Things and A Man Asleep (6 page)

Above all, they had the cinema. And this was probably the only area where they had learned everything from their own sensibilities. They owed nothing to models. Their age and education made them members of that first generation for which the cinema was not so much an art as simply a given fact; they had always known the cinema not as a fledgling art form but, from their earliest acquaintance, as a domain having its own masterworks and its own mythology. Sometimes it seemed as if they had grown up with it, and that they understood it better than anyone before them had ever been able to understand it.

They were cinema buffs. Film was their primordial passion; they indulged it every evening, or nearly. They loved the pictures as long as they were beautiful, entrancing, charming, fascinating. They loved the mastery of space, time and movement, they loved the whirl of New York streets, the torpor of the Tropics, fights in saloon bars. They were not excessively sectarian, like those dull minds which swear only by a single Eisenstein, Bunuel or Antonioni, or even — as there's no accounting for tastes — by Carné, Vidor, Aldrich or Hitchcock; nor were they too eclectic, like those infantile people who throw all critical sense to the winds and acclaim a director as a genius if he makes a blue sky look blue or if the pale red of Cyd Charisse's dress is made to clash with the darker red of Robert Taylor's sofa. They did not lack taste. They were highly suspicious of so-called art movies, with the result that when this term was not enough to spoil a film for them, they would find it even more beautiful (but they would say - quite rightly — that
Marienbad
was "all the same just a load of crap!"); they had an almost exaggerated feeling for Westerns, for thrillers, for American comedies and for those astonishing adventures full of lyrical flights, sumptuous images and dazzling, almost inexplicable beauties such as (the titles were imprinted on their minds for ever)
Lola, Bhowani Junction, The Bad and the Beautiful, Written on the Wind
.

They did not go to concerts at all often, and even less often to the theatre. But they would meet, by chance, at the Film Theatre, at the Passy Cinema, or the Napoleon, or in little local flea-pits - the Kursaal at Gobelins, the Texas at Montparnasse, the Bikini, the Mexico at Place Clichy, the Alcazar at Belleville, and others besides, around Bastille or in the XVth
arrondissement
, graceless, ill- equipped cinemas frequented by the unemployed, Algerians, ageing bachelors, and film buffs, where they would see, in atrociously dubbed French versions, those unknown masterpieces they remembered from when they were fifteen, or those reputed works of genius (they had memorised the entire list) which they had been trying in vain for years to see. They would always remember with wonderment the blessed evening when they had discovered, or rediscovered, almost by chance,
The Crimson Pirate
,
The World in His Arms
,
Night and the
City,
My
Sister Eileen
, or
The Five Thousand Fingers of
Dr T.
Alas, quite often, to tell the truth, they were horribly let down. Films they had waited so long for, as they had thumbed almost feverishly through the new issues of the
Entertainment Guide
every Wednesday, films they had been told by almost everyone were magnificent, sometimes did finally turn out to be showing somewhere. They would turn up, every one of them, on the opening night. The screen would light up, they would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out; they would be sad. It was not the film they had dreamt of. It was not the total film each of them had inside himself, the perfect film they could have enjoyed for ever and ever. The film they would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt, the film they would have liked to live.

V

So that was their life, as they lived it, as their friends lived, in cluttered and charming flats, with their outings and their films, their grand comradely dinner parties and their wondrous plans. They were not unhappy. Fleeting, surreptitious moments of bliss in living lit up their days. Some evenings, after dinner, they would linger at table, to finish off a bottle of wine, nibble some nuts, light cigarettes. Some nights they wouldn't manage to get to sleep and, half sitting up, propped up by pillows, an ashtray shared between them, they would talk until dawn. Some days they would walk and talk for hours on end. They would smile at each other's reflections in shop windows. It would seem to them that everything was perfect. They would walk unconstrainedly, with loose limbs, untouched, it seemed, by the passing of time. Simply being there, in the street, on a crisp, cold, blustery day, wrapped in warm clothing, at dusk, proceeding smartly but unhurriedly towards a place of friendship, was enough to make their smallest gestures - lighting a cigarette, buying a bag of hot chestnuts, negotiating a way through the crowd at a station exit - appear to them as the direct and obvious expression of a boundless bliss.

Or again, on some summer nights they would walk for miles through neighbourhoods they did not know. The moon's round orb would shine high in the sky, casting its velvety light on every thing. The long, wide, empty streets would reverberate with the sound of their footsteps, as they walked all in step. Taxis would go by seldom, slowly, almost noiselessly. On such nights they had the world in their arms. It was unimaginably exhilarating, as if they had been entrusted with fabulous secrets and inexpressible powers. And they would hold hands and begin to run, or to play hopscotch, or to run a hopping race along the pavement, whilst bellowing in unison the great arias of
Cosi fan tutte
or the
B Minor Mass.

Or again, they would push open a door into a small restaurant and joyfully, almost ritually, absorb the ambient warmth, the clutter of cutlery, the clinking of glasses, the muffled sounds of conversation, the inviting whiteness of napkins. They would select their wine punctiliously, unfold their napkins, and then it would seem to them, as they sat in the warm, in a close huddle, smoking a cigarette to be stubbed out in a moment's time when the hors d'oeuvres would arrive, that their life was going to be only the infinite sum of such auspicious momepts, and that they would always be happy, because they deserved to be happy, because they would manage to stay free, because happiness was within them. They would sit facing each other, they were going to eat after having been hungry, and all these things - the thick white tablecloth, the blue blot of a packet of
Gitanes
, the earthenware plates, the rather heavy cutlery, the stem glasses, the wicker basket full of newly baked bread - constituted the ever-fresh setting of an almost visceral pleasure, a pleasure so intense as to verge on numbness: an impression, almost exactly opposite and almost exactly identical to the experience of speed, of a tremendous stability, of tremendous plenitude. From this table set for dinner arose for them the feeling of perfect synchrony: they were in tune with the world, they were swimming in it, in their element, with nothing to fear from it.

