Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (23 page)

So what do I smell like? I
asked. She sighed.

Like the river, she said.
Not the Seine, but a river in the country. Like silt.
Earth
and water.
Paint, of course.
Turpentine.

A good smell?
I asked.

Actually I can’t smell much
of anything these days, she said.
Too many cigarettes.

Quite a philosophy you have
there, I said with some bitterness.

My open door is my
philosophy, she said. Anyone can walk in.
Even you, Gustave.
And if someone doesn’t belong here, sooner or later he’ll walk out again.

Well, I’m not going
anywhere, I said a bit too loudly, folding my hands behind my head and kicking
out my legs to make the point.

She smiled sadly.
Yes, Gustave.
You are.

She was right. Things fell
apart, or fell together. When the time came Charles was off like a shot to the
marches and speeches at Nanterre—the deadly dull suburbs he used to complain
about were suddenly the center of the student universe. But I kept going to
class and doing my figure studies and showing up at all hours at M’s flat,
where she continued to tolerate my presence. The door was never locked, so
sometimes when I showed up nobody would be there, or it would just be Simone
and one of her
boyfriends,
and by this point Simone
had decided I was completely uninteresting so they would just ignore me. Or M
would be there with Ly Cam, and they’d both be wearing thin robes and smoking
hash and Ly Cam would be playing his guitar, and there’d be an odor, I almost
want to say a stench, rising from their bodies, a hot dank smell, and only then
would I be so depressed I’d just turn right around in the doorway and go home
again. Otherwise there was no insult, no gesture of indifference that I
wouldn’t put up with—I was like a dog that licks the hand that beats him.
Though truth
be
told, M was never cruel, at least not
deliberately. She was just forgetful—it was part of her beauty, part of what
made her seem so intensely
there
when she was there, when her mind wasn’t drifting as
it so often did like a cloud over forlorn landscapes, like the rice paddies and
burning jungles we saw every night on television. If she did bring her
attention to bear on me, as she had that night in the cemetery, it was like
drinking electricity. She was the first to ever listen to me, and so I learned
to talk from her, to her, as I’m talking now, though I’d spent most of my life
up to that time locked in the silence of looking, brute slab of a boy that no
one looked at, who lived in his eyes.

Speaking, Gustave’s eyes
are shut, smooth eggs in the heavy trapezoidal slab of his face, with wrinkles
at the edges evocative of epicanthic folds. So, he says, lips twitching beneath
his mustache, and again, so. He opens his eyes, gray unrippling pools meeting
the camera.

So finally May came, the
May you’ve heard about. Up came the students and the workers, marching, filling
the streets and squares. The famous slogans appeared, the paving stones were
pulled up, the barricades that are a part of the French legend, that every
French child secretly imagines himself standing upon like Gavroche, daring a
phalanx of soldiers to fire; they were erected,
they
came to pass. I also took part, following Charles lead to march with the rest,
to shout with the rest, to hurl bricks at the police wearing a bandanna soaked
in Coca-Cola to ward off the tear gas. In the Ecole des Beaux-Arts I and the
other art students were deputized to create posters, stencils, propaganda,
working all day and long into the night in shirtsleeves, listening to the
increasingly panicked music of radio reports as the Latin Quarter caught fire,
red and black paint on my hands, arms, face, clothes. For one day even I spoke
for the movement: Charles’s Sorbonne groupuscule deputized me to go to the
Citroen factory in the 15th to meet with the young workers there. My class
background, Charles explained, made me an ideal spokesman and go-between: I was
a sort of centaur, half-student,
half
-worker. In fact
I couldn’t have had less in common with these sons of smoke and metal, but my
appearance I suppose was authentic enough: the size of my body, the size of my
hands. From a glassed-in office that had been hastily vacated by the managers I
was briefed by some of the foremen and union representatives, then led out to
the factory floor where hundreds of young men stood in coveralls shouting, a
terrifying spectacle, I had no experience with public speaking, I was led out
to a sort of catwalk above them, flanked by other beefy men, the pressure of
their bodies on my own reassured me and I said to the workers, Strike, and they
shouted Yes; I said in a louder voice, not reading from a script but
remembering what Charles had told me, The students and the workers are equally
oppressed, for the destiny of the students is to become capitalists, your
masters, and they refuse to commit this crime, to be accessories to crime or to
take any part in crime, and the young workers (who were French workers, after
all, and who’d no doubt read much more Marx than I had) did not see this as
strange or condescending or contradictory, they shouted
Vivent les étudiants,
Vivent les travailleurs
, as though they were the same thing, and waved their
red banners in the air so beautifully, in long streaks the pennants crossed and
recrossed the air above the factory floor where I haltingly but then with
growing confidence addressed them with a megaphone that had been handed to me,
becoming louder and more strident, until one of the other men tapped me firmly,
almost a punch in the upper arm, and I yielded the floor, leaned perilously
against the narrow rail gasping from the effort, the exhilaration of being a
movement’s mouthpiece. Intoxicating, this enlargement of the ego but of the
space it usually occupied: I had become a vessel of something, a spirit or a
power, that was quite beyond my comprehension. For hours and days it seemed I’d
been listening to Charles or M or even Simone (who’d cut off all her hair in a
revolutionary gesture that sublimated her medusan sexuality, that transferred
all that smoky energy from the hair that had shrouded her gaze and neck into
her lips and fingertips and hips, so that I wanted to sleep with her again, it
somehow brought her closer to M, to M’s M-ness, but Simone wouldn’t sleep with
me again and M would not sleep with me at all; as for Charles, he’d come once
to my bed late after a party with nothing but a copy of
Paris Match
over his blonde crotch,
grinning puckishly, and without thinking I threw back the covers and invited
him in and we spooned for a while, not saying much, my lips on the back of his
neck and my cock nestling between his hard firm buttocks without quite becoming
erect, and we fell asleep like that and in the morning he was gone) talking or
even reading to me directly from essays, books, and pamphlets, and I’d read
some of these books and pamphlets myself: Sartre and de Beauvoir, naturally,
and Mao’s
Little
Red Book
(Charles’s favorite), some English poems that M loved, and the prison writings
of Gramsci (I remember one lazy afternoon lying on my stomach in M’s apartment
while she patiently explained to me the difference between state power and
civic power, the coercive power without versus the coercive power within, and I
listened and drew her, as had become my habit, but with the left hand so to
speak, for I was listening to the hum of her voice and also through the open
windows there were already at that time shouts and songs and sirens on the
street pulsing by, recurrent events of sound that gradually accelerated into
the heart of May, all of which ended up in the swift lines and subtle
crosshatching of the drawing, M pacing imitating Charles with one finger in the
air), also of course there was much talk of the Situationists and the art of
the happening, which I as an inveterate and incorrigible slave of the pencil
and brush was curious about but could not in my peasant’s heart accept as art,
though I could full well appreciate the power of sensation, as I appreciated the
sensation of the movies we went to, late at night, every night, we saw Godard
Truffaut Rosselini Pontecorvo Pasolini but also American films of the previous
decade, and I still remember sitting side by side with Charles and Simone and M
with our eyes and skins shining in the dark watching Marlon Brando’s sly and
endless humiliation in
On the Waterfront
(curiously oblivious to
the traitorous and counter-revolutionary reputation of the film’s director), or
Jimmy Stewart in the ecstatic vise of looking forever at the tumbling body of
Kim Novak, or Rock Hudson cherishing the secrets of chastity in bed with Doris
Day, or anything with Humphrey Bogart, especially
In a Lonely Place
where he’s the
screenwriter suspected of murder: as I say these films were for us like the
happenings of the Situationists in that we could feel precisely or obscurely
just how they pulled the skin off of reality, pulled off our own skins and made
us raw with feeling and perceiving, and yet I could not call this art because
for me art meant beauty and it still means beauty. And there is not much beauty
in the story I have to tell of myself as a young man in love with a woman and
in love with a man and in love with their cause, without ever really having
understood woman, man, or cause.

