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

  They were the "new generation", young executives who had not yet cut all their teeth, technocrats on the way, but only halfway, to success. Almost all of them came from the lower middle classes, whose values, they felt, were for them no longer adequate. They cast their eyes enviously, desperately, towards the visible comfort, luxury and perfection of the upper middle classes. They had no past, no tradition. There were no inheritances to wait for. Of all of Jérôme's and Sylvie's friends, only one came from a wealthy, well-established family: they were textile wholesalers in Lille, with a comfortable pile conveniently invested in property in Lille, in a portfolio, a country house near Beauvais, gold and silver plate, jewellery, and roomfuls of antique furniture. All the others had spent their childhoods in dining rooms and bedrooms with imitation Chippendale or imitation rustic furniture as such things were imagined initially at the dawn of the 1930s - full-size beds covered with puce taffeta, three-door wardrobes with mirrors and gilded mouldings, horribly square tables on turned-wood legs, imitation antler coat-stands. In such surroundings, in the evening, beneath the family lamp, they had done their homework. They had taken down the rubbish, they had gone "off with the pail" to fetch the milk, they had slammed doors behind them. Their memories of childhood were all similar, just as the paths they had followed, their slow departures from their family backgrounds, and the vistas they thought they had chosen for themselves, were identical.

  They were therefore of their own time. They were at ease with themselves. They were not, so they said, completely fooled. They could keep their distance. They were relaxed, or at least they tried to be. They had a sense of humour. They were by no means dim.

  A detailed analysis would have detected easily enough, within the group they constituted, divergent trends, stifled enmities. Any sociometrist with an eye for finicky detail would have easily discovered in their midst fault lines, reciprocal exclusions, latent hostilities amongst them. It sometimes happened that one or another of them, in response to some more or less fortuitous accident, or a camouflaged provocation, or a misunderstanding all in hints, would spread discord amongst them. Their fine friendship would then disintegrate. They would then realise, with simulated amazement, that X, whom they'd always thought a generous chap, was the very soul of stinginess, that Y was nothing but a desiccated egoist.

  Strains followed, and matured into break-ups. Sometimes they took malicious pleasure in setting one group up against another. Or alternatively there were protracted periods of sulking, of pronounced distance, of coldness. They would avoid each other and continually find ways of justifying their avoidance, until the hour of forgiving, forgetting and of reconciliation came round. For in the last analysis they could not manage without each other.

  They played these games intensely and they spent on them precious time which they could have used without disadvantage to quite different ends. But they were such that, even if it occasionally irritated them, the group they constituted defined them almost entirely. Outside of it they had no real life. They were wise enough, none the less, not to see each other too often, not to work together always, and they even made an effort to keep up individual pursuits, private spheres to which they could withdraw, where they could forget, up to a point, not the group itself, the mafia, the team, but, obviously, the work on which it was based. Their almost shared lives made it easier to launch surveys, to go on trips to the provinces, to spend nights on analyses or on drafting reports; but it also tied them down to working like that. That, to tell the truth, was their awkward secret, their common weak spot. That was what they never mentioned.

  Their greatest pleasure was to forget together, that is to say to indulge in distractions. They loved drinking, in the first place, and they drank a lot, often, together. They were habitués of "Harry's New York Bar", denizens of Rue Daunou, frequenters of the cafés in the Palais-Royal arcades, of "Le Balzar", of "Lipp", and a few other bars. They liked Munich beer, Guinness, gin, hot or cold punch, fruit liqueurs. Sometimes they spent whole evenings just drinking, huddled round two tables put together for the purpose, and they would talk, interminably, about the life they would have liked to lead, about the books they would write one day, about the things they would like to do, about the films they had seen or were going to see, the future of humanity, the political situation, their next holiday, their last holiday, an outing to the country, a short trip to Bruges, Antwerp or Basel. And on occasions, as they plunged ever deeper into these collective daydreams, not seeking to wake from them but continually refuelling them in unstated collusion, they would, eventually, lose all touch with reality. On such occasions, now and again a hand would simply emerge from the conclave: the waiter was there, to clear the empty tankards and bring full ones; and then their conversation, as it once again thickened, would consist solely of matter related to what they had just drunk, to their drunkenness, their thirst, their happiness.

  They were in love with liberty. It seemed to them that the whole world was tailor-made for them. They lived at the exact tempo of their thirst, and their exuberance was irrepressible; their enthusiasm knew no bounds. They could have walked, run, danced, sung all night.

  They wouldn't meet the day after. The couples would stay at home, dieting, feeling queasy, overindulging in black coffee and soluble aspirin. They would venture out only once night had fallen, to go and eat a plain steak in an expensive café. They would make draconian resolutions: no more smoking, no more drinking, no more wasting money. They would feel empty and stupid, and in their memory of their magnificent drinking bout there would always be a hint of yearning, a vague annoyance, a feeling of ambiguity, as if the very impulse which had made them drink had only reawakened in them a much deeper perplexity, a more hermetic contradiction from which they could not abstract themselves.

  Or else, in the flat of one or another of them, they would hold almost monstrous dinner parties, veritable feasts. For the most part they had only tiny and sometimes unusable kitchens, and mixed sets of crockery with an odd few rather high-class pieces amongst them. Extremely delicate cut glass stood on the table beside recycled mustard jars, kitchen knives lay alongside little silver spoons with coats of arms.

  They would return all together from Rue Mouffetard, arms laden with edibles, with whole trays of melons and peaches, and baskets filled with cheeses, legs of lamb, poultry, and paniers of oysters in season, and dishes of pâté, and fish roes, and, of course, with bottles, whole stacks of bottles of wine, port, mineral water, Coca-Cola.

  Nine or ten people filled the narrow room, which was lit by a single window looking out on to the courtyard. A settee upholstered in coarse brown velvet occupied a recess at the far end; three would be placed there, the table set in front of them, and the others would sit on unmatched chairs and on stools. They would eat and drink for hours on end. The exuberance and the copiousness of these meals were odd: to be honest, and from a strictly culinary point of view, they were rather poor meals: roast meat and poultry without any sauce; the vegetables were almost invariably boiled or sauté potatoes or even, on days before pay-day, the main dish might be just pasta or rice garnished with olives and some anchovies. They didn't experiment at all; their most complicated dishes were melon in port, bananas flambé, cucumber salad in cream. It took them several years to realise that there was a technique, if not an art, of cookery, and that everything that they had enjoyed eating had been plain fare, unadorned, devoid of subtlety.

  In that respect they demonstrated the ambiguity of their situation in life. What they took to be a feast corresponded in every particular to the only kind of meals they had known for years, namely student canteen food. By dint of eating tough and wafer-thin steaks, they had taken to worshipping Chateaubriand and fillet steaks. Meat in gravy - for years they looked askance at braised meat - did not attract them; they had too clear a memory of lumps of fat swimming around three slices of carrot in close proximity to a soggy piece of soft cheese and a spoonful of gelatinous jam. In a way, they liked anything which made a show wi
thout showing it had been cooked. They liked the visible signs of abundance and riches; they would have no truck with the slow process of elaboration which turns difficult raw materials into dishes, and which implies a whole world of pans, pots, slicers, strainers and ovens. But the sight of salami sometimes almost made them faint, because it was all immediately and entirely edible. They liked pâtés and ready-made diced vegetable salads decorated with mayonnaise whorls, boned ham and eggs in aspic: they yielded too often to such temptations, and regretted it, once their eyes had had their fill, almost as soon as they plunged their forks into the jelly enhanced by a slice of tomato and two sprigs of parsley. After all, it was only a hard-boiled egg.

  Above all, they had the cinema. And this was probably the only area where they had learned everything from their own sensibilities. They owed nothing to models. Their age and education made them members of that first generation for which the cinema was not so much an art as simply a given fact; they had always known the cinema not as a fledgling art form but, from their earliest acquaintance, as a domain having its own masterworks and its own mythology. Sometimes it seemed as if they had grown up with it, and that they understood it better than anyone before them had ever been able to understand it.