Perhaps they were a bit more adept than others at making out or even provoking these auguries of good fortune.

Their ears, their fingers, their palates - permanently on the alert, as it were - lay in wait only for such propitious instants, which could be set off by minute details. But when they surrendered to those feelings of unruffled beatitude, of eternity undisturbed by the slightest ripple, when everything was in balance, deliciously slow, the very intensity of their bliss underlined the ephemerality and fragility of such instants. It did not take much to make it all crumble: the slightest false note, a mere moment's hesitation, a sign that was perhaps too vulgar, and their happiness would be put out of joint; it went back to being what it always had been, a kind of deal, a thing they had bought, a pitiful and flimsy thing, just a second's respite which returned them all the more forcefully to the real dangers, the real uncertainties in their lives, in their history.

The trouble with market researching is that it can't go on for ever. The day was already marked down in Jérôme's and Sylvie's history when they would have to choose between unemployment, or underemployment, on the one side, or, on the other, a fuller kind of involvement in an agency - a full-time job, with executive status. Or else change their careers, find a job in some other line; but that would have only shifted the same problem to another terrain. For if it is commonly accepted that people who have not yet reached thirty may remain relatively independent and work as and when it suits them, even if their availability, openness of mind, the variety of their experience and what is still called their adaptability is sometimes valued, it is on the other hand required, paradoxically, of any potential partner, once he has passed the milestone of his thirtieth birthday (and this is, precisely, what makes your thirtieth birthday a milestone) that he show some evidence of stability, provide some guarantees as to his punctuality, discipline, judicious behaviour. Employers, especially in advertising, not only decline to take on people over the age of thirty-five, they are reluctant to rely on someone who, at the age of thirty, has never been
on the staff.
No question, either, of carrying on using them as if nothing had changed, on short-term contracts: such instability looks unconvincing; at thirty, you owe it to yourself to have got somewhere, or else you are nowhere. And no-one is anywhere unless he has found his niche, built his nest, got his own keys, his own desk, his own little name-plate.

Jérôme and Sylvie thought often about this problem. They still had a few years left, but the life they led, the entirely relative peace they enjoyed, would never be a permanent possession. Everything would crumble progressively; they would have nothing left. They did not feel crushed by their work, they were sure of a living, more or less, for better or worse, taking the rough with the smooth, without their profession consuming the whole of their lives. But that was not destined to last.

You can never remain just a market researcher for very long. Almost as soon as they are trained, researchers rush towards the higher rungs, to become deputy director or director of an agency, or to find one of those coveted jobs in some big firm, as director of, say, recruitment, or staff training, or industrial relations. These are the plum jobs: carpeted offices, two telephones, a dictaphone, a refrigerated cocktail cabinet and even, sometimes, hanging on the wall, a painting by Bernard Buffet.

Alas, said Jérôme and Sylvie to themselves very often and sometimes to each other, you have to work to earn your crust, that's obvious, but if you work you do not live. They thought they had learned that, in years gone by, from experience, of a few weeks' duration. Sylvie had become a filing clerk in a market research consultancy, whilst Jérôme coded and decoded interview questionnaires. Their working conditions were more than pleasant. They turned up when they liked, read the newspapers in the office, went down for a beer or a coffee quite often, and they even felt a degree of liking for the work they performed in dilatory fashion, led on as they were by an exceedingly vague promise of proper employment on a regular contract and accelerated promotion. But they didn't stick it out for very long. They were atrociously grumpy on getting up; full of resentment every evening, going home on the overcrowded metro; they would slump onto their sofa, dog- tired and dirty, and do nothing but dream of long weekends, free days and not getting up in the morning.

They felt locked in, trapped, done for. They could not resign themselves to such a fate. They still believed that masses of things could happen to them, that it was the fixed daily hours of work, the unending sequence of days and weeks that made the straitjacket which they did not hesitate to describe as infernal. It was, all the same, and whatever else might be said about it, the start of a fine career: it held out good prospects for them; they were at that epic stage when the boss assesses you as a youngster, feels privately pleased with himself for having taken you on, gets straight down to training you, to shaping you in his own image, invites you to dinner, gives you a friendly thump, and, with a wave of his hand, opens your door to fortune.

They were stupid - how many times did they repeat to themselves that they were stupid, that they were wrong, that they were in any case no more right than the others, the ones who hang on determinedly and climb? - but they liked their long days of idleness, their lazy wakings, their mornings in bed, with a pile of detective novels and science-fiction beside them, they liked their walks in the night, down by the riverside, and the almost elating sense of freedom that they felt on some days, the feeling of holiday time which overcame them each time they got back from a campaign in the provinces.

Of course they knew that was all wrong, that their freedom was just a will o' the wisp. Their lives were much more marked by almost panic-stricken hunting for work each time (and there were many) one of the agencies they worked for went bust or got taken over by a bigger firm, by their days before pay when cigarettes had to be counted out one by one, by the time it took, on some days, to get invited out for a meal.

They were right in the middle of the most idiotic, the most ordinary predicament in the world. But knowing it was idiotic and ordinary did not prevent them being right in it. Long ago, they had let slip, work and freedom had ceased to be strict opposites; all the same, it was that opposition which was, for them, the determining factor.

People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their
real
plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jérôme and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin.