She wanted us to go and pick up the records that Franck had left for me. My protests were useless, as were Franck’s. We found ourselves in the huge apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins, which might have seemed gloomy had it not been for the cheerful amount of clutter everywhere. Cécile had not touched a thing since Pierre’s farewell party: the empty bottles of alcohol, the books piled up, the overflowing ashtrays, the dirty plates and the paintings lying all over the floor produced a strange atmosphere in this empty place, which was far too big for her. She cleared away the clothes that were heaped on the sofa and shoved them onto the floor to make room for us to sit down. She went to look for the records. We could hear her rummaging in the cupboards as she moaned about the mess everywhere. She reappeared and then vanished immediately. Franck put his arm around my shoulder.
‘Apparently you didn’t care for A bout de souffle?’
‘I liked it personally. It was Papa and Juliette who didn’t. They couldn’t understand why you had liked the film.’
Franck looked thoughtful: ‘I love a girl who’s got a very pretty neck, very pretty breasts, a very pretty voice, very pretty wrists, a very pretty head, very pretty knees…’
His eyes were moist and there was a furtive smile on his lips. Cécile entered the room carrying a box of records in her arms. There were far too many. I was embarrassed to take them. Cécile spelled out her broth-er’s intentions: ‘Pierre’s not giving them to you. He’s lending them to you.’
Since I looked doubtful, she grabbed a bundle of envelopes held together by a rubber band and read us his most recent letter:
Dearest Cécile,
The holidays drag on. The weather’s perfect. At night, we freeze. We’re still at our base camp at Souk-Ahras. Since the Morice line has turned out to be completely useless, they’re reinforcing it with the Challe line. This is serious stuff. The fence is electrified all the way along with five thousand volts and at certain points it’s over thirty thousand. Best not to touch it. I’m working with a guy from Electricité de France who knows all about high voltage and, what with my military skills, if I don’t find a job in management, I could retrain in electricity. As incredible as it may seem, the French army has learnt lessons from past mistakes. The heavy and supposedly impassable Maginot line-style fortifications are no more, the Challe line is a simple cordon used to detect break-ins and, as such, it’s pretty diabolical. We have a system that enables us to identify where the line has been cut and we can send out units straight away to step in and prevent people infiltrating from Tunisia. As soon as there’s an alert, we fire off star shells. What with surveillance radar and the mined barbed-wire system, the place has become too quiet. For weeks, nothing has happened. You’d think you were a character in The Desert of the Tartars. I think of myself as Lieutenant Drogo. Except I’ve got nobody here with whom I can discuss anything. Buzzati’s book is unrealistic. His fortress has an unbelievable number of intellectuals per square metre. Here, it’s real life: nothing but thickos. We look ahead of us. The enemy’s over there. We wonder where. There’s nothing but shrubs and scree. Perhaps they’re somewhere else. We spend our days waiting for the guys from the ALN and we get bored to death. I spend hours monitoring the echoes on the radar. The only time we got the alert, it was a wild boar that had managed to get itself trapped. This at least improves the rations. Finally, what bugs me most is that I’m starting to alter my views. I was convinced that we were all bastards, that the local inhabitants were against us and wanted independence. Now I realise you shouldn’t listen to the pet theories of people miles away/nowhere near the conflict. You have to see what’s going on in these places. The army is doing a real job here and you mustn’t believe the crap you hear. There are nothing but bad solutions to choose from. Few people can have spoken such crap as I have. Apart from Franck, perhaps. That was in Paris. Here, it’s different. We’re not in a café chatting, we’ve got our hands in the shit. I feel as if I’m a windsock. I keep on changing my mind. At times, I ask myself what the hell we’re doing here and afterwards I realize that, if we leave, there’s going to be a ghastly mess. They’re not joking, the guys confronting us. But they’re not just coming to pick a quarrel with us, they know that we’re well equipped. They never attack from the front.
