The Merry Month of May (29 page)

The next day was Friday, Friday May the 24th, and le Général had announced some time back that he would speak to the nation on TV on that Friday. Why he chose to wait so long, in the midst of such a crisis, nobody knew exactly. Perhaps it was just his way. He was not about to be pushed, ever. There had been much talk and rumor that le Général was going to ask for a national Referendum on his continuing in power, and in his speech he did declare such a Referendum vote, for sometime in June, though he did not name the date.

We, of course, our gang of Americans, watched his speech on TV at the Gallaghers’. There was much speculation about it among us afterwards. He did not seem to be his old vital self, to say the least. Despite his usual vigorous, self-controlled, theatrical delivery, his old self-assurance seemed to be missing. For the first time since I had watched his talks, he gave the impression that he was not really sure his latest call would be heard by the people.

After it was over, and I had had dinner with Louisa and Ferenc, I decided to go out into the streets again.

I had been going out every night since Monday. I had become quite occupied with the Students’ Film Committee of the Odéon. It was quite easy to get to the Odéon, if you took the back way up rue Cardinal Lemoine and around the side of the Panthéon. Once you got to the crowded, jammed-up Odéon, where the marathon discussion was still going full tilt in the theater amphitheater, you were perfectly safe from the police.

Of course, on the Friday of the 24th I did not really know what to expect.

It had already been a pretty rough day, according to my transistor radio. The day had been full of demonstrations in cities all over France. Even the farmers out in the countryside were coming into the towns to demonstrate for more Government protection of the small farmer and higher prices for French products. In Nantes, in Brittany, a mob of 3,000 farmers and students had attacked a police headquarters, first with stones and bottles, and then had cut down trees around it and tried to burn it down.

And in Paris people were out all over the place, and demonstrations were going on everywhere. After le Général’s speech which was heralded with great boos and jeering, mobs had collected at the Place de la Bourse and set fire to the Bourse itself, France’s sacred Money Mart and Stock Exchange.

It all looked pretty grim. But I felt I had to go, and I wanted to see what the kids thought about it all now.

As I was leaving the Gallaghers’ apartment, Ferenc asked me to take him with me. He wanted to see it too, he said.

I was a little taken aback. I already felt that it was dangerous enough for me myself to go out. I didn’t relish having the added responsibility of Ferenc. Besides that, it had finally begun to rain somewhere along in there, making everything slipperier and more evil-seeming. The May rains which the police officials had waited for so hopefully in the beginning of the month had finally come—much too late to do anything about the Revolution, now, except to make everything worse.

So I hesitated. But the crestfallen look on Ferenc’s face was too much for me. “Okay,” I said. “Come on, if you want to. But you have to follow me and follow my lead without any arguments. If we get separated, you’re on your own.” The big grin that came over his large face was almost worth the decision.

“I suppose I better take off my monocle? And put on my glasses?” he said thoughtfully.

“If I were you, I’d leave the monocle here,” I said.

He nodded. “I’ll do just that.” And took it off with its black cord and laid it carefully on top of Louisa’s fireplace mantel.

“One mustn’t go around looking like a bloody executive or aristocrat on a night like this,” he said.

“What about me?” Louisa said.

“You’re staying here,” I said positively. “There’s no question about that.”

“I think he’s absolutely right, dear Louisa,” Ferenc said gently.

“I suppose so,” she said gloomily.

“For God’s sake, think about McKenna,” I said as we went to the door.

I had been worrying about my marvelous little Goddaughter ever since I had learned for sure what had happened to Harry in Cannes. In the fact McKenna, who after all was only in the third grade, had, after the Sorbonne revolt, organized and created her own tiny Revolution in her class at school (a bilingual school which taught both English and French) Louisa had told me. At this school, in a staggered sort of fashion, each class spent one day a week out at Meudon, a woodsy sort of suburb just up the hill from Sèvres, for some kind of vague outdoor health reasons, I suppose. Somehow they had got the use, cheaply, of some old quonset huts out there. Well, McKenna had canvassed her class, collected more than 50 per cent of them behind her, and had got up in class and made I gather a rather lengthy speech about the inadequate facilities of the Meudon installation. There was not enough heat, the children were always freezing cold, and the food served them at lunch was so bad that none of the children could eat it. When the teacher canvassed the class herself, face to face, only about 40 per cent stood up to back up McKenna. Although over 50 per cent had promised that they would. In any case it was still enough of a revolution for the teacher (a rather dislikeable sort I gathered) to take it to the Headmistress of the school, one of those exceedingly formidable woman educators, whom McKenna staunchly confronted in her office, and who then called up Louisa. Louisa and Harry naturally backed McKenna up all the way. But though promises of rectification had been made by the Headmistress with a harassed laugh (she was having a hard time, they said, just keeping the school running) so far nothing had been done, but it was supposed to be.

