Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Read online

  I listen to you, I said. You will notice as I recount this conversation I do not spare myself. I did not spare myself then either. My own sense of dignity, the peasant’s reserve with which I greeted the strange kaleidoscope that was the Paris of my fellow young people, always seemed beside the point when it came to M. I let myself hang open with her, like a tongue hangs out of a shoe.

  She shook her head. You don’t listen. You’re not listening now. You devour, but you don’t listen.

  A long, steadily rising cry caused the door to Simone’s bedroom to vibrate. Neither of us looked away from the table where our empty coffee cups were. We could both all too easily visualize what was going on in there.

  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 coul
d 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.

  That was your father?

  She didn’t answer, just stuck out a hand. Help me up.

  I thought his name was Harriman.

  Forget it, she said, looking up at me, dry-eyed, smiling. She patted my huge hand. Forget it.

  And I did, until just now, here in this hotel room, with you.

  Those were, as they say, the days. But it wasn’t all tear gas and rock music, there were longeurs, still points around which the world turned, as the thing grew and leaped and metastasized from the complaints of students into a mass movement that had brought, as they say, all of France to its knees. We went to the movies, to lectures, we argued with each other in the Sorbonne and on the stage of the Odeon where spontaneous, sometimes very funny skits took place mocking DeGaulle, Pompidou, LBJ, the CGT, even our own leaders—I remember a tall boy with a pillow under his sweater and a red clown wig, pretending to be interviewed by an obsequious reporter. Committees, committees, trying to maintain some kind of order within the larger chaos, picking up trash on the Sorbonne grounds, fixing the toilets, organizing the donations of food that came in with astonishing regularity, like grace itself, from the grocers and shopkeepers and delivery men sympathetic to the cause. Money was almost meaningless, one committee was set up to investigate the possibility of a student-printed and student-administered currency to challenge the franc, the pound, the dollar. The Communists and the Socialists, grown men, serious men, came to visit us, to talk with the students but more often to be lectured by them, to do them homage, almost humbly, in awe of what we had accomplished, astonished and uneasy at the spirit that prevailed everywhere, the shaggy dog joke of the revolution waiting for its punchline, in the meantime everyone behaving as if liberation had already come, as if being young were enough. It almost was. We were never bored but there was still time, somehow endless time in a single month, between actions and riots and speeches there was sex and reading and movies and football and theater and art and even sleeping, people slept well when they slept, they fell down wherever they were, in ateliers and lecture halls and in the apartments of friends and strangers, angelic smiles on their faces. And the days went on. And it seemed that reality, what we had once taken for reality, was well and truly suspended, permanent vacation, no future to worry about. I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires. My slow fat heavy body was slower to take in this message than the others. But I began to feel it in my limbs. I was looking at her differently now, when she was listening to someone else, laughing, arm in arm with Charles and Simone, dancing in the streets, hysterical with joy. But still, if she caught me looking, I looked away.

  But finally some alchemy of indifference and curiosity led her, one rainy afternoon when Charles and Simone were out, to agree to pose for me. It was a kind of dare she made herself that I was the vehicle for—I did not flatter myself that her willingness to be painted was different in kind from her willingness to tolerate my simple oafish presence. But she did admire my skills as a draughtsman. I had come dripping from the school where I had been engaged in my usual practice of poster-making, left my portfolio in the living room while I dried off in the bathroom. When I came back she had my drawings out on the coffee table and leaned over them, frowning, a cigarette burning unattended in the ashtray balanced on th
e sofa’s arm. She looked up at me and gestured at a pastel drawing of a large woman with broad hips and low hanging breasts, posed so that she appeared all buttocks and thighs, but the head and hands were waifish and delicate, connected improbably but firmly to her lower half by a sinuous sway of spine and back.

  Does she really look like this? Your model?

  That’s how she looks to me.

  But would I recognize her if I saw her on the street?

  Perhaps.

  She lifted the sheet, a bit roughly, to expose the next drawing: a nude man in heroic posture, as if he had just won a prizefight, one fist in the air. His muscles were huge and exaggerated, like those of a comic book character, but his genitals were exact and ordinary—their ordinary proportions made the rest of him seem inflated like a parade balloon. She laughed and glanced up at me and a quick little spark crossed the smoky air between us, a spark I hadn’t really felt since that night in the cemetery. She looked at another drawing, and another. Then:

  You should draw me.

  Truly?

  Yes.

  Have you modeled before? I asked. Conscious of an unavoidable sleazy lewdness to the question, I tried to make a joke of it by waggling my eyebrows, as if I were Groucho and she was Margaret Dumont.

  Not for drawings.

  Photographs? I asked, removing an imaginary cigar from my lips.

  She just smiled. When can we do it?

  Well…

  Why not now? What do you need?

  What if they come back?

  Then they come back.

  Well. I don’t have my crayons with me. Or an easel.

  Here’s a pencil. And the card table.

  All right.

  She had stepped to the mono turntable parked precariously on a bookshelf and lowered the needle: a Bud Powell piano riff punctuated the air.