Going to Meet the Man (19 page)

Chico, in the film, is the son of a Martinique woman and a French
colon
who hates both his mother and his father. He flees from the island to the capital, carrying his hatred with him. This hatred has now grown, naturally, to include all dark women and all white men, in a word, everyone. He descends into the underworld of Paris, where he dies.
Les fauves
—the wild beasts—refers to the life he has fled and to the life which engulfs him. When I agreed to do the role, I felt that I could probably achieve it by bearing in mind the North Africans I had watched in Paris for so long. But this did not please Vidal. The blowup came while we were rehearsing a fairly simple, straightforward scene. Chico goes into a sleazy Pigalle dance hall to beg the French owner for a particularly humiliating job. And this Frenchman reminds him of his father.

“You are playing this boy as though you thought of him as the noble savage,” Vidal said, icily. “
Ca vient d’où
—all these ghastly mannerisms you are using all the time?”

Everyone fell silent, for Vidal rarely spoke this way. This silence told me that everyone, the actor with whom I was
playing the scene and all the people in the “dance hall,” shared Vidal’s opinion of my performance and were relieved that he was going to do something about it. I was humiliated and too angry to speak; but perhaps I also felt, at the very bottom of my heart, a certain relief, an unwilling respect.

“You are doing it all wrong,” he said, more gently. Then, “Come, let us have a drink together.”

We walked into his office. He took a bottle and two glasses out of his desk. “Forgive me, but you put me in mind of some of those English
lady
actresses who love to play
putain
as long as it is always absolutely clear to the audience that they are really ladies. So perhaps they read a book, not usually,
hélas!, Fanny Hill
, and they have their chauffeurs drive them through Soho once or twice—and they come to the stage with a performance so absolutely loaded with detail, every bit of it meaningless, that there can be no doubt that they are acting. It is what the British call a triumph.” He poured two cognacs. “That is what you are doing. Why? Who do you think this boy is, what do you think he is feeling, when he asks for this job?” He watched me carefully and I bitterly resented his look. “You come from America. The situation is not so pretty there for boys like you. I know you may not have been as poor as—as some—but is it really impossible for you to understand what a boy like Chico feels? Have you never, yourself, been in a similar position?”

I hated him for asking the question because I knew he knew the answer to it. “I would have had to be a very lucky black man not to have been in such a position.”

“You would have had to be a very lucky
man.
”

“Oh, God,” I said, “please don’t give me any of this equality-in-anguish business.”

“It is perfectly possible,” he said, sharply, “that there is not another kind.”

Then he was silent. He sat down behind his desk. He cut a cigar and lit it, puffing up clouds of smoke, as though to prevent us from seeing each other too clearly. “Consider this,” he said. “I am a French director who has never seen your country. I have never done you any harm, except, perhaps, historically—I mean, because I am white—but I cannot be blamed for that—”

“But
I
can be,” I said, “and I am! I’ve never understood why, if
I
have to pay for the history written in the color of my skin,
you
should get off scot-free!” But I was surprised at my vehemence, I had not known I was going to say these things, and by the fact that I was trembling and from the way he looked at me I knew that, from a professional point of view anyway, I was playing into his hands.

