“Pinecones. He dropped pinecones,” Christopher said.
Still, even if Christopher hadn’t invented the game he knew how to play it. Maybe that would be good enough. They could try it out on the River Seine and see if the new game of dropping things over the side and waiting for them to reemerge would be good enough.
“You said that you wanted to take parts of my father’s stories and put them into a new context?” Christopher asked. “Well, the story is that Edward Bear invented Pooh Sticks.”
Before they could hash it out any further they were interrupted by a few police officers who were approaching from the east. There were four police officers with two boys, students, set between them. These men were separated into two groups of three and in each group the policemen walked on the right and left leaving the youngster in the middle.
Gerrard let out the string on his yo-yo, attempted to unspool it quickly, and found that there were many meters of thread twisted round and round the spindle. He could hear the police talking as they approached and could just make out the students as they argued back.
“You two aren’t fun anymore,” one of the students complained to the policeman on his left.
“I’ve outgrown fun,” the first policeman said.
Gerrard pulled his yo-yo out of the soft mud and then tossed it so that the string looped around the pole of a street lamp that faced the water. The yo-yo continued to unwind and slip down, until it finally disappeared into the water, but Gerrard held the string and the two of them walked across to the other side of the road where Chris quickly tied the other end to a tree branch.
The other policeman was now talking. “It’s not that we don’t admire your ideas. It’s not that they’re bad ideas, if they could be acted on. But human nature just won’t allow for it.” He and his partner stepped forward and hit the string. They stopped and then each absently brought a hand to the forehead.
The other group of three men came up on this and again the two policemen were stopped at the string. They put their hands up, attempted to untangle themselves, while the students ducked. The second student, the thinner of the two, a man with brown hair and a suede jacket, stepped over to where his blond friend in the grey sweater was waiting.
“Everything is reduced to an abstraction. Everything is reducible to its economic representation and no longer has value in and of itself,” he told one of the policemen who was twisting backward and flapping his hands up and down the front of his jacket.
“Wait a moment,” the policeman said. “I’m still listening. I’ve just got something caught on a button.”
The two students watched for a moment as the police swatted the air and then realized their opportunity. They turned the corner at a full run. One policeman stood up straight and watched them go, and then took off after them, breaking the yo-yo string as he went. The rest of the men followed along after.
“Looks like you’ve invented the new game,” Christopher said.
Gerrard laughed and started to untie the yo-yo string from the tree branch, but decided to leave it. He was tired, and crossed over to the water again. He sat on the bank of the Seine, dangled his feet over the water, and then lay back on the cobblestones and let his body relax, let himself sink a bit into the ground.
With his eyes closed, he let his breathing slow, and he considered Natalie, the shape of her face, and the way her lips felt when he kissed her, and wondered how it was that he’d lost her.
* * *
The phone was ringing. Gerrard was no longer lying on the bank of the Seine, but was lying in the thick grass of the Jardin du Luxembourg. And he could hear a phone ringing. His feet were in dirt. He was kicking over large pink flowers. The camellias were planted in the moist sod in perfect lines. On the other side of the garden there was a large white tent, entirely commonplace and yet also perfectly extraordinary.
The phone rang again. It seemed to be coming from the tent.
Gerrard felt certain that he’d find elderly women in yellow V-neck sweaters, and all manner of other upper-crust Gaullists inside, all of them drinking champagne, but when Gerrard pulled the tent flaps open and stepped inside he found the tent was empty except for full-length mirrors, a red wooden table with a green phone set atop it, and red-and-white-striped floorboards. The mirrors created the impression that the tent was twice as wide as it actually was, and when Gerrard stepped up to the ringing phone he felt as if he was standing in the middle of a vast open room where he could be seen from all sides even though the table was right up against the glass.
“Hello?”
The woman’s voice sounded familiar even though she wasn’t speaking French or English, but like something that reminded Gerrard of American Westerns. The woman on the other end of the line sounded like Tonto from The Lone Ranger.
“Nyangurnangku,” the woman said.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“You are not alone. I can see you,” the woman said.
Gerrard looked back and forth, into the mirrors, at the space in between the stripes, but he didn’t see anyone there in the tent with him. He put the phone back to his ear and started over.
“Hello?”
“There is a structure to the dreaming, Gerrard. It isn’t your dreaming alone, isn’t anyone’s dreaming. The dreaming came first. Do you understand?”
“Hello?” Gerrard asked his greeting.
Somebody else came on the line. The voice was that of a child. The little boy recited in English, “When I was one I had just begun,” he said. “When I was two I was still brand new.”
Gerrard put down the phone and walked out of the tent and across the street to the Odeon Theatre. He did not stop to consider how far away the Odeon actually was from the Jardin du Luxembourg, or stop to think that he’d exited through the same door flaps that he’d entered and managed to end up somewhere different from where he’d begun.
Gerrard wanted to test the logic of the moment, to see and understand the new cause and effect, but instead he walked up the steps of the Odeon Theatre, between the Greco-Roman columns, and to the large oak doors.
