The Merry Month of May (12 page)

It is a hard thing to explain. I am sure Harry went away deliberately. And when he came back, there seemed to be just the slightest hint of a less than full enthusiasm in Harry. Let me put it this way: His passion for the student movement, while every bit as heartily stated, was a hair less fervent than hers. Still, this was a long distance from the way he had been talking the past days. I had an uncanny but powerful feeling that something here did not have to do with Hill at all. Did not have to do with the student movement, either. Did not even have to do with that “hypocritical” human society they all, and me too I guess, disliked so much and were against. And Louisa seemed to have hypnotized herself into a kind of breathless, quiet female hysteria, with her talking.

I am convinced that when people are crazy is when they over-symbolize. I mean when every act, gesture, word symbolizes more than it itself is in its own nature is when people are crazy; certifiably nuts.

“If they had come to
my
apartment, Jack,” Louisa smiled, “
I
would have moved heaven and hell.
I
would have left
no stone
unturned until I went back out in the streets with them, back to their lofts and their unwashed washing.”

I was upset. It all made me nervous. And not only that. I found myself placed suddenly in the position of the villain. Without any preparation. I was held responsible with regard to Hill and the student movement, by the both of them. Me, who had been publishing pieces in my Review on Berkeley and the student troubles in America for over a year. Both of them began to talk at me about how little I was doing, and how thoughtlessly selfish I was being, and what
was
I doing? and why
wasn’t
I doing?

Finally, when I could finish my new drink politely without seeming to have tossed it off in too much of a hurry, I took my hat and crept quietly away, feeling somehow guilty. As if, in coming to them about Hill, in having seen him and brought them news of him, in fact by having allowed Hill to visit me in my apartment at all, I had become responsible for everything bad that might happen to Hill,
and
to the student movement,
and
to the Gallagher family itself.

Louisa saw me to the door. But her glassy eyes and her voice were both far away.

Outside on the quai it was dark. I set my hat properly, and grasped my umbrella, and tried to shake off my awful feeling. Over in the Quartier sirens wailed, and tear-gas grenades thudded above the chants. Up in the air between some buildings over there, there was a bright flash, and then a deafening report. It was one of the new percussion grenades the police had begun to use now.

And up on the corner of the Pont de la Tournelle squatted the dark little vans of special police, like two awful bugs in the dark night.

6

I
REMEMBER IT WAS
the next day, Thursday, Thursday the 9th May, that I first went out to look at the riots for myself.

I do know what special thing made me decide to go out that particular day. But I do not know if I can describe it. As I’ve said, at that time the whole thing bored me. I had other interests going. And I had no desire to get myself mousetrapped against some apartment building as innocent bystander, and get beaten up by half a dozen CRS riot, police. Perhaps if I were a lot younger, and still venturesome. But I was not that naïve any more. Not the cynical Jack Hartley of today: divorcé; small time editor; failed writer at a variety of forms, and 47 years old with two arthritic knees. I preferred to ignore it.

But that Thursday something happened, something in the air, that made it impossible to ignore it any longer.

I must try to get this down exactly. I had risen as usual around eleven, had my coffee and orange juice served me as usual in bed together with the mail by my Portuguese. Then I made my usual morning toilet. Now, my morning toilet is always one of the best parts of any day for me. Showering: then shaving slowly and leisurely with one of my set of straight razors given me by my grandfather: selecting one of my several Caswell-Massey cologne waters, a luxury indulgence on my part I admit, since they could not be bought in France, and had to be sent from New York: attending to my aging teeth with a Water-Pic treatment after a firm brushing. As my grandfather used to say: If you don’t look after your teeth, you can’t eat; and I love to eat, as did he. It was one of those times of the day when being a bachelor really paid off. No women running around scattering powder everywhere and leaving the water taps not quite turned off. No female hammering to get in and use the john or the mirror or the toothbrush—just when you were about to apply bared blade to lather for the first sensuous stroke. There is no instrument invented that will give you the absolutely close, clean, satisfying, esthetic shave that an old-fashioned straight razor will, if you keep it cleaned and take care of it. Then, feeling marvelous, I had dressed and gone to work at my desk editing a revolt piece which had just come in from a professor-friend contributor at Berkeley.

