Paris to the Moon (37 page)

Then Lorenzo took over and talked about the three plans that were open to us: We could continue to
mediatiser
and agitate about the Balzar, but that did not seem like a promising strategy, since in the meantime Bucher could simply wear us (and the waiters) down. We could attempt to buy the Balzar from Bucher—but he would almost certainly not sell. (I do not know to this day why Lorenzo had become pessimistic about this possibility, though I am sure that he was right. Perhaps he had another conversation with Bucher when they arranged the breakfast meeting.) The third possibility was to raise enough money to, in effect, start our own Balzar—a Balzar
des refuses,
a real Balzar, under some other name, while Bucher's Balzar continued its impersonation. We all looked cheerful at this possibility, though it obviously demanded an infusion of capital. But a possible site had already been located farther down the rue des Ecoles, and one of our members had long experience in the
restauration
... it might be done.

The conversation batted along, sometimes with animation, sometimes in a desultory way, for the next couple of hours. We pursued dead ends (could another, more sympathetic, buyer be found?) and digressions (what was the precise status of the
garcons
after the strike?) and kept circling around the central point. We needed to show Bucher that we were in earnest about opening another Balzar, in order to get him to, perhaps, perpetuate the current one. Like all public meetings of "causes," this one had a curious sideways, crab-walking momentum of its own. Somehow, the notion that we ought to show Bucher we were serious metamorphosed into the idea that the only way to show him that we were was to ask for a subscription of some real but small sum—say, six hundred francs, about a hundred dollars— from all the members of the association, which in turn metamorphosed into the idea that we ought to put the
idea
of the subscription to a vote of the membership. We voted on this resolution, and it passed.

The whole thing made no sense at all, as we all knew perfectly well the moment we left the classroom and went back out into the cold early winter air and headed for the Metro. The sum involved was both ridiculously small—Bucher was hardly about to be intimidated by it—and at the same time sufficiently noxious to keep a lot of people from wanting to offer it up. (I did not look forward to explaining to my own wife that we needed to pony up a hundred dollars in order to open up a new brasserie.) And to put it to a vote simply attenuated things still more. It was one of those bizarre decisions that are arrived at in protest meetings by a process of drift and uncertainty, in which a backwater suddenly for a moment looks like the way to the blue ocean and then, even when only moments later everybody knows that it's a dead end, we still close our eyes and pretend that we are going somewhere.

I do not want to give the impression that once the drama and
steak au poivre
had been removed from our movement, it lost momentum or seriousness. The classroom was full; the debate was intense; the purpose was firm. It was just that the strongest part of our case was its presentation, and once we moved away from our proscenium, there was not very much we could do. We had moved in a single November night from ideology to politics—from what you
want
to what you do—with the usual disappointing results. "We have gone from '68 to '81 tonight," a friend sighed in my ear as we walked home. He meant that we had gone from Utopian vision and slogans to the realities of the assumption of power, or from Mao (the make-believe French Mao) to Mitterrand.

I walked all the way home from the Twelfth, across at the Gare d'Austerlitz and then all the way along by the river. It was a cold night, winter really, and the few leaves left on the trees shivered sympathetically above, like waiters carrying trays.

On November 30, that Tuesday, we met with M. Bucher early in the morning at La Coupole, the vast twenties brasserie that he owns down on the boulevard du Montparnasse. It was eight-thirty in the morning—much too early, we all agreed—but that had been M. Bucher's hour, and we did not want to change it, I suppose for fear of seeming sluggish.

Bucher was as agreeable as ever. This time, though, instead of the short sleeves and open shirt that he had worn at our first breakfast together at the Balzar, he wore a suit and tie, pressed tightly over his belly. He began by smiling and shrugging and making the significant admission that maybe M. Delouche, the new maitre d', was the wrong man to be fronting the Balzar. He complained again about the
mediatisation,
meaning, I think, M. Quelin and
Le Monde,
which Lorenzo agreed had been unfortunate, but then pressed on to his hard, blunt point: The
garcons
will leave with a fat envelope, and that's it.

