The Merry Month of May (35 page)

“I didn’t know Harry ever harbored secret ambitions to be a film director,” I said, hoping it sounded easy enough.

“I don’t think he ever did. He’s doing this for them, for the students. And for the Revolution.” She paused and looked thoughtful. “But perhaps he may have such ambitions now, after this. After all this mess is over. And I for one would like to see him do it.” She turned that smile on me. “He’s really such a big man, Harry. But you know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.” I was getting decidedly uncomfortable. “What do you think is going to happen with de Gaulle?”

“I think he’s going to quit,” Louisa said positively. “Step down. I don’t see how he can do anything else, now. And I’ll be glad. His isolationist policies of the last five years show how old and blind he’s gotten. He’s like an ostrich. His pride has made him blind to what’s been happening in the world.”

“The old guy’s tough,” I said. “He may be able to pull it out.” Personally, I felt de Gaulle’s chances were a whole lot better than that. I didn’t believe le Général would ever give up and step down, as long as he got his proper Referendum vote. But I did not want to argue with Louisa, who could become quite distraught on the subject of de Gaulle.

“I don’t think so,” she said stubbornly. “Not this time.”

“But who would replace him? Mitterrand? He’s offered himself up as candidate for a united Left.”

“Not enough power,” she said immediately. “He could never make it.”

“Mendès-France?”

“Non plus,”
she said immediately. “He’s got even less of a chance than Mitterrand.”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying! Then who? There just isn’t anybody,” I said.

“Probably it would be Pompidou,” Louisa said.

“But he’s simply de Gaulle’s creature,” I said. “Why throw out de Gaulle and then vote in Pompidou?”

“He is his creature now, I grant. But I have the feeling he is more flexible. If he were elected, I think he would slowly—and delicately— make the changes necessary toward a more flexible policy in keeping with the world of today. With the Technological Revolution.” She turned those vague dreamer’s eyes and ferocious smile on me. “I like this new young man Jean Lecanuet, the quote Centralist unquote. He seems to want to bring things along in keeping with Servan-Schreiber’s ideas, in
The American Challenge.
That’s the way things
have
to go if France is ever going to modernize itself.”

“But he hasn’t got a ghost of a chance, Louisa,” I protested. “You know that.”

“No,” she said, staring at me. “No. Maybe not. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Just then Fred Singer, the TV commentator fellow, came over and sat down with us, and I excused myself and went away. I was glad. It was about all I could do not to run.

Later, when everybody left, I left too and did not stay to dinner. Ferenc was going over to the lady painter’s place to eat, and apparently was going to spend the night there, instead of on “his” couch at the Gallaghers, and I could not bear the thought of having dinner with Louisa alone.

I noted that Weintraub left alone. Sam hung back. She continued to lie on the floor, reading alone as we all left.

Myself, I left alone too. I did not really feel like talking to anyone. I wandered up the car-less street by myself to my own place, thinking I would drift over into the
Quartier
and have my dinner by myself in some unknown, unsung little bistro. It would be an enormous relief.

I had not been in my apartment five minutes, not long enough to have gotten down my first Scotch-soda, when the phone rang. I somehow had a hunch who it was.

“Âllo, Chéri!”
Martine’s voice came over the apparatus.
“Tu es là tout seul ce soir? J’ai envie de te voir si c’est possible. Je peux venir préparer le dîner si tu veux. J’ai des nouvelles.”

“Good?” I said. “Or bad?”

“Good. Ver-ry, ver-ry good,” she said. “But I do not wish to speak of it
sur
the phone. I will arrive
chez
you in one half the hour. Hokay?”

“Okay,” I said and grinned. I hung up and went to stare out the windows at the river and the empty quais. What good news could she possibly have? What good news would change anything now? What possibly?

When she arrived she was carrying two netted-cord panniers containing the makings of an excellent dinner. While she stripped down to her bra, panties and shoes to begin the cooking, she talked to me from the bedroom.

