by Gregory Day
And now a single file of scouts passed them on the other side of the road. As if to confirm all arcane regimentation.
Mathilde and Francis walked, drifted, the other way.
†
To rebel against the rebellion. Is that what they were doing for those few short hours? Was this a pastorale, were they drifting, or actively resisting the moment, resisting history?
At the corner of Rue Pasteur and Avenue Augustin Dumont, where the clouds gathered, she offered him her hand as they began to cross the road. His breath was nearly taken away by the touch. Suddenly, though, the house in Geelong, in Milipi Avenue, the house to which he would presumably return, filled the spaces of his mind. With its own spaces. His bedroom, its single bed, the built-in bookshelves, the windows looking onto the grey paling fence, the dark alcove in the kitchen for the stove, the back porch, even the matrix of its flimsy trellis, the screen door whose handle you had to lift up rather than down. He even saw the lonely birdbath in the backyard – lonely because he saw clearly, at the heart of this most sensuous moment, how it was empty of water. In his absence. He’d done well in his studies of the French language because, like a trained parrot, he had a talent for rote learning. So now he said: ‘The birds. Where are the birds?’
Les oiseaux. Où sont les oiseaux?
It was a fey question, in the middle of the city there, with all the major union and factional affiliations readying themselves for a major public collaboration, the meetings going on with lively debate and impassioned declamations of protocols and their deconstructions. She knew this and yet the question had a charm. She imagined his homeland as a vast lilac aviary, against which Paris seemed a blank page, its famous details erased by the emptiness of its skies.
The sky was white now. She was looking up and the sky was white. It had been the blue of the season but now, looking up, the clouds had gathered. The sky was white with no birds.
‘Where are the birds?’ she said in English, as they arrived on the far side of the Mairie de Clamart. Then, in the window of a tabac, she saw an orange canary in a cage. Letting go of his hand suddenly she rushed over. The tabac was empty. No-one behind the counter and a single Monoprix bag on the counter. She moved straight to the cage. She leant through the silver light of the window, her arms aglow, and unhooked the cage door. The orange canary titled its head at her quizzically. And then, smiling broadly through the window at FB, she came out of the tabac again.
La porte a été ouverte, mais l’oiseau va-t-il s’envoler?
‘The door has been opened,’ she said, taking his hand once more. ‘But will the bird fly?’
†
Later that day, after the blandishments of Clamart, the words appeared on the walls of the city along with all the others. From the moment of the first student demonstrations at the Nanterre campus, indeed from February to April in Chicago, Brussels and Munich, the student revolution had become a pageant of scrawled one-liners, the architecture of the city the pages of an artist’s book.
VITE!
(quick)
IL EST INTERDIT D’INTERDIRE
(It is forbidden to forbid)
LE BONHEUR EST UNE IDÉE NEUVE
(Happiness is a new idea)
NE ME LIBÉREZ PAS, JE M’EN CHARGE
(Don’t liberate me, I’ll do it myself)
SOYEZ RÉALISTES, DEMANDEZ L’IMPOSSIBLE
(Be realistic, demand the impossible)
They had found brown paint in a tin strewn the night before. They rushed to buy a brush but could find nothing open. Then Mathilde had seen one also lying on the ground, amongst the refuse of a barricade.
On an apartment building at 26 Rue de Buci, between Saint-Germain and the Seine, they wrote the words in large block type, the brown paint slightly discoloured by the blue paint that had not quite dried on the brush that they found.
LA PORTE A ÉTÉ OUVERTE, MAIS L’OISEAU VA-T-IL S’ENVOLER?
6
‘“Back to the Land” Is the Schtick of Pétainists’
In a restaurant that night in Montmartre he had made the mistake of telling Mathilde he could hardly believe she had grown up at the very place on the south-west coast that he was about to visit on a research trip.
She had raised her shoulders and shaken her head. ‘But you can’t leave at this moment. It would be like running away from history.’
