A discussion was being conducted around the cadavers. If the school were to be besieged, should they be carried out into the courtyard and hurled over the gates at the CRS?
There existed, to be sure, a magnificent precedent in the Cid, whose corpse, strapped to his saddle, led the Spanish army into battle against the Moors. But no one knew what to do. No one dared take a decision. The young iconoclasts drew the line at the dead.
An hour later, news having arrived that the CRS had turned off along the boulevard towards Saint-Germaindes-Prés, the students who were not on duty that day, whose names were not posted up in the occupation roster pinned on to a bulletin board in the school’s central hallway, sneaked into the street and made their way home.
Having chosen not to inform themselves for fear of being ridiculed, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew also thought it wise to slip away.
The absence of passers-by, of traffic, endowed the carrefour de l’Odéon with a draughty film-set vastness. On every side, along its tributaries, the rue de Condé, the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, the rue Hautefeuille, in twos, threes and fours, bleeding or unhurt, demonstrators were tiptoeing off the deserted stage on which the drama had been enacted. There was, too, at the last, one young boy in a voluminous cape who momentarily interrupted his flight so that he might gather up, with the mischievous pirouette of a periwigged blackamoor, a bloodied red foulard which a fellow fugitive had let fall in the gutter.
That same afternoon, to their surprise, the place Saint-Michel had been spared. Even so, only one of the brasseries around the fountain was still open for custom. As they walked past it, their intention being to cross the pont Saint-Michel to the Ile de la Cité then recross the Seine by a bridge further south, someone inside the brasserie rapped on its window.
‘Théo! Théo!’
It was Charles. A year older than Théo, he had formerly been his classmate, until they had lost contact with each other when he entered one of Paris’s polytechniques as a student of economics. Even at school, his politics had been conservative and capitalist. He read the Wall Street Journal, for which he had been obliged to place an order with a bemused newsagent, and he would airily allude to ‘seeing my banker’ when all he meant was ‘going to the bank’. But in a cynical world he was not a cynic. Théo was very fond of his starchy, old-world gallantry, his flapping arms and the silent laughter that would shake his tall, broad-shouldered frame.
They went inside.
Charles was standing alone at the window holding a glass of lager. He was unrecognisable. Instead of the parodically sober dark suit which had long been his trademark, he wore a leather bomber jacket with a filthy fur-trimmed collar, a pair of mottled jeans and a loud plaid shirt. Even more extraordinary was his head, which had been shaved all over, except for a thick topknot in the Chinese style.
He slapped Théo on the shoulder.
‘I don’t believe it! Théo! How’s life?’
For a moment Théo didn’t know how to respond.
‘Charles? Is it you?’
‘What do you mean, is it me? Of course it’s me. Don’t you recognise me?’
‘You, yes.’ Théo pointed at the topknot. ‘That, no.’
Charles gave it a tweak.
‘Don’t you like it? Don’t you think it suits me?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What don’t you understand?’
‘You,’ said Théo helplessly. ‘Always so chic, so well-dressed. Double-breasted suit, polka-dot tie, Wall Street Journal. Now look at you.’
Charles looked instead at Théo.
‘You’ve changed quite a bit yourself, you know. You stink, for example.’ He fingered Théo’s clothes. ‘And what’s with the rags? You look like something out of Zola.’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Théo after a pause.
There was a still longer pause, until, with a grin, Charles replied, ‘So is mine.’
Then, kissing Isabelle and shaking hands with Matthew, whom, being no cinephile, he was meeting for the first time, he added, ‘Let me buy you all a drink.’
They asked for food instead.
‘Food? Well, I wonder,’ said Charles, glancing at the bar. ‘There’s a shortage, after all. But I’ll see what I can do.’
They didn’t understand what he meant by shortage. But there were so many things they didn’t understand.
Afew minutes later, when he returned with sandwiches and Coca-Colas, Théo put the question to him again.
‘So? The topknot?’
