Things and A Man Asleep (7 page)

Let us take a young man who does a year or two at university, then completes his military service honourably.

Around the age of twenty-five, there he is, as naked as the day he was born, although he is also, by virtue of his education, already in virtual possession of more money than he ever wished for. That is to say, he knows with certainty that the day will come when he will have his flat in the city, his country cottage, his car, his hi-fi. It so happens, however, that these elating promises continue to evade his actual grasp. By their very nature they belong to a process which also includes, if you care to think about it, marriage, parenthood, a change in values, social attitudes and patterns of personal behaviour. In short, our young man will have to settle down, and it will take him fifteen years.

Such a prospect is not comforting. No-one embarks upon it without protest. For Christ's sake, our young lad thinks, am I going to have to spend my days behind these glass walls instead of going for walks in flowery meadows? am I going to catch myself hoping the night before each promotion exercise? am I going to calculate, connive, champ my bit, me, who used to dream of poetry, of night trains, of warm sandy beaches? And, taking it mistakenly to be a consolation, he falls into the trap of hire-purchase. Then he is caught, well and truly caught. All he can do is to gird up his patience. Alas, when he gets to the end of his troubles, our young man is no longer quite so young, and, to cap his misfortune, it can even seem to him that his life is behind him, that it consisted only of his striving and not of what he strove for, and even if he is too cautious, too sensible - his slow climb has given him plenty of experience - to dare to say such things to himself, it will none the less be true that he will be forty, and straightening out his home and his weekend place and his children's education will have filled more than adequately the few hours he will have been able to spare from his work . . .

Impatience, thought Jérôme and Sylvie, is a twentieth- century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, etc., they realised they would not have the strength to wait. Like anyone else, they could have made it; but all they wanted was to have it made. That is probably the sense in which they were what are commonly called intellectuals.

For everything contradicted them, beginning with life itself. They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership. They wanted to stay free, and virtually innocent, but time went by notwithstanding, and brought them nothing. The others ended up seeing wealth as an end in itself, but as for them, they didn't have any money at all.

They told themselves they weren't the worst off. Perhaps they were right. But modern life irritated their misfortune whilst it erased the misfortunes of others: the others were on the right track. Jérôme and Sylvie didn't amount to much: penny-scrabblers, freelancers, flitters. On the other hand, time, in a certain sense, was actually on their side, they had an image of a possible world which could seem exhilarating. But this, they agreed, was, by way of consolation, pretty small beer.

VI

They had put down roots in a temporary soil. They did their work in the way others study, choosing their own hours. They could waste time like only students can.

But on all sides dangers lurked. They would have liked their story to be a story of happiness; but more often than not it was a tale of happiness under threat. They were still young, but the years were going by fast. An old student is a gruesome thing; a burnt-out case is more gruesome still. They were afraid.

They had free time; but time was also working against them. There were bills for gas, electricity and the telephone that had to be paid. Every day they had to eat. They had to have clothes, they had to redecorate, change the sheets, take the washing to the laundry, gets shirts ironed, buy shoes, catch the train, buy furniture.

Money, sometimes, consumed them entirely. They did not stop thinking about it. Even their emotional life, to a considerable extent, depended on it directly. There was every reason to think that when they had a little wealth, when they got a breathing space, their shared happiness was indestructible, no constraint appeared to limit their love. Their tastes, imagination, new ideas and appetites blended indistinguishably into freedom. But these were privileged moments; more often they had to struggle: at the first signs of overspending, quite often they would rise up against each other. They would clash over nothing, for a wasted one hundred old francs, for a pair of stockings, for not doing the washing-up. Then for hours on end, for whole days at a stretch, they stopped speaking to each other. They would dine hurriedly, opposite one another, each for himself, for herself, not looking. They would sit at opposite ends of the sofa, half-turning their backs on each other. One or the other would play patience, interminably.

Money stood like a barrier between them. It was a wall, a kind of buffer they banged against at every turn. It was something worse than poverty: a narrow, straitened, exiguous absence of ease. They inhabited the closed world of their closed lives, without a future, without openings other than impossible miracles, stupid dreams which wouldn't hold water. They were suffocating. They felt they were sinking.

They could of course talk of other things, about a recent book, a theatre director, about the war in Algeria or about people, but it sometimes felt as if their only
real
conversations were about money, comfort and happiness. That was when their voices would rise, the tension grow. They would talk and, as they talked, they would feel just how impossible, unreachable and paltry these things were. They would grow irritated; they were over-anxious; they would feel implicitly challenged, each by the other. They would dream up holiday plans, travel plans, plans for the flat, and then tear them down, rabidly: it would seem as if what was most real in their lives would then appear in its true light as something without substance, something absent. So they would fall silent, and their silence was full of rancour; they resented life and sometimes were weak enough to resent each other; they remembered their messed-up degrees, their unappealing holidays, their drab life, their cluttered flat, their impossible dreams. They would look at each other, they would find the other partner ugly, badly dressed, graceless, crumpled. Beside them, in the street, cars slid slowly on. In the city squares, the neon lights flashed in turn. At the café terraces, people looked like complacent fish. They hated the world. They went home on foot, tired out. They went to bed without saying a word.