The Saint-Justisme is taking shape. After some tedious starts, I’ve filled two exercise books that I found at a nearby school whose pupils were evacuated over a year ago. I am more and more convinced that democracy is nothing but a hoax invented by the bourgeoisie so they can run the system permanently. We’re going to have to smash everything, without regard or discussion. Individual freedoms are snares and fantasies. What’s the use of being free to say what you think if you have a bloody awful salary and you live like a dog? You express yourself, you enjoy the so-called freedoms of the pseudo-democracy, but your life is rotten. We’ve had revolutions and wars. We’ve overthrown governments. Nothing changes. The rich remain rich and the poor just as poor. It’s always the same people who are exploited. The only freedom that should be given to citizens is economic freedom. We’ve got to get back to basics: ‘To each according to his means, to each according to his needs.’ More than ever, the only real power is economic and that’s what we have to take back. It won’t be by fair means, but by foul. Too bad if, once again, we have to eliminate the supporters of the old order. If we have failed to create a new revolution and not sent to the guillotine those who have usurped economic power, we shall have done nothing but gossip. Elections are merely a sham.
I’m longing to know the results of your exams. I’m not in the least worried – you’ll pass with flying colours as usual. You have to learn to have self-confidence. As soon as you’ve got your results, let me know. Did that little bugger Michel come by to take the records? I don’t understand what he’s waiting for. If he doesn’t make the most of the opportunity, too bad for him. I’m not going to lend them to anyone else, except Franck. It’s up to you. I’m not giving them, I’m lending them…
Cécile wanted to reassure me: ‘You know, when Pierre says “little bugger”, he doesn’t mean it unkindly.’
I did not want to take the lot. I made my selection. I counted out thirty-nine of them. Cécile refused to make a list.
I left twenty behind. They could be swapped if I wanted. True to form, Franck stuck his oar in. Pierre’s letter must have made him feel uncomfortable. He put on his bad-tempered expression.
‘You’d be better off swotting up your maths instead of listening to rock. What’s happened to your good resolutions? Vanished. Have you given up already? You’ll get failed next year and you’ll regret it all your life. Pierre’s right, you’re just a little bugger.’
On the spur of the moment, I thought I was going to grab hold of him. Cécile came to my defence. We had something in common, she said. She was allergic to maths as well. She suffered from a basic incomprehension. Pierre had struggled with it for years. He had tried everything possible to help her improve. He had shouted. He had shaken her like a plum tree. In vain. She had been lucky to get herself out of it by doing a literature degree. Franck didn’t miss a trick: ‘Right! Is that what you want to do? A literature degree?’
Cécile gave him a strange look. She was not amused. Because of me, the maths and the literature degree, they started to quarrel. The sound of their voices grew louder and increasingly sharp. Eventually they sounded like two watchdogs barking at one another. He went out, slamming the door. Cécile was annoyed. So was I. We sat on the sofa in silence. We thought Franck would come back. He did not come back.
‘Why do we have this problem?’ she murmured.
‘You mustn’t be cross with him; he’s not very smart at times. He doesn’t think about what he’s saying.’
‘I’m talking to you about maths, little bro’. We don’t understand a thing. It’s not normal.’
‘It’s in our nature. It�
�s nothing to be ashamed of. In general, maths brains are useless in literary matters and they’re proud of it.’
But she was so resistant to my explanations that I gave up. She insisted that we had to resolve this problem. Since it was one we shared, we would join forces. If a guy who was gifted was incapable of teaching maths to an idiot, then perhaps two idiots could manage if they were taught together. She did not want to remain a failure. I was not convinced by her reasoning. If a lame man runs with two crutches, it doesn’t make him a sprinter. But I was in no position to refuse. I agreed to her suggestion of our taking maths lessons together in a spirit of hypocrisy.
‘It’s a very good idea.’
