Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep Page 6

  Their nostalgia was slightly hypocritical. The Algerian war had begun with them and was being pursued before their eyes. It hardly affected them; they took action on occasions, but they rarely felt obliged to do so. For years they didn't imagine that their lives, their future, their ideas might one day be turned upside down by it. But that is what happened, up to a point, at one time in the past: in their student days they had come to participate more spontaneously and often almost enthusiastically in the meetings and street demonstrations which had greeted the outbreak of the war, the call-up of the reserve, and, especially, the coming of Gaullism. In those days there seemed to be a connection, directly established, between what they did in their own small sphere and what they aimed to do. And you couldn't really reproach them for having been, as it turned out, quite wrong: the war didn't cease, Gaullism didn't go away. Jérôme and Sylvie dropped their studies. In advertising circles - which were generally located by quasi-mythical tradition to the left of centre, but were rather better defined by technocracy, the cult of efficiency, modernity, complexity, by the taste for speculating on future trends and by the more demagogic strain in sociology, as well as by the still very widespread opinion that nine-tenths of the population were fools just able to sing the praises of anything or anybody in unison — in advertising circles, then, it was fashionable to despise all merely topical political issues and to grasp History in nothing smaller than centuries. It happened to be the case, furthermore, that Gaullism was an adequate response, an infinitely more dynamic response than people had at first declared far and wide that it would be, and that its danger lay always in some other place than the one where people thought they had found it.

  The war dragged on all the same, even if they saw it only as an episode, as a fact of an almost secondary nature. They had a bad conscience about it, of course. But their feeling of responsibility went no deeper than their memory of having been affected by it in the past, than a virtually automatic allegiance to moral imperatives of a very broad and unspecific kind. Such indifference could have given them a measure of the true strength of many of their bursts of passion - of their pointlessness, even perhaps of their gutlessness. But the real question lay elsewhere. They had watched with something approaching surprise as some of their old friends got themselves involved, cautiously or wholeheartedly, in helping the FLN, the Algerian freedom fighters. They hadn't really grasped why, and could not manage to take seriously either the romantic explanation (which tended, rather, to make them smile) or the political explanation, which passed their understanding almost entirely. As for themselves, they had solved the problem far more simply: Jérôme and three of his friends, relying on valuable contacts in high places and fraudulent doctors' certificates, had managed to get themselves exempted from military service in time, on health grounds.

  Yet it was the war in Algeria and the war alone which for almost two years protected them from themselves. After all, they might have aged less well, or less slowly. But it was not by their own decisions, nor by acts of their own volition, nor even, whatever they might have claimed, by their sense of humour that they succeeded for some considerable time in deferring a future which they painted, self-indulgently, in blackest hue. The events of 1961 and 1962 - from the Algiers generals' putsch to the massacre at Charonne metro station - which heralded the end of the war enabled them, temporarily but with uncommon effectiveness, to forget, or rather, to suspend their habitual concerns. Their gloomiest forecasts, their fear of never making it, of ending up in some obscure and narrow rut, looked a good deal less dreadful, on some days, than what was happening before their eyes, than what threatened them day by day.

  Those were sad and violent times. Housewives stocked up with sugar in kilos, bottles of cooking oil, tins of tuna, coffee and condensed milk. Squads of helmeted security policemen in shiny black waterproof capes and service boots patrolled at ease up and down Boulevard Sebastopol, carrying cavalry rifles.

  Because the back seats of their cars were often strewn with a few out-of-date issues of newspapers which some touchy individuals could be expected to consider demoralising, subversive or just plain liberal - Le Monde, Libération, France-Observateur - Jérôme and Sylvie and their friends fell prey on occasions to furtive fears and worrying hallucinations: they were being followed, their number-plates were being taken down, they were being watched, being framed: five wine-sodden foreign legionnaires were going to set upon them and leave them for dead in a dark alley, on the rain-washed pavement, in a neighbourhood of ill repute . . .

  Thus martyrdom burst into their daily lives, became, on occasions, an obsession and, it seemed to them, a characteristic of a particular group attitude, and it gave the days, the events and the thoughts of this time their specific colouring. Visions of blood, of explosions, violence and terror went with them always. It might seem on some days that they were ready for anything; but the next day life would be precarious, the future bleak. They would dream of exile, of the countryside, of long cruises. They wished they could live in England, where policemen are reputed to behave with respect for the individual. And all through that winter, as the cease-fire drew nearer and nearer, they would dream of the coming spring, of holidays to come, of the year ahead when, as the papers said, fratricidal passions would have subsided, when it would be possible once again to saunter, to go out at night on foot with your mind at rest and your body safe and sound.

  The pressure of events led them to take a stand. They were committed, of course, only superficially. Their political consciousness, insofar as they had any such thing as a structured and considered set of thoughts rather than an inchoate eruption of more or less consistently angled opinions, was, they thought, already beyond or above the Algerian issue, engaged with alternatives that were more Utopian than real, with general questions which, they conceded with some regret, had little chance of producing any kind of practical result. None the less, they joined the Anti-Fascist Committee which had just been set up in their area. They rose, on occasions, at five in the morning, to go out, with three or four comrades, pasting up posters calling on people to be alert, denouncing the guilty and their stooges, protesting at outrages and honouring the innocent victims. They took petitions round all the houses in their street, and, three or four times, did guard duty in threatened premises.

  They took part in some demonstrations. On such days, there were buses on the streets without number-plates, cafés would shut early, people would hurry home. They were frightened all day long. They went out feeling uneasy. It was five o'clock and a thin drizzle was falling. They looked at the other demonstrators, smiling tensely, sought out their friends, tried to talk about other things. The marchers formed into columns, which moved forward, then came to a standstill. From the midst of the crowd they were in, they could see, in front of them, a great expanse of wet and gloomy tarmac and then, taking up the whole width of the boulevard, the thick black line of the Riot Police. Cohorts of midnight-blue pantechnicons with wire netting over their windows processed in the distance. They dragged their feet, holding hands, dripping with sweat, scarcely daring to shout, and ran off as soon as the first signal was given.

  It didn't add up to much. They were the first to be aware of this, and they often wondered, standing in the middle of the pack, what they were doing there, out in the cold, in the rain, in these sinister parts of the town — Bastille, Nation, Hôtel de Ville. They wished something would happen to prove that what they were doing was important, necessary, irreplaceable, that their fear-struck efforts would have a meaning for them, would be something they needed, something that might help them to know themselves, to change themselves, to live. No: their real lives were elsewhere, in a near or distant future also full of menace, but of a more subtle, less straightforward kind: traps you could not touch, spellbound webs.

  The attempted assassination at Issy-les-Moulineaux and the brief demonstration which followed it marked the end of their militant activities. Their local Anti-Fascist Committee held one more meetin
g and agreed to step up its activity. But, as the holiday season was nearly upon them, there didn't really seem to be any good reason for them even to remain vigilant.

  VIII

  They could not have said exactly what it was that changed when the war ended. For a long time it was as if the only impression they could feel was the sense of an ending, of something completed or concluded. Not a happy ending, not a dramatic resolution, but quite the opposite, a melancholy, dying fall, which left behind it feelings of emptiness, of bitterness, memories clouded over by darkness. Time had passed, time had fled; an era was over; peace had returned, a peace they had never known; the war came to an end. At a stroke, seven years tipped into history: their student years, their years of making friends, the best years of their lives.

  Maybe nothing had changed. They would still sometimes stand at their window, looking at the courtyard, the tiny gardens, the chestnut tree, listening to the birds singing. Other books, other records were now piled up on their rickety bookshelves. The gramophone needle was beginning to wear out.

  Their work had stayed the same. They were doing the same surveys as three years before. What do you shave with? Do you put polish on your shoes? They had seen films, and seen films again, they had travelled, and discovered other restaurants. They had bought shirts and shoes, jumpers and skirts, plates, sheets and trinkets.

  What was new was terribly insidious, terribly vague, terribly bound up with their own unique story, with their dreams. They were weary. They had aged; yes, they had.

  Some days they felt as if they still hadn't begun to live. But the life they were leading came more and more to seem to them a precarious and ephemeral thing; and they felt drained of strength, as if their waiting, their hardships, their pinched budgets had worn them out, as if all of it - unsatisfied desires, imperfect pleasures, wasted time - had been in the natural order of things.

  On occasions they wished everything would stay the same, not ever move. Then they would be able just to drift. Their life would keep them warm: it would stretch ahead through the months and years without - or almost without - altering, without ever hampering them. It would be but the harmonious sequence of their days and nights, the one almost imperceptibly modulating the other, a never-ending reprise of the same themes, a continuous happiness, a perpetuated enjoyment which no upset, no tragic event, no twist or turn of fate would ever bring into question.

  At other times they could not stand it a moment longer. They wanted to fight, and to win. But how could they fight? Whom would they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness.

  Where were the dangers? Where were the threats? In the past men fought in their millions, and millions still do fight, for their crust of bread. Jérôme and Sylvie did not quite believe you could go into battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner under which they would have enlisted most readily. There was nothing, they thought, that concerned them in party manifestos or in government plans: they would sneer at early retirement pension schemes, increased holiday entitlements, free lunches, the thirty-hour week. They wanted superabundance - Garrard turntables, empty beaches for their eyes only, round-the-world trips, grand hotels.

  The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs.

  For years the crises they had encountered had scarcely dented their good humour. They hadn't taken them as inevitable or terminal affairs; they were crises in which nothing was at stake. They often reflected that friendship was protecting them. The group held together, reliably, cohesively, it was a firm guarantee of their stability, a force they could count on. They were sure they were right because they knew they would stick together, and they liked nothing more than to be together at one or another's flat towards the end of an especially awkward month, sitting around a tureen of potatoes and bacon, sharing their last cigarettes as fraternally as it was possible to do.

