. He twisted his neck round to stare down at the water behind him, his nose looking small and flat against Notre Dame, which was all lit up.
‘There are not many fish in this river,’ he said.
He straightened up and turned his back to us. He leaned on one of the green boxes that were used for selling books in the day, and looked out at the water.
‘I’m a little deaf. From the noise of war.’
His fingers started to drum on the box. I wondered if there were books inside it. My sister was looking down at her shoes. I was cold.
‘It’s so quiet after the heat of the day,’ he said.
And then only one of his fingers tapped, on and on, like our leaking gutter at home.
‘You go home,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘To your family, to your family connections. Don’t forget your family connections, however painful. I’m going, now. I think I’m going to go off now and kill myself by walking and walking.’
He walked away, without saying goodbye or looking at us, his hands deep in his pockets. He slipped off the kerb and stopped for a moment, head down, and then carried on. Carole and I watched him go and then walked off in the other direction. She had a bed for a month in an attic above a nightclub.
‘So much for Charlie,’ she said, as we walked slowly back. ‘Thanks a lot, Gilles.’
‘Why, were you going to marry him?’
She laughed, but not nicely. ‘You know he was an oil man? He said he worked for Texaco. He was rich. He was staying in a hotel on the Champs-Elysées.’
‘So?’
‘Well, it’s like the films. But he was really drunk, really sad. He was so drunk you couldn’t tell.’
‘He was going to kill himself.’
Carole snorted.
‘They often say that,’ she said.
And then she laughed, and put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed. She waved her free arm around in the air and started to dance, letting go of my shoulder and dancing next to me as if the ground was burning hot, turning and hopping and jumping on her toes with her hands floating around her like slow fish. People stared. She often did things that made people stare.
Each time, on my return from these visits, my mother would question me, especially about what time I had gone to bed. I invented films with simple titles, describing what happened. She would sniff my hair and screw up her face.
‘You smell peculiar,’ she would say. ‘All sweet and oriental. Not like cinemas. Cinemas smell of feet and smoke.’
Then she would sit down opposite me with her cup of Caro and ask me about Carole.
What I said we did had nothing to do with what we actually did, since I was sure that the kind of places and friends we visited were what my mother wouldn’t have thought right for a boy my age. So in her mind we went to innocent films, watched television in my sister’s flat, listened to pop songs and read Tintin albums and went to bed by half past nine at the latest. I made out that I found it a bit boring, which was not really a lie, and her eyes lit up.
‘But Carole really likes me going,’ I said. ‘She says it makes her feel close to me.’
‘I’m so pleased, dear. It’s very important that she feels close to her family.’
So the visits continued. My mother never tried to visit herself, though. Maybe she was too scared to.
Even after Carole had made me do something very naughty, which might have got me arrested in the street, I carried on going.
This very naughty deed took place not long after we’d met Charlie. It was around April or May, 1966. We went along to a friend of hers who lived in an attic in a house somewhere in the Mouffetard. The house was a ‘squat’, the big double door covered in dripping slogans. My sister told me that the attic was a vital cell where protest posters were printed, and that I must never tell anyone about it.
I expected to see big machines surrounded by lots of shouting people in Communist caps; instead there were a couple of old tables, one splashed with different colours and made from a huge piece of board laid on bricks, lots of tins and canisters with paint-dribbles on them, and several rolls of paper the size of rolled-up carpets. The wooden floor around the hardboard table was swept very clean, and there was a white sheet nailed to the beams above it, but the rest of the attic was full of old newspapers and dirty clothes. The stink of turps mixed up with stale smoke made me dizzy. It was quite cold, too.
Leaning against one wall were some stained wooden frames holding what I thought were cloudy sheets of glass. Carole explained that they were screens of nylon gauze, stretched very taut. She said that this was the printing machine, called a silk screen, used by the Chinese for centuries, and now it was the voice of the people. It felt smooth and made a far-off shrieking sound when I stroked it, like a car skidding or a saw in the metal workshop next to our house.
Her friend appeared through a wall made of cloth. He wore baggy trousers, broken tennis shoes completely grey with age, an old jacket smeared with the colours of the rainbow and a floppy green hat. He had long hair, covering his ears. He told us, as if we were being naughty, not to touch the screens. His round gold-rimmed glasses were spotted with paint, so you couldn’t see his eyes properly. So was his cleft chin.
‘This is Van,’ said my sister, without apologising. ‘He’s Dutch. His real name’s too difficult for the French.’
‘No,’ said Van, without smiling, ‘it’s not difficult. The French are too stupid, that’s all.’
I didn’t like Van, I decided. His gruffness and funny accent slightly scared me. And he’d called us stupid. The turps smell was making me dizzy. He and my sister didn’t kiss each other hello, they just raised their hands slightly.
‘At any rate, let’s make posters, comrades,’ he said.
He took one of the screens, laid it on the proper table and copied some words onto it from a piece of paper, using a long brush. He kept dipping the brush into a white liquid he called drawing gum. It made me want to do what he was doing, watching him stroke each letter with curvy movements of his left hand. He finished with a quickly scribbled shape at the bottom.
Then he sat on a big cushion with my sister and shared a cigarette with her, but otherwis
e they didn’t touch. The gum had to dry, he said. He told us that the poster had been passed by the committee after three hours of debate, but I wasn’t sure whether he was happy about that or not.
Then he said, out of the blue, in just the same voice, ‘My wife left me. I lost my house, my kids, my money, my country, my language. All in one day, because my wife ran off with this rich bourgeois filth.’
‘I hope they ran off to somewhere nice like the Pas de Calais,’ my sister joked.
‘You know to where, in fact? Katmandu. At any rate, fuck, let’s make posters like they are making sex right this minute, I suppose.’
He took a squeegee, like our window-cleaner’s squeegee, and spread some special varnish over the screen in a single sweep, the varnish smelling even stronger than the turps. He went back to the cushion and had two more cigarettes, because the varnish took longer to dry. He made jokes without laughing, snorting noisily through his nose, but his accent was too strong for me. He swore in English – at least, my sister said it was English, and he said, ‘The French don’t know how to swear.’ My sister protested and gave some examples which would have made my mother faint.
‘OK,’ he went on, ‘I speak French like a Spanish cow. At any rate, I don’t care.’
While he and my sister talked on in this strange way, I explored the attic. It was huge, although some of it was cut off by the brightly patterned cloth wall which didn’t seem to have a way in. Two tall windows, jutting out like thin little rooms from the sloping roof, gave a good view of other roofs and their rows and rows of chimney-pots and television aerials and heating pipes: Paris seemed to be without anybody in it, seen like that.