“What makes you think I
do?
” His face looked weary and stern. “I am a Frenchman. Look at France. You think that I—we—are not paying for our history?” He walked to the window, staring out at the rather grim little town in which the studio was located. “If it is revenge that you want, well, then, let me tell you, you will have it. You will probably have it, whether you want it or not, our stupidity will make it inevitable.” He turned back into the room. “But I beg you not to confuse me with the happy people of your country, who scarcely know that there is such a thing as history and so, naturally, imagine that they can escape, as you put it, scot-free. That is what you are doing, that is what I was about to say. I was about to say that I am a French director and I have never been in your country and I have never done you any harm—but you are not talking to that man, in this room, now. You are not talking to Jean Luc Vidal, but to some other white man, whom you remember, who has nothing to do with me.” He paused and went back to his desk. “Oh, most of the time you are not like this, I know. But it is there all the time, it must be, because when you are upset, this is what comes out. So you are
not playing Chico truthfully, you are lying about him, and I will not let you do it. When you go back, now, and play this scene again, I want you to remember what has just happened in this room. You brought your past into this room. That is what Chico does when he walks into the dance hall. The Frenchman whom he begs for a job is not merely a Frenchman—he is the father who disowned and betrayed him and all the Frenchmen whom he hates.” He smiled and poured me another cognac. “Ah! If it were not for
my
history, I would not have so much trouble to get the truth out of you.” He looked into my face, half smiling. “And you, you are angry—are you not?—that I
ask
you for the truth. You think I have no right to ask.” Then he said something which he knew would enrage me. “Who are you then, and what good has it done you to come to France, and how will you raise your son? Will you teach him never to tell the truth to anyone?” And he moved behind his desk and looked at me, as though from behind a barricade.

“You have no right to talk to me this way.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” he said. “I have a film to make and a reputation to maintain and I am going to get a performance out of you.” He looked at his watch. “Let us go back to work.”

I watch him now, sitting quietly in my living room, tough, cynical, crafty old Frenchman, and I wonder if he knows that the nightmare at the bottom of my mind, as I played the role of Chico, was all the possible fates of Paul. This is but another way of saying that I relived the disasters which had nearly undone me; but, because I was thinking of Paul, I discovered that I did not want my son ever to feel toward me as I had felt toward my own father. He had died when I was eleven, but I had watched the humiliations he had to bear, and I had pitied him. But was there not, in that pity, however painfully and unwillingly, also some contempt? For how could I
know
what
he had borne? I knew only that I was his son. However he had loved me, whatever he had borne, I, his son, was despised. Even had he lived, he could have done nothing to prevent it, nothing to protect me. The best that he could hope to do was to prepare me for it; and even at that he had failed. How can one be prepared for the spittle in the face, all the tireless ingenuity which goes into the spite and fear of small, unutterably miserable people, whose greatest terror is the singular identity, whose joy, whose safety, is entirely dependent on the humiliation and anguish of others?

But for Paul, I swore it, such a day would never come. I would throw my life and my work between Paul and the nightmare of the world. I would make it impossible for the world to treat Paul as it had treated my father and me.

Mahalia’s record ends. Vidal rises to turn it over. “Well?” He looks at me very affectionately. “Your nightmares, please!”

“Oh, I was thinking of that summer I spent in Alabama, when my mother died.” I stop. “You know, but when we finally filmed that bar scene, I was thinking of New York. I was scared in Alabama, but I almost went crazy in New York. I was sure I’d never make it back here—back here to Harriet. And I knew if I didn’t, it was going to be the end of me.” Now Mahalia is singing
When the Saints Go Marching In.
“I got a job in the town as an elevator boy, in the town’s big department store. It was a special favor, one of my father’s white friends got it for me. For a long time, in the South, we all—depended—on the—
kindness
—of white friends.” I take out a handkerchief and wipe my face. “But this man didn’t like me. I guess I didn’t seem grateful enough, wasn’t enough like my father, what he thought my father was. And I couldn’t get used to the town again, I’d been away too long, I hated it. It’s a terrible town, anyway, the whole thing looks as though it’s been built around a jailhouse. There’s a room in the court-house, a room where they beat you up. Maybe you’re walking
along the street one night, it’s usually at night, but it happens in the daytime, too. And the police car comes up behind you and the cop says, ‘Hey, boy. Come on over here.’ So you go on over. He says, ‘Boy, I believe you’re drunk.’ And, you see, if you say, ‘No, no sir,’ he’ll beat you because you’re calling him a liar. And if you say anything else, unless it’s something to make him laugh, he’ll take you in and beat you, just for fun. The trick is to think of some way for them to have their fun without beating you up.”