Early in the course of the
Events M said to me lightly,
Let’s
go to the peace
talks.
A lark to the Right Bank to witness the arrival of the
delegation of the Republic of South Vietnam at the Hotel Claridge.
A
crowd had gathered, small and peaceful by the standards that were currently
being set in the Latin Quarter, held back by the humorless helmeted police,
people straining their necks to see the front of the hotel, which was a dead
zone, cleared for the arrival of the delegation in their limousines. A cop was
shouting at a teenage boy who had climbed a streetlamp to see better,
threatening him with arrest. Another boy, a young man really, no younger than
myself, in sunglasses with a leather coat and his collar turned up moved among
us pointing mock-surreptitiously at various people and objects, muttering the
arcane letters CIA, CIA, over and over again. Perhaps he was accusing himself.
Some people held signs: US OUT OF VIETNAM, etcetera. M was probably the only
American in the crowd. She didn’t chant slogans, or wave a sign; short, all she
saw was a sea of shoulders. Then a ripple ran through us: the delegation had
arrived, preceded by a pair of police on motorcycles. People pushed, straining
forward: caught in an eddy, M and I were separated from Charles and Simone. The
cops manning the line warned us back. The black limousines were opening their
doors.

I can’t see, Gus, M said to
me.

I edged my bulk into the
masses of young men and old Communists and forced an opening at the edge of the
cordon, face to face with
les flics
and a few anonymous men in suits (CIA, I heard the
young man in the leather coat mutter again). The sun glided onto the roofs of
the long black cars.
Her hand in my hand.
The hotel doorman stepping back in a kind of salute.
The
voices behind us doubling in volume and intensity as men got out, slightly
built men, no uniforms other than their business suits, old men with weathered
faces, Chinese-looking to my inexperienced eye, circled around one tall
austere-looking American man with straight slicked back graying hair and an
imperial nose, the ambassador-at-large. At his appearance the crowd’s frenzy
heightened. M’s grip on my hand became painful, she was standing on tiptoe, I
unlatched her and moved her in front of me, without thinking took her by the
armpits and raised her two feet in the air, like a doll, so she could see. She
hung there looking, breathing, I held her motionless and steady,
the
crowd could not budge me. Flashbulbs, reporters were
photographing the ambassador who smiled, one hand raised in benediction,
turning so that everyone could get a view, while the much smaller men behind
him, the Vietnamese, Thieu’s lackeys, impassive, wearing sunglasses, while a
second limo disgorged its contents. The tall American turned one last time to
the crowd, no longer smiling, leaning down a little listening to something one
of the Vietnamese was saying, intent, one hand on his shoulder, nodding,
straightening up again, flash of teeth, acknowledging us, turning away.

Put me down, I heard M say.
And in a lower, almost guttural voice: That was my father. Wherever he steps is
American soil. American ground. Wherever he treads is bloody history.
Paved with smiles.

I lowered her to the
ground. They were all small in the entranceway of the grand hotel, the second
limo lurched forward to cut them off further from the crowd, they were turning,
people were shouting, CIA yelled the leather-jacketed man, hey hey LBJ how many
kids did you kill today, the men were walking the red carpet, were swallowed by
ornate doors, were gone. My hand groped for M’s but she had pulled away, was
fighting her way back out of the crowd, Simone and Charles already gone, off to
the next demo, I caught her sitting on the curb half a block away, staring at
nothing.