One morning the next month, when I went to the corner bistro for my breakfast, I spotted Contemporanéité at the newsstand and saw that our article had been published under the title “A Young Man Alone.” This was also the title of a novel by Roger Vailland that tells the story of a young bourgeois who eventually joins the Communists—which tells you right away what was expected of me by the pathetic clowns at Contemporanéité.
The funniest thing was that what was about to happen formally resembled what they hoped for but had nothing to do with the actual content of their thinking—as you will soon see.
I read the article as I ate my croissants. The text was not too distressing. Not for a left-wing monthly, at any rate. There were errors—above and beyond those I had contributed myself. And as always I was depicted as a toy of History. Fair enough, but they should have taken a look at themselves. How easily they flip-flopped, the gutless creatures, when it came to Korea, Yugoslavia, or what they called the Hungarian tragedy. Which wasn’t a tragedy—it was an insurrection.
Anyway, after my breakfast I got into the Ondine and drove to Jacquie’s with a bottle of scotch and the vague idea of celebrating. There was nothing worth celebrating, but I wanted to celebrate all the same.
I rang and simultaneously turned the doorknob, as I was used to doing. The door did not open, but I heard furtive sounds from within. I was rather startled: Jacquie never locked her door, out of a kind of laziness. And she did not come to open up either. There was dead silence inside now. In vain I rang the bell again. I hesitated: I had certainly not dreamt up the rustling and repeated whispers that had followed my first ring. It did not even occur to me that Jacquie might not want to let me in, that she could be with another guy, for instance. Had that occurred to me, I would not have done what I did, namely go into the little courtyard where the trash cans stood and the window to the john was open. The urge was irresistible—I wanted to see—and I hauled myself up. Apparently Bertrand du Guesclin, in his day, helped himself to an English fortress in a similar way, by sneaking in through a shithouse—just about the only historical fact I ever retained from a school textbook. Now, though, it seems a bit odd to me that a medieval castle had a crapper at all, seeing everything we are told about how, even as late as the Sun King, everyone including the courtiers used to shit any old where, in dark corners throughout their palaces. But that was hardly my problem as I skirted the WC and soundlessly entered the apartment, not really knowing what to expect but probably hoping to give Jacquie a fright.
I was in a hallway stacked with small crates, each measuring about sixty by forty centimeters. Mystery. I caught sounds of movement from the living room, went in there, and what did I see but two big black men—very black—and Anne.
There were also two or three more of the crates, and one of them was open, clearly revealing carefully packed firearms, just like in a western. One of the blacks, in a petrol-blue suit and gold-rimmed dark glasses, who looked like Thelonious Monk, was handling one of the weapons, a Skoda submachine gun.
I was so taken aback that all I could think of to do was to brush off the knees of my pants, which had picked up white dust as I clambered up to the window of the john.
Anne and the two blacks were frozen, so to speak. Perhaps I was embarrassed, but they were shitting bricks. I sized things up: they were not going to shoot me, too noisy, and furthermore the two big apes did not look like killers.
“Excuse me,” I offered with a carefree smile, “I came to see Jacquie.”
“She’s away for two days,” answered Anne mechanically.
She had not changed much, except that her breasts drooped now and she was not made up. The pernicious effect of Marxism, the not making herself up. They piss me off, militants, the way they refuse to use beauty products. Marxists are just Judeo-Christians or whatever, just Holy Joes, that’s what I say.
So there we were, looking at one another, quite rattled, with me trying to figure things out, which was not that hard. People like Anne had taken a pretty big hit from the way Algeria was turning out, what with all power to the military and the marabouts, as though the ragheads could never do something new on their own. Lefties of her ilk in the metropole had to forget the whole thing in a flash and find a fresh oppressed people to support. To realign their project, as Hourgnon put it. There were some who would tell you straight-faced that Nasser was a socialist. Others, Anne among them, went on a desperate search for a new anticolonial war, new Berbers to salaam to. Here right before me were dogs in human form, African autonomists, as witness their submachine guns and their fearfulness.
“No need for concern,” I said, feeling that somebody should say something. “I’m not interested in other people’s business.”
“He’s a friend,” said Anne to the blacks. Her tight-lipped little face gave the lie to her words.
“I’ll take care of him,” she added.
You know the sort of overpowering urge that can take hold of you, the refusal at any price to be pushed around. I moved further into the living room. I stepped over the crates and the Skodas grinning broadly. The blacks were struck dumb, but I had no beef with them. It was Anne that I hated. I sat down on a big sofa behind the little glass-topped table and stretched.