Also, on the day of the failed vote of censure against M. Pompidou’s Government, the Wednesday of May 22nd, McKenna had organized her own little demonstration. I’ve often thought she would have made a hell of a General. Getting three little French kids that she played with on the block to help her, she had got hold of a set of red towels Louisa had and tied them to mop and broom handles. With the adults engrossed in the debate on the TV, the four children under McKenna’s direction had rushed across the living room and begun waving their improvised red flags back and forth out on the little balcony above the quai crying
“À bas le Gouvernement! À bas le Gouvernement!”
The island was crawling with cops at the time, and those of us nearest them grabbed them back in as quickly as we could, afraid the police below would think it was an adult-organized thing. But when I stepped out onto the little balcony and looked down, smiling what I hoped was a confidently amused smile, all the flics below were roaring with laughter.

She was really such a precious, brilliant little thing. I would have given anything to have had one like her of my own, and sometimes when I thought of her I positively hated my ex-wife. And now, with Harry off on his irresponsible junket in Cannes, I dreaded the thought of something bad happening to the family that might injure McKenna.

Of course by now McKenna had long since been put to bed. But Louisa had not answered my last remark. However when I looked back at her from the door, with Hofmann-Beck close on my heels like an eager mastiff, she looked up from the mantelpiece, where she appeared to be studying Ferenc’s monocle, and smiled and nodded at me.

“Well, come on, Ferenc,” I said. “Let’s go. Let’s get with it.”

“I’m right with you, buddy,” Ferenc said, a term he would never have used to anyone before meeting the Gallaghers and us.

I nodded. “Don’t forget your raincoat, now.”

“I think I had better leave my bowler here, and take one of Harry’s caps in the entry,” he said.

We went out of the apartment and down out onto the quai in the drizzle. It looked as though it might be letting up.

Well, I sure need not have worried about Ferenc. Underneath his layers of fat and hypochondria he had a pair of legs at least four times as strong as mine. And when he raised up and showed forth that chest of his, instead of letting it droop on his belly as he usually did, it had a girth half again as large as mine, which was not small. He was as strong as a lion, that young man, and as brave as a fighting bull at least.

We crossed by the Pont de la Tournelle and started up rue Cardinal Lemoine. When we reached Boulevard St.-Germain, I turned up it toward the Place Maubert. We made our way up toward the
Place,
past shops and restaurants which were all carefully shuttered and closed. The French knew how to take care of their trade goods and property. Things like this had been happening to them since the beginning of the Middle Ages. It appeared the drizzle was stopping.

But the goddamned French had something else about them, too. As we sauntered up the half-dark Boulevard toward the
Place,
the inhabitants of the apartments of the four- and five-story buildings above the ground-floor shops were out burning their uncollected garbage and trash in the center of the street. By a sort of common consent, not led by generals or even by civic leaders, they had got together with their brooms and mops and rakes and squeegees or whatever, and had swept all the mountain of uncollected trash out into a row in the middle of the Boulevard and were methodically and carefully burning it up. Somebody had figured out that the center of the Boulevard would be the best place to do it in order to do the least damage to the leafage of the flowering trees that lined the boulevards on both sides and helped to make Paris the Paris they loved and liked to live in. A 100 yards up the way you could hear the fighting and shouting, but back here here they were, all out helping to preserve themselves and their health and at the same time not destroy the beauty of their city, Paris. Old Paris. God, the things it had not seen were few. There was not any possibility of traffic now on the boulevards anyway. And all the way up to the Place Maubert there was a long line of burning crates, cartons, old wet lettuce leaves, rotten tomatoes and fruit rinds and garbage, all of it being tended with old pushbrooms or sweepbrooms by the little bourgeois who inhabited the area. It was enough to almost make me weep. For them. For all of us.