The street lights of Paris click on and turn all the green leaves silver. “Or to go along with the ways
they
dream up. And they’ll do anything, anything at all, to prove that you’re no better than a dog and to make you feel like one. And they hated me because I’d been North and I’d been to Europe. People kept saying, I hope you didn’t bring no foreign notions back here with you, boy. And I’d say, ‘No sir,’ or ‘No ma’am,’ but I never said it right. And there was a time, all of them remembered it, when I
had
said it right. But now they could tell that I despised them—I guess, no matter what, I wanted them to know that I despised them. But I didn’t despise them any more than everyone else did, only the others never let it show. They knew how to keep the white folks happy, and it was easy—you just had to keep them feeling like they were God’s favor to the universe. They’d walk around with great, big, foolish grins on their faces and the colored folks loved to see this, because they hated them so much. “Just look at So-and-So,” somebody’d say. “His white is
on
him today.” And when we didn’t hate them, we pitied them. In America, that’s usually what it means to have a white friend. You pity the poor bastard because he was born believing the world’s a great place to be, and you know it’s not, and you can see that he’s going to have a terrible time getting used to this idea, if he
ever
gets used to it.”

Then I think of Paul again, those eyes which still imagine
that I can do anything, that skin, the color of honey and fire, his jet-black, curly hair. I look out at Paris again, and I listen to Mahalia. “Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe, then, you can have,
if
you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away—you know?—from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters, and all that blood.” I walk to the bottle and raise it. “One for the road?”

“Thank you,” says Vidal.

I pour us a drink, and he watches me. I have never talked so much before, not about those things anyway. I know that Vidal has nightmares, because he knows so much about them, but he has never told me what his are. I think that he probably does not talk about his nightmares any more. I know that the war cost him his wife and his son, and that he was in prison in Germany. He very rarely refers to it. He has a married daughter who lives in England, and he rarely speaks of her. He is like a man who has learned to live on what is left of an enormous fortune.

We are silent for a moment.

“Please go on,” he says, with a smile. “I am curious about the reality behind the reality of your performance.”

“My sister, Louisa, never married,” I say, abruptly, “because, once, years ago, she and the boy she was going with and two friends of theirs were out driving in a car and the police stopped them. The girl who was with them was very fair and the police pretended not to believe her when she said she was colored. They made her get out and stand in front of the headlights of the car and pull down her pants and raise her dress—they said that was the only way they could be sure. And you can imagine what they said, and what they did—and they were lucky, at that, that it didn’t go any further. But none of the men could do anything about it. Louisa couldn’t face that
boy again, and I guess he couldn’t face her.” Now it is really growing dark in the room and I cross to the light switch. “You know, I know what that boy felt, I’ve felt it. They want you to feel that you’re not a man, maybe that’s the only way they can feel like men, I don’t know. I walked around New York with Harriet’s cablegram in my pocket as though it were some atomic secret, in
code
, and they’d kill me if they ever found out what it meant. You know, there’s something wrong with people like that. And thank God Harriet was here, she
proved
that the world was bigger than the world they wanted me to live in, I
had
to get back here, get to a place where people were too busy with their own lives,
their private lives
, to make fantasies about mine, to set up walls around mine.” I look at him. The light in the room has made the night outside blue-black and golden and the great searchlight of the Eiffel Tower is turning in the sky. “That’s what it’s like in America, for me, anyway. I always feel that I don’t exist there, except in someone else’s—usually dirty—mind. I don’t know if you know what that means, but I do, and I don’t want to put Harriet through that and I don’t want to raise Paul there.”

“Well,” he says at last, “you are not required to remain in America forever, are you? You will sing in that elegant club which apparently feels that it cannot, much longer, so much as open its doors without you, and you will probably accept the movie offer, you would be very foolish not to. You will make a lot of money. Then, one day, you will remember that airlines and steamship companies are still in business and that France still exists.
That
will certainly be cause for astonishment.”