The Dreamers (15 page)

Into this ravaged landscape, one paradoxically both lunar and moonlit, one that, from a bird’s eye view,
criss-crossed
by its barricades, resembled nothing so much as a chessboard, came Théo, Isabelle and Matthew.

From Charles’s flat – he himself had left home two hours before – they had walked along the quays of the Left Bank, along the quai d’Orsay, the quai Voltaire and the quai de Conti, until they had turned into the rue Saint-Jacques, at the foot of which they stood together for a few minutes. It was saturated with tear gas. Its street lamps wore mauve haloes. Its houses, shuttered, incurious, felt as unfamiliar to them as those of a city, a Zürich or a Barcelona, to which they were paying a visit for the first time.

Advancing towards the battle, they saw, ahead of them, Zeppelin-heavy clouds of smoke in a blood-red
sky. Whenever a flare shot up and fell back to the earth in a spill of cascading sparks, it would spotlight, as though for their sakes alone, some act of individual courage and self-sacrifice: a young girl beating with her fists the chest of a policeman who had smashed the knuckles of her male companion; a middle-aged
householder
in cardigan and slippers rushing down into the street to help a group of demonstrators overturn a car, perhaps his own.

They continued on their way.

Somehow, miraculously, darting from the left
pavement
to the right and back again, ducking inside empty, unoccupied doorways, sprinting through streets and squares, Théo forging ahead, Isabelle and Matthew
trying
to keep pace with him – as, so long ago, they had sprinted through the corridors and salons of the Louvre, as though that race had been the dress rehearsal for this one – they reached the barricade in the place Edmond-Rostand. Under the cross of another chemist’s they
flattened
themselves against a stained mattress which was propped up on wooden crates and out of which wisps of white wool protruded like tufts of white hair inside an old man’s ear. As they crouched there, a trellis of
shadows
rimmed the smoky infuscation of their eyes.

The light from the CRS torches spattered the walls, the barricade, the faces behind the barricade, with stars, haloes, snow-blots. Here and there, an image, the
fragment
of an image, a mere detail, privileged at random, stood out, a gaping mouth, a crudely bandaged
forearm
, a surreptitiously exchanged kiss, a finger pointing – but why? at what? at whom? Sounds were heard, a grating laugh, a cry of ‘CRS-SS! CRS-SS!’ or ‘De Gaulle Ass-ass-in! De Gaulle Ass-ass-in!’, but heard as though badly dubbed on to a film’s soundtrack.

Hours passed or seemed to pass.

Three, four, five times, the CRS attempted to breach the lines, only three, four, five times to be driven back. Tear gas canisters winged over the barricade and visors were drawn up. Householders opened windows high above the demonstrators’ heads, throwing down towels for their protection, fetching basins and jugs, filling them up and returning to their balconies to pour the contents into the street, for ice-cold water is known to attenuate the effects of tear gas.

Near the barricade behind which Théo, Isabelle and Matthew crouched, and under a street light which cast a halo at her feet, a young black woman was being
subjected
to interrogation by a trio of CRS officers. While the other two blew into their cupped hands and flapped their arms against their sides to keep warm, one of them would shove her repeatedly against the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens. Whenever the young woman's head struck a railing, all three would count out in chorus, ‘…
et trois
…
et quatre
…
et cinq
…
et six
…'

Incensed, provoked beyond forbearance, she finally pulled off a glove and with her long, lacquered
fingernails
engraved four parallel scratches down her assailant's cheek, scratches so profound they could be seen, or nearly, from the barricade on the opposite side of the square.

The CRS officer squealed in pain. Gingerly, he drew a finger along the scratches and inspected the beadlet of blood on its tip. Bellowing ‘Salope!' at the young woman, he gave her a vicious jab in the abdomen with his riot-gun. Staggering, shrieking, whimpering like a tortured animal, she lurched forward on to the pavement, one
net-stockinged
leg upswung at a freakish angle atop the other, like that of a cat performing its toilet.

This was too much for Théo. Oblivious of the rockets, flares and canisters overhead, he stood up and rushed
over to the scene. At the very last minute the officer brusquely turned his head. Théo thrust his knee into the man's crotch, hard enough for him to feel it jellifying under his kneecap.

The officer's face decomposed into a piece of
crumpled
waste paper.

Then, fatally, Théo hesitated. He couldn't decide what to do next. He ought to have run the gauntlet of the rue Médicis or else sought refuge inside one of the houses behind him or shinned over the railings into the
Luxembourg
Gardens to make his escape by its south gates. Instead of which, he continued to stand rigid, the living embodiment of Zeno's paradox, waiting, almost expecting, almost begging, to be apprehended by the two policemen who were only yards away from him and who, an instant later, had him prostrate, his palms swallow-cupped on his crotch.

At the sight of their truncheons hammering her
brother
's body, Isabelle clutched her face in her hands. No longer caring to what hazards she would be exposing herself, she quickly picked her way along the top of the barricade, stumbled, fell, grazed her knees, her ankles, the backs of her hands, slid down the other side and ran to his aid.

Now Matthew was alone. His heart pressed on the accelerator, tore ahead, out of control. He struggled to collect his wits. A diversion, he said to himself. His friends were being hurt, were being beaten. What was needed was a diversion.

He looked frantically through the enveloping shades, searching for a weapon, for a prop of some kind.

Suddenly he noticed, on the ridge of the barricade, that a red flag, planted between two oblong slices of iron grating, had been knocked over by Isabelle.
Unattended
, it lay flat, inert, across the paving stones.

He remembered the duffel-coated Pasionaria. This memory gave him the courage he already possessed. He would once more raise the flag. He would create a diversion so that Théo and Isabelle might flee to safety.