“Go and make coffee,” I shot at Anne.
She bristled. I gave her a hard look. The two blacks also signaled that she had better comply. Old tribal instincts no doubt. They did not get me yet, and had no idea how things were going to work out, but my consignment of the bitch to the galley met with their instant approval; I could tell that every fiber in their fat bodies agreed. Anne went.
“Don’t worry on my account,” I said. “I’m not political. Carry on with your machine guns.”
They were hesitant.
“For that matter,” I went on, “if ever you need me I’m at your service. I don’t give a fuck about all this. But I have a car. And bread.”
The two exchanged glances. One of them looked like Monk, as I said, with his petrol-blue suit and his glasses and his gold rims. The other one had a more aquiline nose, a scraggy beard, long neck, big arms, and a light-colored Italian suit with silk thread that shimmered as he moved. Incipient male-pattern baldness. A slight lisp.
“A car,” he repeated pensively.
He said nothing more, waiting for my reaction.
I nodded.
“A car,” I confirmed. “And my goodwill.”
As the water was heating Anne came rushing in to issue a warning. “A fascist!” was the gist of what she yapped about me.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” I said, “let’s understand one another. Political conflict in France is one thing. But let’s understand one another. Times change. Just count on me.”
The fatter of the pair, the Monk look-alike, was viciously attacking his lip with his thumbnail. Agonized indecisiveness reigned. I shrugged. Then, as I well remember, I turned on the record player. A piece by Herbie Mann with Michael Olatunji on drums. A hell of a racket. Very African. “High Life.” Supposed to be black folkloric music from Africa only slightly modified by jazz. I thought they might like it. They liked it more or less.
“Just a minute,” I said.
Real high anxiety from them as I unlocked the front door and went outside briefly. They relaxed when I came back in with the bottle of scotch. Herbie Mann was still playing on the turntable. The blacks exchanged glances of satisfaction. They made themselves at home, ransacking Jacquie’s liquor cabinet: anis, and arak, and vodka, and Cointreau—and even a Romanian fruit brandy that was supposed to be drunk warm with cloves.
Naturally, since my arrival posed a whole slew of obstacles to calm dialogue, we began drinking in silence, and drinking a good deal, as we waited for someone to get an idea of what we should say to one another. By the time Anne came back in with the java the scotch had been completely demolished and we were halfway through a bottle of something else.
The protagonists began to exchange smiles. The one with the scraggy beard was even nodding approvingly. Thanks to their little grins I noticed that my two Kilimanjaro cossacks had teeth filed down to points. They had to hail from pretty far away, I thought, from some completely undeveloped country, their posh suits notwithstanding.
“Angola? Guinea? Mozambique?” I guessed.
Portuguese colonies were all the rage at the time. Just before the craze for Guevara, Douglas Bravo, etc. Not very long after Lumumba. The Left had a boner for Africa.
My interlocutors shook their heads. They were from an independent land in the middle of the continent, ex-Dutch Gustavia, ex-French mandate, liberated not long before and dubbed the Zimbabwinite Republic but plagued by tribal conflict.
At this point in their explanations they stopped short, as if caught red-handed, and looked at me, then at each other, then at me once more. And then they asked me, in the most flowery and circuitous way, whether it was really true that I was a fascist.
I denied this in all good conscience. Fascism, I said, was prewar: Mussolini, Primo Carnera and all that. Nothing to do with me. I took them for a bit of a ride. They said they just wanted to know whether I was for the Americans or for de Gaulle, which hardly shed light on the matter. Me, I was for nobody. I was for a good laugh. For mad love, like the man said. They didn’t understand me. We didn’t understand one another. But it didn’t matter, because we were all laughing. Anne meanwhile wanted us to explain ourselves; she kept on insisting on explanations. I told her to can it.
“Yeah, right!” went the brothers, heads bobbing furiously.
And can it she did, for naturally she harbored a great respect for the two blacks, seeing as how they were revolutionary militants, and she was not about to contradict them. Hold on a moment, though, because I want to be clear about my own motives. You mustn’t for a second take me for a true believer. I went along with the two blacks because I found them congenial, period. Congenial on account of the machine guns all over the apartment. What was more, we were seriously smashed, and that was part of it.
Any real memory of our conversation is rather hazy in my mind now. I clearly recall their teeth filed down to points. We sent Anne out for sausages. We grilled them in the fireplace. That was as far as we got.
