Lost Luggage (27 page)

Since these secrets of mine might surprise you, I have to explain that when I came into the world Mom was living in a sort of students' commune in the Latin Quarter. Mireille was twenty, an idealist who was studying (in a manner of speaking) second-year French literature at the Sorbonne. She came to Paris at the age of eighteen from a village in Ardennes not far from the Belgian border. It was the fourth time in her life she'd been to the capital. The brightest little girl in high school came to the university with
all the honors befitting a beauty queen who was going to represent the whole region. She says that shortly before her departure they organized a farewell in the local town hall, complete with a band playing music and second-rank dignitaries, and she'd recited two poems, one very lugubrious, by Apollinaire, and the other by Prévert to compensate for it. Thanks to a grant from the provincial government, her parents had got her into a pension for students in Rue de Vaugirard, very close to Boulevard Raspail. She could walk from her lodgings to the university, as if she were back in the village. The Saturday before her classes began they'd come with her to Paris and said their good-byes till Christmas. As she was an only child, they missed her and, trying to ease the pain of absence, took some comfort in an innocent scene, picturing her in the room they'd seen, studying at the table in the corner, twisting her long hair around one finger, or eating in the dining room with other girls just like her. The fact is that Mireille lasted only five months in the pension. At the beginning of 1968, after spending Christmas with her parents in the village, confirming yet again how its quietness stifled her and got her down, she went to her first university assembly, and that changed her life. Mireille described it with the energy that sometimes gets hold of her. When that happens she's unstoppable.

“Look, when I landed in Paris, I was a match waiting to be struck. I had a head seething with ideas from all the books I'd read as a teenager, which helped me to cope with being alone and, yes, to survive, but they didn't clarify anything at that stage. I tucked them away inside my head, cramming them into the chaos, one after the other, so I didn't have to think about what was there all around me. There's nothing worse than the isolation of the provinces and, if you don't knuckle under, nothing worse than a winter's evening at home listening to those fake chummy voices beaming out from the local radio station. Your skin shrivels up out of pure loneliness, honest to God. You're so lucky you didn't have to go through that, Christophe,” she said, jabbing her burning cigarette in my direction, a typical gesture of hers that harks back to her years of debates and discussions. “Your grandfather, as you
know, worked as a clerk in a furniture factory. Whenever he had a free half-hour, he locked himself in the garage and constructed miniature cars and trains. When he finished he gave some of them to the kids of the furniture manufacturer's kids. I always thought that he would have been happier if I'd been born a boy. Your grandmother was a long-suffering housewife. She suffered over everything and everyone. Without realizing it, I suffered with her. Once I was in Paris, I always headed for the great avenues when I wanted to go for a walk. The boulevards of Montparnasse, Saint-Germain, Raspail . . . I walked miles. In those open spaces the suffering gradually left me. I loved hearing the rattling of cars on cobblestones. I breathed in deeply, and, although I was alone, or precisely because I was alone, everything began to make sense. Then, one day in January when I was killing time between two classes, half in a trance, as if it were preordained, I walked into a students' assembly in my department and the match was struck.
Rrrasss!
