The Dreamers (3 page)

From the metro station on the place de l'Odéon Matthew left his friends and walked back alone to his room in a Latin Quarter hotel, one bookended by jeans emporia, minuscule arthouse cinemas thriving on a Spartan diet of Bergman and Antonioni, and Tunisian charcuteries which for a couple of francs would sell you a lamb or mutton kebab and a gummy pastry with a glutinous honey or lemon filling. The soundtrack of its courtyard was that of a neo-realist Italian film: dance band music, a baby's cries, ‘Für Elise' picked out on a poorly tuned piano.

Sleep is a spirit which comes to depend, like most
spirits
, on the trappings of the séance: the veiled lamps, the drawn curtains, patience and silence. It depends, too, on the sleeper’s gullibility, on his willingness to believe that, within a few minutes, if he puts his house in order prior to his departure, he will enter a self-induced trance. Only then does it consent to spew the opaque and terrible ectoplasm of dreams.

Matthew distrusted the occult enticements of sleep.
That night, though, he dreamt. His dream was confused with a memory, a memory of being in London, the year before, on his way to the National Gallery.

He had found himself on a traffic island in Trafalgar Square. Standing on the pavement opposite, in front of the gallery, a young (American? German? Swedish?) boy of incomparable physical loveliness was waiting to cross from the other side. Matthew’s eyes welled with tears, the kind of tears which only so extreme a
manifestation
of beauty will inspire and which, like incompatible liquids inside a test tube, will never mix with shallower ones. He had not the least suspicion of what was about to befall him. For it was only when the boy started to cross the street that Matthew saw his
disarticulated
limbs. Withered by a neurological ailment, he walked like a slapstick clown, crazily flinging his knees out as he advanced.

The two incompatible species of tears suddenly merged in Matthew’s eyes. Racked by pity for this
ravishing
monster, he wanted to step forward, clasp him on both shoulders, kiss him on the forehead and command him to walk erect. Whereupon Matthew himself would slip away unseen in the crowd, many of whom,
dumbfounded
by the miracle, would drop to their knees in
prayer. In other words, he had a Christ complex, an uncodified psychic category that exists none the less.

That was where the memory came to an end. Now the dream took over.

In it Matthew rushed to the boy’s defence against
jeering
passers-by. He cried out,
But his heart is in the right place!
– only to provoke these passers-by into screaming,
No, his heart is in the wrong place! His heart is in the wrong place!
Then he saw that the boy was perched on top of Nelson’s Column, brandishing the Cinémathèque screen as though it were a great yellow quarantine flag. Matthew began to shin up the swaying column. From far underneath, the mob stoned him, urged on by Théo and Isabelle, their faces contorted with fury. He reached the top. In rapid succession the boy turned into Nelson, Napoleon, himself again. On the screen there appeared the trademark of Paramount Pictures: a mountain of snow surmounted by a tiara of stars. Then a shot rang out, causing Matthew and the boy to ascend
heavenwards
together in an elongated swoon, enhaloed by the Paramount stars like a Madonna and Child by
Zurbarán
.

A second shot rang out. It was the telephone. Matthew glanced at the alarm clock on his bedside
table. He had slept no more than seven minutes. Théo was ringing to say that, after their separation on the place de l’Odéon, he had remembered to buy
Le Monde
.

The Langlois affair was splashed over the front page.

So intensely had the three young people focused their scrutiny on the Cinémathèque’s screen, they had remained in total ignorance of what had been taking place behind it. The
coup d’état
had been as well planned as a commando raid. That evening’s closure was merely the
coup de grâce
, provoked by the scores of telegrams which had arrived at the Ministry of Culture, telegrams from filmmakers around the world who had donated prints of their films to Langlois and who refused to authorise any further screening of them in the wake of his departure.

From this broadside Matthew retained a single fact, one he formulated in his mind as a theorem in logic. The Cinémathèque had closed its doors. It was at the Cinémathèque, and only at the Cinémathèque, that he met Théo and Isabelle. Ergo, he would cease to meet them.

