The Merry Month of May (30 page)

We came out on the rue des Écoles halfway up. Now the rue des Écoles runs along the front of the Sorbonne itself. When I looked up that way, I could see that the place had been cordoned off by police units, and that the air was full of tear gas and smoke. I had a sudden fatigue reaction. “Let’s go the other way,” I said.

But at rue Monge we had the good fortune to witness how a Paris barricade is constructed, from its very beginning.

At the corner of rue Monge and rue des Écoles is a lovely little park called the Square Monge with big trees behind which are visible the handsome old buildings of the École Polytechnique. It is surrounded by a handsome fence of wrought iron, and has concrete benches both inside on the grass and outside on the sidewalk. When we arrived, a mob of people were just beginning to tear up the concrete benches and the handsome wrought-iron fence. Ferenc and I stood back against a building cattycorner across the street, and watched.

There was not one student involved in this barricade. These people were all Parisian workers of the lowest class. There were no Algerians among them. About one-sixth of them were women. And almost without exception they all had such badly rotting, mangled teeth that I felt sorry for them all and wondered how they could ever manage to eat their own fabled Parisian cooking.

They had crowbars with them and sledgehammers, and later we saw shovels. They shouted encouragement to each other in shrill voices as they tore up the lovely little park. The women were particularly good at the shouting part. But the women worked hard too. Whenever someone grinned at me, I grinned back. I advised Ferenc to do the same.

Directly in front of us, two men of about 24 began attacking the pavement with a crowbar, They were trying to force an initial opening between two paving stones. They kept at it with an intense concentration. Then a slender, gray-haired, partially bald man in a light-beige raincoat walked up to them.

Now, I do not know the mechanics of how the eyeball, all unwitting to the conscious mind, trains itself in an intelligent man to recognize a plainclothes cop. I have said elsewhere in these papers that my eyeball, all on its own, can recognize an Algerian man or a Chinese man a block away by the back of his head. And my eyeball, again all on its own, can recognize an American in the city of Paris as far away as I can see him, or her. It’s something about the stance, the way they walk, as if they felt guilty, and when they come closer some look on their faces that my eyeball knows but which I do not, confirms me. They are just American, that’s all. And I’ve never been wrong, to my knowledge. And, by the same token of eyeball judgement, I knew immediately that the man in the light-beige raincoat was a plainclothes cop.

Immediately I looked at Ferenc, and he nodded. I nodded back. This was interesting, and we strolled slowly over to where the two young men, now joined by a couple of others, were still trying intently to prise a paving stone from the tightly laid pavement. The man in the light raincoat had begun to remonstrate with them about why they wanted to do it. He talked calmly and objectively: There were no police around to fight; if they prised up the street, it would only bring the police; what was it they were after?

I do not think a soul there except us two knew he was a plain-clothesman. But a crowd began to collect. He was certainly a gutsy cop. Slowly the voices got louder. They were talking French so fast, all of them, that I couldn’t make out what forms the discussion was taking. But several citizens were taking the side of the man in the light raincoat. They did not prevail however, crowbars and youthful adrenalin prevailed, and when this became apparent the man in the light raincoat backed off, shrugged a typical Frenchman’s shrug, and sauntered away, probably to telephone headquarters about what was happening at rue Monge and rue des Écoles. Ferenc and I backed away and stood again back against the building.

It was a fascinating thing to watch. It took them quite a long time to get the first paving stone out. But after that it became easier. And got easier and easier the more of them they removed.

Once they had a foot or two of the square stones up off their bed of sand, there was a great cheer all across the place, and the shovels were brought in. And then it went fast. The men, and the women, formed human chains to pass the stones which the shovelers were now loosening almost faster than they could be passed along. They wanted to make a V-shaped double barricade, that would cut off rue Monge from Place Maubert downhill toward the river, and would also cut off rue des Écoles from the west toward the Sorbonne. God knows who they were, or why they were there, or what they expected to cause or gain from it all. They were just there, and they were just doing it. To have stopped them would have taken machineguns.

