He lived close to the Eiffel Tower, in a third-floor, two-roomed flat which he rented cheaply because, being in the well of a courtyard, it was as sombre as a basement. Théo had dossed down before in the spare room on whose floor mattresses were laid out as in a dormitory. It had just two other pieces of furniture: an illustration from a novel by Jules Verne, enlarged and framed, of a bearded man with pince-nez standing in the luxuriantly sylvan grounds of a crystal-domed observatory and pointing, for the benefit of a younger, beardless man at his side, to a crescent moon of unusual luminosity, with the caption La lune! dit le docteur; and an aquarium of such impenetrable obscurity that its occupants (always assuming there were any, for they were invisible) could imagine, because Charles had been too preoccupied for several weeks to change the water, that they were swimming in the ocean’s most turbid depths.
It was a little after five-thirty when they arrived at the flat. Having forgotten how hungry they were, they raided its refrigerator, devouring salami, cheese, a bowl of radishes. Preparing to take his shower, Charles glanced back at his trio of guests.
Matthew was seated in a corner of the room, his chin grazing his knees, his upper lip crested with a marbly white streak as though he’d been drinking milk from a carton, his lower lip the sort of wavy line a child might draw to represent a gull in flight. Isabelle lay flat out on Charles’s own unmade bed, matching forelocks framing her features like a Pollock’s theatre curtain, her eyebrows two black feathers. Théo was slumped in a great soft beanbag of a chair.
‘By the way,’ Charles finally said, ‘where have you been?’
At first no one spoke. Then Isabelle answered. Making precisely the same gesture as the astronomer it depicted, she pointed up at the Jules Verne illustration.
‘There. On the moon.’
By early evening, at half-past six, demonstrators converged on the place Denfert-Rochereau and started to clamber over the lion of Belfort.
Crying ‘Free our comrades!’, they marched the length of the boulevard Arago, passing the Santé prison, from whose barred windows inmates, none of whom were likely to be students, waved invisible handkerchiefs at them.
At the intersection of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain a road block had been erected by the CRS. It denied access, on one side, to the place Saint-Michel and the bridges of the Seine, and on the other to the boulevard Saint-Germain, forcing the demonstrators to spill out on to the rue Gay-Lussac and the place Edmond-Rostand, which jutted from the boulevard like the nose of that dramatist’s most celebrated hero.
In the course of the evening the occupation of the Latin Quarter got underway. With the majority of demonstrators hemmed in by the CRS between Edmond-Rostand and Gay-Lussac, others stealthily infiltrated the neighbouring streets and squares, the rue Saint-Jacques, the rue du Panthéon, the rue de l’Estrapade and the place de la Contrescarpe. The first of the barricades, too, were erected, out of railings, gratings and paving stones.
By ten o’clock an intricate labyrinth of such barricades stretched from the place Edmond-Rostand to the rue d’Escarpes, and from the intersection of the rue d’Ulm and the rue Gay-Lussac to the Lycée Saint-Louis. Unfortunately, these barricades, which on a map could have been mistaken for bridges, were exactly the contrary of bridges. The idea was that, like a ship’s bulkheads, if one of them were to cave in, the others would succeed in limiting the damage. But the effect was rather to frustrate the possibility of flight, since they also had to serve as arsenals. Were the onslaught to come, the demonstrators, possessing no more sophisticated weapons of attack than the gratings and paving stones which also constituted their sole means of defence, would have to rob Peter to pay Paul.
On television, at quarter past eleven, the Prefect of Police, a bouquet of microphones thrust into his face, patiently explained that he himself had once been a student, that in his youth he too had taken blows from police truncheons and that he could therefore understand and even sympathise with the students’ motives. But there was a limit, after all, and when all was said and done.
Then, in a direct address to the demonstrators themselves, employing one of those euphemisms grimmer than what they are supposed to soften, he stated that, if the Latin Quarter hadn’t been evacuated by midnight, he had been instructed by the Minister of the Interior to ‘clean it out’.