He explained that he had no choice, that a field trip with his professor had been organised as part of his studies. They were to leave for Arcachon and the Dune du Pyla in two days time. He admitted then that he was looking forward to it.
Implied in his comment was a dangerous nostalgia, Mathilde explained. She said she could sense him already luxuriating in an impending peace.
And then she said: ‘“Back to the land” is the schtick of Pétainists.’
At first he didn’t know what she was talking about. Marshal Pétain had headed the collaborating French government under the German occupation, he knew that. But sometimes, even despite his ability to retain vast amounts of information, and despite his aptitude for French studies, he too easily confused the subtle vowel sounds of the language he was hearing. Thus, in this instance, as they dined on sole and drank white wine on the far right knoll of the city, he had heard pédéraste instead of Pétainist. Or, rather, he had not known exactly what he had heard but pédéraste was the closest approximation.
He did not know what this issue of ‘back to the land’ had to do with him, let alone with the molestation of children. But, intellectually ambitious as he was, he tried. Perhaps it had something to do with a destructive romanticism of innocence, of natural purity. The Nazis had had strong notions of a golden earth, after all, an impossible earth, and look at what they did to children. But how was the pleasure of his anticipation of leaving Paris in two days time for the Grande Dune and the landscape of her childhood in any way abusive?
Eventually he decided to be brave. ‘I don’t understand you,’ he admitted.
She stared at him, frowning intensely.
‘But then again,’ he said with a smile, ‘we’ve only just met.’
He intended this last comment as a charming joke but she didn’t seem amused.
‘You are suffering from distraction,’ she said.
He noted that she used the word as if it was a disease, like syphilis, or the flu.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Then, with less certainty, ‘and it seems it’s contagious.’
In the corner of the restaurant a young man played flamenco guitar. Every now and again he would get up and move around the room, soliciting coins with an upturned black velvet hat. He now stood beside Francis and Mathilde. FB reached instinctively for the wallet in the inner pocket of his marsh-coloured coat, but she waved the guitarist away. ‘Plus tard,’ she said.
The guitarist kept moving amongst the tables. The room was dimly lit; if it wasn’t for the glow of a fish tank high on the wall above the door they would hardly have been able to see the musician when he sat back down on his low chair, replaced his hat, and took up his guitar.
There was a bright orange-and-green-striped fish in the tank and now, for the first time since they had entered the restaurant, it caught FB’s eye. As if the mere mention of the affliction distraction had produced such an exotic temptation out of thin air.
He quickly corrected his gaze, looked back at Mathilde.
‘And so, the dunes in the Galerie Sarcon, the Mondrians,’ he ventured, ‘are they a distraction too?’
She thought for a time, or pretended to.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They are les arts décoratifs. My studies. But they can be temporarily put aside for more important things.’
‘Like what?’
She smiled. ‘Like letting birds out of their cages.’
He grimaced then, remembering the flus
h of her skin as they had written the words on the Rue de Buci.
‘But you would have my cage closed?’ he said.
‘No, no,’ she exclaimed. ‘Voler! Voler! Go ahead and fly. But fly in Paris. Where the air needs you.’
†
On the Sunday he woke late, knowing the Galerie Sarcon would be shut. Mathilde had kissed him on both cheeks on the street outside the restaurant before saying goodbye. But it was not the touch of her lips on his skin that had the effect. It was earlier, when they had finished their meal and she was describing to him, by way of demonstrating her point about distraction, the life she had led as a girl on the Gascony coast. Loosened now by the wine she was confessing how she fought to keep her nostalgia for it at bay when, in enunciating the word pinasse, a tiny jewel-shaped bead of her saliva flew illumined through the dimly lit air and landed directly in his open mouth.
Mathilde did not seem to notice what had occurred. She continued apace, describing the freedom she’d had as a tomboy fishing from her pinasse, a small rowboat made from the local pines that had been planted across les landes to drain the marshes. But it was as she talked that the young FB had grown more properly distracted. He sat, nodding his head, but barely paying attention at all.
