Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  PART TWO

  Paris (1968)

  Moi qui ai connu Rimbaud, je sais

  qu’il se foutait pas mal si A

  était rouge ou vert. Il le voyait

  comme ça, mais c’est tout.

  Verlaine to Pierre Louÿs

  ‘So you lived in Paris for a while?’

  ‘Yuh.’

  ‘When was that?’

  I never actually lie, though for a time I used to try and discourage the obvious follow-ups. I would never mention May for a start. Early summer was the nearest I’d admit to.

  ‘Nineteen …’ (a frown of bad memory; mouth like a fish’s searching on the surface) ‘… must have been sixty-eight.’

  Increasingly, though, the year has little effect, and I no longer feel it’s cheating to start blurring my dates. ‘Oh, late Sixties.’ ‘Sixty-seven, eight, round about then.’ For a few years, however, I used to have to dodge out of the way of a variety of replies.

  ‘Oh, what, when those awful …’ friends of my parents would begin, eyeing me palely and filling my pockets with cobblestones.

  ‘Did you see anything of …’ was the usual, mid-way response, as if we were running through films seen, or mutual friends.

  And then there was a third type of follow-up, the cool one I felt most uneasy with.

  ‘Ah,’ (a shift in the chair, a tapping of the pipe, or some other settling social gesture) ‘les événements.’ It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been put as a question. But it would always be a statement; then there would be a respectful, rallying pause, disturbed only, say, by the creak of an unbroken leather jacket. If I failed to leap into the silence, there would (with the kindly assumption that I was suffering from shellshock) be a helpful supplementary:

  ‘I knew a guy out there at the time …’ or

  ‘Now what I’ve always found unclear …’ or

  ‘Right on …’

  The point is – well I was there, all through May, through the burning of the Bourse, the occupation of the Odéon, the Billancourt lock-in, the rumours of tanks roaring back through the night from Germany. But I didn’t actually see anything. I can’t, to be honest, remember even a smudge of smoke in the sky. Where did they put up all their posters? Not where I was living. Neither can I remember the newspaper headlines of the time; I suppose the papers went on as usual – I might have remembered if they’d stopped. Louis XVI (if you’ll forgive the comparison) went out hunting on the day the Bastille fell, came home and wrote in his diary that evening, ‘Rien’. I came home and wrote for weeks on end, ‘Annick’. Not just that, of course: her name would be followed by paragraphs of hoarse delight, wry self-congratulation, and feigned moping; but was there any room in that panting, exultant journal for any ‘sharp vignettes of the struggle’, for any lumbering political reflections? I haven’t kept the diary, but I can’t believe there was.

  Recently, Toni showed me a letter I’d written him from Paris, which contained a rare comment on the crisis. My explanation of the troubles, it seems, was that the students were too stupid to understand their courses, became mentally frustrated, and because of the lack of sports facilities had taken to fighting the riot police. ‘You may have seen a rather well-structured photograph’, I wrote, ‘of a group of police chasing a student into the river. The student is turning sideways towards the camera. A touch of Lartigue about it. At least he got some exercise. Mens seina in corpore seino.’

  Toni still occasionally quotes me phrases from that letter when he thinks I’m getting complacent; which is most of the time. Apparently, the student involved was drowned – or at least that’s what some people said – though even if it were true, I wasn’t to know at the time, was I? Toni, naturally enough, is fairly scathing about my whole Parisian experience.

  ‘Absolutely fucking typical. Only time you’ve been in the right place at the right time in your whole life, I’d say, and where are you? Holed up in an attic stuffing some chippy. It almost makes me believe in cosmic order, it’s so appropriate. I suppose you were mending your bike during that skirmish of 14–18? Doing your eleven-plus during Suez?’ (Actually, yes, more or less) ‘And what about the Trojan wars?’

  ‘On the lav.’

  1 • Karezza

  At twenty-one, I used to say I believed in the deferment of pleasure; I was usually misunderstood. Deferment was the word, not rejection or repression or abandonment or all the other terms it automatically got translated into. I’m less sure now, though I do believe in the balanced, delicate leading-in of the individual to experience. This isn’t prescriptive; just sensible. How many kids of twenty-one today are sentiently burnt out; or worse, find it chic to believe they are? Isn’t a diet of extremity senseless and, finally, comic? Isn’t the whole structure of experience built on contrast?

