The wedding party drove afterward up to Montmartre to the restaurant owned by Leroy Haines, an American Negro who specialized in “down-home” cooking. “Leroy!” “Babe, you old sonofagun!” Haines was almost as big as Babe, and when the two mountains collided in an embrace the tables rattled and the floor trembled. Haines had not accepted any customers, he had reserved the restaurant for Babe and had laid out two long tables with lines of champagne bottles. Turkeys roasted in the kitchen. Babe rolled his small, round eyes. “Ummm. Smells like home.” Benson chuckled. “You sound homesick, Babe.” Babe frowned, “How you sound!”
They sat around the tables and opened the champagne. Glasses clicked. The musicians were saying:
“So she done ole Babe in!”
“Brought him back alive?”
“How you figure Marika did it?”
“She baited it with that.”
“Oh, you mean she baited it with that!”
Babe said, “That’s right, and if she baits it with that, she’ll always catch me!”
Haines brought out the turkeys, green peas, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cob and wine, and they all dug in. Everybody talked and laughed at once, and the food vanished rapidly. From time to time Haines came in from the kitchen to witness the results of his handiwork.
“Afterwards,” he said with a wink, “I’m fixin you folks some apple pie à la mode.”
The party was in full swing when Doug brought the news. It was so startling that at first no one really registered it. Doug had got up to go into the kitchen to talk to Haines, and when he returned he seemed dazed as he announced with his heavy drawl:
“Hey, everybody. I just heard it on the radio. Lumumba’s dead. They killed him.”
Simeon, Babe and Benson exchanged incredulous looks.
“Munongo, the Katangan interior minister announced it.”
No one moved or said anything. Every black man in Paris had felt personally involved, personally outraged, by the overthrow of the Congolese premier. And they had felt equally concerned by his subsequent arrest.
Simeon felt like weeping and knew that the others felt the same. They had won again, Simeon thought; the non-men, the monsters. He looked at Maria, who was glancing from face to face, not quite understanding what had happened.
The news had ended the party. The musicians tried half-heartedly to bring it to life again, but there was no more laughter.
As they walked out of the restaurant later, Maria squeezed Simeon’s hand and smiled at him, as though seeking some kind of reassurance. But he could not smile back.
They bought newspapers, which had already come out with headlines of the news. On the front pages there were photographs of a group of triumphant leaders of the Congo’s Katanga province, the enemies of Lumumba, announcing his death to newspaper correspondents. There were smiles on the officials’ faces as they gave their report. With the exception of a couple of Belgian advisers, all of the persons in the photographs were black.
As he looked at the photograph, Simeon suddenly started with surprise. He stared at the picture in wonder.
Those faces! Those black faces!
III
1
SPRING came late but was warm and beautiful. However, the joy of Paris was fading for Simeon; the Algerian war was doing something terrible to Paris and to France. As the African colonies gained their independence, as the area of French power contracted, a decomposition was setting in—Simeon could sense it all around him.
French extremist newspapers raged. If Guinea was free, if other African countries were winning their freedom, if the French Empire had vanished, then somebody was to blame, somebody was guilty—the weak governments, traitors inside France, the greedy Americans, the sly British, the plotting Russians: somebody. Embittered Army officers, who had never recovered from the shock of the French defeat at Dien-Bien-Phu, panicked as they felt Algeria, their last bastion, slipping from their grasps. The Congo proved that Africans were not ready for independence; the aid given the Algerian revolutionaries by Communist countries proved that France was defending Western Christian Civilization in Algeria.
The poison penetrated further into the people. One of its manifestations was a rash of chauvinism: ultra-right-wing organizations, with strains of anti-Semitism and a white supremist ideology multiplied. Men returned from military service in Algeria calloused and often dehumanized. Embittered European settlers, who had left Tunisia and Morocco after these countries had won their independence, settled in France and insinuated themselves into key positions of French life and politics.
There had been a metamorphosis in the police—or so it seemed to Simeon—during the year since his arrival in Paris. Simeon had never liked police, but the French police had impressed him more favorably than most. Once polite and attentive, now they slouched on street corners with the insolence of power, cigarettes hanging from their lips, occasionally signaling with obscene gestures to young girls who passed by. Simeon learned that this change in the police was not accidental. The police department had been purged of officers who had shown softness in dealing with Algerians in France.
Most depressing of all to Simeon was the seeming indifference of the population to what was happening in Algeria, with the exception of a courageous minority. Everybody knew about the concentration camps and the tortures. Everybody knew about the filthy slums, the bidonvilles, in which hundreds of thousands of Algerians in France were obliged to live. But few cared enough to act or even to protest. Wir sind die kleiner leuter—“We are little people”: this was the expression the Germans had used, Maria told Simeon, to explain why they did nothing to stop the persecution of the Jews. It was also the attitude of most of the French.