‘I’ve been living in Mongolia.’
Charles visibly savoured the effect which his revelation had on his friend. He wasn’t disappointed.
‘Mongolia!’
‘I spent seven weeks in the Gobi Desert with a nomadic tribe.’
‘But your studies? The polytechnique?’
‘Oh, my studies …’
He gazed blankly into the middle distance as though those studies belonged to some dim, defunct and irretrievable period of his life.
‘Look about you, Théo. History, knowledge, imagination – they’ve taken to the streets. They’re in circulation. They’re no longer the private property of an élite.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Isabelle, ‘that the Wall Street Journal was delivered in the Gobi Desert.’
‘I don’t read Fascist rags.’
Théo and Isabelle were confounded by this impostor.
‘What’s happened to you?’ cried Théo.
He gaped at the survivors of the battle, now drinking beers and Cokes as though taking a break between tutorials. ‘What’s happened to everyone? Why are there these barricades, these CRS vans everywhere? What’s going on, for Christ’s sake?’
‘You’re seriously asking me that question? You really don’t know?’
Charles examined Théo’s features for a hint that he was being teased.
‘No! No, I tell you.’
‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Away …’
‘Away? How did you get back in?’
‘Back in?’
‘How did you re-enter the country?’
There was no answer to that. His eyebrows raised like two bushy circumflexes, Charles returned Théo’s own blank stare.
‘I’m beginning to think it was you who were in the Gobi.’
Persuaded at last that, for a reason he could not as yet fathom, his friends knew nothing of the upheaval which had convulsed the faculty of Nanterre, then the whole of Paris, then ‘the four corners of the Hexagon’, as newsreaders like to say, he began to relate to them the legend of what was already coming to be known as les événements de mai.
And so it was they learned how the expulsion of their own Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque had been the Sarajevo of these événements; how, at the very least, that expulsion had crystallised a spirit of revolt that was already in the air, had served to light a flame that was to be relayed from hand to hand like an Olympic torch.
‘It’s not just the university, not just Paris!’ said Charles, who was no longer able to contain his lyricism. ‘The whole of France is on strike. Phones don’t work, banks have closed, there’s no post, virtually no petrol left. It really is a general strike, students and workers united, a common front against a common enemy. A new society is waiting to be born, Théo, a new world! A world without grands-bourgeois and petits-bourgeois, grands-fascistes and petits-fascistes. A world that’ll no longer have any need of the old world’s tired old masters! No more Leonardo! No more Mozart! No more Shakespeare!’
He paused.
‘No more Hitchcock!’
‘Never!’ cried Théo.
There was another pause.
‘You’ll see, my friend,’ Charles murmured softly. ‘You’ll see.’
Paris was a carnival. Michel Foucault was headlining at the Maubert-Mutualité amphitheatre, Sartre at the Sorbonne, Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud, sharing the stage with their own public, at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. Qu
eues formed early, good seats were at a premium and it was often standing room only.
Old ladies on the sixth or seventh floor poured basins of water on to the heads of the CRS, then closed their windows and drew their curtains with a speed and a zeal that belied their age and respectability. Fretful mothers hovered in the wings of demonstrations until, spotting their teenaged offspring, they would cuff them on the ear and drag them home, deaf to the immemorial objection that their pals had been permitted to stay. Nor were these teenagers the very youngest of the militants. Following the expulsion of a pupil from the Lycée Condorcet, the schoolchildren of Paris had elected to call their own strike. Downing fountain pens and wooden pencil-boxes, they paraded through the streets of the Left Bank alongside their elder brothers and sisters. ‘What next?’ fumed an indignant leader in Le Figaro. ‘Are we to expect tots from the primary schools to rise up in revolt?’
Charles then mentioned a young German, Daniel Cohn-Bendit.
This Cohn-Bendit was nicknamed Dany le Rouge. He represented the street. He spoke to the street and made himself its spokesman. He charmed the street as Orpheus charmed the beasts. Wherever he went, the street followed him.
