The Dreamers Read online

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Matthew,’ said Théo. ‘She’s a bitch. She breathes in all the air around her.’

  They had just arrived in the Cinémathèque garden.

  *

  At a first glance the scene confronting them was identical to that replayed there evening after evening at the same hour. But only at a first glance. Something had changed. The rats weren’t talking shop.

  Apprehensive, Théo strode ahead of the others and went to take a look at the Cinémathèque’s gates. They were locked. From either side of the padlock a thick steel chain hung in a half-circle, reminding him of the ostentatious fob-watches worn by fat capitalists in Soviet propaganda films. In the middle had been strung up, askew, a handwritten cardboard sign. It read: Fermé.

  He darted down the stairs two at a time and squinted through the bars of the grille. Inside, the foyer was unlighted. The box-office was unattended. The floor, which hadn’t been swept, was littered with ticket stubs. The shadowboxes and magic lanterns, with their paper seagulls, naked athletes and equestriennes condemned to leap endlessly through a ring of tiny metal hoops, sat undisturbed.

  Théo looked the way Newton must have looked the moment the apple, or the penny, dropped. An addict denied his fix wouldn’t have had a more frightening expression on his face.

  *

  ‘Salut.’

  Théo abruptly turned.

  It was Jacques, one of the most fanatical of the rats. He had the streaky features of a debauched greyhound. With his long stained suede greatcoat, his bulging shoulder bag, his grimy boots, his cocainy white face and his horrible matted hair, he looked like a scarecrow that the crows had scared.

  ‘Salut, Jacques.’

  ‘Say, Théo, you couldn’t …’

  Théo, who knew that Jacques intended to ask him for a few francs, cut him short.

  It was a familiar ritual. But Jacques was no ordinary beggar. His petitions were invariably ‘to help pay for the editing of my film’. If no one had ever seen this film, stranger things had happened and masterpieces had been fashioned from less money than Jacques must have contrived to scrounge off his fellow cinephiles over the years.

  These days it had become less easy for him. Knowing that he regularly rummaged through the litter bins on the place du Trocadéro, one of the rats had bought a pornographic magazine in Pigalle and, on the most lascivious of its photographs, scrawled a cartoon strip balloon over the model’s gaping pudenda, inside which he had written bonjour, Jacques in a spidery hand. On his way in to the Cinémathèque at six-thirty the rat had planted it where he could be certain Jacques would filch it on his way out at midnight.

  Ever since that incident, which had unfolded without a hitch, Jacques had exiled himself from the front row and would now exchange barely a word with his former friends. Théo was aware of being the only one left whom he continued to ask for money, but he retained an affection for this pitiful creature he had known in better days.

  For her part, Isabelle would have nothing to do with him. She claimed that he wasn’t clean, that he smelled bad.

  ‘If shit could shit,’ she said to Théo, ‘it would smell just like your friend Jacques.’

  Jacques had shocking news. Langlois had been dismissed. Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque’s creator and curator, he whom Cocteau once called ‘the dragon who guards our treasure’, had been dismissed by Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture.

  ‘What do you mean, he’s been dismissed?’

  ‘That’s all I know,’ replied Jacques, who was still angling for an opening in the conversation to borrow money. ‘He’s gone – and the Cinémathèque’s closed until further notice. But I say, Théo …’

  ‘Why would Malraux do such a thing? It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Oh, the old story. The chaos, the disorder, the megalomania.’

  Théo had heard it all before. It was said of Langlois that he kept cans of film in his bathtub, that he had mislaid irreplaceable classics; but also that, during the war, he had rescued prints the way others had rescued parachutists.

  He was an eccentric curator. His idea of guarding treasure was to pass it around. He liked to show films. He thought it was good for them to be run through a projector. In this he differed from the kind of archivist who believes that projection is harmful to a film – which is not unlike saying that smiling is harmful to a face.

  Yet it’s perfectly true, projection, like smiling, does produce wrinkles. Langlois’s enemies accused him of squandering the nation’s patrimony. Films, they said, were no longer kept in bathtubs.

  *

  Théo, who never read a newspaper, now urgently wanted to buy one. Details, he needed details. Mechanically scooping up a cluster of coins from his pocket, he pressed them into Jacques’s palm without first sifting through them. Considering the news he had just received, he could almost imagine he was paying off an informant.

  Isabelle was less than thunderstruck by the turn of events.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she pronounced with a clairvoyant’s conviction. ‘There’s been a mistake. Langlois is on the carpet for some minor infraction. The Cinémathèque will open tomorrow. Maybe later tonight.’

  She was like someone who hears a shot and tells herself it’s just a car backfiring.

  ‘Listen, Isa,’ said Théo. ‘Take that grisly dead fox away from your ears and listen for once. I’m telling you what Jacques told me.’

  ‘What does Jacques know?’

  ‘He had it from Victor Peplum’ – Victor Peplum was another of the rats, so nicknamed because of his passion for cheap Italian epics, the kind which feature brawny Macistes and Hercules rippling obscene biceps beneath dainty togas – ‘and Peplum had it from one of the ticket collectors.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Isabelle, and she tapped her forefinger against the side of her nose.

  The cinephiles had meanwhile dispersed to drink menthes à l’eau in one of the cafés bordering the place du Trocadéro. The light in the garden had turned soft, homogeneous, with not the least breeze to disturb its evenly diffused lustre. Enveloped in this half-light – itself raked at regular intervals by another, more concentrated light, from the Seine’s left bank, the luminous cone balanced like a gyroscope on top of the Eiffel Tower – the shrubbery had begun to grow shadowy, bat-like wings.

  Near the Cinémathèque’s entrance a youthful couple, incongruously bronzed, dressed alike in grey duffel coats and woollen tam o’shanters, sat enlaced on a bench. Imagine Siamese twins joined at the lips. Indifferent to the world which by popular tradition they were causing to revolve, they repeatedly readjusted the angle of their necks, their shoulders, their arms, like acrobats positioning themselves for a triple somersault. So primitive and unashamed was their lovemaking an anthropologist could have mistaken it for some tribal rite of passage – the mating dance of two tans.

  Matthew shivered. The sight of their glowing complexions made him feel whey-faced.

  ‘What are we going to do now?’

  First they would eat, on the Trocadéro esplanade, the sandwiches they had brought for the evening.

  On the slope descending from the esplanade itself to the Seine embankment someone had aligned an evenly spaced row of Coca-Cola bottles, in and out of which the roller-skaters would slalom at terrifying speeds, hunching their bodies backward like nutcrackers and stopping themselves from pitching head first into the river only by the curlicue of a last-minute skid. Wearing a thin blue vest and sawn-off denim shorts, an immensely tall, slender black shoeshine boy, his own burnished skin the best advertisement for his trade, had put his shoe box aside, fastened on a pair of roller-skates and started majestically to skate in a circle, quite erect, his arms raised horizontally on either side of his beautiful body, in the posture of a crucified black Jesus. Sleek silken hair sprouted from the armpits of the Cross.

  They found a sheltered spot overlooking the scene and sat there, dangling their legs and eating their sandwiches.

  It was Isab
elle who spoke. As a Trappist monk takes a vow of silence, she had taken a vow of conversation. She annotated the spectacle that lay spread out at their feet. She played God.

  Insolently staring at a teenage girl with an olive skin, eyes like brown marbles and the inkling of a moustache, she said, ‘Now, whatever you think of her, and I agree she won’t be to everyone’s taste, I simply can’t imagine God creating the world without including at least one example of that type. No?’

  Or, of a daydreaming youth, blond and bespectacled, the transparent rims of whose glasses tempered a slightly too piercing gaze, ‘I daresay I’d have given him finer cheekbones’ – meaning, if I were God – ‘but, really, the overall effect is not bad, not bad at all.’

  Or else, of this amazing pair walking near the fountains – two albino and apparently blind brothers, identical twins, in their thirties, both dressed in exactly the same fashion, both carrying white canes which they tapped in time together, left, right, left, right, as smartly drilled as guardsmen – ‘Well! I must say, I’d never have thought of that!’

  It started to rain. Isabelle, who couldn’t bear ‘weather that touches me’, insisted they take the metro, even if the two boys would have preferred to saunter along the quays of the Seine.

  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. Fo
r 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.