  But friendships, too, began to fray. Some evenings, within the finite fields of their unspacious rooms, the couples that had come together crossed swords by word and eye. Some evenings, they finally grasped that their fine friendships, their almost hermetic language, their private jokes, this shared world, shared language, the common gestures they had made up, were based on nothing: theirs was a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing. Their lives were not conquests, but slow collapses, dispersions. That was when they realised how deeply they were condemned to habit, to sluggishness. They were bored in each other's company as if all there had ever been between them was a void. Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth. But the words were hollow, the gestures empty, without substance, without consequence, without a future, words repeated a thousand times, hands shaken a thousand times, ritual actions which no longer afforded them any protection.

  At that time they would spend an hour trying to agree about which film they would go to see. They would talk just for the sake of talking, play at riddles or at guessing games. Each couple, when alone, would speak harshly of the others and sometimes of themselves; they would harp on their lost youth; they would recall having once been enthusiastic, spontaneous, brim-full of real plans, of images of wealth, of desires. They would dream of new friendships; but they could barely manage to picture them.

  Slowly but with inexorable obviousness, the group fell apart. With sometimes brutal suddenness, in the space of barely a few weeks, it became obvious to some of them that the life of old would never again be on. Their weariness was too great. The outside world too demanding. People who had lived in rooms with no running water, who had dined on a quarter of a stick-loaf, who had believed they were living as they pleased, who had burnt the candle at both ends without running out of wick, such people, one fine day, settled down. They were swayed, almost naturally, almost objectively, by the temptation of a steady job, a staff appointment, bonus payments, and an extra salary cheque at Christmas.

  One after another almost all their friends gave in. The age of rootless living gave way to the age of security. We simply cannot, they would say, go on like this all our lives. And they said like this with a vague wave of the hand towards: larking about, too little sleep, eating potatoes, worn-out jackets, hard work on low pay, public transport.

  Bit by bit and without really noticing it happen, Jérôme and Sylvie ended up almost alone. Friendship was possible, it seemed to them, only when they were in the same boat, leading the same lives. But when one couple suddenly acquires what looks to the other couple like a fortune, or the firm prospect of a fortune, whilst the other, for its part, prizes the freedom it has clung to - there was what felt like a clash of two worlds. It was no longer a matter of passing squabbles, but of real splits, deep chasms, of wounds that would not close up all by themselves. Mistrust of a sort that would have been impossible a few months earlier had entered their relationships. They would be stand-offish in conversation; they seemed to be for ever challenging each other.

  Jérôme and Sylvie were harsh, were unfair about their friends. They spoke of treason and abdication. They took pleasure in observing at first hand the devastating damage which money, they claimed, would wreak upon those who had sacrificed everything on its altar, and from which damage they were, they thought, still exempt. They watched their old friends settle almost easily, almost too comfortably, into rigid hierarchies and unreservedly adopt the values of the world they were entering. They watched them scrape and wheedle and come to believe in their power, their influence, their responsibilities. Through them they believed they could see the exact opposite of their own world:
the one which gave justification, all together, to money, work, advertising, skills, a world which gave value to experience, a world which gave them no place, the solemn world of executives, the world of power. They came close to believing that their friends were being taken for a ride.

  They did not despise money. Perhaps it was the opposite: that they loved it too much. They would have liked substance, certainty, a calm, clear way to the future. They were alert to all signs of permanence: they wanted to be rich. And if they still refused to make themselves rich, it was because they did not need a salary. Their imagination, their culture allowed them to think only in millions.

  They often went out in the evening, sniffing the air, ogling the window displays. They would push on past the thirteenth arrondissement, close to home, and of which they knew only Avenue des Gobelins because of its four cinemas, they would skirt around the sinister Rue Cuvier which would have led them only to the even more sinister environs of Gare d'Austerlitz, and, almost naturally, would follow Rue Monge, then Rue des Ecoles, on to Saint-Michel, Saint-Germain, and thence, according to their whim or the time of year, to Palais-Royal, Opéra, Montparnasse, Vavin, Rue d'Assas, Saint-Sulpice, the Luxembourg gardens. They walked slowly. They stopped at each antique dealer's, pressed their noses against ill-lit windows, made out, through the mesh shutters, the reddish glow of a leather sofa, the foliate decoration of an earthenware dish or plate, the gleam of cut glass or a brass candlestick, the elegant curve of a cane-seated chair.

  From one station to another —antique dealer, bookshops, record shops, restaurant menus, travel agencies, shirt-makers, tailors, cheese-shops, bootmakers, confectioners, delicatessens, stationers - their paths through Paris constituted their real universe: in them lay their ambitions and hopes. That was where real life was, the life they wanted to know, that they wanted to lead: was it not for these salmon, for these carpets, for these crystal glasses that, twenty-five years before, a shopgirl and a ladies' hairdresser had brought the two of them into this world?