” In the absence of matches Mireille flicked on her lighter, providing the flame for her onomatopoeia. “Don't think that I was converted into an activist on the spot. What enchanted me in that first assembly was the tumult of voices, the yelling, the warmth of all our bodies, the students, like a cauldron turned up full blast, about to explode. We all agreed on one thing: The fascist fossil General de Gaulle was clinging to power, and we had to protest and get rid of him. After that, though, the methods of protest and action diverged and were even contradictory. The pandemonium that eventually broke loose in the assembly hall was more or less pacified by four or five student spokespersons. The views of one group were hissed at by another and cheered by a third, but then you didn't know whether they were really in agreement or just being sarcastic. One group of boys giggled at every single proposal, and, when they did speak, it was to call for sexual freedom as the only solution. ‘Let's stop fighting and get down to fucking right now,' they shouted, taking off their pullovers. None of the girls took any notice of them because they were a pretty callow bunch. There were Marxists, Trots, anarchists, communists, textualists, and I don't know what else. Whenever somebody got up to speak, it only served to divide the protests
yet again. Half a dozen students, at the very most, declared themselves situationists and demanded that, before anything else, delegations should be formed to go and visit the factories and awaken the critical consciousness of the workers of France. Otherwise we'd be going nowhere. Anyone who wanted to, they claimed, could meet Guy Debord. Then one of the girls spoke up. ‘Why would we want to meet Debord when we have Beauvoir?' Another cried, ‘Beauvoir? Beauvoir and Sartre? Move on! Long live anarchist surrealism!' Or it might have been the other way around: ‘Long live surrealist anarchism.' Mingling among the students, I spotted several of the lecturers, listening to their words and observing their exaltation with incredulity written all over their faces. Two boys who spoke with an English accent unfurled a banner attacking the president of the United States, a bastard who was called Johnson, or Johnston, or something like that, and calling for more worldwide protest against the Vietnam War. Everyone applauded, and they proudly raised their left fists. The others imitated them for a few seconds. After a couple of hours of this racket, the assembly broke up. There were no practical results that I recall, but we all felt that, with our joint efforts, we'd sorted out the world, or at least we'd tried to. At that point we couldn't have imagined what would happen four months later. As I left, I realized that this was the first time I'd ever played hooky, and I went back to the pension transformed. I hadn't talked to anyone. I'd just listened but I was really shaken up. I remember I locked myself in the loo, wet my face, looked at myself in the mirror, and let out a scream, half rage and half emotion. One of the girls tapped at the door asking if anything was wrong. ‘No, no, it's nothing,' I replied, ‘or everything,' but she didn't hear the last bit because I said it under my breath.” Mom lit another of her Gauloises, took a long theatrical drag to prod her memory and went on. “At dinnertime, the girls in the pension looked like total wimps, a bunch of innocents with the stuffing knocked out of them, the replica of myself. I bolted down my food without saying a word and locked myself in my room. I remember that I read a few pages of a novel by Gide that we were discussing in class at the time,
Les Caves du Vatican
, I think it was,
but my mind kept veering away from the text and getting lost in a tangle of other disjointed ideas. I had to put a stop to this. I wasn't the least bit sleepy, but I got into my pajamas, turned the light off and let my thoughts organize themselves. Then, in the compact darkness of that room, I couldn't stop thinking about my parents. I saw them as sacrificial victims. They lived in a borrowed reality, falsified by the government of de Gaulle and his gang. Slaving their lives away, trying to pretend that they actually liked the shitty existence that had been theirs to live after the war. I could see that my dad was a loser, just like the rest of them all over the country, someone who only got worked up over affairs of state (and, in particular, don't you dare touch his France, or his boss at the furniture factory, a god of personal achievement), and that my mom was a pathetic, indifferent extra, the walk-on always categorically taking his side. ‘Things will never be as good for us as they are now,' she used to say when she sensed a family upset brewing . . . I mean, tiny little upsets, really. Her words bounced around my brain and made me totally depressed. Above all, let there be no changes, may the future not unsettle us. I realized that they'd be old very soon, well before their time. This revelation settled like a ball of lead in my stomach. It was the same pain I used to feel when they told me in their whining, blackmailing voices that they were missing me. Yes, go and study in Paris, they actually said, but come home to us so we can all be proud of it. I don't know if I cried that night . . . Yes, yes, I do know, what am I saying, of course I know, of course I cried, let's not deceive ourselves, first with a furious sob muffled in my pillow and then languid and tireless as a lullaby. It was so melodious that in the end I went to sleep.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to summon up her interlude of sleep and, when she opened them again, she ran her tongue over her lips. “My mouth's dry from all this talking. How about bringing me a beer? There's some in the fridge.” I brought two, one each, and she took up the thread again. “The next day I got up feeling giddy. My head was spinning as if I'd woken up in the middle of an earthquake. I threw on some clothes, skipped breakfast, and headed for the university. The sensation of shock stayed with me as I walked
