The Merry Month of May (28 page)

“Listen, you old fag! Is that all you got to do for a hobby? What are you going around sticking your nose in other people’s business for that doesn’t concern you? Why can’t you just fade?”

I am old enough by now and looked into myself enough, and have been a bachelor long enough (all bachelors are always suspect), that being called a fag, even to my face, neither surprised nor bothered me. “Samantha, I don’t know if you know that Hill is in love with you, really in love with you.”

She laughed, harshly. “That kid. Well, if he is, it is certainly not any fault of mine, nor is it any part of any contract or deal we made together.” She could really speak excellent English, when she wanted to drop that Harlem jargon of hers. But of course, she had been educated almost half her life in ritzy Swiss schools.

“Well, I’d like to talk to you about it, if you would allow me. When you get back to Paris.”

“I’ll be glad to talk to you, honey. But it’ll cost you. How much you willin’ to pay?”

“I would even pay,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll let you take it out in trade, honey!” she cried. Then she laughed, harshly.

There was a sort of strangled struggle on the other end of the phone, and then Harry’s voice came back on. He was breathing a little heavily, and over his breathing I distinctly heard another, third voice somewhere back in the room, feminine.

“Listen. Christ, Jack,” Harry snarled at me. “You know how much I think of you, too. But what did you have to go and get into this for? It all would have been all right. Nobody would have known about it. Now you’ve told Hill. Have you told Louisa, too?”

“Of course not. Are you goofy?”

There was a pause, and he sighed. “Sometimes I don’t know.” He seemed, down there at the other end of the phone, to be shaking himself all over, as if trying to collect himself, his person together, and his thoughts. “But Hill might just as well tell her.”

“Hill most certainly will not tell her. Nor will he tell anybody else. He’s too ashamed of it all. That I’m sure of. But if Weintraub figures it out for himself, and he’s perfectly smart enough to . . . Or if Samantha tells him . . . You’re putting yourself into a pretty dangerous position, Harry.

“You’ve got that other little girl with you, too,” I said, “haven’t you?”

“Yes. The one from Castel’s Weintraub told us about that first night. She’s on strike like all the rest of the kids, was living at the Sorbonne. In a sleeping bag. So she had nothing to do, and her parents wouldn’t know,” he said, and suddenly his voice hardened. “And let me tell you, it’s great! Just great!” Then his voice changed back to normal. “It was to be just for these few days. I made a deal with Sam to give her the money to go on to Israel to her Sabra friend as soon as we get back to Paris.” Again there was the sensation of him shaking himself all over, not shuddering, but shaking himself to get himself back together. “But now I’m afraid I’m getting hooked.” It ended on a hollow note, and he stopped.

“Well, it’s your affair, Harry,” I said, lamely. It was the best I could come up with. “I just wanted to tell you about Hill.”

“Hill,” he said as if he didn’t even know the name. “Hill! God damn Hill. What the hell did he ever care for me in his God damned life. I’ll talk to you when I get back to Paris.” He hung up abruptly.

It seemed people were always hanging up on me abruptly, while I never hung up on anybody abruptly.

I looked at the black phone in my hand, and then put it back in its cradle. I had lots of work to do: get ready those two issues which the Odéon kids had promised to drive out to Brussels for me; and I had those two articles to write about the Revolution, one for each issue, which I had promised to do for them with the aid of Terri. But I simply could not work. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything.

I wound up again at my windows, in the gathering dusk, looking out at the dead-appearing city. At least they were keeping half the streetlights on at night; electricity, gas and water, though nominally on strike, were still running. But across the way upriver at the Pont de la Tournelle the usually beautifully lit penthouse restaurant of the Tour d’Argent was closed down and dark. And down at our end of the bridge the two evil little black bugs of police camions were dutifully, resolutely, conscientiously keeping their 24-hour guard, their vigil.

In spite of Harry’s absence the rest of us kept up our regular evening meetings at the Gallaghers’ apartment. Most of us lived close enough by that we could get there on foot in the traffic-less city. The two correspondents, Fred Singer and that UPI kid Willy Something had now been joined by three other correspondents who had heard of the nightly meetings. All of them had been allotted enough gasoline allowance to get around the city. So it wasn’t difficult for them to appear at the appointed hour. The “Witching Hour”, somebody started calling it.

