by Gregory Day
Whatever the case, he and I connected. At that late stage in his life, and in the haven of the bookshop in James Street, there was a compact. If Oulipo was mentioned, or a topic as licentious or outrageous as Wilhelm Reich and his orgone accumulator, no-one blinked an eyelid. Some laughter might be heard, born of the nonchalance of those who’d arrived on earth too late to really understand the strictures and crises of the twentieth century and the experimentation they produced, but nonetheless in the bookshop, FB, who did understand such things, felt less alone. We connected. Not through the disembodied glitches of the internet but with all our five senses working. In the same room as each other. In a room in a regional city, a room full of books in Geelong.
But then he was dead. Just as we were about to get going. Just as I was about to tell him about the theatrophone, and to ask him what he thought of Charlie Hebdo, of Christopher Barnett, of Houellebecq’s Submission, of Macron, and of Modiano. Now I was left alone on the raw stump of postcolonial pine, with the brown, brown river.
The words of Sarraute filled the vacuum.
Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.
After I don’t know how long I got up and retraced my steps – literally this time – back to my house. As I went the bright vacuum, the luminous void-shape of his passing, re-emerged, flicking occasionally, a lizard’s tail of light behind me. I entered the house, sat down at the table with his presence all around me, took up the checklist he and Anna had dropped off, and, once again, began reading.
Two
4
Slip Face
It had been first written in a small black-and-red notebook, alongside metro routes, timetables, and ‘cabbage, fish, marmalade’. Then it had been scored with chalk on a wall in the Sorbonne. Now it was written in dark grey under-paint on the apartment building opposite the cafe, below two ghastly griffins of the Second Empire.
The forest precedes man,
The desert follows him.
The mist had come with the first light, but as the buildings and the earth below them were warmed it soon disappeared from Rue Monge. Mathilde and Georges had been up all night yet their conversation did not lack for energy. They sat at a corner table by the shining window, looking out onto the day’s first cars making their way along the street. Mathilde, the young woman with freckles and red hair, was cursing.
‘You are talking about something that was new six decades ago. Have you not heard of Kupka?’
‘Yes, well I have. But this is not linear. This is about unrealised realities.’
réalités non réalisées
She scoffed, scornful, her face flung back as if towards Gascony. ‘It is no such thing,’ she said. ‘It is about unrealities.’
irréalités
‘No, it is a question of vision,’ Georges replied. As he argued with Mathilde he was not cross so much as certain. He spoke for a time about Kupka. About The Yellow Scale and how there would be no Beatles without it. No Sgt. Pepper’s. He spoke of how it was for Kupka when he was living not in Prague or Vienna but in the Parisian suburb of Puteaux. Thus Georges enumerated the nodes of his knowledge of the Czech abstractionist.
‘But the Puteaux Group was also called the Golden Section!’ Mathilde cried, aghast. ‘Their very name was a materialist thing.’
chose matérialiste
She went on. ‘It is the difference in length between your arm and your leg, between the leaf and the stem. It is not an abstraction! It cannot be spectacularised! It must retain its real context to be available for eternity. Otherwise it is like a gold that will refract, the structure will slump, the surface will fray: into ugliness, and violence.’
Georges raised his hands into the air. He was exasperated now. ‘And so,’ he retorted, ‘do we just go on, with ancient harmony in our minds, like a patrimony? Like a warehouse full of Papa’s grain?’
This struck a nerve in her. The red-haired, freckled Mathilde. The foot traffic was increasing outside. People with sleepless hair, smoking, touching. Stepping over rubble, piles of cobbles, bent steel, prone street signs and other refuse on the street. She rose from the table brusquely, pointing through the door.
There, across three days and nights of detritus, of rumpled crowbarred boulevards, was the scrawled phrase on the wall that had ignited their conversation.
La fôret précède l’homme,
le désert le suit.
†
After farewelling Georges by Aux Assassins, she arrived at the gallery before midday, still not having slept, but somehow refreshed now that she was alone. She had invited him to join her, to demonstrate her point about Kupka, but he was tired. She was glad. And anyway, she needed time, and was sure that history would make her point for her. When all the crazy ideas in the air became granular again, before taking their place back down on earth.
Unbuttoning her cardigan, she crossed into the second, smaller room, and saw she would not be alone. A thin, neat middle-aged man and a younger man with an English coat and a mouche, not saying much. Two elderly women, one with Le Figaro spread before her, the other speaking quietly but rapidly, as if to the wall.
She would at least be able then, she thought, to properly see the dunes.
pour voir les dunes
The two men discussed the paintings in an intermittent way, quietly, so that even as she shared the space with them she could only make out fragments of what they said. She gathered, however, that the older man had brought the younger man to see only the Mondrians, and specifically the dunes. Perhaps he too was not from Paris – his accent sounded like that of her father’s friend René Pernac, who was from the Médoc. Whatever the case, the older man did not stay long and left quite suddenly, as if a duty had been accomplished, an introduction performed.