along the street. Then again, I remember that it was freezing cold, one of those winter days when the air ruffles the surface of the river, comes off even icier, and pricks your face with a thousand needles. I was walking but couldn't feel my feet. All of a sudden, my body decided that I was going to skip class again so I went into a café. Sitting in a corner, I asked for a latte to perk me up a bit and took my book out of my bag. I don't know which one it was, but that's not important. The prospect of spending the whole day in the café reading and smoking (I'd started a couple of months before) calmed me down, giving me a strange feeling of serenity. I'm not sure how long I was sitting there so engrossed—a couple of hours at least—before a girl came up to me and asked, ‘You were at the assembly yesterday, weren't you?' The question must have jolted me out of some kind of daydream because she had to repeat it before I took it in. ‘Sorry . . . my name's Justine. You were at the assembly yesterday, weren't you?' I'd seen that face. She was one of the few girls who'd spoken the previous day. I'd been awed by her when she'd talked without letting the others interrupt her. I said, “Yes, I was at the assembly,” and asked if she'd like to sit down with me. Then we had more coffee and something to eat, and we talked till it got dark. Well, I talked and she listened. It was very easy, precisely because I didn't know her and we were the same age. I spewed it all out: from the disgust I felt at my parents' passive desertion to the need to launch an assault on that fucking awful society so the same thing wouldn't happen to us. We had to change the course of history! I could hear myself parroting ideas that had impressed me so much the previous day, but now, coming out of my own mouth, they made me feel secure. Justine, who also came from outside Paris, nodded convinced, spurring me on. ‘Our parents are the living dead,' I remember she said at one point. ‘This is a country of the living dead. Is there anything more grotesque than all those daily parades of war medals? Leave this city, this neighborhood even, and everywhere you go you find the same thing: prematurely aged people working like beasts and getting dressed up on Sundays to go to the park and show off their medals. If their houses got flooded one day, they wouldn't rush to help their wives,
children, or grandchildren first, but they'd save their fucking war medals . . .' I know that instant beguilement is one of the virtues of youth, or a defect if you like, and that it's often simple illusion, but I identified with Justine completely. When we said good-bye with a kiss on each cheek, it was as if we'd known each other all our lives. We arranged to meet in the same place the next day.” Mireille paused. She looked tired. I told her that, if she liked, we could continue another time. “What are you saying?” she exclaimed. “The best part's yet to come! We met every day that week. We exchanged life stories. Our friendship grew more and more solid, like interlacing strands of a plait. On Friday she persuaded me to leave the pension and go and live at her place. Justine was right in the center of things, in the Latin Quarter, Place de la Contrescarpe, in a building of cheap apartments, made to measure for students and with the spirit of an intellectual commune. Counting me, there were four boys and three girls. (It would be unthinkable today: living in a commune like ours and in that zone, which is so expensive.) On the Saturday they helped me to move the few bits and pieces I had in my room. The very same day I phoned my parents and told them quite an elaborate lie: The woman who ran the pension had been arrested; some days earlier the police had discovered that she recruited girls, students, as prostitutes; the pension had been closed so they could carry out their inquiries. At the other end of the phone, my father heard me out with a look of stupefaction on his face, I imagine. I could hear my mother screeching in the background, ‘What's happened to her? What's happened to her?' I calmed them down, begging them not to worry about anything. If I was phoning them, it was to tell them I was fine and that I'd managed to find another boarding house, a more suitable one and even closer to the university. Your grandparents, Christophe, died years later convinced that I'd always been a saint. I don't think I was very fair to them . . . Actually, I prefer not to think about it. The fact is that, thanks to Justine, my world expanded. As for the relationships between the seven members of the commune, I'll spare you the intimate details. A son shouldn't know these things.” She grinned, soliciting my support, which she
knew, in these matters, would be hard to get. “But, listen, I'd say that I've never lived as intensely as I did in that period. Not that I yearn for it these days, you realize. Justine's apartment, my new home, was a meeting point more than anything else. People were constantly coming and going, friends, rebel students like ourselves, looking for ‘dialectics,' as we used to say in those days. The hours flew by. The heating in the apartment only worked erratically, and we were freezing. We'd all get together, crammed into one airless room, sitting on the floor wrapped in blankets around an electric radiator that someone had cadged from his parents. We passed the hat around to buy wine and cigarettes, bread and cheese, and argued till the early morning. We weren't always going on about politics—we were more attracted by the social struggle. ‘Let us have justice for once and for fucking all! Let's open the eyes of our comrade workers!' we shouted, blurry with booze. Sometimes, inflamed by our proclamations, raging against the ruling class, we formed groups and headed out at midnight to cover the swanky neighborhoods with our slogans. We used to laugh so much! People who would later become famous filed through our apartment, for example Jacques Sauvageot, leader of the students' union, or a boy called Robert Merle who wanted to be a novelist. Or another fellow named Riesel, the leader of the situationists, but I don't know what became of him. That commune was the real university for me. By May, three months after moving in, I was totally ready to play my part in the revolution. Then, Christophe, one fine day you and your father appeared. Well, first Gabriel and then you, nine months later. That's the right order unless I'm mistaken.”