The French TV, after a great uproar in the press, had begun giving at least some coverage to the strikes and the rioting.

Of us all only poor Ferenc Hofmann-Beck had no way of getting home after our eight o’clock sessions. And if he did, he had no way of getting back to work the next morning to his office in St.-Germain from his apartment in Auteuil, except to hoof it. As a result he began to wind up, during the rest of that week, sleeping on the couch in the Gallaghers’ living room.

In the morning he would stagger off to his office on the Boulevard St.-Germain through the thinning tear gas, to take up his “post”. Though the workers’ unions had long ago struck his French publisher boss, the offices, and everything else about the business, the executive branch had decided to keep to a business-as-usual policy.

Every now and then Ferenc was able to bum a ride to Auteuil with someone who had gas and was going there, for a change of clothes. But with Harry gone I had taken to staying to dinner with Louisa every night, and most nights of that week the last sight I saw as I left the apartment was the two unbelievably large bare feet of Hofmann-Beck sticking straight up in the air from under the edge of the coverlet Louisa had given him to cover himself with on the couch. He had brought back from Auteuil some shirts, socks and ties to leave at the apartment, so he would not look “totally disreputable”, as he said, when he tottered off to his office with his bowler hat and umbrella in the mornings. It was rather nice to have him around, Louisa said with a smile. And I guess it was. Certainly he had become a great favorite with McKenna, with whom he played all sorts of idiot games which he made up on the spur of the moment.

He would eat his dinner with us, and almost immediately go off to sleep on “his” couch in his underdrawers, hanging his clothes meticulously over the back of a fauteuil. He certainly kept us all entertained, with his wild crazy stories of what went on at the office among the stiff-upper-lip, business-as-usual executives, and of the things he saw in the street coming and going.

He was, with his “eating thing”, as he called it, and as we all called it now, a pretty heavy drain on Louisa’s icebox, but I was able to help her out from my preaccumulated stocks. And food was never really scarce.

He had always loved Louisa and Harry. But now with the Revolution, possibly because of it, he had become almost pathetically attached to them. He seemed very distressed by Harry’s absence. Much more than Louisa, I must say I noted. So Louisa and I would sit and talk while he snored, those enormous bare feet sticking straight up in the air like tiny skyscrapers.

We talked quite a lot those evenings, Louisa and I. As far as I could ascertain, there was never any suspicion in her mind that Harry was doing anything more down in Cannes than his stated purpose in going: to strike his and Steinerwein’s film. And as far as Hill was concerned, she was unperturbed and adamant about it.

“He’s only doing his thing,” she said, and smiled, “as the young like to phrase it nowadays. I would never stop him from that. No more than I would have stopped Harry going to the war as a Marine private when he did not have to.”

“You weren’t married to him then,” I said gently.

“But were I, I would not have stopped him.”

There was a rough, hard, inflexible, Puritan morality about her that could not be touched. Or pushed. Or breached. Or even breathed upon, from outside. She was an impenetrable fortress of it.

“I would have stayed home, and remained faithful, and done my war-work like the rest, and held myself together while I waited and hoped.”

“I’m sure you would, Louisa,” I said softly.

As I tiptoed out that night, Ferenc was not snoring; but the soles of those immense feet stared at me, somehow cynically. He was a cynical man, Ferenc. But after all, he was a Hungarian, at least by culture. He would never understand a New Englander like Louisa.

15

W
E HAD PLENTY
to keep us occupied during that long weekend Harry was away.

On the Wednesday, the 22nd, the day Hill had come to see me so distraught, the French Government officially banned the re-entry into France of
Dany le Rouge.
Cohn-Bendit had gone off into Germany, hoping to begin an international students’ revolt which would carry the French students’
Révolution
over the whole of Europe. Cohn-Bendit, aged 23, had been born in France, of German-Jewish refugee parents from World War II, and so nominally could claim French citizenship. But he carried a German passport, I have no idea why, and so the French could nominally be legitimately legal in barring his re-entry.

