The Sea Came in at Midnight (8 page)

Then there was a sound from out in the street.

It was the night of 6 May 1968, or to be exact 3:02 in the morning of 7 May. The shot that woke me woke the modern age. Echoed down the rue Saint-Jacques to the boulevard Saint-Germain and the university a few blocks beyond, where a few thousand students had taken over, thrown out the professors, draped red and black flags over the statues of Hugo and Pasteur, hoisted banners that read
FORBID THE FORBIDDEN
and
BELOW THE BOULEVARD, THE BEACH,
and waited as what seemed like tens of thousands of cops surrounded the school waiting in turn. Who knows what any of them took the sound of the gunshot to be. Years later, for everything that’s been written about it, there’s no record of any student having a gun, and the police weapon of choice was the truncheon, when it wasn’t a tank … did the cops really think some student had fired a gun? Did the students really think some lone cop had fired a gun? Maybe they thought it was the snap of a truncheon across some anonymous body. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the least. Maybe in the early-morning hours what mattered was the sound’s sheer explosiveness not its source, and it cracked the waiting in two—and cracked in two there could be no waiting anymore. The cops charged.

Upstairs in our flat Mama, half hysterical, held me in the dark of the hall and I could smell gunfire through the door of their bedroom, open just enough so I could see in the light of the bed lamp my father standing there holding his head in his hands. A lifeless feminine arm jutted into view. Bedlam exploded in the streets. Tearing myself from Mama I ran downstairs as she chased after me, and in the dark of the rue Dante up and down the rue Saint-Jacques people were yelling and running, ripping cobblestones up from the road, hurling them aimlessly, pushing cars over on their sides and setting them on fire. Cops were swinging at everything. They surged against the sidewalks, uprooted the chestnut trees. Glass glistened everywhere. Tear gas canisters rolled in the gutters. The air was thick with fumes and smoke and there was a chant in the distance I didn’t recognize as
Métro boulot dodo
till I read it in the papers later.

It meant, more or less,
subway, work, sleep—a
bitter reduction of everything the modern age had become. It was the moment when the meaning of the modern age unraveled. In the years leading up to this moment there was an incontrovertible moral logic to upheaval, upheaval was the instrument of morally distinct aspirations, whatever you thought of those aspirations. In the minutes before 3:02 on the morning of the seventh of May, the students who seized the Sorbonne did so on behalf of complaints that ceased to matter at all by 3:03 … by 3:04 upheaval lost all rationale, it was the expression of a spiritual chaos no politics could address; by 3:07 I was running in my underwear in the street, sprung loose of moral meaning along with everyone else, time exploding in a void of meaning; at 3:08 I turned to see Mama behind me in the door of our apartment building, not running after me but just looking as if to commit me as fast to memory as the moment allowed. And then she just walked from the doorway into the crowd as calmly as everyone else around me ran insanely. …

I stopped and said, Mama? and stepped toward her, when someone knocked me over. When I picked myself up, she was gone.

T
HERE I AM CRYING
in the street. Around me there’s a sound that’s more than just the collective voice of upheaval, it’s the collective voice of the age growing into a din like I wouldn’t hear again for years … the louder it grew the louder I tried to call her, till I was screaming so loud finally my voice was gone. It would be seven years before I got it back.

Timelines of chaos! Anarchy of the age! It wasn’t possible everything could have happened in that one night, it just seemed like one night. Had to have been nights and nights, weeks of nights. … The last lucid memory I had was standing there looking for Mama in the riot, then turning back to the doorway of our building on the rue Dante waiting for her to come back and somehow knowing she wasn’t going to come back. And I wasn’t going back upstairs, back to the gun on the floor and the smoke in the hall and my father in the bedroom, so I took off down the boulevard Saint-Germain in the direction of the very café where I would meet Angie years later, and up the boulevard in waves I could see them in the streetlights, tanks rolling, cops marching. In their black helmets in the night they looked headless, thousands of headless cops snapping truncheons in their hands and a sound from the helmets like black hail bouncing off, handfuls of bolts and nuts thrown by students. I traveled below the sight lines of chaos. I moved unscathed, except to be drenched by erupting water mains and buckets of water that Parisians in the upstairs windows kept dumping on the students below, whether to douse or revive their fury I never knew—I don’t think they even knew. Medical students in white frocks streaked with blood ran back and forth shouting at everyone to calm down, but no one wanted to calm down, the spectacular disintegration of everything was too exhilarating, and now everyone existed just to be exhilarated.