The shadow cast on the wall by the telephone assumed the shape of a revolver against his head.

‘Does that mean I won’t see you tomorrow?’

There was silence on the line. Then:

‘You mean, go to Chaillot anyway?’

‘No, I meant …’

Matthew had always yielded to the drift of events. He had been content to let them bear him aloft as, at the end of some ridiculous but moving film they had seen together at the Cinémathèque, Edith Piaf had been borne upwards to heaven on the Montmartre funicular, while the word
Fin
zoomed into the foreground of the screen like the light at the end of a tunnel. In the matter of choosing a film to see, a restaurant to eat in or a
decision
to make, he had always left the initiative to others. Now, for the first time in their friendship, he would make a proposition to Théo.

‘Couldn’t we meet in the afternoon? Maybe have a drink?’

The telephone is a keyhole. The ear spies on the voice. Théo, to whom it had never once occurred that he might meet Matthew anywhere else but at the Cinémathèque, realised that he had tuned into a faint signal of distress.

‘Well …’ he replied doubtfully. ‘I’d have to cut a class. But – okay. I’ll be at the Rhumerie at three. You know where that is?’

His was the tone of someone who gives orders
without
stopping to wonder whether they will be obeyed, who keeps people waiting in the knowledge that they will wait.

‘The Rhumerie? Boulevard Saint-Germain?’

‘Be there at three. Ciao.’

The phone went dead. Matthew dragged the quilt up as far as his chin and closed his eyes. His friendship with Théo and Isabelle was a tightrope act. On this
occasion
he had crossed safely to the other side.

Outside, along the boulevard, he could hear the tuneless heehaw of a police car siren.

Waiting. Matthew was waiting. He had been sitting on one of the wicker seats in the enclosed, dun-coloured terrace of the Rhumerie since ten to three, nursing a hot toddy. It was now quarter-past. That, at least, was the time displayed by a clock on the boulevard opposite him. Matthew, who had slim, brittle, squared-off wrists, never wore a wrist-watch: its buckle and strap against his veins made him feel as queasy as though a doctor were permanently taking his pulse. So he was obliged to rely on street clocks. And he remained so convinced that the first clock he had happened to see was telling the correct time that, even if it was contradicted by every
single clock he saw thereafter, he continued to place his faith in it.

Waiting. For the person who waits, Zeno’s paradox, which denies the completion of all movement, is less of a paradox than a lived experience. Matthew was living the paradox. For Théo to leave his parents’ flat in the rue de l’Odéon and cover the short distance to the Rhumerie (he told himself), he would first have to reach the
boulevard
Saint-Germain. But, before arriving on the
boulevard
, he would have to cross the carrefour de l’Odéon and, before the carrefour de l’Odéon, there would be the rue de l’Odéon to walk down and, before that, the kerb of the pavement to step off – and so on, to the point where he must still be standing, paralysed, on the threshold of his bedroom, one arm half in, half out of his jacket sleeve.

As he waited, Matthew watched a group of young Americans strolling past him. They stooped beneath the weight of their rucksacks. With their shawls and kaftans, their moccasins, tinted granny glasses, guitars, leathery water flasks and bewildered children in tow, they somehow knew that they should gather at the intersection of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the boulevard Saint-Michel. It was their reservation. There
they blissfully drew on marijuana joints, passing them around like peace pipes. And it was so hard to envisage them in any other
quartier
one was tempted to believe that their charter aeroplanes had landed directly on the place Saint-Michel, taxiing to a halt between the
fountain
and the Arab touts who dealt hashish from one pocket and discount metro tickets from the other.

It was now twenty past three. The Chinese have a proverb: When you keep someone waiting you give him time to count up your faults. It was typical of Matthew that he should, instead, have counted up his own. For it was, so he thought, his own faults rather than Théo’s that prevented the latter from being on time for their appointment. Isabelle, well and good – she crushed him utterly. When in her presence, he would always
remember
much too late what it was he meant to say. But Théo’s superiority was not of a kind to make him feel small.