"They drove the old owner into the bushes like a hunted animal," he says scornfully. "Not me. All this"—he meant the war of the
garcons—
"belongs to another century." He caught himself, knowing that he mustn't seem too harsh, too "liberal." "But you know, on reflection, that's why I like it. I value it. That's why I want to be a member of your organization."

He agreed, after much tender pushing by Lorenzo, to meet himself with the
garcons.
The strike had shocked him. "Ninety-five percent of my media is about Balzar and point two percent of my business. Listen, I'll talk to them, I'll try to make them happy. But if they want to leave with a fat envelope, they can leave." He swore, forcefully, that there are no tour groups admitted to the Balzar.

Then Bucher did something, amazingly, intuitively shrewd. Before he had always spoken of the alternative to his ownership as McDonald's—"Listen, if you don't want me, maybe McDonald's will take over"—and we knew this to be pure rhetoric; McDonald's was not about to take over the Balzar, in the first place, and in any case, McDonald's bashing of that kind was too generalized, too vague an ideological gesture to have any weight. It was a purely rhetorical turn, recognizable as such. But now he turned to another potential owner.

"Listen," he said, "I hear you'd like me to sell. OK. Maybe you want me to sell out to M. Conran? I'm sure he would love it." Terence Conran is the English restaurateur and furniture tycoon who a few weeks before had just opened his own new brasserie, L'Alcazar, over on the rue Mazarin. It was the first attempt by a major figure of the London cooking renaissance to establish a beachhead in Paris, and it had been getting a lot of press.

Bucher shrugged. "I think he has nothing to teach us about how to run a brasserie. I'm trying to defend a 'Franco-Francais' tradition but..."

A little of the air seemed to pass right out of our movement at that moment. The anti-Americanism that lent a piquant, alarming note to the Balzar wars had been, as anti-Americanism most often is in France, not quite real, an abstract idea, a speech act with very few barbs in it. (Lorenzo, Claude, and I had once had a long debate, over dinner, about the relative merits of John Coltrane, whose pianist, McCoy Tyner, Lorenzo's brother had studied with, and Cannonball Adderley, favored by Claude.) Anti-Americanism in France at the end of the twentieth century is in fact in some ways like anti-Catholicism in England in the nineteenth century. It is a powerful, important, influential, official doctrine, but it is also not entirely real: English people imprecated against the Catholics and the pope, but that didn't stop them from loving Venice, traveling to Florence, worshiping Raphael, and filling their houses with Italian pictures. Even the much-publicized fusses about American mass-produced food and French peasants "trashing" McDonald's are almost pure media events. The French farmers knock down a McDonald's for the benefit of the French media, which publicize it in
Le Monde
in order to see what
The New York Times
will have to say about it the next day. Anti-Americanism has enormous life as an abstract ideological principle and a closed circle of media events of this kind, but outside of a tiny circle on the elite left and, surprisingly, a slightly larger one on the elite right, it has almost no life as a real emotion. But suspicion of the English is a permanent feature of the French psyche. Anti-English sentiment in France is like anti-French sentiment in nineteenth-century England: inarticulate but real. Those people just annoy the hell out of you. This contempt for the English, as opposed to the love-hate relation with Americans, is seen, for instance, in the almost open disdain that the French press has displayed in its investigation of the death of Diana Spencer, as it prefers to call her. Or at a more obscure level it can be seen in the magazine
Le Point,
which is usually pro-American in the neutral, hidden sense (it runs endless reviews of American music and movies and television), but when it ran a cover story on the British invasion of the Dordogne, the story was full of mistrust and contempt.

So for Bucher to say that McDonald's was coming was a mere ideological gesture, instantly seen as one. But to say that he could sell out to Terence Conran was to speak to a real, and completely annoying, possibility. Afterward, when our committee gathered in a cafe across the street from La Coupole, with two new members of the group—whom I didn't know but whom Lorenzo had invited along after the meeting earlier that week, Lorenzo having a good left democrat's desire to keep the leadership in touch with the masses—we all felt unhappy. The two new guys were sure that there was a
complot
of some kind, a hidden history, that was being kept from them. Discussing the possibility of our new Balzar, they also seemed unable to accept the logic of capitalism in any form, including one we would own ourselves.