But who am I to criticize? Simeon thought, as the spring grew warmer and he passed pleasant days at cafés and nights with Maria. He had surrendered to her. He was leading the kind of life she desired—one of isolation and abdication from problems. But he could not escape a feeling of guilt whenever he read a newspaper, whenever he encountered Algerians on the street, whenever he saw Ben Youssef.
“No news of Ahmed?” he would ask anxiously.
“No. Where he is, he won’t have much time to write. He could be dead or alive. That’s the way this war is.”
“And Hossein?”
“We haven’t heard anything from him. I think he’s dead.”
The foreigners—Simeon among them—lived in a fantasy world, like foam floating on the sea of French society. They were not involved in current realities in France just as they were not involved in what was happening in their native countries.
The expatriates were an incestuous group—Simeon could calculate that such-and-such a girl had slept with nearly every man in the foreign colony, and just how many girls each man had lived with. In the one year Simeon had known them their faces had changed remarkably. Well-washed American, Dutch, English boys who had come to Paris on a lark and innocent girls wanting to taste “freedom” during the interval between dependence on their families and dependence on their husbands now had dark hollows under their eyes and slouched, lifeless bodies. Only those who worked steadily with a minimum of café life survived intact and with some vitality.
Deserted by his wife, Clyde drank from the moment he woke until the moment he went to bed. He went from woman to woman, as though in a desperate search for the affection he had never received from Jinx. He would throw his arms around Simeon whenever they met, and say drunkenly:
“See that girl? Pretty, ain’t she? My girl. Hell, I don’t need Jinx. Get along fine without Jinx.”
“Sure.”
“What do I need Jinx for? Man shouldn’t stick with one woman anyway, know what I mean? You d’accord?”
“Sure, sure.”
Babe had settled down in his apartment with Marika and spent his time either chatting in cafés, taking care of his shop or
cooking meals for his friends.
Benson lived a bitter and hermetic life with a new Spanish mistress, emerging from his apartment now and then to drink heavily and launch an ironic tirade against the United States in particular and the white world in general. Simeon asked him one day: “Do you ever think you’ll get married?”
He shook his head.
“It’s a trap,” he said. “A goddam trap. Most of the women they got over here are white, and I could never marry a white woman and look at myself in the mirror again. You know, when I was younger in New York I used to run around with some interracial crowds, and my mother told me: ‘If you ever marry a white woman, don’t bring her here in my house, you hear! You ain’t givin’ that satisfaction to the white man! He done said it, done said it a million times—that colored men wants his women. Well, dammit, we gonna prove him wrong! He can keep his women. No son of mine gonna insult black womanhood by marrying a white woman and stay my son! You hear me?’
“You know, Simeon, I can’t get those words out of my mind. Every time I sleep with a white chick I feel guilt, feel that I really hate the woman. I can’t marry that.”
Simeon said, “Marry a Negro woman, then.”
“That’s the trouble. I can’t do that either. For one thing, being black, she’d remind me of my own pain. And I wouldn’t be able to get rid of my hate, I wouldn’t be able to hate her like I can hate white women. Then, another thing, I can’t marry her because the white man says I got to marry a Negro woman! In a way, marrying a Negro woman would be like accepting segregation. It’s crazy, but that’s the way I feel, I can’t help it. I would be staying ‘in my place.’ Well, dammit, no! I ain’t gonna stay in my place! I’m gonna break all the rules. It’s only if you break the rules that a Negro can call himself a man.”
He stared straight ahead, then said, “Know what the greatest crime of the white Americans is?” he asked.
“What?”
“That those people made us sick. That they made us as sick as they are. Almost. You know that?”
Simeon said, “Some of us.”
“All of us. Ain’t no people can live under that pressure, that humiliation, without becoming sick. Without being twisted, distorted.”
Simeon said, “A lot of us. But not everybody, not even most. Those kids at Little Rock aren’t sick. The sit-downers aren’t sick. All those people who are fighting whatever way they can for equality aren’t sick.”
Benson shook his head. “I say everybody’s sick. The whole country’s got to be sick, because it’s a sick situation. But the white people are worse than we are. They’re the sickest of all.”
Doug worked at the American Embassy by day, and divided his time at night between his American “heiress” and the French girl he said he loved. He told Simeon, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m giving up the heiress. I’m going to marry the French girl, and to hell with a career.”
“That’s great, Doug,” Simeon said, feeling dubious. The next time he saw him, Doug was again unsure.
Harold, the Negro composer they saw rarely, seemed the healthiest of the lot. He was living in Vienna and came to Paris only on short visits, like Dean Dixon, the American Negro who conducted the Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra.
“My commission is running out and I’ve almost finished the concerto. I’ll be going home soon,” Harold said.
“Home?”
“Sure, back to New York. That’s the only place I really feel at home.”
Harold always amazed Simeon, he rarely thought of problems of race or anything else. He thought, worked, and lived his music.
“That’s the only way to be, for an artist,” he explained. “Temporary causes and problems are the death of art.”
Simeon said, “There are periods when, as a man, you’re bound more to a cause than to art.”