  What I’m leading up to is that when I arrived in Paris, with almost two decades of education behind me, plus an enthralled reading in the classics of passion – Racine, Marivaux, Laclos were trusted guides – I was still a virgin. Now, don’t jump to all those conclusions (puritanism lurking behind stance of worldly knowledge; fear of sex disguised as austerity; sneaky jealousy of today’s kids) because I know them already. The fact that pubescents nowadays are getting stuck in before their testicles are fully descended doesn’t bother me in itself. Not really. Not very often.

  ‘Maybe you just don’t like sex?’ Toni would whisper at me, after what we called the Common Pursuit had led, in his case, to joining the Great Tradition. ‘Time to Revalue, kid,’ he commanded.

  ‘I know I like it – that’s why I can refuse it.’ I liked this argument.

  ‘You can’t mean you know you like it; you mean you think you will like it.’

  ‘All right.’ If he wanted to put it that way. ‘Anyway, De Rougemont says passion thrives on obstacles.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you have to build your own. Do It Yourself artist. Why don’t you want to get in there and root? Root de toot. I mean, Christ, I want to root everyone.’ Toni made a few rolling, nasal pig-noises. ‘I can barely think of a woman I don’t want to fuck. Think of all that pussy out there, Chris; all that dripping fur. You’re not exactly a warpie. It’s true you don’t seem to have the tremendous drive that I’ve got’ (Toni, admittedly, did look older, more rabbit-hungry) ‘but I should think most women, given the opportunity, would go down on you like a ton of bricks. I mean, knock out those over seventy, no fifty, and those under fifteen, nuns, religious screw-ups, most newly marrieds but not all, a few million with malnutrition whom you probably wouldn’t want to touch, your mother, your sister, no on second thoughts we may as well leave her in you never know, your gran, plus June Ritchie and anyone I happen to be going around with at the time – and what have we got? Hundreds of millions of women all of whom mightn’t be averse to breaking in the old dick. French, Italians, Swedes,’ (he cocked an eyebrow) ‘Americans, Persians …?’ (he put his head on one side) ‘Japanese – the inscrutable yoni? Malaysians? Creoles? Eskimos? Burmese?’ (an impatient shrug) ‘Red Indians? Latvians? Irish?’ (then, crossly) ‘Zulus?’ He paused, a shopkeeper who has spread out his best stuff and knows that if you only address your mind to the matter, you’ll find something you like.

  ‘I didn’t realise you wanked over the atlas.’

  ‘Graduated from the National Geographic.’

  ‘Well, who didn’t?’

  ‘But you could have by now, couldn’t you?’ (Toni, like a dutiful air-traffic controller, was always monitoring what he called my ‘near misses’) ‘There was that nurse, wasn’t there, who said if you were good, the next time you could have chocolates?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that girl who wasn’t Jewish, wasn’t Catholic and had been to X-films?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that woman when you were on the Christmas post?’

  ‘I might have lost my bonus.’

  ‘That’s what it’s all about, kid, losing your bonus. And Rusty, for fuck’s sake, Rusty …’
>
  Rusty was actually Janet, but Toni had given her a pulp sobriquet partly, I think, because of his tendency to Americanise sex; but officially because, he claimed, he was afraid that if I didn’t finally hurl one past her (as he, not I, would have put it), she might rust up.

  After leaving school, I’d spent a couple of months knocking around with Rusty. She was the local solicitor’s daughter and fulfilled our SST qualifications. (Though in her case, it was more like TSS. She had big tits and was unhappy. Toni deduced with impregnable logic that she was unhappy because, as soon as her tits became larger than her mother’s, her parents gave her a hard time; so she had Suffered; and if you had Suffered, you couldn’t not have Soul.) Janet and I used to lie around in the sun, which I almost enjoyed (though I suspected I would always be oppidan at heart: my cool soul needed to be indoors, like a stick of rhubarb growing best in an upturned chimney-pot). We went for walks and laughed at golfers; we tried learning to smoke; we thought about the capital-F Future. I explained that I was part of the Anger Generation; she asked me if this meant I wasn’t going to take a job; I said I wasn’t sure – you could never tell which way Anger was going to jump; she said she understood.