At half-past twelve the Maginot Line of barricades was as entrenched as ever and the Minister’s instructions were passed on to the CRS.
Into this ravaged landscape, one paradoxically both lunar and moonlit, one that, from a bird’s eye view, criss-crossed by its barricades, resembled nothing so much as a chessboard, came Théo, Isabelle and Matthew.
From Charles’s flat – he himself had left home two hours before – they had walked along the quays of the Left Bank, along the quai d’Orsay, the quai Voltaire and the quai de Conti, until they had turned into the rue Saint-Jacques, at the foot of which they stood together for a few minutes. It was saturated with tear gas. Its street lamps wore mauve haloes. Its houses, shuttered, incurious, felt as unfamiliar to them as those of a city, a Zürich or a Barcelona, to which they were paying a visit for the first time.
Advancing towards the battle, they saw, ahead of them, Zeppelin-heavy clouds of smoke in a blood-red sky. Whenever a flare shot up and fell back to the earth in a spill of cascading sparks, it would spotlight, as though for their sakes alone, some act of individual courage and self-sacrifice: a young girl beating with her fists the chest of a policeman who had smashed the knuckles of her male companion; a middle-aged householder in cardigan and slippers rushing down into the street to help a group of demonstrators overturn a car, perhaps his own.
They continued on their way.
Somehow, miraculously, darting from the left pavement to the right and back again, ducking inside empty, unoccupied doorways, sprinting through streets and squares, Théo forging ahead, Isabelle and Matthew trying to keep pace with him – as, so long ago, they had sprinted through the corridors and salons of the Louvre, as though that race had been the dress rehearsal for this one – they reached the barricade in the place Edmond-Rostand. Under the cross of another chemist’s they flattened themselves against a stained mattress which was propped up on wooden crates and out of which wisps of white wool protruded like tufts of white hair inside an old man’s ear. As they crouched there, a trellis of shadows rimmed the smoky infuscation of their eyes.
The light from the CRS torches spattered the walls, the barricade, the faces behind the barricade, with stars, haloes, snow-blots. Here and there, an image, the fragment of an image, a mere detail, privileged at random, stood out, a gaping mouth, a crudely bandaged forearm, a surreptitiously exchanged kiss, a finger pointing – but why? at what? at whom? Sounds were heard, a grating laugh, a cry of ‘CRS-SS! CRS-SS!’ or ‘De Gaulle Ass-ass-in! De Gaulle Ass-ass-in!’, but heard as though badly dubbed on to a film’s soundtrack.
Hours passed or seemed to pass.
Three, four, five times, the CRS attempted to breach the lines, only three, four, five times to be driven back. Tear gas canisters winged over the barricade and visors were drawn up. Householders opened windows high above the demonstrators’ heads, throwing down towels for their protection, fetching basins and jugs, filling them up and returning to their balconies to pour the contents into the street, for ice-cold water is known to attenuate the effects of tear gas.
Near the barricade behind which Théo, Isabelle and Matthew crouched, and under a street light which cast a halo at her feet, a young black woman was being subjected to interrogation by a trio of CRS officers. While the other two blew into their cupped hands and flapped their arms against their sides to keep warm, one of them would shove her repeatedly against the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens. Whenever the young woman’s head struck a railing, all three would count out in chorus, ‘… et trois … et quatre … et cinq … et six …’
Incensed, provoked beyond forbearance, she finally pulled off a glove and with her long, lacquered fingernails e
ngraved four parallel scratches down her assailant’s cheek, scratches so profound they could be seen, or nearly, from the barricade on the opposite side of the square.
The CRS officer squealed in pain. Gingerly, he drew a finger along the scratches and inspected the beadlet of blood on its tip. Bellowing ‘Salope!’ at the young woman, he gave her a vicious jab in the abdomen with his riot-gun. Staggering, shrieking, whimpering like a tortured animal, she lurched forward on to the pavement, one net-stockinged leg upswung at a freakish angle atop the other, like that of a cat performing its toilet.