We chatted, of course, but idly. All they cared about was whether I was with them. Certainly I was. They asked for nothing more. (Later on I happened to run into other Zimbabwinites who were doctrinaire—Marxists, Maoists, Fanonists. I let them blather. With idiots the best thing to do is let them rave.) The two blacks that day couldn’t have given a hoot about ideas so long as we were drinking together and so long as I seemed to want to help them.
It was Anne who was not happy. I had filched her blacks. They kept sending her back to the pots and pans. She brought up questions quite beside the point: feminism, the unveiling of Berber women, Clara Zetkin, birth control, Agnès Varda, Duras, Beauvoir, Ibarruri. A horrible mishmash.
To catch her breath, and to combat the great mental fatigue brought on by debating all on your own, she would drink. By nightfall she was blind drunk. For our part we had slowed up a bit. We rolled her onto the couch. She began to snore. She would be on my case the next day. I had deprived her of her personal western. Staggering a bit, the blacks and I schlepped the crates to my Ondine. We drove them down to the port. A Norwegian freighter was laying over. Some guys from its crew were in on it—and paid to be. They loaded the goods. We shuttled back and forth several times.
The cargo was on its merry way to transit through Guinea or the Congo, I don’t remember which, and then trundle by trucks and porters into central Africa. There it would reach guerrilla forces. What guerrillas? I did not have even the slightest idea at the time. I took the blacks back to my place. It was past midnight. We demolished two more bottles. I threw up straight into my dad’s desk drawers. Good night all. Curtain.
The next morning we had hangovers from hell but we were fairly happy. We drank black coffee, the two blacks and I, in the kitchen. We spoke softly, the way you do the morning after the night before. I was pleased about what I had done. I wanted to know a little more. The two guys described their situation. Their country, Zimbabwin, had been liberated, and a National Liberation Front, the FLZ, had taken power. But, as I understood it, one ethnic group within the FLZ had its boot on the neck of the others, and what was worse it was a Muslim group, whereas my two apes were half fetishists and half Marxist atheists. As they told it, the Muslims over there were like the bourgeoisie here: grand families and chiefdoms in collusion from time immemorial with the Arab slave traders who made their way down into black Africa by taking the Nile upriver and then traveling way further into the interior, by way of Sudan, to the very heart of the continent; there they conducted roundups, mass kidnappings of entire populations for sale by the Red Sea, the men as labor, the women as whores, and the children, well, that depended.
My guests had split off from the FLZ, founded the People’s Movement of Zimbabwin (MPLZ), and organized a guerrilla campaign in the south with their own tribes, Christians and fetishists. I told them that frankly all the religious stuff bored me stiff. They said okay, but it would eventually be swept away as the movement progressed; as for themselves, they were completely freed from any such mystical notions. They added that you must not get too far ahead of the masses, as Lenin was supposed to have warned. But when they got heated I found their rough accent hard to penetrate.
How long have I been talking? An hour? Two? And I still haven’t said a word about the N’Gustro affair. But hang on. The whole background has to be filled in, otherwise you will get just a superficial account of little interest and fit only for the weeklies.
I am taking longer and longer breaks and not getting to the crux of the matter. Presuming I won’t run into any glitches before getting to the end of my disclosures. This will also expand those disclosures. If I talked all night long that would be just fine. But it is not yet even ten, ten in the evening. I have wound and set the big grandfather clock; its yellow copper pendulum is ticking. I must have a taste for the theatrical.
My blacks left at eleven o’clock in the morning. I’m not giving their names. I expect they are still active, here in France or overseas. I have no desire to alert the cops.
They asked me to kiss Anne goodbye for them, saying that we would see one another again if need be. I got into the Ondine. I couldn’t resist the temptation to run by the port. The Norwegian had weighed anchor. The Skodas were up and away. Perhaps it was all but a dream, to coin a phrase.
I drove up Rue Jeanne d’Arc and went by Anne’s. Wearing a Chinese robe, dark circles beneath her eyes, her complexion blotchy, she was warming up coffee. Whitish fragments in a glass bespoke Alka-Seltzer. I sat down at the table without a word. She shot me a hostile glance but served me coffee. I was overtaken by tender feelings. Rounding the table, I shifted a lock of her hair and planted a kiss on the side of her forehead. She became less hostile, more uncertain. I gave her an irresistible smile.
I don’t know whether it does it to you. After a terrific binge, you wake in the morning still lit but a tad bleary-eyed and tired, so very tired, and sweating at the least provocation. At the same time, even if you couldn’t dig any ditches, or, on account of your trembling hands, attempt, say, a Japanese watercolor—at the same time, sexually speaking, you are in high gear. That is what it does to me.
