Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep Read online

  They would open the mail, they would open the newspapers. They would light their first cigarette. They would go out. Their work would keep them busy for a few hours only, in the morning. They would meet for lunch, a sandwich or a steak, according to their mood; they would have coffee at a street café and then go home, on foot, slowly.

  Their flat would rarely be tidy, but its very untidiness would be its greatest charm. They would hardly bother themselves with it: they would live in it. The comfort of their surroundings would seem to them to be an established fact, a datum, a state of their nature. Their attention would be elsewhere: on the book they would open, on the text they would draft, on the record they would listen to, on their dialogue engaged afresh each day. They would work for a long while. Then they would dine, or go out for dinner; they would see old friends; they would walk together.

  Sometimes it would seem to them that a whole life could be led harmoniously between these book-lined walls, amongst these objects so perfectly domesticated that they would have ended up believing these bright, soft, simple and beautiful things had only ever been made for their sole use. But they wouldn't feel enslaved by them: on some days, they would go off on a chance adventure. No plan seemed impossible to them. They would not know rancour, or bitterness, or envy. For their means and their desires would always match in all ways. They would call this balance happiness and, with their freedom, with their wisdom and their culture, they would know how to retain and to reveal it in every moment of their living, together.

  II

  They would have liked to be rich. They believed they would have been up to it. They would have known how to dress, how to look and how to smile like rich people. They would have had the requisite tact and discretion. They would have forgotten they were rich, would have grasped how not to flaunt their wealth. They wouldn't have taken pride in it. They would have drunk it into themselves. Their pleasures would have been intense. They would have liked to wander, to dawdle, to choose, to savour. They would have liked to live. Their lives would have been an art of living.

  But such things are far from easy. For this young couple, who were not rich but wanted to be, simply because they were not poor, there could be no situation more awkward. They had only what they deserved to have. They were thrown, when already they were dreaming of space, light, silence, back to the reality, which was not even miserable, but simply cramped (and that was perhaps even worse), of their tiny flat, of their everyday meals, of their puny holidays. That was what corresponded to their economic status, to their social situation. That was their reality and they had no other. But beside them, all around them, all along the streets where they could not but walk, existed the fallacious but nonetheless glowing offerings of antique-dealers, delicatessens and stationers. From Palais-Royal to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from Champ-de-Mars to the Champs-Elysées, from the Luxembourg Gardens to Montparnasse, from Ile Saint-Louis to the Marais, from Place des Ternes to Place de l'Opéra, from Madeleine to the Monceau Gardens, the whole of Paris was a perpetual temptation. They burned with desire to give in to it, passionately, straight away and for ever. But the horizon of their desires was mercilessly blocked; their great impossible dreams belonged only to Utopia.

  They lived in a quaint, low-ceilinged and tiny flat overlooking a garden. And as they remembered their garret - a gloomy, narrow, overheated corridor with clinging smells - they lived in their flat, to begin with, in a kind of intoxication, refreshed each morning by the sound of chirping birds. They would open the windows and, for many minutes, they would gaze, in utter happiness, at their courtyard. The building was old, not yet at all at the point of collapse, but dowdy and cracked. The corridors and staircases were narrow and dirty, dripping with damp, impregnated with greasy fumes. But in between two large trees and five tiny garden plots of irregular shapes, most of them overgrown but endowed with precious lawn, flowers in pots, bushes, even primitive statues, there wound a path made of rough, large paving stones which gave the whole thing a countryside air. It was one of those rare spots in Paris where it could happen, on some autumn days, after rain, that a smell would rise from the ground, an almost powerful smell of the forest, of earth, of rotting leaves.

  They never tired of these charms and they always remained just as naturally responsive to them as they had been on the first day, but it became obvious, after a few care-free, jaunty months, that these attractions could in no way suffice to make them oblivious of the inadequacies of their dwelling. Accustomed to living in squalid rooms where all they did was to sleep, and to spending their days in cafés, they took a long time to notice that the most banal functions of everyday life - sleeping, eating, reading, chatting, washing — each required a specific space, the manifest absence of which then began to make itself felt. They found consolation where they could, congratulated themselves on the excellent neighbourhood they were in, on the proximity of Rue Mouffetard and the Jardin des Plantes, on the quietness of the street, on the stylishness of their low ceilings, and on the magnificence of the trees and the courtyard through all the seasons; but indoors it all began to collapse under the heaps of objects, of furniture, books, plates, papers, empty bottles. A war of attrition began from which they would never emerge victorious.

  With a total floor area of thirty-five square metres, which they never dared check, their flat consisted of a minute entrance hall, a cramped kitchen, half of which had been converted into a washroom, a modest-sized bedroom, an all-purpose room - library, living-room or study, spare bedroom - and an ill-defined nook, halfway between a broom-cupboard and a corridor, in which space had somehow been found for a matchbox fridge, an electric water-heater, an improvised wardrobe, a table, at which they ate, and a laundry-box which doubled up as a bench-seat.