The theater had been taken by the students and was being used as a meeting hall. Opening the doors was a shock. He moved from silence to the din of a conversation among thousands. Five haggard-looking professors and students sat stoically in metal folding chairs on the stage while in the balconies above, the din of voices grew louder. A young man illuminated by a spotlight leaned over the railing on the third level. He ran his hand over his unruly beard and shouted so that spittle flew out of his mouth and presumably down onto the people sitting on the main floor below.
“This is not normal, and we cannot pretend that what is happening now can be sustained indefinitely. Eventually people will wake up, and the dream will end,” the young man yelled.
“You mean the workers will eventually go back to sleep. They are awake now,” one of the older men on stage said. He adjusted his glasses and spoke softly into the microphone in front of him.
Gerrard felt somebody’s cold hand on his neck, and when he turned to look who it was he found Natalie standing next to him.
“Where have you been?” she asked him.
He didn’t know how to answer.
22
Gerrard was inside the Sorbonne with hundreds of others, pressed against a window and looking out at the other two wings of the university’s Cour d’Honneur. The student by the folding chairs at the front of the crowd held up a megaphone and denounced de Gaulle. He was an unshaven but otherwise tidy young man. Gerrard thought he recognized him from the Conterscarpe Café or maybe from the March 22 occupation. The young man explained the moment, denounced de Gaulle’s own denunciation of the strike.
What de Gaulle had said was simple: “Reform yes, but no chaos.” More precisely what he’d said was “la reforme oui, la chienlit non.” A chienlit was a masquerade, a carnival or a chaos, but this word could be heard a different way. It could be heard as chie-en-lit or “shit in bed.” He
thought the president was speaking in code.
“‘He insinuates that we are children and that this movement is a movement of the bowels. He says that we are so out of control that we are shitting ourselves, but notice that to indict us he had to turn to an anachronism. He says we should reject the carnival mask, the masquerade, but is what we’re doing a carnival or masquerade? Isn’t it more the case that everyday life under de Gaulle, that this new technocracy is a masquerade? In fact, this economy or society is a spectacle that insists that we live under masks. We are to be dominated by the different roles available in the market.’” The young man was reading from a composition notebook with a red cover and the crowd was shifting on the wood floor in front of him. He read in a monotone and mechanically turned the pages in his notebook.
The student pointed out that in the seventeenth century Pascal put his finger on what was so obvious now. Three hundred years before the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française and programs like Jeux Sans Frontieres, Pascal saw how the games we play, or our daily masquerades, are killing us.
“‘We would live according to the ideas of others,’” the student read. “‘We would live an imaginary life, and to this end we cultivate appearances. Yet in striving to beautify and preserve this imaginary state of being we neglect everything authentic.’”
He told the crowd that if their usual lives were masquerades then the strikes and occupations were ways of stepping out of the usual carnivalesque dance and into reality. And that meant that the shit in the bed was de Gaulle himself and not the strike. Not the radical break.
Gerrard glanced out and spotted Natalie in the crowd in the courtyard. She’d found a change of clothes since Gerrard had seen her last and she looked quite beautiful in a black wool coat and a clean blouse. He couldn’t tell for sure, but she might’ve been wearing lipstick.
“Hello, Cecile,” he said when he caught up to her in the courtyard. “How is your search for free love going?”
She looked up at him and then returned to staring at the ground. She shuffled her feet in the mud and pursed her lips. “It’s always a mess when you’re around.”
Gerrard felt confident that she’d missed him. He just needed to confront her with this fact and to let her know that his feelings hadn’t changed. They could carry on. The occupation made cohabitation easy even if privacy was still a rare luxury. Besides, she needn’t go on trying to realize Sagan’s little best seller in the midst of a full-on revolution. She should put aside such a partial project, especially now.
“Free love is for the hippies. It’s an American idea now, all about dressing like Indians and screwing pop stars outdoors, in the bushes in Central Park. If you want to realize that all you need do is follow the instructions you find in Elle or L’Express,” Gerrard said.
“Where is your friend Christopher Robin?” Natalie asked.
Christopher Robin was pretending to be a tourist, mostly hanging around his hotel, but occasionally venturing out to catch the usual sights. He’d taken Christopher to see the Arc de Triomphe, for instance.
Natalie brushed her hair out of her eyes and finally looked at him, and he reached out and took her by the hand.
* * *
Natalie had a paper bag full of groceries with her, just some stale baguettes and hardened brie, but it tasted good to him. They found a spot under a poster of Chairman Mao to sit and discuss what they wanted to do next.
They were surrounded by feet clad in leather dress shoes and girls in respectable flats and hosiery. A shuffling crowd ebbed and flowed around them as they leaned on the limestone façade and rested against the ornate pillars around the door’s transom. Natalie put her head on his shoulder as he laid out their options. He put down three books on the hard mud.
The first book was The Time Hoppers. Written by an American named Silverberg, the cover depicted cartoon arrows that pointed back on themselves canceling their own direction, a man with a rainbow instead of a head, and a melted stopwatch.