It did it to Anne too. I did not have to say much. Just enough for her to save face. I mumbled excuses of a kind, or rather fed her lines designed to reverse her understanding of things: I rewrote the night before, saying how kind we were to her, how much we approved of her, how marvelous she herself was, how she grew suddenly tired, which was the only reason she had not played a part in our doings. I almost gave her to think it was she who had assigned me my tasks. She must have known it was not true. But at the same time you recall so little, the day after tying one on, so little not of reality but of its meaning. She wanted to believe me. She relaxed. All comrades now. We agreed that I had changed: no longer a fascist at the drop of a hat; she had converted me. That was exactly it: over time she had been responsible for my transformation. That was the gist of what we told each other, what we let ourselves believe. She was so happy to have “disalienated” me. Jacquie would be away until the evening. We cut to the chase. I screwed her. We were like animals. I am never so potent as when I am exhausted or feverish. Banged her five times before three thirty in the afternoon. Quick visit to the bakery. Ravenous snack. Coffee, rolls, shortbread, almond muffins. Triple sec, and refills. The afternoon beat a retreat. We freshened the atmosphere. Sprayed Air Wick everywhere to counter the obstinate jungle odor. A shower each, a little housekeeping. Jacquie would be home soon. Anne preferred not to be there. Jacquie would inevitably deduce our glorious excesses from Anne’s expression. We headed for downtown. Gourmet restaurant. Dutch tourists. Potted saddle of hare and lots of wine. We left, grabbing tables for support. Night had fallen. We went to a little movie theater to see Orson Welles’s The Trial. We fell asleep during the screening, at least I did, while Anne claimed to have watched it all and understood everything.
“Society,” she said, “society. It’s society, an image of society.”
“That’s not true,” I countered. “It’s the story of an old fossil. A film against old fossils, but badly made.”
“Society,” she started off again, but I cut her off right away:
“Not again! Anthony Perkins would be off to a bad start in any society.”
“No, no,” said Anne. “The film symbolizes our universe of oppression.”
There was no end to it. We went into a bar on the way back. We talked a fair amount more until closing time. We spoke about art, that sort of thing. As for art, Anne was pro.
“Art no longer exists,” I contended.
She launched into a long harangue about the necessity for culture to be alive, or some such.
“Culture is dead!” I retorted.
“It lives thanks to the life of those who revive it every day.”
“Exactly what I was saying.”
“Suppose you started to write,” said Anne. “You would recreate everything around you by filtering it through the prism of your subjectivity.”
“There’s nothing living about that,” I said. “All it means is dough.”
“It’s living because you are living,” she went on in her juvenile one-track way. “What you write lives.”
With my nose in my Picon and beer I thought about this, mused over it, wondered what I might recount. About how I was in prison, and about what followed. By watching Jacquie at work I was beginning to know my way around the writing thing. We chatted some more, and I warmed up. We played the Scopitone, the whole selection one by one. Nougaro singing that he was drunk, Françoise Hardy on a swing, or Sylvie Vartan on a flying cigar—I can’t really remember, but the colors were pastel. Each time a number ended, a pink glow would cross the screen to get customers’ attention and entice them to come over and put another coin in the slot. Some of the productions were pleasant, others were shit. Claude Lelouch is supposed to have started out making these. I admired that sort of success, the money.
“Slices of life,” I said to Anne, “that’s fair enough. Slices of life have to be created. But don’t call them art. They are product.”
They would not last long, all those opinions I had. I went on saying that Art was dead. Nine out of ten people who said so did so complacently, because they had no talent. The other one out of ten, I didn’t know. Not my problem. I was not any of the ten. Very soon, as I say, and I insist on it, I had no more opinions. Very soon I had only one goal, and that was scratch. Nothing was done without it. Some people talked about its disappearance in the future, world revolution, destruction of the State. I didn’t have the time to wait. Approaching thirty years old, sole survivor of the Butron line. As for the Ondine and the Rouen house, they were losing their luster. I wanted a yacht, fine hotels, supremely idle hours, and distinguished admirers. In view of my misdeeds there was only one route to satisfaction for me: to catapult myself to the very top of the money tree.
But that night I was not yet thinking that way. I fed Anne pathetic platitudes: I was rich in experience, filled with a longing to express myself. What a joke! I had stuff to say about police, priests, prison guards, and Universal History. Nobody could have given a shit. No problem now though. People less rotten—and more rotten—than me have wallowed in filthy lucre. I want to be like them.