In Berlin on Monday the 21st, Dany claimed that from five to 11 people had already been killed in the Paris riots, but that he could not prove it because the information was being kept secret; also that there were many students blinded, presumably by tear gas, although he did not elaborate on that.

None of us had heard even the slightest rumor of anyone having been killed. I think some of us, especially the correspondents, would have if there had been deaths. It was pretty amazing there hadn’t been any, actually. Anyway, Dany’s allegations certainly were not going to endear him to the French Government.

When this news about barring him was released, it set off a whole series of student riots which ran on through the entire weekend, and which, finally, developed into the worst fighting since the beginning of the Revolution.

It was these demonstrations, beginning Wednesday night, that Hill was rushing off to help film—though in his state of distraction he neglected to tell me any part of this new development.

On Wednesday night the demonstrations were not so bad. There was a lot of marching and singing, and shouted slogans against le Général de Gaulle, who had finally interrupted his Romanian state visit to return on the Saturday night of the 18th. Since he had expressly stated that he would not do this for any such amateurish “childrens” revolt”, it must have hurt considerably his nineteenth-century pride to do it. But the massive strikes were beginning to cut close to the bone on everybody, including him apparently.

A few fires were started in the piles of uncollected crates, rubbish and garbage on Wednesday night, none of them serious. But that was about all, because, strangely enough, apparently on the Government’s orders, the police stayed completely out of it.

They had retreated from the Latin Quarter almost a whole week before. But the police were keeping the students from crossing to the Right Bank. The
Quartier Latin
had become a sort of student-owned-and-operated city in itself, though under a tacit siege.

This excepted, of course, all the bars, cafés, restaurants and
tabacs,
which were doing a land-office business from the “tourists” (which included Parisian Frenchmen) who came “inside the lines” to look.

Almost obviously, the Government, and the
Patronat,
with whom the Gaullist Government worked so closely, were just sitting back and hoping the Revolution would “rot” itself out as food funds for the students and the workers’ unions dwindled, and as the people themselves, the whole French people, got discontented with discomfort.

Never have I seen such a clear-cut example of the fact that a modern Government must by definition be the paternalistic enemy of its citizens. At least, any kind of Government mankind has been able to discover or invent up to now. It made you scared, and it was scary.

On the Thursday it got worse. And as usual, it all ended up around the Place Maubert, which now looked like a real battleground in a real war. Apparently, the Government had told the police to go in and break it up. When the police advanced, barricades of paving stones immediately began to go up in the streets again everywhere, topped now by the iron grilles, which had been placed around all the beautiful trees along the boulevards. On top of these went all the crates and rubbish the garbage collectors had not collected, which were then set afire and left, forcing the police to charge into them.

Now it was not only the organized students and workers who were involved but also just plain bums and riffraff, the “lower depths” of Paris who had crept out from wherever it was they normally hid themselves and apparently were in all the fighting just for the hell of it, the fun of it. It was getting out of the hands of the police, and now was beginning to get out of the hands of the students themselves, and was turning into just a plain old destructive anarchy of human hate and rage, without any point to it at all except just to fight and commit mayhem and see blood flow.

When le Général had returned from Romania, one of his most-quoted remarks was the now-famous line, “Réforme oui, chienlit non.” According to the papers
chienlit
was a French Army barracksroom term, a quite old word, almost impossible to translate. Translated literally, one source said, at least on the French Army level, it meant “Shit in the bed”, or bed-messing. But the word was also used to mean “masquerading”, as in the sense of children dressing up in grown-ups’ clothes. So that, in another sense, the word did exist on a polite level as well. In modern
polite
usage it meant a just plain “bloody mess”. But le Général almost certainly must have known this, and used the word deliberately, a sort of triple or quadruple entendre. Anyway, it
could
be considered a considerably gross term. I suppose, on that level, the most nearly equivalent in English would be, “Reform yes, bullshit no.” In any case the students certainly took it on that level, and as they did with so many other things, they made a chant out of it:
“Chienlit, c’est lui!”,
meaning: “The bullshit, it’s de Gaulle!” except that in French it rhymed. You could hear this being shouted by hundreds, by thousands, all over the Quarter all day and all night, that Thursday.