“It’s about how a midlevel bureaucrat handles the possibility that a time traveler, or more a company of time travelers, might upset the delicate temporal structure, the chain of cause and effects, that supports the institutions of power that he is sworn to protect. The story goes along, each character is constrained by his or her own personal desires, and in the end nothing changes. Even time travel can’t alter the teleological principle at work in the book or shift the way power acts and controls the characters.”
Next Gerrard put down his own copy of Bonjour Tristesse. The illustration on the cover depicted the curved backside of a young woman, her bottom visible through a transparent dress. She was bracketed by blue and red rectangles. The tricolor held her in the centre white space.
“This one—”
“Let me,” Natalie said. “It is, like the science fiction novel, about what’s impossible. The protagonist, the young Cecile, is the most conservative character in the book. She clings to a routine and debauched life and is willing to destroy any and all threats to her lack of self-awareness. She wards off all introspection and in the end her only freedom is the freedom to say hello to her sadness,” Natalie said.
He kissed her at that moment. She responded, even slipped her tongue in his mouth; when they paused, when the embrace loosened so as to let in air, she leaned away from him. She backed off.
“Gerrard. Don’t. Please,” she said.
* * *
The girl with black hair parted in the middle was from Nanterre. She read aloud from L’Humanité in the courtyard of the Sorbonne and a ring of other girls listened. Natalie recognized them but she couldn’t remember any of their names.
They were getting the moment wrong anyhow. Each of them seemed to enjoy the newspaper description and miss the threat in it. The paper reported a split between the workers and students. The paper informed the reader that Daniel Cohn-Bendit was the leader of Les Détournés, but there was no split, and Cohn-Bendit wasn’t with Les Détournés. Cohn-Bendit was some sort of independent anarchist. Natalie had heard rumors that he’d fallen out with Debord in public. The redheaded media darling had slapped Debord during a chance encounter at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Natalie did not know where the strike was headed and certainly did not feel confident enough to stand around giggling at their troubles. Instead she wandered off. She examined the walls that were light brown or a kind of yellow. The Sorbonne was very beautiful.
What Natalie wanted was some sort of intuitive sense of how the student strike, the factory occupations, and the strangeness that came along with both of these might succeed, but Debord didn’t approve of Henri Bergson.
Bergson claimed that you had to go beyond rational thought in order to know anything, and this struck Debord as softheaded. Still, Natalie couldn’t see any other way to get past the surface of the moment. All of them, the upper-crust but disenchanted students who felt at home with the Louis Treize architecture, the young workers in leather jackets who obviously were eager to help Natalie or any other girl find free love, and all the rest of the people on strike were playing a game of pretending, but they didn’t have any end point in mind. The students around her in the courtyard were spinning around and around, all of them debating what should come next, but only settling on one simple idea.
They would continue the occupation.
The only way they might win was if Bergson was right. If rationality was not necessary, or if it was even a hindrance, then they could prevail. They could ride the moment for the full duration, just let it move them along. Spontaneous action would give them an intuitive grasp on the totality.
And Natalie had almost convinced herself when Gerrard turned up and what had seemed like a kind of foundation turned to mud.
* * *
Gerrard had his own theory about Bonjour Tristesse.
“The point of Sagan’s book is that freedom requires more than just doing what you want with your body. It’s not even about what you do with your mind. It’s about
choosing how you want to be constrained. Cecile wasn’t manipulative enough—she thought she wanted to be free but what she wanted was to continue being trapped by the things she was accustomed to—”
The Sorbonne was pressing in on them and Natalie reached for Gerrard’s broad shoulders. She could find comfort in his wild eyes and mussed hair.
She had some food for him and watched him chew for a time. She could see something like love in his eyes, and she wanted to love him back. Maybe stale baguette and hardened brie would be enough.
They sat together under a poster of Chairman Mao and Gerrard asked her to help him choose what to derail next. Christopher Robin hadn’t worked out quite the way he’d hoped and Gerrard was reconsidering. He had a science fiction novel, and a copy of Sagan’s book.
“In Debord and Wolman’s guide for derailing art they say the most distant element works best,” she told him. She’d let herself lean on Gerrard, wasn’t thinking about what she was doing or how he’d respond. “For instance, if you’re collaging a photograph from the past you could combine it with something very current like an advertisement, and get a revolutionary effect. Debord describes a metagraph relating to the Spanish Civil War and says that the phrase with the most distinctly revolutionary sense is a fragment from a lipstick advertisement. The phrase, ‘Pretty lips are red.’”
Gerrard tried to kiss her and she let him, but even as she arched her back she thought about Cecile in Bonjour Tristesse. What if it turned out that the words free and love were opposites? What if the freedom necessary for intuition required her to give up on love?
Gerrard was wild but his desire was predictable, and the romance he was offering her was routine. To be his girl, to be filled up with his love would mean betraying the uncertainty she’d found, and she couldn’t afford to lose her uncertainty. It was the only kind of freedom she knew.
“Gerrard. Don’t. Please.”
23
Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) Page 15
