Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy Page 19

  Gustave’s brow and eyes and nose and moving lips. The back of Lamb’s head. Gray blank backdrop of a room. Here and now. Then and there.

  On the first day of the month of brides DeGaulle dissolved the Assembly and took off at last the mask, revealing a second mask that was the true face of the state, the helmets and gas masks of the CRS, black immobile plastic and metal, raccoon eyes unblinking, the men inside just meat in rigid light-absorbing shells, violent mollusks heaped up against our inchoate victory, that was dissolving now in front of our eyes. We were losing the workers, who discovered after all that they had much to lose, not just their chains: pay rises had been promised, working hours adjusted. It was the Communists themselves who turned out to be the most at home in the system, who prospered from permanent deferral of their platform, itself a deferral from what Moscow pledged, what Che and Fidel in their own reckless, ruthless beauty had seemed to promise. What remained? Only thousands of students with no leader or plan, broken into dozens and hundreds of groupuscules, as large as UNEF and as small as we three smoking and dreaming in the empty flat, looking for and failing to discover our true size in the long humid evenings, passing through empty or crowded streets where the trees and barricades alike had been torn down. In the papers we bought and strewed across the floor like a carpet the reflections and post-mortems were already being disseminated, the lightning bottled for reuse by melancholics and those who’d afterward claim to have been there. It was as if the horizon itself, the one we’d marched for, the line that had defined the world we’d found and which had come to seem so close, so crossable, had vanished into the sea of ordinary life. M looked out the window, quoting T.S. Eliot to me and Charles bored and stoned and spread out on the floor like stunned insects, lying on top of the newspapers and posters and flyers and ashes. I would not have thought death had undone so many. I would not have thought boredom could ever return, could ever become again the context and fiber of our minutes, our days. Yet it had.

  I didn’t care. M was near me. Jules et Jim, Gustave and Charles. And M. I knew they slept together, though silently. Charles never made a sound, he had left that to Simone and his swans, to make that ugly inhuman cry echo through the wall-less flat at any hour of the night. But M too was silent, so that I believed they might have believed I thought them chaste, except in the morning I would see them, in the gray cotton light of a Paris dawn, entwined naked, covered or not covered by a sheet. Sometimes I sat in a wooden chair a few meters of and sketched them, and left the sketches here and there in the flat, a gesture whose meaning I didn’t care to scrutinize. M would find them and collect them; I assumed she threw them out, but later on, after the very end, I found them coiled and tucked into a discarded boot in the corner she’d used as a closet, fanned them out on the floor and looked at the black charcoal streaks of bodies in the aftermath of love. A love I bore witness to without sharing. I suppose that she did love him, easily, the way they all did, for his beauty and arrogance; but there was something else, a skeptical inclination of the head when I caught her sometimes looking at him while he was speaking fervently about Marx or Godard or the revolution, always the revolution, the center of history that had been given to him wrapped in a bow like a present, like M herself. We shared something, she and me. It was her little joke to refer to us both as les americains; Charles would stride in the street with his usual impatient quick steps, and M would fall behind a few paces and take my arm, saying After all, we Americans need to stick together. Or at the café with our copies of Action and Le Monde, with Charles cursing over the haplessness of De Gaulle’s ministers and the perfidy of the PCF, she’d say to me, Well, Gus? We could use the American perspective on this affair. Or the times I’d be at the kitchen table with a piece of toast and M would appear, languid, nearly naked in a paint-spattered shirt she’d borrowed permanently from me, because on her it was large enough to be a dressing gown, her little hands twisting like marionettes from the ends of rolled sleeves. She’d turn a chair around so its back was to me and sit down, straddling it, a lock of hair lolling over one eye, looking at me the way I’d looked at her that day and so many mornings afterward, with a pencil or pastel in my hand. Not appraising, not judging, merely measuring. And I felt for once that my big flabby body belonged somewhere, I’d lean my elbows on the table with my toast and pour her a cup of the same crap coffee and we’d sit there, quietly, like married people, until Charles would bring his noise and his bluster into the airspace we called the kitchen, and the day would start again, the revolution would resume.