It was amazing how swiftly the barricades rose. The concrete benches from the lovely little park were stuck in amongst them, while the beautiful wrought-iron fence around the park was set in in sections along the face so that they stuck forth like spears in the direction—the two directions—from which the police were expected to come.

“I think it’s about time we moved on,” I said. I had not forgotten that gray-haired man in the light raincoat.

Neither had Ferenc. “I expect so,” he said calmly. Then suddenly he grinned. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s been a great evening.”

We sauntered on down rue des Écoles to where it crossed rue Cardinal Lemoine, not far, and turned back down Cardinal Lemoine toward our sanctuary of the Île St.-Louis.

At rue le Regrattier we shook hands.

“It’s amazing really, isn’t it?” Ferenc said in an odd voice. “Really, it is amazing.”

I let myself into my door with my key, and he went on down the quai to “his” now proprietary couch at the Gallaghers’ apartment.

16

S
ATURDAY MORNING
F
ERENC AND I
walked Louisa and McKenna up to Boulevard St.-Michel to view the devastation. It was unbelievable. All the way up St.-Germain the streets were torn up, the tall gooseneck metal streetlamps were down, and turned-over burnt-out cars had been dragged to the gutters, sometimes encroaching up onto the sidewalk itself.

At Place Maubert the innocent little newspaper-magazine kiosk had been torn completely apart and dismembered—for no apparently good reason, because it clearly had not been strewn on the barricades that had gone up there later in the night after we left it. At rue St.-Jacques more tipped-over cars had been dragged to the sidelines.

Everywhere, work crews were at work trying to clean up. They were using bulldozers and those small one-man mobile cup-shovels and other pieces of roadbuilding equipment. But this time there would be no replacing of paving stones. Asphalt trucks and mobile road-rollers were already pouring and tamping their hot smelly asphalt into the places where the torn-up street had been cleared. People and students sat at the outdoor tables of the cafés having a coffee or an apéritif while the fumes from the asphalt rolled over them.

But the worst place of all was the Carrefour, and Boulevard St,-Michel itself where it ran from there up to the Place Edmond Rostand at the corner of the Luxembourg. At the Carrefour itself nothing had been left standing. Nothing. And up the Boulevard at least one-third of the lovely old flowering trees, such a beautiful and distinctive part of Paris and of the
Quartier,
had been downed during the night and lay out in the street or up onto the sidewalk almost to the storefronts. They could asphalt the boulevards, all right. But it would take a long time to replace those.

Hundreds of people were out strolling to view the destruction. They climbed over the tree butts when they had to, or passed around them out in the street when it was possible. We joined the parade.

It was hard to believe where last night there had been such violence and wild emotion and potential danger there was now such quiet and order and amiable calm.

At the rue Racine there was a phenomenon I knew about and I took the others to see it. Rue Racine was a short street which ran on an angle from Boul’ St.-Michel to the Odéon and on it was a barricade which the students had come to call the
barricade pure,
the “pure barricade”. It had been there for at least two weeks and had never been removed. It was made of nothing except paving stones. That was what made it “pure”. It had become a joke at both the Sorbonne and the Odéon. Nobody was allowed to put any streetlamps, trees, tree grilles, or traffic signs on it. I took McKenna’s picture standing up on top of it, from a squatting position in the street.

Then as an afterthought I took one of the
pavés
from it to save for her. I thought someday she might like to have it. I thought I could have one of the sides ground down smooth and polished and then engraved with the place and date of the Paris Revolution for her.

But then, after I had taken it, I felt peculiar walking along with it in my hand, as if some flic I met might think I meant to heave it at him. So I stuffed it into the pocket of my trenchcoat, where it hung down so heavily that it made me look like some kind of deformed semihunchback. So, in this odd fashion we made our way on up St.-Michel to Edmond Rostand and had a coffee there at the big café on the corner across from the Luxembourg. Everyone in the café certainly seemed happy and cheerful enough.