The street had always come timorously to a halt on the thresholds of houses. Now these same houses invited it in. The street entered. It made itself at home. And the day would come, said Charles, the day would come when the Assemblée Générale would be besieged by all the streets of Paris and Dany le Rouge would make his entrance borne shoulder-high by his court of streets, his cortège of streets, radiating from him as from some human Arc de Triomphe.
*
Théo was struck dumb. The country had been turned inside-out and he had had no intimation of it. And he understood now why no telephone call had come from Trouville, why the poet and his wife had failed to return, why their aunt from Le Nègre Bleu had ceased to trouble herself with their well-being, why they had been able to live for so long in a misrule of isolation and disorder.
As the café had become stuffy and overcrowded, they decided to leave. Slanted rain drummed on the pavements, causing their bodies to bend like those of circus clowns on weighted shoes.
‘You all need to be re-educated,’ said Charles, adding mysteriously, ‘Come to Maspero with me.’
‘Who or what is Maspero?’ Isabelle asked as, cupping her hands against the flame, she lit her last cigarette in the wind.
‘You are Martians, you three. Come with me, I’ll show you.’
Maspero was only a few yards away, in the rue Saint-Séverin. It turned out to be a bookshop, over whose front door could be read La Joie de Lire.
Inside, its walls had been plastered with as many manifestos as those of the Ecole de Médécine, along with stencilled posters of upraised fists clutching bombs and roses. In pride of place, however, were three silk-screen portraits, of Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh.
With his symmetrical features, which did nothing more than fill in the blank spaces between his jet-black curly hair, his black beret, his thick black eyebrows and even thicker black beard, the first of these recalled a Rorschach blot. The second had the shiny, enigmatic countenance of a eunuch. The third, with his mandarin’s cheekbones and beard, suggested one of those quaint figures which, if inverted, reveal another, slightly less convincing face, as in a Rex Whistler caricature.
La Joie de Lire was patently used by its customers as a library rather than as a shop. Its well-thumbed stock, strewn across table-tops or shoved into white wooden bookshelves, was being consumed by the same young people – leaning against its walls or sitting on its uncarpeted floor, none of them contemplating making a purchase – who had been demonstrating in the streets an hour or so before. Even the bookseller, his feet stretched across the counter, his chair tipped back as far as it could go without toppling over, was imperturbably reading Rosa Luxemburg.
In one corner stood a group of Latin American students. You knew they were Latin American by the sultry maestria with which they affected to wear their berets à la Che, by their hobnailed boots with leggings as complicated as sailors’ knots and by their revolutionaries’ granny glasses. They smoked minute cigarillos which hung wet and skewed from their lips, gave off a peppery aroma and had to be relighted after every puff. Sporting Zapata moustaches as bogus as those scrawled by children on billboards, they liked to think of themselves as political exiles. Yet nothing could have been more absurd than their camouflage fatigues.
Charles started picking up books off the tables as mechanically as though he were shopping in a supermarket. These books were tough little objects whose lurid black-and-red covers made one think of tiny revolutionary tracts. They would have disturbed the patrician serenity of the poet’s library. He would have rejected such cheap paperbacks with the art collector’s scorn for reproductions.
‘Read these,’ said Charles. ‘Maybe then you’ll understand how and why the world is about to change.’
Isabelle turned them over in her hand.
‘Where’s Das Kapital? Shouldn’t we be cutting our teeth on Das Kapital?’
‘Le Capital’ – for Charles, a true initiate, the work already existed in his own language – ‘is the Bible. One of the greatest texts ever committed to print. But it’s far too difficult to start with. You have to earn the right to read it.’
‘How are we to pay for these?’ Théo asked. ‘We’re broke, or hadn’t you noticed?’
‘Take them. Everyone does. Pay for them when you can. If you can.’
