The Merry Month of May (21 page)

“I don’t want you to tell me anything, Jack,” he said. “I want you to be a witness, that’s all.”

“Witness?” I said. “Witness to what? I do not intend to be anybody’s witness to any God damned personal junk.”

“Witness to the fact that I’m not having any,” Harry said. “Not any at all. I know what I am, I know where I stand, I know what is good for me, and furthermore I know what I really want. I think I know where I’ve been. And I’m making you my witness.”

That was pretty hard to refuse. In fact, it was not possible to refuse it, under the circumstances. I had been impressed, like a sailor. Once he stated it, like that, I was already committed, simply because my ears had heard it. And anyway, under those circumstances, I did not want to refuse.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m your witness. I fail to see how I can not be. Under the circumstances. Now what?”

“Now nothing,” he said. “Let’s go see the fucking Sorbonne.”

We had about finished the herring and
museau
by this time. Our waiter Number Fifteen was hovering around waiting to serve the entrées.

“If you are going to visit the Sorbonne, gentlemen,” he said in French, “I would like to offer very much the suggestion that you also pass by and view the Odéon. It is not possible that you could not find it amusing.”

I thanked him. When he served Harry his
cassoulet,
I regretted my decision not to order it. But I stuck with my steak. We ate the rest of the meal without talking much, mostly nodding or saying hello to people we knew who came in or got up to leave.

“Do not forget to pass by and view the Odéon,” Number Fifteen called, after we paid and were leaving.

That was what we did. The easiest way to get to it was to walk back down the Boulevard we had come up, to the Carrefour Odéon, and turn up there, away from the river. It was pleasant strolling along under the shade trees, with the excited kids all around.

“I thought it was Louisa she was after,” I said.

“So did I,” Harry said beside me. “But maybe that was just a ploy. Anyway, that’s a joke!”

When we turned up, the whole crazy place was visible way off, straight up the rue de l’Odéon, in the Place de l’Odéon, where the famous fish restaurant La Méditerranée nestled on a warped corner of the
Place.

The theater itself was called the Théâtre de France but everybody spoke of it as “the Odéon”. It had been built by Louis Quinze in the eighteenth century, 1781 or somewhere around there, then was burned in the Revolution and later restored. It had a huge colonnaded façade with the columns running four or five low stories up to the pediment, very Greek copy, with low, thick, arched arcades you could walk under running around the other three sides. It was a big building with lots of storage rooms and dressing rooms backstage around in the back which butted on the rue de Vaugirard, and just across the street were the Luxembourg Gardens.

Now two huge red and two huge black flags were streaming in the breeze from the very top of the pediment, the tricolor had been hauled down, and the entire roof appeared to be alive with unkempt kids swarming around, or just standing, or sitting on the cornice eating their lunch of bread and meat or bread and cheese.

Huge banners had been fastened to the big columns just under the architrave. “Imagination takes power at the Théâtre de l’Odéon.” Another said “Barrault is dead,” referring to the theater director’s own quote about himself on Wednesday night when he joined the invading students.

Another said “FREE ENTRY”. The students intended to throw the stage and pit open to a perpetual dialogue that would go on 24 hours a day every day, everybody invited. Apparently this had already started, and lots of workers, waiters and
petits commerçants
appeared to be taking advantage of the invitation.

Up closer, we saw somebody had painted a smaller banner: “When the Assemblée Nationale becomes bourgeois theater, the Bourgeois Theater must become the Assemblée Nationale!” This referred to Prime Minister Pompidou’s performances in front of the Assemblée at the beginning of the week.

The whole
Place
was alive with people, not all of them students by any means, and discussions, dialogues and arguments were going on all around. No auto traffic could have gotten through it.
Commerçants
argued with waiters, waiters argued with students, students argued with
commerçants, commerçants
argued with
commerçants.
A TV group was filming it all from the top of their truck. Coming up, the sidewalks and the street itself were jammed with students and other people grinning or laughing and going to or coming from the
Place,
but there had been no jostling.

The whole place was wild, laughing, scratching crazy.

“Do you want to try to get in?” I shouted at Harry.