Without further hesitation, he scaled the barricade, lifted up the flag and swung it high above his head. Then, failing to understand that the word
Fin
was advancing towards him like a train emerging from a tunnel, he started to sing.

A shot rang out.

Brandishing the flag, Matthew turned into his own statue.

On the far side of the barricade, a CRS officer stared in disbelief at his machine-gun. He held it at arm's length and seemed only just to have realised that it was loaded. He pulled off his tear-gas mask. In spite of this mask there were tears in his eyes.

‘I couldn't help it!' he cried. ‘I couldn't help it!'

Matthew turned aside from him and fell forward in a heap.

Fighting free of their captors, over whom the shot appeared to have cast a spell, Théo and Isabelle ran to where Matthew was lying, knelt down on either side of him and cradled his head.

He opened his mouth. His tongue hung slack on his lower lip. It was flecked with foam.

In his contorted features they could read the terrible truth that one not only dies alone, one
dies alive
.

He tried to speak.

But, even in death, Matthew would remember too late, much too late, what it was he intended to say.

Though, as we grow older, we have fewer reasons for hope or happiness, fewer of those which do remain to us will turn out to be illusory.

It was a dry evening in early October. A squally wind having blown up from the Seine, the roller-skaters’ Coca-Cola bottles spiralled off the Trocadéro esplanade as skittishly as flat pebbles over a river. The Eiffel Tower sparkled like a neon sign.

That evening the Cinémathèque was so crowded that the
rats
who had failed to find unoccupied seats were authorised, just this once, in defiance of fire-
hazard
regulations, to sit wherever there was room, on the flight of steps leading down into the auditorium, along the aisles, on the carpet under the screen’s vertical vastness. As for those who had arrived altogether too late, they continued to throng the foyer and the
staircase
, forlornly toying with the praxinoscopes and the shadowboxes and the magic lanterns, hoping that a seat might even then become vacant for them, that someone already seated might be seized by an
epileptic
fit.

Thwarted by concerted protests, protests which had been amplified by the events of the spring, de Gaulle had finally been obliged to reinstate Langlois as the
Cinémathèque’s curator. Those two national
institutions
, Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, had been reunited.

When Langlois walked on to the Cinémathèque’s stage, the whole house rose to its feet to acknowledge the prodigal’s return with a spontaneous ovation.

He introduced François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud, the director and star of
Baisers volés
, the film to be presented that evening
en avant-première
. They too were applauded. Then, the lights dimming, the curtains parted reluctantly from their embrace.

To everyone’s amazement, the film opened with a shot of the avenue Albert-de-Mun and the path running parallel to it into the garden of the Cinémathèque. Superimposed on this shot, in Truffaut’s own handwriting, was a dedication: ‘
Baisers
volés
est dédié à la
Cinémathèque
Française d’Henri Langlois.’ The camera then slowly panned towards the Cinémathèque’s entrance, closing in on the padlocked grille and the sign
Fermé
attached to it. A salvo of applause greeted the allusion and a ripple of emotion swept through the auditorium. Some members of the audience rose to their feet as before and cheered. Others wept.

On the soundtrack, as the credit titles unrolled, the voice of Charles Trenet was heard:

Had the needle stuck?

If it had, it was for just two members of the audience.
They were seated in the very front row and, as they
listened
to Trenet, their eyes glittered like those of their neighbours. Their tears, however, when they came, welled up from quite another source.

The first version of the novel you’ve just been reading was published in 1988 under the title
The Holy Innocents
. It was my own first novel, one with which, although it received a good press on the whole – a few reviewers were ecstatic, a few were dismissive, most were
in-between
– I was at the time of publication, for several reasons, profoundly dissatisfied and remained so ever after. So much so that when, almost at once, my agent received a proposal from a film company, I told him
categorically
to refuse it. And when, over the years,
producers
continued to show interest, I asked that I not even be kept informed of who they were and what they were offering. (I am, in this one sense, a yes-man, in that I tend to find it easier to say yes than no.)

My agent respected my request until the spring of 2001, when he finally caved in. He felt (rightly, as it
happens
) that I would wish to know not just that an offer had been made by Jeremy Thomas, the most
adventurous
and least parochial by far of contemporary British
film producers (
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, The Last Emperor, Crash
and so forth), but that it had been made on behalf of a filmmaker for whom I had an enormous admiration, Bernardo Bertolucci.

I accepted the offer and also accepted Bernardo’s and Jeremy’s suggestion that I myself screenwrite the
adaptation
: the offer, because I couldn’t think of a single
filmmaker
in the world who struck me as having a greater affinity with the novel’s themes than Bernardo; the suggestion because it gave me an opportunity
concurrently
with my screenwriting assignment to rewrite – or rather, as in a palimpsest, to
overwrite
– that first version with which I was so unhappy. (There was equally the fact – let’s be honest – that I stood to make a lot of money.) The new, changed title,
The Dreamers
, was mine, but the impetus to drop the original came from

Bernardo, who cared for it as little as I myself had come to do. It was to be the first of innumerable changes. Bernardo’s film now exists. If the reader has already seen it, he or she will realise that this book, although much closer to the film than the first version, is not at all what is termed a novelisation. That is deliberate. And perhaps I can explain why by way of a whimsical little analogy. If one wears dark grey trousers, let’s say, and a
jacket which is also grey,
but not exactly the same grey
, the result looks awkward and inelegant, almost as though one were hoping to pass the ensemble off as a suit. Far better to wear a jacket in a different colour altogether. So with a novel and its cinematic adaptation.

So, too, with my novel and Bernardo’s film. They may be twins but – just like my own fictional siblings, Théo and Isabelle – they’re not identical.

G.A.

April 2003