When I brought the records home, there was a fuss. My mother wanted to know where they came from, who had given them to me and why, on the pretext that she herself had never been given anything, neither records, nor anything else. Franck managed to reassure her. Because of the neighbours, she forced me to play them quietly, which, for rock’n’roll, is an aberration. On several occasions, I lugged the record player and the discs over to Nicolas’s place, since he lived in a modern building. We took the opportunity to listen to Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis until our ears were buzzing. Despite his insistent requests, I refused to lend the records to him. Then, our neighbours, who lived above us, moved home and their flat remained empty for several months. I waited until my mother went out and then I turned up the sound; just before she came home, I lowered it to the approved volume. It was a breath of oxygen in a monastic world. I spent hours on my bed listening to records, and, even though I didn’t understand a thing, I knew the words by heart. Maria couldn’t have cared less. Juliette felt obliged to make comments. To begin with, being very keen on variety shows, she used to enjoy Gilbert Bécaud. She changed her mind, and eventually came to adore rock. It produced a miraculous effect on her: she kept quiet. We turned up the sound. Up to the normal volume at which you need to listen to rock: as loud as the speaker would allow. There was a ring at the door. I switched off the sound. The woman who lived on the fourth floor wanted to know whether, by any chance, it was from our flat that…
Juliette showed herself in an unexpected new light. She lied better than me, and I was an expert. With her natural ingenuity, she opened her eyes wide, and put on a bemused, open-mouthed expression to protest about this infernal din. Seeing her looking so innocent, no one on this earth would have imagined that anything but the absolute truth could come from the lips of this angelic face. I couldn’t resist the pleasure of making fun of a girl who went to mass every Sunday, went to confession on Thursdays and was in the priest’s good books: ‘What does Father Strano say? Do you confess your fibs?’
She merely smiled, with an ambiguous expression. Bardon and certain neighbours still had their doubts about me, so Juliette had a splendid idea. She switched the record player on while I was out and turned it up to the maximum. I would arrive down below, all unsuspecting, and complain to Bardon about this racket that was preventing me from working.
‘Do we no longer have the right to be quiet in our own home? It’s unbelievable!’
On several occasions, she also warned me about our mother arriving home unexpectedly. Our little game lasted for a long time. But this trifling episode, which ought to have brought us closer, paradoxically set us a little further apart. Whether I lied was of no consequence. These were the tools a man resorted to in order to survive; but that a young girl, not yet an adolescent, who was the image of purity, could deceive people and do so with such nerve, opened up frightening new perspectives for me on the human soul. If she was capable of lying with this alarming sincerity, capable of making me doubt myself, how could I know when she was telling the truth? Who could I believe? I could no longer trust anyone. It was a horrible revelation.
9
The Balto was packed. Ten people were clustered around the baby-foot table. I was in dazzling form. Opponents followed one after another, powerless. True to our custom, we played with our heads down. We saw his leather wristbands before we heard his husky voice: ‘Hi there, nitwits. You’ve improved, haven’t you?’
Samy tossed his coin on the table. He was wearing his smug expression. Nicolas and I gave each other a quick glance. We were determined to deal with him unceremoniously. We were the ones on fire, not him, and we intended to make the most of our advantage. Samy got round my midfielders, but Nicolas played the game of his life. He stopped almost everything. He held his centre-back at a slightly straighter angle so as to block shots from Samy, who was getting irritated. Nicolas scored four goals with his backs, three of them off the side. I was the one who was useless. As soon as I got the ball back to the forwards, Samy blocked my shots almost as if he had guessed what I was going to do beforehand. I scored one miserable goal by shooting when he had barely laid hands on his rods. It was a bit iffy. Samy, in lordly fashion, did not protest. On match point, he played around with us and lined up a rebound shot that was so quick we didn’t see the white ball disappear into the goal. We heard a metallic clack followed by ‘Take that, morons!’ Nicolas was furious with me. There were seven coins in the ashtrays. He inserted one. Three quarters of an hour waiting for our turn, just to be trounced by Samy. Nicolas had a go at pinball on the Liberty Belle. He challenged me to a game. But while he started to play, I sat on the terrace reading. I was dripping with sweat.