  But these were as I say the waning days. De Gaulle was back, a querulous and demanding voice on the radio, and the whole city seemed to be waking from its dream. Charles, like a little boy, fought waking. And he wasn’t the only one. Losing his audience, finding it harder every day to rouse his cadre, each of whom little by little was finding himself caught up once again in ordinary concerns, exams, the summer holidays, he hectored the two of us more and more, answering the silence in M’s face and the boredom in my own with diatribes on anarcho-syndicalism and the Communists’ betrayal of their own legacy and the misguided veneration of Trotsky—we must get back to the first principles of Marxism-Leninism, we must mobilize our own class privileges on behalf of the people, who do not yet realize that they are the people, when they do it will be a terrible day for the bosses and owners and politicians and Charles’s own father, it cannot be helped, to make an omelet etcetera. M made a face at me when his back was turned and I tried not to laugh but still my face was distorted and when Charles saw it he became enraged, he pushed back from the table and shouted My God Gustave, don’t you understand it’s all for you, you are the People, you fucking peasant, you’re the one it’s all for, and it’s all right if you don’t care for theory but without theory there’s no practice, you asshole, you fucking smirker, you shirker. To which there was no defense but to raise both my palms in the air, I surrender, while M looked up at the ceiling, stone-faced. She doesn’t understand any of it, he grumbled to me one afternoon when M was out, she reads all the books and shouts all the slogans but she has no feeling for it, she’s really an American, she doesn’t believe, they’re a generation behind us at least as far as class consciousness goes, it’s a real problem. But she goes with you to all the demos, I said, she’s right there up front, she’s fearless, I’ve seen her. That’s not the point, he answered, what makes me crazy is she’s there but she’s not there, she believes but she doesn’t believe, I can feel her standing apart, looking down on all of us, on me, on you, on herself maybe. I didn’t answer but thought of the two of them making love, how her eyes must slide away from his, faking it, or rather not faking it hard enough, not the orgasm but the illusion that one is really inside the other person or has taken the other person in, is truly with him, moved by him, rocked by him, living and dying in a single embrace. It’s a little too obvious, isn’t it, with M, that you are not her fantasy, her mind or something, call it soul if you like, is elsewhere, possessed but by whom, by what. M was his lover but she was my horizon. I knew in the breathless nights of their sex that he fucked her in vain, in herself behind the eyes recessive and untouchable as the revolution itself. Underneath the scorn and derision, or contrariwise the lit flame of passion, I saw something, something tucked like a bookmark into the illuminated text of her life, something I recognized. I saw her, how she looked at me and my pear-shaped pullet’s body, my ill-fitting face and clothes, my Frankenstein freakishness, and recoiled in fear and recognition at something that reminded her of herself. The two of us were pushed or pushed ourselves to the side of whatever river was flowing, the current caught us up but only took us so far, on the banks of the waters of Babylon we stood or knelt and watched, only watched and witnessed. Charles, protagonist, could not understand us, tried to bring us under the umbrella of his own fierce subjectivity, enroll us as players in the drama of his own hang-ups, which he of course thought were universal, those were the only terms by which a mind so educated could play th
e hero’s role, he had to be the hero for everybody, he wanted to be my hero, M’s hero, and could not. For myself I wanted only to paint her, to reach beyond my own manifest limitations and touch something as genuine and as elusive as my own soul, the flicker at the corners of her eyes, her mouth, looking back boldly at me when I sketched her naked. Naked! No woman was ever less naked, or more like a nude, than M in our occasional sessions, when Charles was out or asleep, sessions never longer than a half hour or so, whenever the mood struck her to discard whatever she was wearing and stand or kneel or squat or recline for me, wherever she was in the flat, and I followed after with whatever tools I could scrounge—a bit of newsprint, a stub of charcoal, if I was lucky some pastels. Always I worked swiftly, trying to capture what seemed most ephemeral in the pose, the breath, the tug of her upper ribcage under the slope of her breasts, a lock of hair over her left eye that she blew away, impishly. Then we would hear Charles on the stairs and languidly, without hurry, she would roll away to the bathroom or to cover herself while I finished the sketch. I did not bother to conceal these sketches from Charles, he looked at them sometimes, cup of coffee in hand, without comment, an amused expression on his face. I was no threat to him. And sometimes she looked with him, poker faced, leaning on his shoulder. He’d gesture at one of the pictures, at the thickness and coarseness of the jawline, or the way one eye was manifestly larger than the other.

  Look at Picasso, he’d say. Look at you, Picasso’s mistress.

  He makes me so ugly, she’d murmur, as though in agreement.

  She went on posing for me, a way to break up the tedium, to exhale a little in those waning days in the tense, static city. But she would not pose for a full session, the hours I needed to paint her properly; and when I finally had stretched a canvas and set up an easel and had paints at hand, so that the next time the mood stuck her I would be ready, the mood ceased to strike. Anyway things were beginning to move, to come unstuck for the final convulsion. Charles was talking over the radio, we had to hush him, DeGaulle was speaking, calling for new elections, a victory I should have thought but Charles for once saw it clearly, It’s all over if he can do that, they’ll return him for sure, he said, fists clenched, he represents stability, order, everything they want, my father always voted CGT but he’ll vote for DeGaulle now like every other petty bourgeois, it’ll be a massacre, it’s all over if we can’t seize the moment. He stood up. I have to go to the Sorbonne, now, we have to organize, we have to show them. He held out his hand, invitation to a dream. Distracted, smiling a little, M took it and stood beside him. They looked at me.