“It is all over. You do not need to worry any more. It will begin to start stopping on the Friday coming. Day after tomorrow. Le Général is not quitting. He will announce tomorrow. Cabinet meeting three o’clock. Television and radio address by him at four-thirty.” She came out of the little bedroom into the short hallway, looking magnificent.

“But more important, much more important: There will be gasoline. Much, much gasoline. For the Pentecost weekend. The Government made a deal with the gasoline companies, and the suppliers. The truckers. They will begin trucking the gasoline into Paris tomorrow night. They will use soldier drivers, too, wherever necessary. Unlimited gasoline for the Pentecost weekend. Everybody will vacation it.

“A great ploy, no? It will change the mood of everything. And it is predicted great weather for all of Pentecost. But it is a great secret. You must not tell one people.”

I must say, she really did have a magnificent body. She turned into the kitchen and went on in a louder voice.

“So it is finished. After Pentecost the unions will agree. They will have to. And all because of the gasoline. They will be working on it all the night tonight. But the deal is already made. My friend and protector will be working furiously at his ministry all the night.” That was the way she always described her banker-lover. She smiled sweetly at me from the kitchen.

“It is good news, no? So I can stay all night.”

I went to stand in the little hallway. I never liked to bother her too much in the kitchen when she was cooking.

“And how do
you
know all this, Martine?”

“From my friend and protector. Who else? It has been many phone calls between Colombey. Everything is being prepared.”

“Where did le Général go today, when he disappeared for seven hours?” I asked.

“To talk to the Army. To his generals. He visited the Generals Massu and Hublot at the home of his son-in-law General Boisseau in Mulhouse.”

“In Alsace,” I said.

“Oui. Massu commands the two Divisions in Germany. Hublot commands the three Divisions in France itself. They have promised to back any legally constituted Government, which of course his Government still is. And two regiments in Germany have been put on alert for return to France if it is necessary.

“Le Général will have to pay for this. In a short while he will declare an amnesty and release the Général Salan and other officers who are still in prison from the Générals’ Revolt in Algeria. But it is a small price to pay. They are not longer dangerous.

“It is good news, no?”

“It is,” I said. “It is also good to have a girlfriend who has the ear of the mighty.”

“Ah, oui! It is what you Americans say an extra,” Martine smiled. She was already in the midst of cooking. “But you must remember it is a secret, hah? The deliveries of gasoline will not begin until in the night tomorrow night. They will continue all through Friday, so that the citizens will have sufficient gasoline for the weekend of the Pentecost. Of course the vacation will include the Whitsuntide Monday of the June 3. Nobody will come back till Monday night or Tuesday morning.”

She grinned. “It is anticipated it will break the back of everything. It will prove the Government is still the Government and is in control. But you must say nothing. Not even to your friends the Gallaghers. Not until Friday.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t. But it is nice to know. I had begun wondering if I shouldn’t drive Madame Gallagher and the baby out to Brussels.”

“Two days ago I might have said yes. But is no longer necessary,” Martine said crisply.

She had bought us what in French is called
petits poussins,
what we would call spring chickens, but smaller than we use in the States, young birds not even half grown. She baked them in the oven with a black sauce made out of the giblets, then she pan-cooked them again in a skillet with the sauce, and they were delicious. I ate two entire birds myself. And Martine ate two whole birds also. I enjoy women who like their own cooking. I also like women who have a real and honest healthy appetite.

As we sat down to table, after she had put on her loose-flowing robe split to the waist, I was thinking that I did not now need to talk to Harry about driving Louisa and McKenna out. In one way I was relieved. But in another way I was sorry it was not going to be forced on us, what with all the Samantha business. Also, there had been no word from young Hill as far as I knew.

“So you’re going to be able to stay all night?” I smiled across the table.

“All the night, Chéri,” she smiled. “The whole night.”

