by James Jones
Sometimes the traffic got blocked up on the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain when the students were out, and there would be a great deal of illegal horn-honking, and a long wait. But by detouring around the Latin Quarter entirely, you could get to where you were going in Paris in the normal amount of time.
The students had three basic demands back then, during that first week: they wanted their seven convicted comrades released; they wanted the special riot police (the CRS: Compagnies Républicaìnes de Sécurité) withdrawn from the Latin Quarter; and they wanted the Sorbonne reopened and classes resumed. At the same time, they maintained they would continue to boycott the year’s-end exams. But they would consent to sit down with the Government and discuss their program for the reforms they wanted.
You have to understand that it was all really a question of timing. For example: To the eternal credit of their profound perspicacity and insight, the Government started off the week by refusing all three student demands. The arrested comrades were not released, the police were not withdrawn, and the Sorbonne remained closed. Only a few agitators were causing this, they stated in their news leaks, not the great mass of the student body. So on the Monday of May 6th, their big demonstration banned officially, the students took to street-fighting again and to building in the Quarter their barricades of paving stones, tree guards and traffic signs; and they kept it up for 14 hours all through the night. On the next day the big, nonviolent, unauthorized but uncontested, six-hour, 12-mile march was made all around Paris by more than 20,000 students some said (anyway, a number which obviously startled the authorities), only to end in more barricades and street-fighting when the police tried to break it up after the march was finished. And it was happening now in other cities, too: Toulouse, Strasbourg, Lyons, Bordeaux.
Two other young leaders had emerged alongside Dany le Rouge: Jacques Sauvageot of UNEF, the biggest students’ union; and Alain Geismar of SNE Sup., the young teachers’ union. On Wednesday the 8th, after four days of refusal, the Government finally offered to reopen the University—if the students would stop demonstrating; the response, instead of the agreement the students would have given three days before, was now a wild student sit-in in the middle of the Boulevard St.-Michel, tying up traffic for three hours, and a stated threat by young M. Sauvageot that if the Sorbonne was opened, the students would take it over and occupy it. So on Thursday the Government announced the Sorbonne would stay closed, and the demonstrations and street-fighting began again, this time early in the afternoon.
It was all one long history of changing their minds, inefficiency, bungling, blundering, and execrable, inexcusably bad timing. Our group of Americans, in our almost ritualistic pattern of meeting at the Gallaghers’ every evening, watched and read and discussed it all. Almost everybody had been out at some time or other to watch.
I had not been out to the riots myself. I had been working hard, I had a considerable number of dinner dates that week, and the whole thing bored me. But Harry had been out. He had been out quite a number of times. But there seemed to be strangely little he could tell about it. He said there was a strangely nonserious air of gaiety about it all. It was too vivacious. He didn’t think it would accomplish much. To me he seemed irritated, even angry, at the students. You might almost have said he was jealous in some odd way.
They had not heard from Hill since the previous Sunday when I delivered them Hill’s second message. But Hill had had some young woman (Anne-Marie the pipiste, I wondered?), who seemed to be “working” as his “assistant” they said, telephone them a couple of times. And he had been home once, they found out from their maids, to pick up his big Bolex 16-mm zoom-lens movie camera. But he had sneaked in and out without seeing them.
I found them both strangely unworried about it all. I knew I was worried about him. But they just seemed to go right on. Harry had made a deal two months before, and was deep into the writing of a new, American-Western. Louisa went out to her lunches at Lipp’s or Alexandre’s with her friends, shopped afternoons, entertained at home nights or went out with Harry. They both seemed to have at least their usual amount of fun. It was more as if Hill were away at school at some American university back home, instead of maybe running for his safety from the tough Paris cops.
“Naturally, we’re worried,” Harry said when I finally asked them. But then he stopped. And he went on with whatever it was he was doing: fixing himself or me a drink, I guess.