  I’ll catch up with you, I said. I have some things to do first.

  Let’s go, Charles said to M.

  Feverish, as if I were the dreamer. I worked at the canvas, all the rest of that day, the sketches and drawings surrounding me offering different angles, moods, movement almost, like film stills, a few frames, enough to complete—I hoped—a gesture. The radio played in the background, news reports, the announcer speaking rapidly of events as they unfolded in the city, the marches and countermarches, the new brawls. Outside my window it was quiet, a gentle early summer breeze came through the open windows. I worked. My palette was basic: black for the police, heavy browns for the secret earth, dark green for the jungles of Vietnam, ashy gray for the sands of Algeria, into which murky death-haunted colors intruded life in the form of a little pink, a dab of light brown, a very little vermillion. A figure assembled itself, I preserved the panel effect, a touch of superannuated Cubism, why not, odalisque at length, discarded caryatid, the canvas large, nearly two meters at its base, one arm crooked out at the elbow to support the head, delicate smear of her face, black hair torque upward, reap the whirlwind. All day. At some point near dusk I stood back from it, looking with disbelief at the liberated canvas, its jagged energy, like a tunnel into something, raw, ungainly, anatomically irregular, unfinished, but I knew if I touched it with the brush again something would give, I’d lose the painting, lose M. I lay down to close my eyes for a few minutes, exhausted, to regroup, when they opened again it was night, the streetlights burned through the windows, and there was a low sound outside, unlullling reverberate roar, like the sea. I got up, looked out.

  The bodies of the students surged and broke on the seawall of the police. The tear gas rose like spume in a nature documentary, in slow motion. The cries of the crowd and the grinding engines of CRS vans churned the dirty panes of class with their vibrations. The slogans were muted but I moved my lips to them. I’d been reading them for so long, on walls and alleys, in men’s rooms, in the Metro, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts I’d stenciled posters by the dozens, sweating and cursing without rancor, in the joy of solidarity, high on turpentine and spray-paint fumes, handing stacks out the door into the arms of lithe young comrades, their Mao caps rakish, their trousers pencil-thin and impeccably creased. Soyons cruels! we cried, lashing out in our rage and joy. And I’d listened to the speeches and debates, had even taken part in a few; I’d shouted with crowds, I’d wedged my fat blunt body into the ranks of sitters and marchers, I’d raised my fist and shook it over the others, like a priest shaking out sacred oils on the congregation. So why then, that particular evening, the day of the counter-demonstration, the surge of Gaullists (the old folks, our parents, every one of them it seemed a Resistance-fighter, a martyr, and we their ungrateful children, drinking Marx, reading Coca-Cola), why did I sit there in the darkened window, invisible to the history that was passing us by, watching the revolution dying by inches?

  They were down there somewhere. Events, les Evenements, had thrown them together. In my mind the film we’d seen last weekend, Bonnie and Clyde, how they went out together, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, alone on a country road, riddled with bullets. And who was I, I persisted narcissistically in asking myself, what was my role in their solipsistic drama? Part of the scenery, part of the violence—the response, Charles taught, to powerlessness, response as proper as poetry. So much blood, Technicolor red, spraying up and out at the screen in an Artaud fountain. We loved it, we loved the shock, we came out laughing like our laughter was a spell, protecting us from the knowledge the movie had carried with it, Hollywood wisdom, across the ocean bearing its message of the glamour of death. They were down there without me. Were they together? Was she holding the bottle while he lit the rag? Were they locked arm in arm with others, the avant-garde that had been left behind by the convulsive reaction of a nation remembering its nationhood? Was she crying from the gas? Would he vomit? Would they get their skulls cracked, methodically, at the hands and clubs and shields of the masked CRS men? Did they not themselves at that moment wear masks of righteousness and beauty, mirrors of each other, mirrors on the faces of all the young men and women, les jeunes, mirrors reflecting the arc lights of the cops and the neon of the Champs de l’Elysees and the smoky torch of cinemas showing the films of our actual, dreamed lives? I reached up and touched my own face, half-visible to me in the greasy glass, felt the stubble, my chins folding into one another, the pendulous nose, the flesh bunched around my eyes that made them appear piggish and small. The back of the canvas rebuked me. Where was my own mask of youth and beauty? Had M taken it? Or had she thrown it away? What I had pressed into her hands, the night I knew she couldn’t love or pity me, but could only be there, in my gravity well, fellow American. It was out there, somewhere, the mask that had been meant for me, my moment in the waning sun of revolution, forgotten or smashed somewhere on the streets, youth’s canvas, where her body lay. I went out into the counterrevolutionary night.