19

I
WENT AROUND
all the next day and night with my private information locked up inside me like a ticking timebomb. Every time I opened my mouth I shut it again and thought twice. There were so many people to whom I could tell what I knew and relieve their anxieties.

But I kept my word.

Everything turned out exactly as Martine had told me that it would.

At three o’clock there was the Cabinet meeting, apparently. At four-thirty le Général went on radio and TV, pre-taped, with a remarkably strong address saying he would not resign but that he was dissolving the Assemblée Nationale and calling for new elections which would take place, as prescribed by law, in a certain number of weeks.

The theme of the address was “Participation”—of the citizenry in Government, and of the workers in industrial management; and the keynote was the “terrible threat” of a Communist conspiracy that wanted to destroy
la belle France.
Particularly when compared with his feeble speech of a week before it was a powerful address.

Nobody believed that stuff about the Communists, whom he did not actually name, but it was a convenient and dramatic handle with which to present his attitude to the French bourgeoisie, who had always feared the Communists, and were still the most powerful voting group in France.

An odd fact about this address was that on TV there was no visual image, only a blank screen with le Général’s voice recorded over. I was told later by somebody that this was because the TV employees were oh strike against the Government’s policy of censorship of the Government-owned TV, but I do not know if this was true.

That night, of course, I could talk. But who in life ever wants to hear anybody say, after the fact, that he had known before but hadn’t told? Anyway, that night the gasoline ploy was still a secret, since deliveries would not begin until some time around eleven-thirty or midnight. So I really could not tell my whole story anyway. In the end I kept shut.

That afternoon, the afternoon of the Thursday of May the 30th, there was a huge, a massive demonstration on the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées in favor of the Gaullists. It went on before, during, and after le Général’s big speech, and it had people like Malraux, Debré, Roger Frey, Maurice Schumann, and François Mauriac leading it. The Government did everything it could to make it a success. They even provided Army trucks to haul people in from outside Paris for it. Not only that, for the first time since the last serious street fighting they allowed the independent stations Radio Luxembourg and Europe Number One to come back on the air to report it. The radio reporters were rather droll when they thanked the French Government for allowing them to recommence broadcasting and hoped that they would do the same for the student demonstrations in future.

In spite of all that it was a pretty impressive demonstration. The Champs-Élysées was one huge living sea of people for de Gaulle, from the Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. An interesting note about it was that there were lots of American flags in the street, along with the Tricolor. In spite of le Général. Americans in the office buildings along the Champs waved their own little American flags from their windows and the French people in the streets cheered and waved their bigger flags in response. Certain sources, usually Government sources, claimed it was a bigger crowd than the student-worker march across town on May the 13th. Certainly it was a better-dressed crowd and a louder one. And surely it was a richer one. There was a much higher percentage of older people in it.

At least I heard that, on the radio. I did not go to it myself, any more than I went to any of the big student-worker demonstrations.

There weren’t many of us at the Gallaghers’ that night at seven. Harry was out filming the Gaullist march for the student film. The UPI boy and the TV commentator Fred Singer were both out reporting it. The American businessman with the string of Left Bank girls was either out demonstrating or stuck in his Champs-Élysées office. But Samantha Everton was there. And Weintraub. And old Ferenc. The lady painter was there, too. She was obviously rather infatuated with Ferenc now. I figured they had done the dirty deed. I hoped so.

When we all left this time, Samantha hung back again. She did not make it obvious, but I noticed it this time. Outside, Weintraub asked me to have dinner with him someplace in the
Quartier.

I declined but said, “Haven’t you got anything better to do than eat with me?”

He made a wry smile. “Sam told me to fuck off. She’s busy, she said. And she intends to remain busy.”

“But isn’t Harry out shooting?”

“Yes,” Weintraub said. “Yes, he is.”

We walked along.

I looked at my watch. It was nine
P.M.
My ego got the better of me. After all, what harm could Weintraub do if he knew?

“Listen,” I said. “Did you know that by morning this city will have sufficient gasoline for the entire Pentecost weekend?”