“Then one shouldn’t pretend to be an artist. One should go get a gun and fight. But leave art alone.”
2
I’ll be out very late. So I’ll probably just go to my room, and not come by here,” Maria said.
She looked at Simeon guiltily. He sat at his desk in the apartment, trying to write another article for He-Man.
“Don’t be angry, Simeon.”
He looked up. “I’m not angry. But I don’t see you much any more.”
“But you could come with me, darling. I would be so glad.” She sounded sincere. Simeon wanted to believe she was sincere.
He shook his head. “No, that’s not being with you, not with all those people around. You go ahead, Baby. But come by tonight.” He felt as though he were begging. He detested himself and was furious with her.
“It will be very late. You know how these parties are.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’d like to see you when I wake up in the morning.”
“All right.”
She closed the door and he sighed, turning back to his typewriter. He could not concentrate. She was slipping away from him. Well, he had anticipated it. In the early spring, Maria had appeared in a new play and, recently, she had had a bit part in a film. And she was going higher. She was completely a woman now, poised, sure of herself, elegantly dressed. She was no longer the lost refugée in Paris; she was a willful handsome woman headed for a very specific goal that did not include Simeon.
He got up from the table. Through the window he looked at the dark night that seemed so alive to his dull spirit. He did not feel like working. He looked at his black patch in the mirror, wondering what he was. People were identified by their occupations, their actions. Did he, then, have no identity? Was he a shadow, a passive observer? He had a feeling of desperation: he wanted to be alive.
Come to Africa, one of the African students had said.
What would I do there?
Work among a people you’d feel close to. Be useful. Be alive.
Perhaps, one day.
But he doubted now that that day would ever come. He could see no future that was different from the present. He was a prisoner of his own inertia and did not feel the strength to break out.
He went downstairs and outside. The air was warm and humid, and many people were in the streets. He heard a loud explosion in the distance: probably another bomb planted by the OAS, the secret organization set up by right-wing terrorists after the failure of the Algiers Putsch. In the name of Christian Civilization. People on the street paused a second at the sound of the explosion, then continued on their way. Was the whole country living like Simeon in a state of passivity and indifference?
He passed the cafés. He did not want to drink; that was too easy. A taxi approached, and Simeon hailed it before he quite realized what he was doing. “Champs-Élysées. The Métro Georges-Cinq.” A movie. He smiled with disgust.
For ninety minutes he watched a sultry Jeanne Moreau on the screen. But he was not involved here, either. He felt melancholy and lost.
Simeon walked home afterward. Crowds filled the Champs-Élysées. As he came to the Élysées Club, Simeon saw a laughing group of well-dressed people filing out and climbing into sports cars. Maria was among them. Simeon’s heart leapt, he stopped short, embarrassed, not wishing to be seen. Maria was walking beside her director friend, Vidal, laughing happily. The director took Maria’s arm and helped her into his car.
The line of automobiles moved off. Simeon stood paralyzed on the street. He was sure that there was nothing wrong with what he had seen, that there was no romance between Maria and the director, but his heart was nevertheless twisted with jealousy. Maria had looked so joyful—with an expression he had rarely seen. He no longer felt like walking home, but hailed a taxi, his ears still ringing with the sound of her happy laughter.
IV
MARIA stretched nude between the cool sheets of her bed. Through the wide-open windows she saw a cloudless sky and the dark roof of the Théâtre de France. She sat up, yawning voluptuously,
and her first thought was that she was really an actress.
This room was her sanctuary; no man had ever slept in the bed with her. She slipped on a robe and went to stand at the window, thinking of the evening before. Vidal had been hilarious. He was a good director, too. Simeon would like him, if he would get to know him. She decided to take a bath at Simeon’s apartment in the afternoon, and got dressed quickly because she had a lunch date with Annette, one of her friends in the theater group.
Maria arrived at the café just in time. Annette was a tall, coldly beautiful French girl with perfect features and intelligent eyes. “Vidal wants you to call him later today, Maria. He says it’s very important.”
“I know. I think it’s for the role he was telling us about,” Maria said. They spoke in French.
“But you’d have to travel.”
“Don’t say it as though that were something bad. Nothing would please me more,” she replied.
Annette asked, “And your boy friend?”
Maria hesitated. Why hadn’t she thought of Simeon herself? She felt guilty. “It would only be for a few weeks. A couple of months at the most.”
Annette shrugged. “Two months is a long time. Vidal would like to get you away from Paris, alone with him.”
“We wouldn’t be alone.”
“You know what I mean.”
Maria laughed. “There’s no danger. I’m a big girl.”
They lunched at the Coupole. Actress! Maria felt triumphant. Her role this time would probably be big, the third or perhaps the second supporting female role. She would move upward in the next film. Vidal was interested in her, and through him she would meet other directors. She could already visualize her name on billboards, see her name in newspaper movie columns, her picture in magazines.
The Stone Face Page 16