As it happens, this was only partially true. There were moments, certainly, when he and Théo chatted as equals, indulging in the delirious discourse of cinephiles with less inhibition than was possible in Isabelle’s company. But, even then, a spectral Isabelle, so wraithlike as to be almost invisible, would flickeringly
take possession of her brother, as in one of those
composite
photographs in which two profiles are
superimposed
to produce a third face, one viewed full on, that of a total stranger.

It was the stranger whom Matthew loved. But his love undermined him. He would find himself stammering like a bashful swain in some rustic farce. The simplest sentence became a tongue-twister.

He was still waiting. The elation he had felt when replacing the telephone receiver the previous evening had been extinguished. Here he was again on the tightrope; here it was stretched over a new abyss. It was almost twenty-five past.

On the pavement outside the Rhumerie stood a street musician, a young Moroccan violinist. He was playing, more or less ably, the tune ‘Vilja’ from
The Merry Widow
. Matthew studied him. Every so often, whenever there was a dying phrase in the melody, he would retrieve it at the very last minute with a twitch of his bow, wrapping it round his instrument like one of those swathes of soft marshmallow which hang in country fairs.

Though he was beaming as he played, he made others melancholic just to think about him. He carried the
germ of that melancholy within him as someone may be the carrier of an infectious disease, unwittingly passing it on to strangers without ever succumbing to it himself.

This was one of those moments when Matthew was most vulnerable to infection. He saw himself as the
protagonist
of the kind of film he detested, a sensitive
outcast
making his solitary way along sparkling, neon-lit boulevards amid cheerful, bustling crowds moving in the opposite direction. The film’s background music would be provided exclusively by buskers, all of them the genuine article, recruited by the director himself in what would have been some widely publicised scouting expedition through the city’s streets, squares, parks and metro corridors. And its theme tune – ‘Vilja’, precisely – would be relayed from instrument to instrument, busker to busker, from the scatty old crone at the Flore, whose grin was as wide and creased as her squeezebox, to the blind Jew’s harpist whose patch was the place Monge, as though pursuing him across Paris.

It was half past three when Théo finally arrived, ambling unhurriedly along the boulevard. He wasn't alone. A bored Isabelle had decided to join them. She was dressed in a prewar ‘little suit' by Chanel which, ornately cuffed
and buttoned, was at least two sizes too tight for her. Since Théo was wearing his regulation corduroy jacket, corduroy trousers and sandals, the two of them gratified Matthew by causing a sensation among the middle-class dowagers with their Hermès scarves and inexhaustible fund of pharmaceutical horror stories who, along with the odd laconic loner reading
Le Monde
or
Le Nouvel Observateur
, made up the Rhumerie's clientele.

Neither Théo nor Isabelle apologised for arriving half an hour late, since it had never occurred to them that he might no longer be there. Théo ran his eyes over the menu and Isabelle, picking up a paperback volume which Matthew had left on the table, flicked through its pages.

‘You read Salinger in Italian? Molto chic.'

‘I was told a good way to learn a language was to read translations of books you already know by heart.'

‘That's interesting.'

But Isabelle wasn't at all interested. She had just
discovered
a new expression. She savoured it amorously. From now on everything that once had been
sublime
– a film, a Worth gown, a Coromandel screen – would be
molto chic
. Like those devotees of the increase-
your-word
-power column in the
Reader's Digest
who stake
their conversational reputation on the number of times in a single day they find room for
plethora
and
infelicity
and
quintessential
, dropping these words the way other people drop names, she hated to let any amusing phrase go once it had caught her fancy.

It might be a quotation. For example, Napoleon's ‘People are prepared to believe anything provided it's not in the Bible', which, though no Christian herself, far from it, she was fond of quoting whether it was apropos or not.

Or else it was a whimsical pet name that would attach itself to an object for ever afterwards. Her cigarettes, which were mauve and Russian and looked like
lipsticks
, she renamed ‘Rasputins'. And if one of them smouldered on after several attempts to stub it out, she would simper, as though impromptu, ‘It simply refuses to die! It's a Rasputin!'