I had been very careful with them, when I told them about Hill’s second visit. I had underplayed Hill’s reaction to Harry’s offer of help. I hadn’t lied. I had told them the offer angered Hill. But I had not told them how angered. Neither of them had reacted. Not in any way I could see, anyhow. And I went away with a distinct feeling that if I had told them: told them how first strangely furious and then melancholiac Hill had acted, that they would not have reacted to that, either.
Finally I stayed late one night. I waited till all the congregated eight-o’clock news watchers had gone. I wanted to bring it up again. This all was a long way from the powerful parental reaction I had seen that night back in April, when Harry telephoned me to come over because Hill wasn’t home. And I wanted to know what was going on with them. This time it was Louisa who answered me.
“Of course we’re worried,” she said, just like Harry. But then she smiled one of her superior New England smiles at me, the kind that always irritated me, though I’m sure she never knew this, or was even aware of the superiority.
We three were all alone. The Portuguese maids had cleaned away the TV-and-cocktail debris of glasses and hors d’oeuvre plates, and had retired to the kitchen. McKenna was in bed asleep. But then when I brought up Hill, Harry seemed to just sort of fade away and disappear, too: fade right into the wall; or bend and secrete himself behind the bar or a chair somewhere. So that Louisa and I seemed alone.
I was dimly aware of him somewhere there behind me; but I could not turn to look for him without taking my eyes and attention away from Louisa. And this quickly became increasingly impossible to do. I recognized dimly in some other part of my mind, with a small inner start, that to do so would be to insult her seriously, perhaps irreparably. I had seen her get the bit in her teeth this way several times before, some about politics, and once about summer camps. You simply dared not disagree with her.
“On the other hand, we know he’s doing exactly what he wants to do,” she said. “And what he wants to do is what we want for him: what we want him to do, too.” Her faint New England drawl seemed to get visibly longer and more prominent as she spoke.
Sitting on the couch, she tilted back her head and let her long New England jaw drop at me. And her veiled green eyes, always a prominent thing with her, seemed to come out, pop forward, in her face: now, they looked like two spot-lighted marbles. The smile seemed to tell me she was thinking very critically of me, her old friend Jack.
“After all, it was Hill’s decision to make. And we would certainly not attempt to interfere in that. So that, in quite another way, I can say that we’re not worried about him at all. We’re glad: that he’s there. We’re proud: that he is out there where he is.”
“Well,” I said. “Yes, of course. I mean, there’s very little chance of his—”
“Getting killed? None at all, or almost none,” Louisa said. “But even if there were. Even if there were, we should still want him to be where he is. We, Harry and I, are totally and without reservation on the side of the students in this thing. We’d be rather ashamed of Hill, if he were anywhere else.
“We wouldn’t want him to have to be coming home every day to reassure us, when there are important things he ought to be doing instead. We do not even expect him to telephone us. I told that little girl that. We will go right on carrying on here, I told her: that is the best way we can help Hill. Help them all.”
I could imagine what Hill would say to Anne-Marie about that.
“Well,” I said—somewhat inconclusively, I suppose.
/>
But I found myself, without knowing why, on the defensive. Something had got her up on her high horse and from up there there she was looking down with those marbles for eyes and haranguing me, while I down below stood feeling I had put my foot dumbly into some bear trap, steel-sprung and saw-toothed.
“I expect we have all the normal parental anxieties, Jack,” she said. She shook her head. “But those count for little. And since Hill was not raised in any hypocritical background, I don’t see how we could expect him to do anything else than what he’s doing.”
“Well, yes,” I said. “Yes, of course not. But I just thought that, if you both wanted to, if there was any way to—”
She said it for me. “Contact him?” The superior smile seemed to writhe around on her face for a bit. “And how would that get done?”
“Well,” I said. Of course she was right. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “He did say something to me about some lofts. But he didn’t give me any addresses.”
“There you are!” Louisa cried, triumphantly, as if she had won a whole war from me.
I was beginning to wish Harry would turn up, from wherever it was behind me he had hidden himself, and get back into this.
