The Dreamers (14 page)

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. Queues 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 month 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.

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.