  Janet/Rusty was the first girl with whom I exchanged kisses of respectable duration; the first, that is, with whom I realised that you were only allowed to breathe through your nose. Initially, it was like being at the dentist’s: you spent all the time hoping that your one operative air-passage wouldn’t clog up before you got out of the chair. Gradually, though, I got my confidence. After that, it felt more like snorkelling.

  I snorkelled a lot with Janet. She was almost the love of part of my life.

  ‘She was almost the love of part of my life.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘Does it still sound OK?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s OK – wry, if thin-blooded; but I suppose that’s about right. So why didn’t you ever shoot one past Rusty?’

  ‘Why are your metaphors always taken from sport? Scoring, shooting, hurling, hitting a home run. Why do you make it sound so competitive?’

  ‘Because it is, it is. And if you don’t look out, you’ll get relegated. Rusty, I mean, Rusty …’ He did a lost-for-lust face and waved his hands around like a black-and-white minstrel.

  ‘Did you fancy her then?’

  ‘Fancy her? If it hadn’t been for you, I’d …’

  ‘… ’ve scored five goals, three boundaries, two knock-outs, eight home runs and broken the marathon record while you were about it.’

  ‘Pole vault.’

  ‘Javelin.’

  ‘Shot putt.’ He pretended to juggle two monster breasts in his weighed-down palms.

  ‘Hop, step and thump.’

  ‘Why not, Chris?’

  ‘Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you have to.’

  ‘If you can, and you want to, then you ought to.’

  ‘If you do just because you ought to, then you don’t really want to.’

  ‘If you can, and you want to, and you don’t, then you’re queer.’

  ‘It was the man in Rusty I loved.’

  Rusty/Janet and I spent quite some time not undressing each other. Partly it was lack of opportunity, although – as I would argue grandly to myself – the ingenious and the desperate always find some sodden undergrowth, some disc-slipping back seat, or nervous shop doorway flicker-lit by passing cars. But then, I suppose we weren’t desperate, and our ingenuity was limited to making our parents believe that we didn’t really mind whether we were left alone or not; that way, we were left alone more.

  Sometimes, though, we’d go in for a playful, partial, half-amused investigation of each other. We’d expose a small area of the other’s body – a crescent of breast, a band of belly, a shoulder, a thigh. On the few occasions we undressed totally, there was a sense of let-down afterwards. But it wasn’t, I came to realise later, the sense of frustration at not making love; it was a vaguer feeling, the sort of dissatisfaction you get when you’ve achieved something rather than the sort you get when you’ve failed. I wondered whether the pleasure of striving didn’t exceed the pleasure of achievement, of victory, of orgasm. Maybe the ultimate in sexual fulfilment would prove to be karezza? It is, I used to tell Toni from the sanctuary of virginity, only our competitive, games-playing society which makes us head noisily for the white tape of orgasm.

  2 • Demandez Nuts

  Still, I don’t know how important all that stuff is.

  Paris. 1968. Annick. A delightful Breton name, isn’t it? The -ick, by the way, is pronounced with a long i, to rhyme with pique, which isn’t appropriate, at least not at first.

  I’d gone to Paris to do some research for part of a thesis I’d undertaken so that I could get a grant and go to Paris. A completely normal sense of priorities among post-graduates. At the time, friends of mine were loafing their way – constructively or otherwise – through most of the capital cities of Europe, after developing furious interests in matters which could only be thoroughly investigated where the relevant papers happened to be. In my case, it was ‘The Importance and Influence of British Styles of Acting in the Paris Theatre 1789–1850’. You always need to shove at least one big date (1789, 1848, 1914) into your title, because it looks more efficient, and flatters the general belief that everything changes with the eruption of war. Actually, as I rapidly discovered, things do change: thus, in the years immediately after 1789, the British Styles of Acting had very little Importance and Influence in the Paris Theatre, for the simple reason that no British actor in his right mind would have risked his skin over there while the Revolution was on. I suppose I should have guessed this. But to tell the truth, the only thing I knew about British acting in France when I invented the subject was that Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson in 1827. She, of course, as it turned out, was Irish; but then I was only applying for money for six months in Paris, and the financial authorities weren’t an over-sophisticated bunch.