This was too much for Théo. Oblivious of the rockets, flares and canisters overhead, he stood up and rushed over to the scene. At the very last minute the officer brusquely turned his head. Théo thrust his knee into the man’s crotch, hard enough for him to feel it jellifying under his kneecap.
The officer’s face decomposed into a piece of crumpled waste paper.
Then, fatally, Théo hesitated. He couldn’t decide what to do next. He ought to have run the gauntlet of the rue Médicis or else sought refuge inside one of the houses behind him or shinned over the railings into the Luxembourg Gardens to make his escape by its south gates. Instead of which, he continued to stand rigid, the living embodiment of Zeno’s paradox, waiting, almost expecting, almost begging, to be apprehended by the two policemen who were only yards away from him and who, an instant later, had him prostrate, his palms swallow-cupped on his crotch.
At the sight of their truncheons hammering her brother’s body, Isabelle clutched her face in her hands. No longer caring to what hazards she would be exposing herself, she quickly picked her way along the top of the barricade, stumbled, fell, grazed her knees, her ankles, the backs of her hands, slid down the other side and ran to his aid.
Now Matthew was alone. His heart pressed on the accelerator, tore ahead, out of control. He struggled to collect his wits. A diversion, he said to himself. His friends were being hurt, were being beaten. What was needed was a diversion.
He looked frantically through the enveloping shades, searching for a weapon, for a prop of some kind.
Suddenly he noticed, on the ridge of the barricade, that a red flag, planted between two oblong slices of iron grating, had been knocked over by Isabelle. Unattended, it lay flat, inert, across the paving stones.
He remembered the duffel-coated Pasionaria. This memory gave him the courage he already possessed. He would once more raise the flag. He would create a diversion so that Théo and Isabelle might flee to safety.
Without further hesitation, he scaled the barricade, lifted up the flag and swung it high above his head. Then, failing to understand that the word Fin was advancing towards him like a train emerging from a tunnel, he started to sing.
Debout les damnés de la terre!
Debout –
A shot rang out.
Brandishing the flag, Matthew turned into his own statue.
On the far side of the barricade, a CRS officer stared in disbelief at his machine-gun. He held it at arm’s length and seemed only just to have realised that it was loaded. He pulled off his tear-gas mask. In spite of this mask there were tears in his eyes.
‘I couldn’t help it!’ he cried. ‘I couldn’t help it!’
Matthew turned aside from him and fell forward in a heap.
Fighting free of their captors, over whom the shot appeared to have cast a spell, Théo and Isabelle ran to where Matthew was lying, knelt down on either side of him and cradled his head.
He opened his mouth. His tongue hung slack on his lower lip. It was flecked with foam.
In his contorted features they could read the terrible truth that one not only dies alone, one dies alive.
He tried to speak.
But, even in death, Matthew would remember too late, much too late, what it was he intended to say.
Though, as we grow older, we have fewer reasons for hope or happiness, fewer of those which do remain to us will turn out to be illusory.
It was a dry evening in early October. A squally wind having blown up from the Seine, the roller-skaters’ Coca-Cola bottles spiralled off the Trocadéro esplanade as skittishly as flat pebbles over a river. The Eiffel Tower sparkled like a neon sign.
That evening the Cinémathèque was so crowded that the rats who had failed to find unoccupied seats were authorised, just this once, in defiance of fire-hazard regulations, to sit wherever there was room, on the flight of steps leading down into the auditorium, along the aisles, on the carpet under the screen’s vertical vastness. As for those who had arrived altogether too late, they continued to throng the foyer and the staircase, forlornly toying with the praxinoscopes and the shadowboxes and the magic lanterns, hoping that a seat might even then become vacant for them, that someone already seated might be seized by an epileptic fit.
Thwarted by concerted protests, protests which had been amplified by the events of the spring, de Gaulle had finally been obliged to reinstate Langlois as the Cinémathèque’s curator. Those two national institutions, Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, had been reunited.