After that we walked over to rue Bonaparte and took it down to the Place St.-Germain and had lunch at Lipp, where everything was business-as-usual. It was funny to note that at every table there was a silent transistor radio, and that somebody at each table had the tiny plastic earplug in his ear for the news.

On the way home we took them past our own barricade at the rue des Écoles and rue Monge.

The lady painter from our American group who lived near Maubert was with us too, and we dropped her off at her place and went on home to the Île. She and Ferenc had been having a mild flirtation for the last week, and he had called her up, and she had met us at Maubert on our way up to St.-Michel. She, though I think not Louisa, was shocked as much as I was about the old trees. Louisa seemed to think it was all part of the Revolutionary game. Like the old saw.
If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.

Actually, I had seen some of the first of those beautiful big trees come down myself the night before, along the Boulevard St.-Michel.

After saying goodby to Ferenc and letting myself in, I found I wasn’t able to sleep. After standing at my windows with a drink for half an hour watching the heated glow in the sky over the Quarter, I had gotten dressed and gone out again.

This time I went straight up Cardinal Lemoine and around the Panthéon and down through the Place Edmond Rostand and straight over to the Odéon. It was still the same jammed-up crowding screeching place it had been on my other visits. But now tonight with the renewed fighting the excitement was more intense. There were noticeably fewer Countesses and Baronesses with their tall black-tied escorts “touristing”. When I got back upstairs with my
Laissez-Passer
card, I found both Weintraub and Hill Gallagher there in the crowded steaming little offices of the
Comité du Cinéma des Étudiants de la Sorbonne.

Hill looked awful. He stood around like some kind of stork with his shoulders all hunched up and when I went over to him particularly to say hello he mumbled something and turned away from me. He looked like he had more misery in him than there was in all the rest of the world. But not Weintraub.

“Hey!” he said cheerily, and came over to me. “I was wondering if you’d show up tonight.”

“I almost didn’t,” I said. “But I couldn’t stay away.”

“That’s the old Revolutionary spirit,” Weintraub grinned, and slapped me on the back. But for the first time I thought I could detect a haunted look underneath the grin.

The usual groups of kids, all familiar faces by now, were all standing around the office. Daniel the Chairman with the steel-rimmed glasses was behind his desk. The usual democratic discussion and voting was going on just the same, at full tilt. It had become an almost unconscious ritual for them by now.

“What do the Cinema Committee kids think about all the renewed fighting?” I asked Weintraub.

“Naturally, they think it’s all a deliberate ploy on the part of the Government,” he said cheerfully. “The Government has been holding back hoping the Revolution would ‘rot’ itself out, as they say. When it didn’t, they decided to send the police in again against the students, to make it so unpleasant for the people that they will turn against the students, stop all the strikes and settle down and go back to work. In other words, the new fighting is to try and alienate the working people from the students and destroy the solidarity.”

“Um,” I said. I did not know if I could subscribe to that.

“Well, that’s what they believe,” Weintraub said. “Especially now that talks are starting between the Government and the unions tomorrow.” He added, “We’ve got three crews out shooting the St.-Michel fight tonight.”

“They don’t really think they’ve got any possible chance of winning, do they?” I said.

“We never talk about that.” He moved. “Let’s go in and have a coffee. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

We moved through the democratic discussion of something or other chaired by Daniel and went to the door into the “kitchen” part of the Cinema Committee’s “offices”, which also, by its other door, led onto the tiny balcony high above the main amphitheater. The by now almost goofy 34-hour marathon discussion was still going on down there. But it had lost a lot of its energy, and most of its sense. There was a pot of stew simmering on one burner of the tiny butane hotplate and a pot of coffee on the other. There was one young couple necking on the mat in the corner but not as far as I could see, while trying not to look, doing more than that. Otherwise it was empty. “Did you see the ‘hospital’ on your way up?” Weintraub asked as we shut the door against the discussion.

“I heard it,” I said. “As I came up the back stairs.”