The entire huge porch beneath the great columns was jammed with a mob of people, all evidently trying to get inside to hear the dialogue in the pit.

“No,” he shouted back. “We’d never make it.”

We worked our way across the
Place,
heading for the rue Racine, which would take us to the Sorbonne. It had the same look as the rue de l’Odéon had had.

The Boulevard St.-Michel when we came out into it had a soberer, saner look. We walked up it toward the Place de la Sorbonne. This of course was crowded with knots of kids. So were all the cafés along it.

“Well, Number Fifteen was certainly right,” I said. “About Odéon.” Harry nodded. “He sure was. Great sport. But there’s going to be a big bill. I just wonder if anybody is thinking about who’s going to pay that big bill when it is presented.”

This sobered me down a little. “Well, I guess they will all have to pay a part.”

“
They
will,” Harry said, “yes. Because the Government and the
Patronat
sure as hell aint going to.”

The word patronat translated means “body of employers”.
The Patronat,
with a capital P, means just about the same as our word Establishment, except that it is probably a little more precise in
who
it means. Everybody knew, at least every American did, just how antiquated the French
Patronat
was in comparison to our equally unloved American Establishment. It was about a hundred times worse, in just about every sense. It had hardly changed at all since Karl Marx started taking the Industrial Revolution to task. Their capitalism was still of the circa 1870 variety. Their Stock Exchange even, the Bourse, still worked by secrecy and hidden buying, without open declaration. Comparatively speaking, they were taxed almost not at all. And as a result the comparative richness between them and the French worker was enormously greater. Whoever lost in this “Revolution”, it would almost certainly not be the
Patronat.

“Well, it’s the people’s vacation,” I said, a little lamely, but Harry did not answer.

The Sorbonne, when we got to it, looked about the same as it had on the first day of the occupation except that now everything looked a little dirtier. The streets and sidewalks outside were covered with litter: mimeographed pamphlets, tracts, mimeographed single-sheet announcements, candy bar wrappers, old cigarette packs. But the students were apparently trying to organize a clean-up group, because we saw a number of them wearing some kind of unreadable armband and carrying brooms. A few of them were sweeping away at the mess, but most were talking. We went in from the rue Victor Cousin side.

Inside, the famous court looked like some kind of Persian market. Booths made of card tables or old refrigerator boxes had been set up all over the place. Here the outside theme of increasing litter and dirtiness was continued, in trumps, but here nobody was trying to do anything about it. Each booth it turned out was the station of some particular political persuasion. There were Maoists, Ché Guevaraists, Stalinists, Leninists, Trotskyists, and I don’t know what all. Huge portraits of Lenin, Mao and Guevara had been plastered on the columns. Slogans had been painted in red paint just about everywhere,

“Society is a carnivorous flower,” said one. “I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desire,” another said.

They were all over the place.

“One pleasure has the bourgeoisie, that of degrading all pleasures.”

“Be a realist, demand the impossible.”

“Those who make a revolution by halves, dig their own graves.”

“A Philistine’s tears are the nectar of the Gods.”

“Acid is yellow!”

“Imagination power!”

“Sex power!”

“Cunt power!”

“Commodities are the opium of the people.”

There were hundreds of others. A steady stream of youthful comers and goers filed through the courtyard gate and milled about in the yard. Everybody had a happy, laughing, vacationing look. I went over to one booth and asked to buy a copy of
L?nragé,
a paper with fairly funny cartoons the Anarchist group had begun putting out. The longhaired boy at the booth stared at me coldly, decided I was not ridiculing him but was simply not one of the well-informed, sneered at me, and said, “They’re over there. Here we are Trotskyites. We don’t mess with their garbage.” I apologized, and sauntered away. I did not have the courage to try another booth. Anyway, I could buy the paper on the street in St.-Germain.

“Come on,” Harry shouted at me across some heads. “Let’s go see the amphitheaters.”