When we got to the
Place,
it did not take long to see that the police had invested it. Beyond the Place Maubert the police were lined up three or four deep in their black fighting raincoats, helmets, goggles and shields. They had worked down from the Carrefour St.-Michel, and established a cutoff line here all across the Boulevard. They were not doing anything at all, just standing there.

Some distance away there was a mob of citizens, on our downhill side of the street. They kept a respectful distance, 50 yards say, and hurled insults at the cops.

There were no students, now. Mainly, they were all dark Algerians. There was not one student involved that I could see. Of course the area between Maubert and the river was all an Algerian quarter—which had been hurt hard during the time of the Algerian War. We sifted our way through them until we were out in the no-man’s-land between rue Monge where the mob was and the police lines beyond the end of the
Place.
We were alone out there in the middle of the
Place.

“Aren’t we rather vulnerable out here?” Ferenc said from behind me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Really. I mean, look at them. They’re not trying to hurt anybody.”

“But we
are
very presentable targets,” Ferenc said in his best King’s English accent.

“Cut the shit,” I growled, and then something strange happened to me. I discovered I had made up my mind to cross the
Place,
the no-man’s-land, and pass peacefully through the police lines. Was I showing off for Ferenc? Was I proving that I was an old hand at the Revolution? Was I testing my own rather doubtful courage in some crazy way? In any case I absolutely knew suddenly that those police over there would not do us any damage if we walked toward them calmly and sanely, clearly unarmed with bottles or stones, and said to them “Excuse me, but I live up there.” I knew they would not touch us. I just knew it. And I kind of wanted to walk up the rest of the poor old torn-up busted Boulevard. Just to see what had happened to it in the last 24 hours.

I really do not know what it was came over me. Anyway I forged ahead, out into the middle of the deserted
Place
and past the high stone pedestal from which the Germans had removed the metal statue of some unknown notable during the War to melt it down, and on toward the police line across the Boulevard. Ferenc was right behind me. I could hear his footsteps and there was not one sign of falter in them.

Then, suddenly, at the sharp corner of the rue Lagrange after the
Place,
just at the little
café-tabac
there, two young Algerians in dark clothes leaped out of the dark straight in front of me, shouting some insult, and one of them heaved a paving stone at the police line. Then they leaped back, and ran around the sharp corner onto rue Lagrange.

I did not see where the
pavé
landed. It either fell short or was blocked by a shield. A couple of the policemen shouted something back which I did not understand but the voices had a plaintive note to them, as if they might have been saying in English, “Come on! What are you doing, dumbass! We’re not bothering you, are we?” They threw no tear gas, or anything else, in retaliation.

But suddenly my whole feeling changed. I could not be sure the police did not think we were friends of the Algerians, and were coming on to attack them. Probably they didn’t. In any case, I did an abrupt aboutface, with Ferenc right alongside me, and started away, walking slowly.

“That was rather bad luck,” Ferenc said in an even voice at my side, matching his stride to my slow one. He was indeed following my lead as I had asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was. Come on, we’ll go up here.” And when we reached the pedestal, I took off across the empty
Place
toward the rue de la Montagne Ste.-Geneviève. Nobody contested us, or bothered us.

Rue de la Montagne Ste.-Geneviève is probably one of the most picturesque streets in all of Paris. It is full of tiny but very good restaurants, and mounts steeply and twisting from Place Maubert up to the Panthéon on top the hill. It is the street where Hemingway placed his
bal-musette
in the opening part of
The Sun Also Rises,
where Brett Ashley is introduced. I loved to walk it, and used to eat there a lot. But now the street was so absolutely full of crates and cartons and garbage from the restaurants and the apartments above that you could hardly see any of the groundfloor windows or the painted names of the restaurants above them. It looked as though if anyone carelessly dropped one match along it the whole street would go up in one great whoosh of flames.