  They were cinema buffs. Film was their primordial passion; they indulged it every evening, or nearly. They loved the pictures as long as they were beautiful, entrancing, charming, fascinating. They loved the mastery of space, time and movement, they loved the whirl of New York streets, the torpor of the Tropics, fights in saloon bars. They were not excessively sectarian, like those dull minds which swear only by a single Eisenstein, Bunuel or Antonioni, or even — as there's no accounting for tastes — by Carné, Vidor, Aldrich or Hitchcock; nor were they too eclectic, like those infantile people who throw all critical sense to the winds and acclaim a director as a genius if he makes a blue sky look blue or if the pale red of Cyd Charisse's dress is made to clash with the darker red of Robert Taylor's sofa. They did not lack taste. They were highly suspicious of so-called art movies, with the result that when this term was not enough to spoil a film for them, they would find it even more beautiful (but they would say - quite rightly — that Marienbad was "all the same just a load of crap!"); they had an almost exaggerated feeling for Westerns, for thrillers, for American comedies and for those astonishing adventures full of lyrical flights, sumptuous images and dazzling, almost inexplicable beauties such as (the titles were imprinted on their minds for ever) Lola, Bhowani Junction, The Bad and the Beautiful, Written on the Wind.

  They did not go to concerts at all often, and even less often to the theatre. But they would meet, by chance, at the Film Theatre, at the Passy Cinema, or the Napoleon, or in little local flea-pits - the Kursaal at Gobelins, the Texas at Montparnasse, the Bikini, the Mexico at Place Clichy, the Alcazar at Belleville, and others besides, around Bastille or in the XVth arrondissement, graceless, ill-equipped cinemas frequented by the unemployed, Algerians, ageing bachelors, and film buffs, where they would see, in atrociously dubbed French versions, those unknown masterpieces they remembered from when they were fifteen, or those reputed works of genius (they had memorised the entire list) which they had been trying in vain for years to see. They would always remember with wonderment the blessed evening when they had discovered, or rediscovered, almost by chance, The Crimson Pirate, The World in His Arms, Night and the City, My Sister Eileen, or The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T. Alas, quite often, to tell the truth, they were horribly let down. Films they had waited so long for, as they had thumbed almost feverishly through the new issues of the Entertainment Guide every Wednesday, films they had been told by almost everyone were magnificent, sometimes did finally turn out to be showing somewhere. They would turn up, every one of them, on the opening night. The screen would light up, they would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out; they would be sad. It was not the film they had dreamt of. It was not the total film each of them had inside himself, the perfect film they could have enjoyed for ever and ever. The film they would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt, the film they would have liked to live.

  V

  So that was their life, as they lived it, as their friends lived, in cluttered and charming flats, with their outings and their films, their grand comradely dinner parties and their wondrous plans. They were not unhappy. Fleeting, surreptitious moments of bliss in living lit up their days. Some evenings, after dinner, they would linger at table, to finish off a bottle of wine, nibble some nuts, light cigarettes. Some nights they wouldn't manage to get to sleep and, half sitting up, propped up by pillows, an ashtray shared between them, they would talk until dawn. Some days they would walk and talk for hours on end. They would smile at each other's reflections in shop windows. It would seem to them that everything was perfect. They would walk unconstrainedly, with loose limbs, untouched, it seemed, by the passing of time. Simply being there, in the street, on a crisp, cold, blustery day, wrapped in warm clothing, at dusk, proceeding smartly but unhurriedly towards a place of friendship, was enough to make their smallest gestures - lighting a cigarette, buying a bag of hot chestnuts, negotiating a way through the crowd at a station exit - appear to them as the direct and obvious expression of a boundless bliss.

  Or again, on some summer nights they would walk for miles through neighbourhoods they did not know. The moon's round orb would shine high in the sky, casting its velvety light on every thing. The long, wide, empty streets would reverberate with the sound of their footsteps, as they walked all in step. Taxis would go by seldom, slowly, almost noiselessly. On such nights they had the world in their arms. It was unimaginably exhilarating, as if they had been entrusted with fabulous secrets and inexpressible powers. And they would hold hands and begin to run, or to play hopscotch, or to run a hopping race along the pavement, whilst bellowing in unison the great arias of Cosi fan tutte or the B Minor Mass.