The Dreamers (2 page)

Did Matthew love Théo and Isabelle? In truth, what he had fallen in love with was some facet which was shared by both of them equally,
something
identical in them, even if as twins they were not identical, something which would dart to one face, then to the other, depending on an expression or a trick of the light or the angle at which a head was cocked.

Naturally, he never spoke to either of the avenue Hoche. He would have died before confessing that he went to confession.

‘Have you seen the King?'

‘Yeah, yeah, I think so.'

‘Well?'

‘I don't remember it as anything special. It's not a patch on the Borzage.'

What Théo meant by ‘the King' was
Seventh Heaven,
a melodrama made in the nineteen-thirties by a
Hollywood
film director named Henry King. The same story had been filmed before by another director, Frank Borzage, but it was King's version they had come to see. During the month of March the Cinémathèque was
programming
a retrospective of his work.

But why should they wish to see a film that, according to Matthew, was nothing special? Actually, it would no more have occurred to them to miss it than it would occur to the reader of a newspaper to cancel his order after an issue of unexciting news. They were not there to judge. They saw themselves, rather, as friends, or guests, of the white screen that would become, for ninety
minutes
or so, in the manner of an embassy, part of American soil.

As the three of them walked down the path towards the Cinémathèque, they were talking shop: which is to say, cinema.

The conversation of the
rats
was indescribable. Even Matthew, for whom such terms in English were
normally
reserved for Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Beethoven, succumbed to the cinephilic temptation to describe any half-decent film as
sublime
, any one better than that a
chef-d’oeuvre
. Yet there was something not
quite plausible about the way in which the words would pass his lips. He couldn’t decide whether or not they ought to be picked up between the ironic pincers of
quotation
marks, just as someone unaccustomed to dining out will hesitate before an array of knives and forks. He failed to understand that words, like money, are subject to a fluctuating rate of exchange and that, at the
Cinémathèque
, the
sublime
and the
chef-d’oeuvre
had long since become overvalued currencies.

Only those who have to translate ideas from one language into another will be sensitive to such nuances. For Théo and Isabelle the discrepancy never arose. Hence there was, to Matthew’s ears, something truly sublime about the ease with which they tossed these superlatives back and forth, rendering them as light as shuttlecocks.

Dazzled, he was afraid he’d be left far behind, that beside their lyricism his own insipid enthusiasm would strike them as damning with faint praise. So he took to agreeing with them. He made it his role to be agreeable.

If Isabelle was flattered by this attitude, she showed no sign of it.

As a matter of fact, he was agreeing with some remark she had made as they approached the Cinémathèque entrance.

‘My little Matthew,’ Isabelle at once snapped back at him, ‘when two people agree, it means one of them is redundant.’

His face clouded, but he knew he would have to go on agreeing with her. He was like the player who would rather fumble the ball on the winning side than score a goal for the losers.

‘I never thought of that before,’ he answered
helplessly
, ‘but of course you’re right.’

She stared at him. ‘Oh God, you’re incurable.’

‘Stop teasing him,’ Théo chided her. ‘Can’t you see he hates it?’

‘Nonsense. He adores it. He’s a glutton – no, a gourmet – for punishment.’

Matthew stared back at this terrible young woman whom he loved in his fashion.

‘You despise me, I know,’ he said.

‘
Au contraire
,’ she replied, ‘I think you’re awfully nice. We both do. You really are the nicest person we know. Isn’t he, Théo?’

‘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 Isabelle 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.