She stood then with only the younger man’s quietude – she felt a shyness surrounding him, perhaps a lack of confidence, even as he absorbed himself in the paintings – and the two older ladies viewing the adjacent wall.
pour voir les dunes
Her fingers rested on the cold key to her apartment in her cardigan pocket. With no-one looking she adjusted her bra. She began to insert herself into the gaps between the dabbings of paint, let herself enter the swales, lean on the slopes, feel the sand. Then, just as emphatically, she returned to the image, the paint that made the image. She didn’t think of Zeeland, where the paintings had come about, nor of the dunes where she had been made. But she had needed to come there nevertheless. She had quoted the line to Georges – ‘Art is dead, but the student is a necrophiliac’ – not five minutes before they parted ways at Aux Assassins, he to sleep before rejoining the throng on Boulevard Saint-Michel, she, guiltily, to stand aloof before the Mondrians.
The old woman with Le Figaro began to quote news from the reports. Perhaps these ladies owned the gallery, Mathilde thought. Or perhaps their sons or daughters did. It was hardly a normal place for recitations of the news.
She cringed as she listened to the breathless hatchet-journalism. But the facts themselves were actually enthralling, tyrannical statistics which could only be estimates anyway.
On the Île Seguin . . .
At the Sorbonne . . .
In Lyon . . .
The old woman’s tone was excited, not so much approving as entertained. Her friend must have been listening but she appeared not to be, staring as she was at the annotations beside the compositions on the otherwise white wall.
Mathilde took her time, her breathing beginning to slow after hours of chaotic activity and urgent thought. The outlines of sand began to crystallise in front of her and she compared their rhythm to the cadence of the old woman’s recitations. Eventually the other, more self-absorbed of the two women said, ‘Assez!’ and immediately the dunes lost their chintz, the room fell silent, but for the sound of the newsreader folding away the newspaper.
An
d so they stood, the four of them, before the paintings in the Galerie Sarcon. Until the young man sporting the mouche under his lip and the English coat turned and left the gallery, with a leather tread that echoed from the walls.
She thought the impeccable old ladies would go now that the paper had been folded but no, now they began to talk properly, about the events of the night. She’d had enough. They’d made no mention of what she’d seen, where she’d been; they may as well have been discussing their cats.
She caught a last glimpse of his coat, his tan-coloured coat, as she turned her face away from the ladies’ dialogue.
‘They commandeered a bulldozer from a construction site and began to move things into place for barricades.’
‘They levered the street sign on the corner of Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain and began to wield it like a flag.’
‘It would have been heavy.’
‘Yes, but there were so many of them.’
She followed him out onto Rue des Quatre-Vents. He was not hard to follow, his stride was long but slow; for a time she was content just to keep him in her sights, past the bus stop, past the man with an embroidered F on his black jacket, past the snickering pigeons, until she felt like a sleuth.
She caught up with him under the plane trees at Saint-Sulpice. A green line of life in the city, still untouched except for one whose trunk had been chopped through overnight. The tree lay askance, a toppled monument, a green queen fallen, as if in supplication before the church. On the short stub of its trunk a black telephone sat, like a creature from Magritte. Immediately she imagined picking up the receiver and dialling home. To give her papa an account of what had happened, to tell him how at 2 am the CRS had charged, tear gas exploding into the once joyous, now caustic air.
Instead she motioned to the thin young man standing under the nearby tree, which had not been cut down. She pointed at the telephone on the stump. He smiled at her. It was not a smile with laughter in it, more a smile of someone simply glad to be known.
She knew he had noticed her in the Galerie Sarcon. That they had considered the same paintings: the dunes made iridescent, but still loyal to the sources of their form.
‘Je suis Cézanne du Louvres,’ she said.
He frowned.
‘Shall we make a call?’ she said then, in English, but he still frowned.
Slowly his smile returned.
‘Cézanne wanted to burn the Louvre,’ he said eventually.
‘Exactement. We could dial in a progress report.’ Again she looked at the phone on the sawn-off stump.
It was the tree, he realised later, that had given the telephone its metaphysical powers. The feeling unthinking tree. Suddenly, after a night such as that, with the old world jemmied loose, the phone on the tree had a direct line to the most intimate sources of the world.
Yes, let’s ring Cézanne, she had said. The thin young man in the well-made tan coat was right: Cézanne did want to burn the Louvre. The old master from Aix had come into her mind unbidden, like a sea urchin floating to the surface of blue water. But why him? Why not Frantz Fanon, why not a prank call to the politicians, to Guy Mollet?
The thin young man set her right. Proposed the obvious. ‘Why not Mondrian?’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t we call him instead? We could call him to come back and play with us on the dunes.’
She had smiled. Felt a peace in the hollow. And couldn’t quite believe her ears.