The amphitheaters did not appear to have changed any since Monday. They were jammed right up literally to the rafters, with students sitting on the statues and in the niches in the walls. The “NO SMOKING” signs had been mutilated and made to read “SMOKE!”, as if it were a general’s command. They could have been exactly the same students that I saw on Monday, and as far as I knew they were, so that I had the strange feeling they had all been sitting there without sleep, bowel movements or any other normal function for the three full days that I had been away. We did not go in but stood in the doorway. Some boy had the gavel up on the stage and while we stood there he recognized some girl with long stringy hair and extremely tight gray corduroy pants, who had some indistinguishable amendment to make to something. The morning papers had said that the students had already voted to boycott year-end exams, but this group apparently did not know this, had not voted yet and was still discussing the wording of the proclamation. Bottles of red wine, long loaves of bread and hunks of cheese and sausage passed back and forth from hand to hand. The more or less laughing uproar made such a din it was hard to hear anything that was said.

Harry motioned to me and we started away down the crowded, ringing corridor and ran head-on into Hill and some of his friends.

I must say they looked pretty grubby. Hill appeared to be starting a beard, but it may simply have been that he had not had time to shave for some days.

Anne-Marie was with them, as was Terri of the long hair, and bearded Bernard, but Hill had his arm well around another girl and it was pretty clear they were lovers, at least for the time being. Anne-Marie did not appear to mind, in her militant way. Thin and small as she was, she nevertheless moved along like a sturdy little tank, whose turret gun never stops turning and looking. Even the militantly clean Anne-Marie looked a little grubby. But I understood—whether Harry did or not—that none of them had had a chance at an honest-to-God bath since the Monday of the occupation, if not since the Friday night battle in the rue Gay-Lussac.

I guess Harry did understand it; about the no-bath beatnik, hippie look. At least, he played it all very cool. So did Hill. I thought then that Hill was desperately wanting to avoid any big argument with his father in front of his friends. I think Harry wanted to avoid the same thing. You might never have known that they had ever argued about anything in their lives, looking at them shake hands and say hello. “We just came over to look the Sorbonne over,” Harry smiled. “But I didn’t have any idea we might find you here, run right into you in the corridors.”

“We’ve been sleeping here since Monday night,” Hill smiled back, and he squeezed the little girl he had his arm around and smiled down at her, so that it was pretty obvious with whom he, anyway, had been sleeping since Monday night. “A lot of the kids brought their sleeping bags. It’s not bad at all.

“Actually, you probably wouldn’t have found me,” he said, “a day later. We’re moving our Cinema Committee over to the Odéon. It is felt that since we in Cinema are basically cultural it is better for us to be in the headquarters of the Cultural Revolution. Anyway, there’s a lot more room up in the backstage areas there than there is here in this jammed madhouse.”

“We understood the place had been thrown open to the public,” I said apologetically. “So we thought we’d look in.”

We were speaking English and Hill’s new girl suddenly answered, in unaccented American-English. “It has, it has, it has been thrown open. Wide open. To everybody in Paris. Workers, artists, everybody. We want everybody to come. We want to get acquainted with everybody, in a whole new way of life, of living.”

“This is Florence,” Hill introduced her. “She’s a new member of our Cinema Committee.”

It seemed pretty clear to me why she was a new member of the Committee, and I would have bet 50 dollars with anybody that Hill had certainly been her sponsor.

“She’s half-American,” Hill said. “But she was born and raised in France. She only returned from the States a few days ago, by accident. Without knowing anything at all about the Revolution.”

“Well, I guess she’s finding out now, though,” Harry smiled.

“She sure is,” Hill said, and squeezed her again smiling down.

“I’m loving it,” Florence said.

“I’m about to be elected Chairman of the Students’ Cinema Committee of the Sorbonne and Odéon,” Hill said. “We’re having the meeting this afternoon, if we can find an empty room. Otherwise, we’ll wait and do it after the move to Odéon.”

“Well, I think that’s great, Hill,” Harry said.

“So do I,” I said.

The others stood silently smiling at us that peculiar innocent smile, Terri of the innocent face, and bearded warm-eyed Bernard, all of them except Anne-Marie. It is not true that Anne-Marie did not smile. But her smile, while equally innocent and pleasant, was so superior and openly contemptuous of us “Older Generations” that for me at least it did not seem a smile. It was more like a smirk. Probably she did not even know it.