I think now that I must have become aware of excitement in the air while I was making my toilet, but that I failed to notice it because I was enjoying myself so much.

Anyhow as I sat down with the revolt piece I realized immediately that I had been sensing excitement for some time. Almost at once I found I couldn’t concentrate on anything, certainly not on editing an intellectual revolt piece.

It was another sunny day. There was a breeze on the river. A lot of people were out, on both sides of the water, walking along and enjoying the exceptional weather. None of this was unusual. But something else was. It is my habit to keep my quai windows tight shut when I am seriously working, but now the closed windows could not keep out the electric quality that was in the air.

More than anything it was like a bullfight day in Spain. I thought immediately of the San Fermin Festival in Pamplona: in the morning when one first gets up, late, after staying up all night drinking and waiting for the running of the bulls. Nothing was happening, but people were preparing themselves, just the same. There is an indefinite buzz over the town, its source cannot be isolated, soon people will begin to leave the hotels and houses and move toward the bars and cafés for talk and the first drinks, then there will be a long leisurely lunch with a lot of sangria while the excitement mounts higher, and finally the general exodus toward the bullring in the thickening buzz: Something is going to happen today: There will be danger: Maybe someone will even be hurt: Oh, boy: And we are there: We are the excited audience.

That was it. That was what it was. The audience. There was an audience in Paris. And the audience was preparing itself to go to the arena. A low, constant murmurous sound as of great crowds of people, an oceanlike sound, it seemed to seep in through the very walls themselves and through the glass panes of the windows. It was monotonous, did not rise or fall in intensity or pitch, and it carried on its low soundwave this air of intense holiday.

I tried to go on working. It was useless. Finally I walked over to the windows and looked out. Nothing was especially different. It was still the sunny day. It was still the same quite-a-few-people abroad, walking and enjoying the sun.

Then I opened the window. It was like opening a dam. I was engulfed in a torrent of sunny, happy, gabbling excitement like an electrical charge, that churned in and swept through the apartment and washed against its walls in a golden flood. The soft air puffed at my face and the sun touched it, as if it too was sucked in with the torrent’s gush inward. I leaned out.

Down below people strolled along the quai in twos and threes. On the wide cobbled landing at the top of the ramp under the trees below my windows, a kind of loafing place alongside the moving foot traffic, a group of at least ten was staring off intently toward the Left Bank across the river. Children, and older people too, ate
Esquimaux
or munched on the large waffle-like
crêpes sucrées.
I felt I might truly be in Pamplona, preparing to leave the hotel for the first drink and bullfight talk of the day.

And with the window open now, I could hear faintly the isolated shout, the chant, a thin piping command, the thud of a gas grenade, the great rending crack, though muffled by distance, of a percussion grenade. The cops and the students, they’re putting on a show! Putting on a show! Let’s go! Let’s go! It was noon. The Festival was starting.

How could anyone work? I put my foot up on the windowsill.

There was a larger number of students than normal among the strollers. Most of them were dressed in the by now recognizable “running shoes and bandanna” uniform. All of them were laughing inordinately. Happily they strolled along in twos and threes, sometimes arm in arm.

They were coming from the Left Bank, across the Pont de la Tournelle at the rue Cardinal Lemoine, passing indifferently by our two camions of CRS police, whose men studiously ignored them. They walked downriver toward Notre-Dame, presumably to recross the river there via the footbridge, and the Pont d l’Archevêché which butted on the rue des Bernardins, which led to the Place Maubert where they were apparently fighting for the moment. There was an awful lot of them, and they did not stop coming.

So, their damned Revolution had finally come to the Seine islands, had it, damn them, I thought grimly; and found myself grinning. You couldn’t help it.