He had closed his mouth as soon as he felt the wetness land. The arc of that single bead of her saliva was instantaneously etched onto his brain. It set up a tingling in his whole being. The ease with which it flew, the perfected shape of its trajectory, the softness and scintillation of its touch as it landed. He sat silently, convinced he had a pearl sitting on his tongue.
He went to bed that night, after riding the bus from Montmartre to Jussieu, still savouring that moment and the sense it gave him of having been penetrated by Mathilde. In the morning, when he woke, the sense he had of the pearl of her on his tongue was still clear. The nature of their interconnection could not have been sweeter. He had taken her into himself, into his mouth and his bloodstream, not in a sloppy ungated kissing way but with a perfect economy and singularity.
Yes, that was it. The singularity. That single pearl. It was only one drop, one drop of her, and it was all that was needed to alter him forever.
†
Mathilde spent that Sunday in a state of confusion. Back in the cafe with Georges and two friends of his from Nantes, she didn’t breathe a word. She listened as they debated what should happen in the coming days. A general strike for Monday had been called on Saturday after the extent of the police violence towards the students on the night of the barricades became evident. Three of the main union alliances – the CGT, the CFDT and the FO – had announced a joint demonstration and forum for the Monday morning. The plan was for students to show their solidarity with workers by showing up first thing at the Renault factory on the Île Seguin, then leaving together for a mass demonstration which would start from the Place de la République in the afternoon. Georges was worried about the fragmentations that would ensue, arguing that Stalinists, communists and socialists of every stamp would attempt to colonise the moment. His friend Andre assured him in good humour that such political encrustations were so irrelevant nowadays as to be subjects for anthropologists. Nevertheless, said Gilles, who was Georges’ oldest friend, a thousand fights will ensue and blood does not flow in museums. These were the streets, after all.
Gilles was keen on Mathilde but as they sat drinking beer at the table she was doubly oblivious. Why, she asked herself, had she talked for over an hour in the restaurant of the night before about things, such as her pinasse, that did not really exist anymore? Memories were the internal museums of those who lived in fear of change. She did not like to think of herself as such as person. The pinasse, as it moved amongst the shoals and currents of her childhood waters, had a dexterity she wanted to employ in her life in Paris now. It was not a symbol of some sweet yet distant perfection, yet as she had spoken of it to FB she had felt her sighs rising like fish under her voice. As if the very ocean was a nostalgia pouring its tides through the mouth of the Bassin d’Arcachon, and pouring too like an invisible dye through the bloodstream of her present life. But no, the ocean was a fact, a wedge of blue she held in the corner of her mind. The resinous air, the cries of the gulls, these were not things she longed for, not fairy tale histories to which she longed to escape; they were facts, that’s all, facts like limbs, hair, organs. Facts of her.
So why then had those fish-sighs risen, just when Paris was being overturned?
As a bus full of Japanese tourists went by she snapped out of her reverie. A man passed by the window of the cafe eating a cake. The question remained unanswered.
7
Wind Shadows
Île Seguin. On Monday morning the tempo that had been building at the Renault factory finally reached a crescendo. He was there. Roaring across the bridge with the tide and the fervour. In the air he sensed both the old grievances of the Marxist working class and the new insouciance of the student rebellion. Beneath the pouring crowd on the bridge, the river itself was flowing with irony. It seemed to smile at him as he looked downstream; it seemed to be winking in the spring sunlight.
The weather was beautiful. He kept his feet, used the flats of his hands to balance against the shirts, the coats, the shoulders and sleeves around him. How, they had all been wondering, would the students and the workers get on?