“I just think that it’s horrible for them to set their police brutes on those children,” Louisa said. “Those kids are young, and idealistic, and they have a perfect right to protest against this hypocritical society that they’re forced to inherit and live in without any choice in the matter. If the young are not going to protest, who on earth is going to? Harry and I have been fighting the same two-faced, hypocritical human society all our lives. We are backing these kids all the way, Harry and I, and we are going to do everything we can to aid them.” The green marbles of her eyes seemed to have gone unfocused. “We are whole-heartedly behind everything these youngsters are doing. Isn’t that so, Harry? Isn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Harry said from behind me. “Yes, absolutely.” He came up. He was carrying three new drinks. He gave one of them to Louisa, and then another to me, kept one. But I had a distinct impression he had used the making of them to keep out of the way, and out of the conversation. “To see those kids out there, taking those beatings from the damned CRS, is just beautiful. It’s just something beautiful to see.”
From the corner of my eye I saw Louisa bob her head emphatically from the couch. She smiled on us a kind of breathless, aggressive smile. And the eerily brilliant green eyes in her long face seemed to be looking far away. I am sure she was unaware she had a drink in her hand.
It is a hard thing to explain. I am sure Harry went away deliberately. And when he came back, there seemed to be just the slightest hint of a less than full enthusiasm in Harry. Let me put it this way: His passion for the student movement, while every bit as heartily stated, was a hair less fervent than hers. Still, this was a long distance from the way he had been talking the past days. I had an uncanny but powerful feeling that something here did not have to do with Hill at all. Did not have to do with the student movement, either. Did not even have to do with that “hypocritical” human society they all, and me too I guess, disliked so much and were against. And Louisa seemed to have hypnotized herself into a kind of breathless, quiet female hysteria, with her talking.
I am convinced that when people are crazy is when they over-symbolize. I mean when every act, gesture, word symbolizes more than it itself is in its own nature is when people are crazy; certifiably nuts.
“If they had come to my apartment, Jack,” Louisa smiled, “I would have moved heaven and hell. I would have left no stone unturned until I went back out in the streets with them, back to their lofts and their unwashed washing.”
I was upset. It all made me nervous. And not only that. I found myself placed suddenly in the position of the villain. Without any preparation. I was held responsible with regard to Hill and the student movement, by the both of them. Me, who had been publishing pieces in my Review on Berkeley and the student troubles in America for over a year. Both of them began to talk at me about how little I was doing, and how thoughtlessly selfish I was being, and what was I doing? and why wasn’t I doing?
Finally, when I could finish my new drink politely without seeming to have tossed it off in too much of a hurry, I took my hat and crept quietly away, feeling somehow guilty. As if, in coming to them about Hill, in having seen him and brought them news of him, in fact by having allowed Hill to visit me in my apartment at all, I had become responsible for everything bad that might happen to Hill, and to the student movement, and to the Gallagher family itself.
Louisa saw me to the door. But her glassy eyes and her voice were both far away.
Outside on the quai it was dark. I set my hat properly, and grasped my umbrella, and tried to shake off my awful feeling. Over in the Quartier sirens wailed, and tear-gas grenades thudded above the chants. Up in the air between some buildings over there, there was a bright flash, and then a deafening report. It was one of the new percussion grenades the police had begun to use now.
And up on the corner of the Pont de la Tournelle squatted the dark little vans of special police, like two awful bugs in the dark night.
6
I REMEMBER IT WAS the next day, Thursday, Thursday the 9th May, that I first went out to look at the riots for myself.
I do know what special thing made me decide to go out that particular day. But I do not know if I can describe it. As I’ve said, at that time the whole thing bored me. I had other interests going. And I had no desire to get myself mousetrapped against some apartment building as innocent bystander, and get beaten up by half a dozen CRS riot, police. Perhaps if I were a lot younger, and still venturesome. But I was not that naïve any more. Not the cynical Jack Hartley of today: divorcé; small time editor; failed writer at a variety of forms, and 47 years old with two arthritic knees. I preferred to ignore it.