  ‘Can-can, frou-frou, vin blanc, French knickers,’ was Toni’s comment when I told him I was off to Paris. He was going to Morocco for his de-Anglification, and was already racking up spoolfuls of tortured hisses and grunts on his Grundig.

  ‘Kif. Hashish. Lawrence of Arabia. Dates,’ was my reply, though I felt it lacked a certain edge.

  But it wasn’t really like that. I’d already been to Paris many times before 1968, and didn’t go with any of the naïve expectations Toni was greedy to attribute to me. I’d already done the Paree side of it in my late teens: green Olympia Press paperbacks, ocular loitering from boulevard cafés, thrusting leather G-strings and pouches in a Montparnasse simulation-dive. I’d done the city-as-history bit while a student, I-spying the famous in Père Lachaise, and coming back exultant over an unexpected find: the catacombs at Denfer-Rochereau, where post-Revolutionary history and personal glooming could be sweetly combined as you wandered among vaults of transplanted skeletons, sorted and stacked by bone rather than body: neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls suddenly rose up before the groping light of your candle. I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés round the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.

  I chose Paris because it was a familiar place where I could, if I wanted to, live alone. I knew the city; I knew the language; I wouldn’t be harassed by the food or the climate. It was too large to have a menacingly hospitable colony of English émigrés. There would be little to stop me concentrating on myself.

  I was lent a flat up in Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7-bis Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a friend-of-a-friend. It was an airy, slightly derelict studio-bedroom with a creaky French floor and a fruit machine in the corner which worked off a supply of old francs kept on a shelf. In the kitchen was a rack of home-made calvados which I was allowed to drink provided I replaced each bottle with a substitute one of whisky (I lost money on the deal, but gained local colour).

 
I installed my few possessions, greased up to the concierge, Mme Huet, in her den of house-plants and diarrhoeic cats and back numbers of France Dimanche (she tipped me off about each nouvelle intervention chirurgicale à Windsor), registered at the Bibliothèque Nationale (which wasn’t too conveniently close) and began to fancy myself, at long last, as an autonomous being. School, home, university, friends – all in their different ways offered a consensus of values, ambitions, approved styles of failure. You accepted bits, you reacted against bits, you reacted against reacting against bits, and the constant swaying motion of this process gave you the illusion of advance. Here, at last, though, I could really work it out. I’d take a breather and really work it all out.

  Well, perhaps not straight away. Just to come here, sit down, and start methodically working out your life: wouldn’t that be succumbing to exactly the sort of channelled, Civil Service thinking which I had heroically scorned? So for the first few weeks I loafed, without much trouble or guilt. I called in on the Howard Hawks season which is always playing somewhere in Paris. I sat around knowingly in some of the less celebrated squares and gardens. I rediscovered that smirk which goes with riding first class on a second-class Métro ticket. I looked up a few reports of Revolutionary performances of Addison’s Cato (the play was a favourite of Marat’s). I leafed through accounts of Being Artistic in Paris. I lounged about at Shakespeare & Company. I read Hemingway’s posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (‘Out of the question,’ Toni had assured me, ‘they’re so badly written they must be authentic’).

  I did some rather delicate drawings according to the Haphazard Principle. The theory was that everything is intrinsically interesting, that art shouldn’t just concentrate on high-spots (I know some people have taken that line before). So you carry your sketch-book everywhere, and stop not according to the official, received interestingness of what you see, but according to some random factor which you decide on that day – like being jostled in the street, or seeing two bicycles abreast, or smelling coffee. Then you freeze, stay pointing in the direction you were heading, and examine the first thing your eye falls on. In a way, it’s a development of the old theory Toni and I had called the Constructive Loaf.