The smell of exhilaration’s smoke settled over everything. From one end of the city to the other … but I never found it as overpowering as the smoke in the hall of our flat that last time.
That
was the smell of years to come. What would have been one of the more sensational murder trials in modern France just happened to coincide with the country’s most anarchic days since 1871, if not the last years of the Eighteenth Century, so, busy picking through the rubble of the following weeks, France barely noticed. The dead girl in my parents’ bed was a literature student at the Sorbonne, part of the protest only hours before she was shot, maybe destined to be cut down by a charging cop, dying for anarchy instead of desire. I’d seen her once before, actually, one afternoon when I was with my parents at the Deux Magots. She was a couple of tables over, red hair and freckles and a smile I still remember. The position of the gun on the bedroom floor near her hand indicated the possibility of suicide, maybe like it was meant to, a conclusion the police rejected when they charged my father with second-degree murder. He went first to trial then prison stonily and uncharacteristically silent. The romantic in him, compelled by a personal code that was narcissistic at heart but still had its occasional heroic results, I guess, may have been protecting Mama after she caught the girl in bed with him and killed her. It wasn’t till years later it occurred to me it might have been Mama, sick of her silent suffering and feeling unleashed in a Paris flirting with havoc, who was in bed with the girl, something my egomaniac father would have been too proud to explain to anyone let alone police and newspapers, and which wouldn’t have absolved him in any case.

In any case Mama disappeared. Into the Apocalyptic Age! Into the Secret Millennium! The next couple months, as the country descended into disorder, the closest exit out of France was Belgium and you had to get there first, presumably on foot since no cars drove because they had no gas, no trains ran because they were on strike, no planes flew because they were grounded. … I never saw her again, or my father. I was shuffled around a while among friends in Paris, then shipped back to New York and New England to be shuffled among friends there. Didn’t communicate with my father in prison before leaving Europe, hadn’t communicated with him when word came of his death—by then I was sixteen, deposited at a commune in upstate New York and finding the loss of my voice altogether convenient … when I got the letter, I read it once, and went into town to catch a movie. I was unmoved by the lost opportunity of reconciliation—let’s say I never would have believed it. Let’s say I saw nothing to reconcile. Let’s say I’m a monster.

Years later, after I married Angie, the day we moved to the house in the Hollywood Hills, I stumbled on a box of letters. Flipping through, I found an empty envelope addressed in a woman’s hand I knew immediately, though I hadn’t seen it since I was eleven. I kept blinking at it as if something would click in my head that explained it. I had no recollection of receiving it. Though the envelope was torn open at the top, I had no recollection of having read it. In a panic I went through the box knowing the letter had to have fallen out, but it wasn’t there. I went through the other boxes and for a long last time stood in the middle of the empty apartment knowing that letter was there somewhere, slipped through some crack, and that if I left now I’d never find it.

Finally, of course, I had to leave. Kept the empty envelope with its postmark faded and obscured, the date lost forever and the origin a tiny French town I never heard of called Sur-les-Bateaux, about twelve kilometers—according to the atlas—from the coast of Brittany.

O
H I’M SORRY. HAVE I SPOKEN TOO LOUDLY? HAVE I RAISED
my voice? Have I taken a tone? Have I transgressed my station in life as chaos assigned it to me, to always exist just above a whisper? Would I have just gone on never living beyond the sound of my own voice, if I hadn’t rescued Jenna’s copy of Gorky from the gutter on Central Park West that spring day in, what, 1975? … I was nineteen. Eighteen. Don’t even remember what I was doing in the city but there I was, and when I picked up the book that slipped from her arms, she gave me as radiant a smile as I was ever going to get from her. Jenna was a card-carrying Stalinist, an exotic and preposterous bird even in the zoo of the Seventies … now, of course, when I think about her at all, which isn’t much, I realize that—dialectical materialism being what it was—the odds of Jenna giving herself to me were always exactly zero. But I didn’t know that. I was historically naive, as she would have been the first to tell you or me or anyone else.