  On some days the lack of space became overwhelming. They would suffocate. But it was no use pushing back the boundaries of their two-roomed flatlet, no use knocking down walls, calling up corridors, cupboards, openings, no use imagining ideal wardrobes or taking over adjacent flats in their dreams, they would always end up back in what was their lot, their only lot: thirty-five square metres.

  Judicious improvements would undoubtedly have been feasible: a partition wall could have been removed, freeing a huge and ill-used corner space, a too-bulky piece of furniture could be replaced advantageously, a set of cupboards could spring up. Doubtless, then, provided it was repainted, stripped, done up with a little love, their dwelling would have been unquestionably charming, with its one red-curtained window and its other window with green curtains, with its long, rather wobbly oak table that had been bought at the flea market filling the whole length of one wall section, beneath the very fine reproduction of a mariner's chart, and which a little roll-top Second Empire escritoire made of mahogany with inlaid brass beads, several missing, separated into two working desks - to the left, for Sylvie, to the right, for Jérôme - each signalled by an identical red blotter, an identical glass tile, an identical pencil-box; with its old pewter-rimmed glass jar that had been transformed into a lamp, with its metal-reinforced, wood-veneer seed-measuring jar which did as a waste-paper basket, with its two unmatched armchairs, its rush-seated chairs, its milking stool. And the neat, clean and ingenious whole would emanate friendliness and warmth, a wholesome aura of work and shared living.

  But the mere prospect of the work involved scared them. They would have had to borrow, to save, to invest. They could not bring themselves to do it. Their hearts weren't in it: they thought only in terms of all or nothing. The bookcase would be light oak or it would not be. It was not. Books piled up on two dirty wooden shelving stacks, and, in double rows, in cupboards which should never have been used that way. For three years an electric point remained unrepaired, without their making up their minds to call in an electrician, whilst along almost every wall ran crudely spliced and shoddily extended leads. It took them six months to replace a curtain pulley-rope. And the slightest hold-up in regular maintenance resulted within twenty-four hours in a mess which the bene
ficent presence of trees and gardens so close at hand made even more unbearable.

  The temporary, the provisional held absolute sway. They were in wait only of a miracle. They would have summoned architects, contractors, builders, plumbers, decorators and painters. They would have gone on a cruise and on their return would have found a flat transformed, converted, refurbished, a model apartment, miraculously enlarged, full of custom-built details, removable partitions, sliding doors, an efficient and unobtrusive heating system, invisible electrical wiring, good quality furniture.

  But between these too grand daydreams in which they wallowed with strange self-indulgence, and their total lack of any actual doing, no rational plan, matching the objective necessities to their financial means, arose to fill the gap. The vastness of their desires paralysed them.

  Such a lack of directness, of clear-headedness, almost, was typical. What was probably the most serious thing was that they were cruelly lacking in ease - not material, objective ease, but easiness, or a certain kind of relaxedness. They tended to be on edge, tense, avid, almost jealous. Their love of well-being, of higher living standards, came out most often as an idiotic kind of sermonising, when they would hold forth, they and their friends, on the sheer genius of a pipe or a low table; they would turn them into objets d'art, into museum pieces. They would become passionate about a suitcase-one of those tiny, astonishingly flat cases in slightly grainy black leather you could see on display in shop windows around Madeleine and which seem the quintessence of the alleged pleasures of lightning visits to New York or to London. They would cross all of Paris to see an armchair they'd been told was just perfect. And since they knew their classics they would sometimes even hesitate to put on some new garment, as it seemed so important to them, for it to look its best, that it should first have been worn three times. But the slightly ritualised gestures they would make to show their approval at a tailor's, or a milliner's, or a bootmaker's shop window display only managed, most often, to make them look slightly silly.

  Perhaps they were too marked by their past (not they alone, moreover, but their friends, their colleagues, people of their age, the circles they mixed in). Perhaps they were too greedy from the outset: they wanted to go too fast. The world and its things would have had to have always belonged to them, and then they could have imprinted on them myriad signs of their ownership. But they were condemned to conquest; they could become richer and richer, but there was no way they could have always been rich. They would have liked to live in comfort, amidst beauty. But they shrieked, they admired, and that was the surest proof that they were not in it, not amidst it. They lacked tradition - in perhaps the most despicable sense of the word - as well as true enjoyment, implicit and immanent, like a self-evident truth, the enjoyment which involves bodily happiness; their pleasure was cerebral. Too often, what they liked in the things they called luxury was only the money behind them; they loved wealth before they loved life.

  In this respect their first sallies outside the student world, their first forays into the universe of high-class shops which was soon to become their Promised Land, were particularly revealing. Their still-wavering taste, their over-hesitant meticulousness, their lack of experience, their rather blinkered respect for what they believed to be the standards of true good taste, brought them some jarring moments, some humiliations. For a time it might have appeared that the sartorial ideal to which Jérôme and his friends aspired was not that of the English gentleman, but the utterly continental caricature of it presented by a recent emigrant on a modest salary. And on the day Jérôme bought his first pair of British shoes, he took great care, after polishing them at length with a woollen rag dipped in a little beeswax of superior quality, rubbing very gently in small concentric circles, he took great care to put them in the sun where they were supposed to acquire an outstanding shine in the least time. Alas, alongside a pair of crepe-soled moccasin ankle-boots which he obstinately refused to wear, they were his only shoes; he misused them, dragged them through rutted tracks, and finished them off in just under seven months.