It seemed the Renault plant covered nearly every last inch of the island. Once FB had stepped off the bridge he saw how a voice through a megaphone was marshalling the river of bodies. He passed with the throng – excitable, joking, intent – into a vast factory shed with a ceiling almost as high as the sky. On either side he could see the stations and equipment of the assembly lines. Enormous steel presses and cylinders, flat-gridded bays, painted workstations with lathes plastered over with colour photos cut from magazines of talismanic sunshine, holidays, sex. Here and there workers were at their stations, refusing to be distracted, going about their tasks as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening, as if chassis would be assembled as on any other day.
Instinctively he felt a concern for these hermetic, stubborn souls. Alone in the city of light he related to the dignity of their solitude, and thought of his father. But abuse was being hurled at these chassis-monks manning their steel altars. They were told to stop fantasising through their glued pictures of countryside and girls, to get out with the rest of the crowd, to actually live the sunshine and sex.
The faces of the solitaries remained inscrutable, their overalls like soutanes pressed clean. The blue Gitanes smoke swirled.
The crowd came to a standstill at the shed’s far end. Conversations flowed, necks were craned towards a central point: a speaking dais on a hoist, metres in the air.
First the CGT representative spoke. It was just after 8 am. For too long de Gaulle’s machinery had been gummed stuck, but to close down the universities and attack students was ‘the last refuge of scoundrels’. (The CGT representative used the English phrase for this.) A rare moment had arrived, where the light had converged. It must be seized. On this island in the city, where a heartless regime had been created within a beautiful world, hidden systems were now being clarified and exposed. The minds and bodies of Paris were aligned. En masse.
FB could not see the speaker’s face, only hear the sharp, emphatic, nasal voice. The response was strong, even with the factions. The FO, the Trotskyists. He looked up and down the lines for Mathilde. He knew she would be here, but where? It felt strange to be on his own at such a moment of collective significance.
The CGT representative’s voice was calm, reassuring, at first. But then, as he spoke of poor wages, of the retirement age, of the injuries and accidents that had been occurring at the plant, his pitch grew more intense, his indignation plain.
There were thousands standing in that giant steel cave, listening. There was a sincerity in the air and, FB noted, very little heckling. He felt like an imposter, but by
the time all the speakers had had their say there was a feeling of genuine optimism in the air. As the thousands poured out of the steel cave and back into the sunshine, a number of the chassis-monks downed tools to join them. By the entrance gates near the bridge a coffee van was doing a roaring trade. People stood about in large and small throngs, joking, humming bars of ‘The Internationale’, which had been sung with great intent back inside the shed. FB made a note in his journal in 1988, some twenty years after that day on the island in the Seine, that it was apparently the first time in the history of the plant that ‘The Internationale’ had been sung there.
There was plenty of time before the march would begin from the Place de la République, but the momentum was already taking people back across the bridge towards Boulogne-Billancourt and beyond. After queuing at the coffee van for nearly half an hour, always with his eye out for Mathilde, FB stationed himself near the bridge to scan the departing crowd for her face. A dark-skinned man with a slogan printed on his t-shirt in Spanish thrust a wad of leaflets into his hand for distribution. Just as quickly the man was gone again through the crowd.
FB looked down at the roneoed information in his hand. It spoke of two hundred Algerians killed by the Paris police on the orders of its prefect in 1961. This had happened on, or about, the Pont Saint-Michel. The headline on the leaflet read: ‘Où sont les morts, Papon?’
FB knew that Maurice Papon was the prefect of police but he had not known about the two hundred who had died on his order in the very centre of the city. The look the man gave him as he handed FB the leaflets and the contents of the leaflets themselves had more effect on him than all the speeches he had listened to combined.
He began to hand the leaflets out as people crossed the bridge.
Later, he would wonder at his innocence as he stood there amongst the sunlit thousands, handing out those pieces of paper seeking justice for the dead. He came to feel proud of that hour of his life but always felt ashamed of it as well. For in the precise moment in which he’d felt sure that for once in his life his actions were on the side of the vulnerable and the just, he was actually far more concerned with spotting a young woman in the crowd.