If some day something were to give way, such as an agency going out of business or their being seen as too old, or too unreliable in their work, or one of them falling ill, that was all it would take for everything to come tumbling down. They had no prospects, no reserves. Their minds often turned to this subject, anxiously. They would come back to it incessantly, in spite of themselves. They could see themselves out of work for months on end, taking on penny jobs just to survive, borrowing, begging. Then, sometimes, they would experience moments of intense despair. They would dream of offices, of established posts, of regular hours, of proper contracts of employment. But these reversed images threw them into perhaps even greater despair. They just could not, so they thought, recognise themselves in the face of a desk-bound executive, however splendid his apparel. They decided that they detested hierarchies, and that solutions, miraculous or other, would come from elsewhere, from the world, from History. They went on in their bumpy way; it fitted their natural inclination. In an imperfect world, of this they convinced themselves easily, it was not by any means the most imperfect way. They lived for the day; in six hours they would spend what it had taken three days to earn; they often borrowed; they ate ghastly French fries, smoked their last cigarette between them, sometimes spent two hours looking for a spare metro ticket, wore recycled shirts, listened to scratched records, hitch-hiked to get places,

and, quite frequently still, put off changing the sheets for five or six weeks. They were quite near to believing that, all in all, this kind of life was not without its charm.

VII

When they talked to each other about their kind of living, their way of life, their future - when they surrendered themselves in a kind of frenzy, and entirely, to an orgy of better worlds - they sometimes said, with a rather hollow melancholy, that they had not sorted things out properly in their minds. They saw the world through muddled eyes, and the clarity they proclaimed as a value was often accompanied by indecisive fluctuations, ambiguous compromises and assorted other considerations which modulated, minimised or even undermined entirely what were, quite obviously still, their good intentions.

It seemed to them that there they had found a path, or an absence of path, which defined them perfectly, and not just them but all those of their age. Earlier generations, they would sometimes tell each other, had probably found it possible to reach a fuller awareness of themselves and of the world they lived in. They would have liked, perhaps, to have been twenty during the Spanish Civil War, or during the Resistance: in fact, they talked about it a great deal; it seemed to them that the problems facing people then, the problems they imagined people facing, were clearer, even if the need to respond had turned out to be more pressing. As for themselves, the questions that faced them were all booby-traps.

Their nostalgia was slightly hypocritical. The Algerian war had begun with them and was being pursued before their eyes. It hardly affected them; they took action on occasions, but they rarely felt obliged to do so. For years they didn't imagine that their lives, their future, their ideas might one day be turned upside down by it. But that is what happened, up to a point, at one time in the past: in their student days they had come to participate more spontaneously and often almost enthusiastically in the meetings and street demonstrations which had greeted the outbreak of the war, the call-up of the reserve, and, especially, the coming of Gaullism. In those days there seemed to be a connection, directly established, between what they did in their own small sphere and what they aimed to do. And you couldn't really reproach them for having been, as it turned out, quite wrong: the war didn't cease, Gaullism didn't go away. Jérôme and Sylvie dropped their studies. In advertising circles - which were generally located by quasi-mythical tradition to the left of centre, but were rather better defined by technocracy, the cult of efficiency, modernity, complexity, by the taste for speculating on future trends and by the more demagogic strain in sociology, as well as by the still very widespread opinion that nine-tenths of the population were fools just able to sing the praises of anything or anybody in unison — in advertising circles, then, it was fashionable to despise all merely topical political issues and to grasp History in nothing smaller than centuries. It happened to be the case, furthermore, that Gaullism was an adequate response, an infinitely more dynamic response than people had at first declared far and wide that it would be, and that its danger lay always in some other place than the one where people thought they had found it.

The war dragged on all the same, even if they saw it only as an episode, as a fact of an almost secondary nature. They had a bad conscience about it, of course. But their feeling of responsibility went no deeper than their memory of having been affected by it in the past, than a virtually automatic allegiance to moral imperatives of a very broad and unspecific kind. Such indifference could have given them a measure of the true strength of many of their bursts of passion - of their pointlessness, even perhaps of their gutlessness. But the real question lay elsewhere. They had watched with something approaching surprise as some of their old friends got themselves involved, cautiously or wholeheartedly, in helping the FLN, the Algerian freedom fighters. They hadn't really grasped why, and could not manage to take seriously either the romantic explanation (which tended, rather, to make them smile) or the political explanation, which passed their understanding almost entirely. As for themselves, they had solved the problem far more simply: Jérôme and three of his friends, relying on valuable contacts in high places and fraudulent doctors' certificates, had managed to get themselves exempted from military service in time, on health grounds.

Yet it was the war in Algeria and the war alone which for almost two years protected them from themselves. After all, they might have aged less well, or less slowly. But it was not by their own decisions, nor by acts of their own volition, nor even, whatever they might have claimed, by their sense of humour that they succeeded for some considerable time in deferring a future which they painted, self-indulgently, in blackest hue. The events of 1961 and 1962 - from the Algiers generals' putsch to the massacre at Charonne metro station - which heralded the end of the war enabled them, temporarily but with uncommon effectiveness, to forget, or rather, to suspend their habitual concerns. Their gloomiest forecasts, their fear of never making it, of ending up in some obscure and narrow rut, looked a good deal less dreadful, on some days, than what was happening before their eyes, than what threatened them day by day.

Those were sad and violent times. Housewives stocked up with sugar in kilos, bottles of cooking oil, tins of tuna, coffee and condensed milk. Squads of helmeted security policemen in shiny black waterproof capes and service boots patrolled at ease up and down Boulevard Sebastopol, carrying cavalry rifles.

Because the back seats of their cars were often strewn with a few out-of-date issues of newspapers which some touchy individuals could be expected to consider demoralising, subversive or just plain liberal -
Le
Monde
, Libération, France-Observateur
- Jérôme and Sylvie and their friends fell prey on occasions to furtive fears and worrying hallucinations: they were being followed, their number-plates were being taken down, they were being watched, being framed: five wine-sodden foreign legionnaires were going to set upon them and leave them for dead in a dark alley, on the rain-washed pavement, in a neighbourhood of ill repute . . .