She’d just gotten back from studying abroad in Madrid, where by some machination far too mysterious to divulge to an inescapably bourgeois American boy—the son of a poet, no less: a
bohemian—
she’d gone to Moscow for two weeks as part of some sort of “friendship” program that opened her eyes forever. … All right, I went a little around the bend for Jenna that spring in New York. Followed her to secret meetings and clandestine rendezvous with this or that comrade, at the headquarters of this or that cadre where she would spend the night while I stood on the curb outside counting the windows up the side of the brownstone to the one I decided was hers. …

A stalker is just a particularly dedicated romantic, right? Next morning I’d still be there, slumped against a tree. In a way she gave me back my voice, seven years after it was drowned out by revolution, the anarchic kind that disciplined Stalinists had no use for—gave me back my voice albeit in whispers and mutters, and I sat up nights rewriting her speeches for her, the language of her convictions having either failed those convictions or eluded her altogether. I didn’t believe a word. I didn’t believe a word I wrote or a word I said. I didn’t believe a word I whispered or muttered. I believed in the way I wanted her, and when I realized I wanted her so much I’d mutter or whisper almost any conceivable horseshit for her, I knew I had to get away, and hope my voice went with me.

Got away, back to Europe, where else. To Amsterdam, where I lived in the red-light district above a bakery now converted to a nightclub, with the usual haze of hashish and the house chanteuse who sang nude every night with the broken line of a highway painted up the front of her between her breasts. A month later I got Jenna’s card casually announcing she’d be in Madrid in two weeks, and my instinctive reaction, so fast I barely noticed, was not to go at all. My next was to immediately check out of the hotel and head straight for the central station, where I bought a one-way ticket on the next train out, somehow assuming life would get warmer the farther south I got. … I was a little surprised to find the train getting colder the closer it got to Spain, and by the time I reached the frontier in the middle of the night I was feverish in a way that had nothing to do with her. I had a seat in a second-class compartment with an older Spanish businessman who looked and dressed like he should have been up in the better part of the train, and the whole trip we didn’t say two words until crossing the border, where Spanish soldiers went through my bag and found my bundle of old articles and news photos. One magazine cover in particular, from May ’68, was of a car exploding spectacularly in the Paris streets. Are you a revolutionary? the border guard said very calmly. Once back on the train, I asked the businessman what was going on, was it always like this, the guards and soldiers, and he didn’t say anything, just stared back at me and then back at his newspaper, the same paper he’d been reading for twelve hours, and then without lifting his eyes from the paper, as though speaking to no one at all, he answered, “The General is dying.”

On and on he’d been dying, an endless dying, days and nights, weeks and months, and by the time I got to Madrid police and guns and martial law were everywhere, with everyone else behind closed windows and locked doors. No one was in the streets, no one was in the bars or
tascas
or cafés, even the famed fountains of the city seemed frozen. So it was very deliberately into this Madrid that Jenna came, on orders from some Spanish-lisping apparatchik no doubt, to prepare for and bear witness to the reclamation of a Spain that had slipped from her comrades’ fingers thirty-six years earlier. That it was her Stalinists who had stabbed the Republic in the back while Hitler’s Stukas flew overhead was precisely one of those unseemly loose ends for which history is so conscientiously and completely rewritten from time to time. In Madrid, Jenna was in her element. “Anarchists,” she advised me, “are only bourgeois turned inside out,” but as far as I could tell she thrived in the anarchic Spanish air. If anything it brought out the flushed carnal glow of her, her red lips all the more luscious with paranoia.

I had grown a beard in Amsterdam. … Jenna wasn’t so impressed. She didn’t find it radical or dangerous, in the fashion of glamorous Cubans, but self-indulgent and undisciplined, in the fashion of odious hippies, the dregs of capitalism—first thing she said when she got off the plane was, “Why did you grow that awful beard?” In her very smart little cocked red beret with the little red Soviet star pinned to the front, she had big brown eyes, a moist mouth that glinted with the gold earrings that hung from her strawberry hair, a body capable of evoking such wild and meaningless upheaval as to completely disprove the “science” of her ideological certainties. The Party back home in the States didn’t get so many gorgeous recruits. Actually the Party back home hardly got anyone at all anymore under seventy years old, so already they were grooming her accordingly, to fill the ranks with new recruits, young men in particular, although to anyone giving the matter careful consideration there was an obvious contradiction inherent in the advertising: Comrades! Check it out! Under socialism this is the sort of foxy chick you would get to fuck
if
socialism were as corrupt, decadent and self-indulgent as capitalism! If it was as corrupt, decadent and self-indulgent as capitalism, then the Party could afford to be generous with Jenna’s body since she had already given it her heart, a softer slushier more malleable organ of less functional value than shoulders, back, hands, feet, but certainly more useful than a brain, which could be troublesome when it had an inclination to operate on its own. Jenna’s never presented that problem. Compliant as the Party could ever wish for, Jenna made all the necessary dialectical transitions with utmost agility, even aplomb—the gulags were a myth, the purges a hoax, invasions of various countries a matter between comrades and none of the West’s business, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 a complete invention of the bourgeois press.