Francis Bacon in Your Blood (19 page)

We turn round to look at a recent portrait of George sitting on a stool. His features have been whipped into a multi-coloured mush.

‘'E finks I look like this,' George says, shaking his neatly barbered head at the folly of the world. ‘An' he does loads and loads ov 'em an' 'en he goes and sells 'em for thasans and thasans of pahns.'

This point amuses him deeply.

‘An 'ese,' he says to me quietly, confidentially, gesturing at the people standing round, ‘'ese cunts go and pay fuckin' thasans of pahns for 'em.'

I'm beginning to feel more at home in Paris as I get used to the office routine and pick up all sorts of little tricks that make life here easier. I've learnt, for instance, to insist on being in the right because admitting that you're in the wrong, which often wins you points in England, just confirms that you're dim and worthless in France. When I told my landlord apologetically that I'd knocked over the bedside light and broken it, he made me pay for a new one, even though the old one was held together with electrical tape. The next time round, having slipped in the treacherous tub and yanked the shower head out of its lead, I complained fiercely to the landlord about how run down the whole tiny, stinky bathroom was and he eventually stumped up for a partial refurb. I count this as a minor triumph in coming to terms with my new life, but in turn everything here has started to change incredibly fast because revolution is in the air and it's affecting everybody,
breaking down barriers and transforming old, ingrained attitudes. People are excited and bursting with opinions which they share confidentially with complete strangers. Paris and the whole buttoned-up Parisian demeanour is undergoing an extraordinary metamorphosis, virtually hour by hour.

Even my concierge has started talking to me, something no one could ever have predicted. Until now, I've had to hang around every morning in the hope she would come to her door to give me whatever post has arrived. Now she beats me to it, opening the door with my letters stuffed into the pockets of the old flannel dressing gown she always wears, but she won't hand them over until we've discussed the latest turn of events which she follows obsessively on her radio.

‘They've occupied the Sorbonne!' she tells me, waving an enticing bundle of envelopes in my face. ‘I'm on the side of the students. France has to change. The police are disgusting.'

I'd watched a big demonstration turn nasty in the Latin Quarter a few days before. To begin with it seemed like a bit of student fun that had grown spontaneously out of all proportion, then begun to take itself seriously. Perhaps it's because it's in Paris, there's something that struck me as very romantic about the revolutionary look. You can wear a silk scarf or a bandana round your neck and use it elegantly to cover your nose and mouth when the tear gas starts exploding. And it did, the bombs landed all over the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and when the police charged, for a moment I thought they can't do anything to me I'm English, then I realized they were hitting everyone indiscriminately, delicate girls as well as boys, and when the crowd ran I ran with them.

Once I got home, I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. I've never been involved in an uprising and realize I don't really know what it's about, for all the slogans and pamphlets and the graffiti plastered over every available wall. I've never considered myself particularly oppressed politically, but others apparently do, passionately, and I feel ashamed at having stayed
in my ivory tower rather than becoming more ‘engaged'. Again I try hard to forget the whole thing; it's nothing to do with me, I am a foreigner, and these are internal problems. But I still feel the tear gas in my lungs and the excitement of chanting slogans and linking arms with comrades, some of them unbelievably appealing in tight, military-style shirts, others with their hair drawn back in a fetching ponytail.

So I'm involved now, just like my new friend in her dingy
loge
, and now that I'm speaking to her I speak to all kinds of people I've never given the time of day to. From the mournful newspaper vendor and the condescending cheese merchant down to the beggar on the pavement just outside, everyone has an opinion about the ‘events' that they want to share. There's a pork butcher called Noblet just by the Alésia Métro station that has a pink neon sign of a pig winking day and night above its shopfront where I'm usually in and out in five minutes but have to queue now because the question is no longer which pâté to buy but a lengthy, generalized discussion about the latest demonstrations, the brutal repression and the likely outcome. Even the sullen, subterranean creature who punches your ticket every morning as you descend into the Métro's stale air has revealed himself as a human being of strong political persuasions.

French though she is, my new girlfriend keeps away from the demos and, when she's not working on the layout of a new issue of
Réalités
, she stays at home with her Siamese cat doing her own drawings. But I've become swept up in the whole movement. Nobody talks about anything else, and since strikes have virtually paralysed the whole country, everybody is more or less obliged to take a position. If I were asked why I joined in on the occupation of the Odéon, I'd be hard put to say it was out of solidarity with the workers at Renault. I'm there simply because that's where everything is happening, and I'm amazed, once we're all crammed together into Jean-Louis Barrault's theatre, at the eloquence of the speeches, some of them given impromptu by students who must be a couple of years younger
than me. A few of them are ironic or even funny. One red-haired hothead in a torn windcheater has been berating us for the last twenty minutes for not being in the Renault factory, standing squarely shoulder to shoulder with our worker comrades, rather than sitting smugly in a bourgeois theatre, and as we begin to feel collectively guilty, another voice pipes up saying: ‘The question is not why we are not at the Renault factory, comrade, but why you are not.' For a blessed moment, laughter dissolves political intensity.