But that Thursday something happened, something in the air, that made it impossible to ignore it any longer.
I must try to get this down exactly. I had risen as usual around eleven, had my coffee and orange juice served me as usual in bed together with the mail by my Portuguese. Then I made my usual morning toilet. Now, my morning toilet is always one of the best parts of any day for me. Showering: then shaving slowly and leisurely with one of my set of straight razors given me by my grandfather: selecting one of my several Caswell-Massey cologne waters, a luxury indulgence on my part I admit, since they could not be bought in France, and had to be sent from New York: attending to my aging teeth with a Water-Pic treatment after a firm brushing. As my grandfather used to say: If you don’t look after your teeth, you can’t eat; and I love to eat, as did he. It was one of those times of the day when being a bachelor really paid off. No women running around scattering powder everywhere and leaving the water taps not quite turned off. No female hammering to get in and use the john or the mirror or the toothbrush—just when you were about to apply bared blade to lather for the first sensuous stroke. There is no instrument invented that will give you the absolutely close, clean, satisfying, esthetic shave that an old-fashioned straight razor will, if you keep it cleaned and take care of it. Then, feeling marvelous, I had dressed and gone to work at my desk editing a revolt piece which had just come in from a professor-friend contributor at Berkeley.
I think now that I must have become aware of excitement in the air while I was making my toilet, but that I failed to notice it because I was enjoying myself so much.
Anyhow as I sat down with the revolt piece I realized immediately that I had been sensing excitement for some time. Almost at once I found I couldn’t concentrate on anything, certainly not on editing an intellectual revolt piece.
It was another sunny day. There was a breeze on the river. A lot of people were out, on both sides of the water, walking along and enjoying the exceptional weather. None of this was unusual. But something else was. It is my habit to keep my quai windows tight shut when I am seriously working, but now the closed windows could
not keep out the electric quality that was in the air.
More than anything it was like a bullfight day in Spain. I thought immediately of the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona: in the morning when one first gets up, late, after staying up all night drinking and waiting for the running of the bulls. Nothing was happening, but people were preparing themselves, just the same. There is an indefinite buzz over the town, its source cannot be isolated, soon people will begin to leave the hotels and houses and move toward the bars and cafés for talk and the first drinks, then there will be a long leisurely lunch with a lot of sangria while the excitement mounts higher, and finally the general exodus toward the bullring in the thickening buzz: Something is going to happen today: There will be danger: Maybe someone will even be hurt: Oh, boy: And we are there: We are the excited audience.
That was it. That was what it was. The audience. There was an audience in Paris. And the audience was preparing itself to go to the arena. A low, constant murmurous sound as of great crowds of people, an oceanlike sound, it seemed to seep in through the very walls themselves and through the glass panes of the windows. It was monotonous, did not rise or fall in intensity or pitch, and it carried on its low soundwave this air of intense holiday.
I tried to go on working. It was useless. Finally I walked over to the windows and looked out. Nothing was especially different. It was still the sunny day. It was still the same quite-a-few-people abroad, walking and enjoying the sun.
Then I opened the window. It was like opening a dam. I was engulfed in a torrent of sunny, happy, gabbling excitement like an electrical charge, that churned in and swept through the apartment and washed against its walls in a golden flood. The soft air puffed at my face and the sun touched it, as if it too was sucked in with the torrent’s gush inward. I leaned out.
Down below people strolled along the quai in twos and threes. On the wide cobbled landing at the top of the ramp under the trees below my windows, a kind of loafing place alongside the moving foot traffic, a group of at least ten was staring off intently toward the Left Bank across the river. Children, and older people too, ate Esquimaux or munched on the large waffle-like crêpes sucrées. I felt I might truly be in Pamplona, preparing to leave the hotel for the first drink and bullfight talk of the day.