At the far end of the restaurant, facing me, and behind the benches, was the door with the green curtain. Jacky was coming through it with cups and empty glasses. I shrank back into the corner. He passed by without seeing me. An unshaven man in a stained, threadbare raincoat disappeared behind the curtain. What was he doing dressed like that at this time of year? It hadn’t rained for weeks. Stirred by curiosity, I drew back the curtain. In sprawling handwriting, someone had written on the door: ‘Incorrigible Optimists Club’. Heart racing, I moved forward cautiously. I got the greatest surprise of my life. I had walked into a chess club. There were some ten men absorbed in games. Half a dozen more were following the matches, either standing or sitting. Others were chatting in hushed voices. Neon lights lit up the room, the two windows of which gave onto boulevard Raspail. It also served as a storage room for old father Marcusot, who kept spare tables, folding chairs, parasols, worn-out benches and crates of glasses there. Two men were making use of the armchairs to read foreign newspapers. No one had noticed me coming in.
It was not the chess club that was the surprise. It was seeing Jean-Paul Sartre and Joseph Kessel playing together in the smoky backroom of this working-class bistro. I recognized them from television. These were famous people. I was fascinated. They were joking away like schoolboys. I’ve often wondered what could have made Sartre and Kessel laugh so much. I never found out. Imré, one of the pillars of the Club, maintained that Sartre used to play like a dimwit. They did it for fun. I don’t know how long I remained there, in the doorway, watching them. Neither of them took any notice of me. Nicolas came to look for me: ‘It’s our turn.’
He didn’t know there was a chess club there and he wasn’t in the least interested. As for Kessel or Sartre, their names meant nothing to him. Nicolas didn’t have a television and reading was not his strong point.
‘I don’t want to play any more.’
He stared at me in disbelief: ‘Are you crazy?’
‘I’m going home.’
I rushed off to tell Franck and Cécile my story. I would have done better not to say a word. Because of me, they started arguing again. To begin with, I kept them guessing. They went through a list of a whole string of celebrities. Franck had deduced that the men playing chess were intellectuals. Eventually he hit on Sartre. He couldn’t get over the fact that I had seen him. They didn’t get Kessel. They couldn’t imagine that these two could be playing and joking with one another. The problem was that Franck swore by Sartre, and Cécile didn’t in the least. She adored Camus. Franck loathed him. I hadn’t yet realized that it was like being for Reims or the Racing Club de Paris, Renault o
r Peugeot, Bordeaux wine or Beaujolais, the Russians or the Americans, you had to choose which side you were on and stick to it. There must have been one hell of a disagreement between the two men for their voices to rise so sharply. Certain nuances of the exchange eluded me. The words: narrow-minded, history, complicit, blind, lucidity, bad faith, cowardice, morality, commitment and conscience reoccurred on both sides. Cécile gained the upper hand. Her machine-gun delivery and her vivaciousness may have prevented Franck from responding at first. Unable to contain himself, he countered with: ‘You’re a petit-bourgeois moralist and you always will be. Like Camus.’
Cécile seethed. Quite calmly, she retorted: ‘As for you, you’re a pretentious little bugger and you always will be. Like Sartre.’
Franck left, slamming the door. Cécile and I sat waiting for him. He did not come back. Cécile was not annoyed with me. I tried to console her and to plead Franck’s case. She was turning this discussion into a matter of principle; something fundamental and of prime importance. I did not see why it was so crucial. She said to me: ‘Don’t go on about it. He’s wrong.’
From one of the piles of books stacked up in the drawing room, she picked up a thick book and handed it to me.
‘L’Homme révolté by Albert Camus.’
‘I may not understand it.’
She opened the book. I read the first line: ‘What is a rebel? A man who says no.’ It didn’t seem very complicated. I felt involved. Did this mean that I was a rebel?
‘Read it. You’ll see. What bugs them is that Camus is readable. And brilliant. Sartre isn’t. They loathe Camus because he’s right, even though I don’t agree with him on everything. He’s a bit too humanist for my taste. Sometimes, one has to be more radical. Do you follow?’