If I didn't have much idea why we occupied the Odéon, I'm very clear about the reasons we have stormed the Hôtel de Massa, which is France's most important literary society and whose corrupt, conventional values about fifty of us, all members of the newly formed Union des Ecrivains, are about to denounce and overthrow. We were prepared to fight to gain entry to the building, which sits in its own little park behind Montparnasse, but it turned out to be unguarded and empty. Such unopposed occupation feels a bit of an anticlimax, but it's a perfect late-spring evening and some Union members have brought guitars and someone else has gone out to buy wine, and soon a few couples start dancing on the lawn outside. I'm sitting next to a founder member of the Union who impresses me immediately because she sees Beckett regularly and has had two books published by Gallimard. Everything seems to be going fine, like some marvellous unexpected party, until she asks me why I joined the Union. I'm about to come out with the usual slogans but caught in her steady, sympathetic gaze I can't dissemble and I tell her that since I wanted to write it seemed better to join than not to join, even though I didn't think anything we did or said or wrote would change things much for the workers at Renault. I more or less expected her to drop me there and then but instead she leant over and kissed me.

I go to every Union meeting now. Most of them take place clandestinely. We meet by prearrangement in another member's
often unexpectedly comfortable apartment or in one of the ‘safe' cafés we know outside the Latin Quarter. We never refer to each other by name, which is easy enough since everyone is known as
camarade
. Unlike the haranguing that went on at the Odéon, our discussions are kept to an urgent whisper, with a comrade posted at the window to alert us to any sign of potential police intervention. We have all developed a habit of looking over our shoulder at odd moments during the day and we take strict precautions when we come to meetings to arrive singly and ensure we have not been followed. This has the unfortunate result of heightening my sense of insecurity, which has always been a problem and is now becoming all but uncontrollable since at the same time I have fallen desperately in love with my new writer friend, Danielle, and my movements have become doubly clandestine and furtive as I try to camouflage my visits to her in her room high up over the city in Belleville from my unsuspecting girlfriend at
Réalités
.

Our Union discussions cover such a vast terrain, from certain members' Maoist tendencies to sweeping social reforms or improving writers' relationships with their worker comrades, that we have been separated into various
cellules
as a way of focusing on more specific issues. I am one of half a dozen members entrusted with denouncing by every available means the country's corrupt, bourgeois system of literary prizes, which will be awarded when we reconvene after the summer holidays. This is an odd coincidence because the literary editor at
The Times
for whom I've started writing bits and pieces from Paris has asked me to do an article about the forthcoming Prix Goncourt. I tell the comrades this and before I know what's happened a detailed plan has evolved whereby, as the
Times
's Paris correspondent, I turn up at the awards ceremony with the other comrades from our cell disguised as my film crew. Then, as the Prix Goncourt is awarded, and all the other, real TV cameras are filming, the comrades will slap the new recipient and as many jury members as possible round the face and announce that the whole
French literary establishment is putrescent with complacency, convention and corruption; one comrade is particularly pleased with the alliteration this achieves. Meanwhile, as the moment draws closer, I grow jittery to the point of illness about how the whole thing will end. Over the summer, as the May uprising has been brutally quelled, foreigners suspected of any political activity in France have been given twenty-four hours to leave what is patriotically termed the ‘national soil' for good. So that would put paid to the life I've been trying by hook or by crook to create here. I'm also worried about the basic legality of the situation. I could probably be charged with something like entering on false pretences with intent to defame this, that and the other, and be handed a prison sentence. I can't get any advice because we've all been sworn to secrecy, but the fact that I'm so vague about the implications makes me all the sicker with anxiety.

When the day comes everything goes eerily to plan. We are welcomed at the Drouant restaurant where the ceremony takes place although with our long hair and beards and scruffy clothes we actually look more like revolutionaries from Central Casting than journalists and cameramen. We don't in fact even have a proper film camera since the offer to lend us one fell through at the last moment, and a couple of comrades have brought their Kodaks and Focasports, probably with snapshots of the recent summer holidays still on them. Nobody appears to find this incongruous, and once we're past security, the comrades fan out to take up various strategic points round the restaurant's main, heavily ornate space. French national television is here in force and several professionals are hurrying to and fro getting the right lighting in place for the announcement. I am fighting a panicked impulse to rush out of the room and never be seen again, but I can't because I have given my word I would help the cause and the comrades. This seems totally daft given that my whole career is at stake, and I don't even know whether this
action directe
, as one comrade has termed it, has a chance in hell of changing anything for the better. The cameras begin to whirr, the lights are dimmed, and I notice the comrades have gone into a huddle in the gloom. One of them then comes over and whispers in my ear, ‘The comrades have decided this is not the moment for direct action.' The relief I feel is limitless, only to be replaced by a fury so intense that it is all I can do not to slap him and all the other comrades hard and publicly round the face.

I go to one more cell meeting. There is no explanation or apology for the failure to act. I am not asked for my reactions so I sit there and listen sulkily to the new directive that has been passed along to our cell. There is a government plan, it appears, to tear down the old Halles, the food markets once known as the ‘belly of Paris', and replace them with a faceless complex of modern shops. The
action directe
comrade grows eloquent as he describes the loss of these soaring glass and iron ‘cathedrals' that have become such a focal point of the city. I love the area, not least because I often end up there with Francis as one of our last ports of call during a night out, and I'm appalled by the idea that the whole area might be razed.

‘So how do we prevent them from tearing down the Halles?' I ask.

‘That's simple,' says
action directe
. ‘We wait, and then the moment the bulldozing begins we dynamite the Sainte-Chapelle.'