  Then, as time passed, with the help of accumulating experience, it seemed that they were learning how to stand back a little from their most fervent passions. They had learned how to wait, and how to grow accustomed. Their taste matured slowly, became firmer, more balanced. Their desires had time to ripen; their greed became less sour. When on outings around Paris they stopped in villages to look at antiques, they no longer rushed straight towards the china plates, towards the church pews, towards the blown-glass demijohns and the brass candlesticks. To be sure, the somewhat static image they had of the ideal home, of perfect amenity, of the happy life was still imbued with a lot of naivety, a lot of self-indulgence: there was something forced in their liking for objects which only the taste of the day decreed to be beautiful: imitation Épinal pseudo-naive cartoons, English-style etchings, agates, spun-glass tumblers, neo-primitive paste jewellery, para-scientific apparatus, which in no time at all they would come across in all the window displays in Rue Jacob, in Rue Visconti. They still dreamt of possessing such things; they would have assuaged that obvious, instant need to be up-to-date, to be seen to be connoisseurs. But this extreme imitativeness was becoming less and less important, and it was pleasant for them to reflect that the picture they had of life had slowly been stripped of all its more aggressive, showy and occasionally juvenile trappings. They had burnt what they had previously worshipped: the witches' mirrors, the chopping-blocks, those stupid little mobiles, the radiometers, the multi-coloured pebbles, the hessian panels adorned with expressive squiggles as if by Mathieu. It seemed to them that they were progressively mastering their desires: they knew what they wanted; they had clear ideas. They knew what their happiness, their freedom would be.

  But they were wrong all the same. They were beginning to lose their way. Already they were starting to feel they were being propelled along a path of which they knew neither the turns nor the terminus. They did on occasions feel frightened. Most often, however, all they felt was impatience: they felt ready; they were available; they were waiting to live, they were waiting for money.

  III

  Jérôme was twenty-four and Sylvie twenty-two. They were both market researchers. Their work, which was not exactly a trade nor quite a profession, consisted of interviewing people by various different techniques, on a range of subjects. It was difficult work, requiring at the very least a high degree of nervous concentration, but it was not uninteresting, not at all badly paid, and it left them an appreciable amount of free time.

  Like almost all their colleagues, Jérôme and Sylvie had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice. No-one knows, in any case, where the untrammelled development of their natural inclinations towards idleness would have led them. There again, history had chosen for them. Of course, like everyone else, they would have liked to give themselves to something, to feel in themselves some powerful need that they would have called a vocation, an ambition that would have raised them up, a passion that would have fulfilled them. But they possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them. When they were students the prospect of a mediocre degree and then a teaching post with a tiny salary at Nogent-sur-Seine, Château-Thierry or Etampes terrified them so much that virtually on meeting each other - Jérôme was then twenty-one, Sylvie nineteen - and without needing to talk it over, they dropped out of courses they had never really begun. The thirst for knowledge did not torture them. Far more prosaically, and without hiding from the fact that they were probably making a mistake and that sooner or later they would come to regret it, they thirsted for a slightly bigger room, for running hot and cold water, for a shower, for meals more varied, or just more copious, than those they ate in student canteens, maybe for a car, for records, holidays, clothes.

  Motivation research had emerged in France several years earlier. That year it was still expanding fast. New agencies were springing up by the month, out of
nothing, or almost. You could get work in them easily. Most often it involved going into parks or standing at school gates or knocking on doors in suburban housing estates to ask housewives if they had noticed some recent advertisement and what they thought of it. These instant surveys, called minitests or quickies, earned a hundred francs each. It wasn't much, but it was better than baby-sitting, working as a night watchman or as a dishwasher, better than any of the other menial jobs - distributing leaflets, book-keeping, timing radio advertisements, hawking, cramming - which were traditionally the preserve of students. And then the very youth of the agencies themselves, their almost informal state of development, the still total absence of trained staff, held out the prospect, at least potentially, of rapid promotion and a dizzying rise in status.

  It was not a bad guess. They spent a few months handing out survey questionnaires. Then came an agency director who, for lack of time, took a chance on them: and so they set off for the provinces with tape-recorders under their arms. Some of their fellow travellers, scarcely older than they were, introduced them to the techniques of the open and the closed interview, which were actually less difficult than is commonly supposed. They learned how to make other people do the talking and to weigh their own words carefully; they learned how to unearth from people's muddled hesitations, perplexed silences and shy hints the lines that needed pursuing; they pierced the secret of that universal "aha . . .", a truly magical intonation with which the interviewer punctuates the interviewee's words, to bolster his confidence, to show that he understands, to egg him on, to query and even sometimes to threaten him.