*
When Langlois walked on to the Cinémathèque’s stage, the whole house rose to its feet to acknowledge the prodigal’s return with a spontaneous ovation.
He introduced François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud, the director and star of Baisers volés, the film to be presented that evening en avant-première. They too were applauded. Then, the lights dimming, the curtains parted reluctantly from their embrace.
To everyone’s amazement, the film opened with a shot of the avenue Albert-de-Mun and the path running parallel to it into the garden of the Cinémathèque. Superimposed on this shot, in Truffaut’s own handwriting, was a dedication: ‘Baisers volés est dédié à la Cinémathèque Française d’Henri Langlois.’ The camera then slowly panned towards the Cinémathèque’s entrance, closing in on the padlocked grille and the sign Fermé attached to it. A salvo of applause greeted the allusion and a ripple of emotion swept through the auditorium. Some members of the audience rose to their feet as before and cheered. Others wept.
On the soundtrack, as the credit titles unrolled, the voice of Charles Trenet was heard:
Ce soir le vent qui frappe à ma porte
Me parle des amours mortes
Devant le feu qui s’éteint.
Ce soir c’est une chanson d’automne
Devant la maison qui frissonne
Et je pense aux jours lointains.
Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces bons jours?
Une photo, vieille photo
De ma jeunesse.
Que reste-t-il des billets-doux,
Des mois d’avril, des rendezvous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
Had the needle stuck?
If it had, it was for just two members of the audience. They were seated in the very front row and, as they listened to Trenet, their eyes glittered like those of their neighbours. Their tears, however, when they came, welled up from quite another source.
Afterword
The first version of the novel you’ve just been reading was published in 1988 under the title The Holy Innocents. It was my own first novel, one with which, although it received a good press on the whole – a few reviewers were ecstatic, a few were dismissive, most were in-between – I was at the time of publication, for several reasons, profoundly dissatisfied and remained so ever after. So much so that when, almost at once, my agent received a proposal from a film company, I told him categorically to refuse it. And when, over the years, producers continued to show interest, I asked that I not even be kept informed of who they were and what they were offering. (I am, in this one sense, a yes-man, in that I tend to find it easier to say yes than no.)
My agent respected my request until
the spring of 2001, when he finally caved in. He felt (rightly, as it happens) that I would wish to know not just that an offer had been made by Jeremy Thomas, the most adventurous and least parochial by far of contemporary British film producers (Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, The Last Emperor, Crash and so forth), but that it had been made on behalf of a filmmaker for whom I had an enormous admiration, Bernardo Bertolucci.
I accepted the offer and also accepted Bernardo’s and Jeremy’s suggestion that I myself screenwrite the adaptation: the offer, because I couldn’t think of a single filmmaker in the world who struck me as having a greater affinity with the novel’s themes than Bernardo; the suggestion because it gave me an opportunity concurrently with my screenwriting assignment to rewrite – or rather, as in a palimpsest, to overwrite – that first version with which I was so unhappy. (There was equally the fact – let’s be honest – that I stood to make a lot of money.) The new, changed title, The Dreamers, was mine, but the impetus to drop the original came from
Bernardo, who cared for it as little as I myself had come to do. It was to be the first of innumerable changes. Bernardo’s film now exists. If the reader has already seen it, he or she will realise that this book, although much closer to the film than the first version, is not at all what is termed a novelisation. That is deliberate. And perhaps I can explain why by way of a whimsical little analogy. If one wears dark grey trousers, let’s say, and a jacket which is also grey, but not exactly the same grey, the result looks awkward and inelegant, almost as though one were hoping to pass the ensemble off as a suit. Far better to wear a jacket in a different colour altogether. So with a novel and its cinematic adaptation.
So, too, with my novel and Bernardo’s film. They may be twins but – just like my own fictional siblings, Théo and Isabelle – they’re not identical.
The Dreamers Page 12