But the air of electric gaiety and holiday did not come solely from them. It was in the faces of the older people, too—the rotund little Frenchmen with their gray moustaches and dark caps and baggy suits; the older women dressed in dresses designed not to hide but simply to cover their good French fat; the younger ones in their New York-cut suits and ties and miniskirts. They were all in it together, whatever it was; and whatever it was, it was fun.

Behind me my Portuguese came in and interrupted me. This was something she almost never presumed to do. She told me she had just heard on her kitchen transistor radio that there was a big bagarre, a truly big fight, going on over at the Place Maubert.

I gave up entirely on my Berkeley piece and stayed in my window to watch. I could almost see Maubert from where I stood, but not quite. The tall houses along the Left Bank cut it off from my view. But I could see the cloud of smoke and tear gas above it. Maubert was a
marché,
a street market, on the Boulevard St.-Germain almost on a level with Notre-Dame, where St.-Germain junctions with the rue Monge, which can be considered just about the eastern boundary of the Latin Quarter. It made a nice large junction for erecting barricades, when all the market stalls were taken down.

The sun was pleasant and warm on my face and shoulders. I saw, picked out, the high bald dome of Harry Gallagher glistening in the sun as he crossed the Pont de la Tournelle. Harry was striding in his tweed jacket among the students like a senior professor. When he was below me, I leaned out and called down to him.

“Wait up. I’m coming down.”

We stood against the sidewalk’s belly-high stone parapet. Students who passed us on the sidewalk grinned merrily at us. I grinned back at them.

“You’ve got to admit it’s exciting,” I said.

“Oh, it’s exciting.” Harry had been up to the Brasserie Lipp in St.-Germain for lunch and had walked home through the students’ quarter.

“I couldn’t work,” I said. “I had to give it up. There’s too much excitement all around.”

Harry gave me a professional smile, but he looked as if he had not heard me. All through the Quartier the students were out in roving bands, he said, and the place was alive with platoons and companies of riot police, not only the CRS now but also the
Gendarmes Mobiles,
really a military force, armed with unloaded carbines and under the authority of the Army, but capable of being requisitioned by the Prefect. Barricades were up all over the place, and either being defended, or abandoned, or breached by the police, and then torn down by the truckloads of public-service workers who followed them.

“But they have been doing that for days,” I said. “What is so different about today?”

“Something is,” Harry said. “I don’t know. But it’s gotten bigger. Whatever it is.”

“They’ve been fighting at Maubert before today,” I said. “But it never bothered me from working. What has changed?”

“Something has,” Harry said. The students were apparently trying out a new tactic, he went on, which consisted of raising a barricade at some undisputed point, which of course would bring the police in their camions, then after a small fight retreating and fading away, while by radio or motorbike informing another group to begin doing the same thing somewhere else. They were keeping at least a dozen big task forces of police busy in this way. They seemed very well organized. In addition, large contingents of police were blocking off all the bridges on the Left Bank side, from the Pont Alexandre III at the Invalides to the Pont au Double at the front of Notre-Dame.

“They’re not going to have any police left,” Harry said, “if they don’t watch out.”

Place Maubert had been one of the big fights today, he said. Barricade after barricade had been put up, lost, sometimes retaken there.

Both of us looked across the river. We could still hear the occasional chant or shout or muffled thud of a grenade, coming across. And the tear gas made a high, rising cloud of white above the tops of the houses over there. Right then, I made up my mind to go over there, and have a look at it.

“Well, I certainly can’t work around here,” I said.

“It’s amazing to see them put one of those things up,” Harry said. “All they need is one crowbar to start it, and then a couple of shovels to keep it going. They form human chains to pass the paving stones along. There’s something truly ritualistic about it.”

“Well, they’ve certainly had enough centuries of practice at it for it to become a ritual,” I said. I coughed. “I can’t get over the feeling that I’m at Pamplona for San Fermin.”