5
Grains
That was the Saturday, 12 May, and, according to FB’s diaries, no-one in the city, on either side of the many arguments, the many lucidities and irrepressibilities, was quite sure. The police had attacked at 2 am, and were now, in the daylight, dismantling the barricades that had been heaped up through the previous day and overnight.
They introduced themselves. To each other, and to history. Mathilde, Francis. Francis, Mathilde. Both in support of the momentum taking place since the government had closed down the Nanterre campus earlier in the month, but both from a long way away: Arcachon, Geelong. Gascony, Australia.
They stood for a time, joking about the plane tree telephone, deciding in the end, yes, to call not František Kupka or Paul Cézanne but Mondrian. The phone had rung out. They had put this imaginary lack of success down to intellect. Not theirs but his. He was not taking calls from nature anymore. He was too busy with the arrangement of his grids.
Later, in the Café Peretz, while Mathilde was in the toilet, he sat alone and amazed. The telephone in fact was their communicating angel. They had not needed to make a call to any painter, any anti-colonial freedom fighter such as Fanon, or any politician-devil like Mollet. It was as if the phone on the plane tree stump had blithely connected them.
Or that’s how he felt.
They had just begun talking.
As if in mid-conversation.
†
The weather was warm, the light threading the dishevelled streets almost mystically, reflecting the underlying limestone, sandstone, gypsum and chalk. When she suggested he take off his coat, FB realised the expensive coat was excessive, almost stupid. He enjoyed clothes, and had felt that the coat was at a Parisian pitch, but now his embarrassment showed. You must be hot? she’d asked rhetorically, but he didn’t like the shirt he had on underneath, let alone his own body. Yet she cajoled him into it. She told him that the tone of the coat, its interesting discolorations, reminded her of the miles of marshes, called les landes, inboard from her childhood home at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast. ‘It is an abstraction,’ she said, laughing now, with this playful reference to Mondrian.
‘I am a dune buried in a coat,’ he had said.
He could see how she enjoyed that stroke of repartee, which relaxed his doubts about his shirt at least, bought for $5.80 at Eddy Elias Menswear in Geelong; a grey synthetic short-sleeved business shirt, with some anonymous monogram fraying badly on the chest pocket. He had meant to buy three French shirts as soon as he arrived but had felt too self-conscious and could not summon the courage to deal with the grace and confidence of Parisian shop assistants.
‘La dune enveloppe les landes.’
She tried this follow-up joke on him but with no success. So she explained. ‘The dune dressed up in the marshes,’ she said, and told him of the marsh-farmers who had walked for centuries on stilts across the so-called ‘useless’ squelchy lands of which his coat was a simulacrum.
He assumed a mock innocence. Enlisted, and not for the first time since he’d been in the city, an implied antipodean innocence. Any resemblance was unwitting, he cried, but she reassured him, told him how much she loved les landes, or what was left of them.
‘Last night the streets were like les landes,’ she said. ‘Finally we were on stilts. Unproductive to capital. Beautiful.’
He saw in his mind then a horizon of tussocks, tumbled upon one another and forming a barricade the same colour as his coat. The barricades Mathilde had helped to build were not made of tussocks but of anything that could be found close to hand, objects of the city converted, decolonised. And though the streets were not literally moors they were also being recycled, composted, diverted from their official function.
He understood her. He couldn’t believe it, but he did. It felt natural to him. Even the hidden fervour he sensed hovering around their duet was something he could understand. Something that had sat in the pit of his excitable stomach since he was a boy.
Yes, he understood. He could hardly believe he had slept all night, all his life in fact, not now that he had met her properly.
†
They walked away, through detritus, clusters of spectators assessing the drama, Mathilde leading them away from the trouble. At Saint-Germain-des-Prés there were meetings, also outside the School of Mines, but miraculously as they came through Montparnasse towards the Porte de Châtillon she saw no-one she knew, no-one to wonder why she was wal
king in the opposite direction.
As they walked he began to tell her why he was in Paris. That he was a civil engineer studying sand dunes. The older man she had seen with him at the gallery was his professor. The professor had alerted him to the Mondrians.
†
They walked and walked, eventually towards the périphérique, through Châtillon towards Clamart. She told him later that she thought they were seeking nature, as if it could still be found on the edge of the city, as both a consonance and consort. Could the meter man with the bad cough across the street putting a ticket on a green Morris feel the same way? Perhaps. Could the girl with the short braids wolfing down a baba? Maybe one day, in the circadian calendar of her heart.
A lady carrying a long pole passed them, heading back in towards the action. Two nuns, and a man wearing a surgical collar. All with faces set, headed for the aftermath of the barricades. An apple-green 2CV. A blue car, a yellow one, two blue 2CVs. He had recorded it all. He wrote down, too, how she had described helping to lift such cars overnight, hauling them up onto their sides in the Rue Gay-Lussac.