Leaving the bookshop, they strolled along the boulevard Saint-Michel, over which hovered a pall of ash-grey smoke, uncertain in which direction to drift.
They talked. Rather, it was Charles who talked.
Were its naïve faith in the insurrection of the masses to be transcribed in detail, his discourse would sound banal. Yet it wasn’t banal, because to speak of changing the world is itself a means by which are changed those who speak of it. And, without truly being aware of what was happening to them, Théo and his sister found themselves once more in thrall to a cause, a charm, an exciting new drug. For the addicts that they were these terms had become synonymous.
As for Matthew, his eyes, like those of the Madonna of the avenue Hoche, were open but seemed closed, too closed for a sounding of their depths to be taken.
It was exactly half past four when they arrived at the Drugstore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At that hour, it presented an oasis of warmth and light on the grey boulevard.
‘Lend me some money, will you,’ said Isabelle to Charles. ‘I want to buy cigarettes.’
The Drugstore was squeezed in between a chemist’s shop with its green, neon-lit cross and a café tabac outside which was affixed what looked like an inverted red fire-extinguisher. In front of its glass-enclosed terrace, inside which young waiters in tartan blazers served banana splits and Pêche Melbas, a group of male prostitutes, dressed in the latest fashion of the oldest profession, furtively or blatantly patrolled their beat.
They crossed the empty boulevard.
While Isabelle went off to buy her cigarettes, the others entered the Drugstore. To their left, stairs led up to a restaurant whose tables were laid out around a small, circular gallery overlooking the ground floor. On its walls were enormous pairs of lips sculpted in bronze – of Bardot, Deneuve, Elsa Martinelli. Further left, another staircase led to a second, almost identical restaurant. Beyond, a third flight of stairs descended to a lower-ground-floor shop which sold gadgets designed to soothe jangled nerves: a row of steel balls attached to a pulley which clicked pleasantly, one against the other, when set in motion; a rectangular glass casing mounted on a hydraulic frame and filled with mercury, in which, at the pull of a lever, Hokusai’s wave was animated before one’s eyes.
Even if the view from the enclosed terrace was obscured by a fleet of CRS vans parked along the boulevard, the Drugstore’s clients consumed their cheeseburgers, salades niçoises and osso buccos as though nothing were amiss, as though it were any other mont
h of May but this. The men wore Italian jackets gashed by deep vents in the back and open-necked shirts with frilled cuffs and broad, pointed collars folded flat over their jacket lapels. When one of them stood up, a miniature gold crucifix would catch the light. The women wore bracelets, charms, bangles, necklets and earrings which made the Drugstore resonate with the tinkling of cowbells in the Alps.
Charles studied them all with loathing. He already saw them facing a firing squad, crucifixes ripped from their necks, cowbells silenced for ever. ‘These are the petits-fascistes I was talking about,’ he muttered. ‘Fit for nothing but the dustbins of history.’
When Isabelle rejoined them, Théo asked Charles if he could put them up for the night. Without articulating their unease, they knew they couldn’t return so soon to the flat near the place de l’Odéon, the flat that, until that morning, had been sealed off from the outside world.
He agreed without posing either questions or conditions. He warned them, though, that he was going home only to shower and change. He was to be at the place Denfert-Rochereau at six o’clock. The faculty of Nanterre having reopened, its students had decided that their victory, however short-lived it might prove to be, should be celebrated with a demonstration covering Paris in its entirety. That day’s exchange of fire had been one of the preliminary bouts.
The plan had been to march to the television studio to denounce its coverage of the insurrection, then onward to the Palais de Justice in silent protest against the parody of law and order that had left scores of their fellows in prison cells. But the Prefect of Police had at once taken the step of confining all demonstrations to the ghetto of the Latin Quarter. If by such a stratagem he had hoped to remove the sting from their protest, he couldn’t have been more mistaken. The injunction was interpreted as an appointment, an appointment Charles meant to keep at Denfert-Rochereau.
The Dreamers Page 11