Above all, they were offended by the very existence, the very idea, even in a purely hypothetical form, of Terence Conran. "I wouldn't go to England and give them lessons on making tea," one of them said, bitterly. Lorenzo, I thought, looked unsettled.

It was around that time that I finally went to have lunch with J.-P. Qu6lin, the biting food critic of
Le Monde.
I was almost, though not quite, an official emissary from the friends of the Balzar to him, hoping that he would tone it down a little. We went to Aux Fins Gourmets, the Basque bistro downstairs from our apartment, where I have been going for several years now and where, to my surprise, Quelin had never been.

Quelin turned out to be from central casting. (But then we are all from central casting: I running down, without extra forethought, from the apartment, in sneakers and sweater and beige Levi's, and at my age too.) He was wearing what I have come to think of as the Uniform, the standard gear of French journalists who still see themselves as men of letters: black and beige houndstooth jacket, white cotton shirt, black knit tie. He has a perfect hatchet face, a long jaw, a clear enunciation, and he smoked American cigarettes square in the middle of his mouth. He looked nearly exactly like Ian McKellen playing Richard III.

I came in, took my table, and noticed him, thinking, This can't be J.-P. Quelin; he looks much too characteristic for that. But of course, it was, and he smiled, sardonically, and pointed: So it is you. He had invited along his editor, who turned out to be a lovely, worried-looking, square-built blonde—a mum (French writers and their editors, Frenchmen and their mums). He was brutal with the waiters and decided at last on
haricot de mouton
and a bottle of Madiran. I had sworn to have an
omelette
and no wine at all, but took the wine as a challenge to my—well, if not to my masculinity then to my Franco assimilation, my right to live in Paris and call myself a writer.

We talked about cooking and restaurants. "There is an Anglo-Saxon contempt for French food and a love for it all the same," Jean-Pierre Quelin began. I tried, tactfully, to argue that while the top heights of French cuisine remain unique—Passard, Gagnaire—the everydays might be more pleasurable now in New York or even London. He was dubious about the second proposition but agreed about the first: They are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This, I think, is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday, we got fourteen [small] courses, mostly of vegetables—
haricots verts
with peaches and raw almonds dressed with basil and fresh mint; fresh shell beans with onion ravioli and tomato coulis—that made even the best of old cuisine look like sludge.)

We kept pouring the Madiran, and to my alarm, a second bottle followed the first. I saw the afternoons work disappearing. In voicing my own tentative criticisms of the state of French cooking—mild and commonplace—I realized that Quelin was completely insulated from the general opinion that the new Mediterranean synthesis that reigns in New York and London is simply the thing and that the French two-tier system—three stars for the millionaires and occasions; the same old same old forever elsewhere—is defunct. He just had never heard the idea. I didn't even try to convince him otherwise, though, not that I could.

Quelin's editor left and, the bottle still there, we began confiding—no, not confiding, engaging in that level of frank, let's-call-a-Medusa's-head-a-Medusa's-head honesty that is one of the pleasures of the end of a two-bottle lunch in Paris. We shared philosophical reflections on our sons, our lives, the impossibility of journalism. "The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages," he said, "the voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us." We talked about his time in the army in Algeria, when a Breton peasant under his command tried to rape a local girl. He stopped him, and the peasant drew his revolver: "I looked death, in all its absurdity and horror, right in the face for fifteen minutes." Then we talked about our sons. The day will come when they condescend to us, when they feel themselves to be our intellectual superiors, "and in that moment of pity we will find our pride."

It occurred to me then that the paradoxes that litter French writing are deeply felt among all French literary people. The pity and pride of paternity; the absurdity and profundity of death, the voluptuous cruelty of journalism—these antinomies are not affectations but part of a real heritage of feeling. They
mean
it. In my heart, I suppose, I don't believe that something
can
be horrible and beautiful; I am too American for that, though I suppose I believe that something can be voluptuous and cruel. A child of the occupation—his father escaped twice from prison camps, to see him as a baby—and the Algerian War, he knows in his blood that it is so, that life is damnably double, whichever way it falls. It may be an affectation, but it is not a pose.