But I mustn’t blow my own trumpet: I admit that at that moment I believed completely in my talent. The very next morning, money being no object, I went out even before breakfast, practically before shaving, and bought myself a small Hermes typewriter and a tape recorder—the very recorder I am talking into now.
I remember trying out the tape recorder that morning. And being unable to dictate anything at all. I tried the typewriter too. Typed any old thing to begin with, to see if the machine worked. Then sentences, to see if they read well. Disaster. I immediately abandoned ship. I didn’t like what I produced at all. I paced up and down disconsolately in my dump with my hat on my head and a cigarillo at the corner of my mouth, checking every mirror to see if I looked like a writer. Conclusions very doubtful. Perhaps, with a hat, I wouldn’t look too bad on the back of a crime novel. Twilight of the Old Fossils, by Henri Butron. Or else, hatless, no photo on the book, but just a few in the press if I got a prize or had enough pull. The Pretzel Is Moldy by Five O’Clock by Henri Butron, a bold work, an original talent, great beach reading. I felt I couldn’t do it; I was afraid.
I went out again to take a look-see in the bookstore. I bought anything that sold well, not in the usual sense but regularly, consistently over time. Sagan, Troyat, intellectuals like Jules Roy, Claude Simon, Marshal Juin. I could not be sure the book dealer had not palmed me off with any old thing by claiming high print runs. When you read bestsellers, it seems as though they are very easy to write. So I tried my hand, and tried again, but all I managed were four or five lines of pastiche, and not even close at that.
I gave up. But it was only day one. I did not lose heart. Which was the right idea. I thought things over.
In midafternoon Jacquie came to see me. She was very sullen, very nervous. She broke her cigarettes by fiddling with them too much.
“So you got it on again with Anne?”
The other little bitch must have been bragging. Not too smart on the face of it. But what was that to me?
“Don’t go thinking I’m jealous,” said Jacquie. “It’s a moral issue. You are not suitable company for Anne.”
“Don’t start that again!” I shouted (I think I shouted).”What happened to the disalienation you always talk about? Your famous free love? And that Boche?”
She had lost me, it was obvious.
“Thingamajig,” I said. And (remembering): “Reich—Wilhelm. Tons of his stuff on your bookshelves. Quite a guy.”
“Let’s not exaggerate,” she said. “There’s no connection.”
“My ass there’s no connection! Reich was quite the guy. He was for everything, so long as it gave pleasure. Naturally he was locked up. He died in a Yankee penitentiary.”
She was abstract, Jacquie. Sexual liberation, family planning—but in the abstract, always in the abstract. I shouldn’t touch her daughter, for example!
“Imbecile!” she said very coldly. “That’s what you are, an imbecile. It’s strange. There’s something in you, I don’t know what.”
“Must be the Belgian,” I murmured, just to enrage her.
But she contained herself, as they say.
“You’re pathetic. I’m sorry for you.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “So what? Anything else to say?”
She trembled. She slapped me across the face. I struck her back, a light but well-aimed kidney punch. She plumped down on the carpet. Her face was contorted with pain. Her eyes were filled with hate. She was panting. She could no longer stand.
“I’m sorry for you too,” I said in a really harsh way. “You’re the anti-Lilith.” (My erudition pulled her up short.) “Your brain is between your legs. What’s more, it has syphilis.”
When it comes to extended metaphors, nobody can hold a candle to me. Jacquie was ever more beside herself. We got into trading the grossest insults. Eventually she produced things that piqued me. They made me happy. I wanted that, subconsciously.
“It’s because you are alive,” she mumbled. “We think we can put up with you because you are alive. Because you seem to be struggling with yourself. But what have they done to you?” She repeated this twice and I had no answer for her, because I didn’t know what she was talking about, and because she seemed completely crazy with her spasmodic and whistling breath. “It’s just not possible,” she continued, “to be alone to that extent, so egoistic; it verges on mental illness. Because you don’t understand the feelings of others, you don’t even know that they exist, you lack any feelings of your own, you lack them so badly. And the moment comes when a lack of heart becomes a lack of intelligence.”
“Don’t deny my intelligence,” I warned.
She shook her head, still sitting on the carpet. She did not deny my intelligence. Good for her.
When she left, she slammed the door.
She had belittled me as well, claiming that without her I would never be anything. In the heat of battle several things had occurred to me. Ideas often come to me as I speak. I said that I was going to move to Paris. I pretended to have signed contracts. She jeered. I couldn’t leave it at that. I packed my bag in no time and split for Paris that same night.