 |
| author Carol Rose |
My May 1968 Part One
by Carol Rose
Today it is May 1998, my hourly companion,
the faithful France Culture radio
station, has begun to speak of May 1968 in reverent tones; an historical event,
without any doubt, which had changed France irrevocably.
First of all the awareness of time having
passed likitysplit’ — thirty years had gone by — then it hit me that the manner
I had lived this string of events did not jibe with the reverence in the
speaker’s voice. It struck me as odd as
I had not been particularly aware at the time of having lived closely through
any major event and yet there I had been in the midst of things I barely
understood.
I understood the excitement
of the daily marches taking place on the Avenue in front of our courtyard. I longed to be out there to join in the
upsetting fun. The pharmacist at the
corner on the Place Denfert Rochereau was very mocking of me for he realized
how I was longing to be free to join the crowd.
He was appalled by the chaos, the total disorder of the meetings of
workers and students which usually originated or ended in front of his
shop. People shouting slogans would
climb up onto the Lion de Denfert and wave red anarchist flags.
Meanwhile, in the courtyard where we occupied
an old house with two little children, the concierge, Madame Libé, was fearful
and scandalized by the goings-on. We
would stand on the sidewalk of the Avenue, she dressed in purple, wringing her
hands at the events taking place before us.
I, a little child on each hand,
was not seeing any danger whatsoever in the quite orderly demonstrators
marching by with their slogans and banners.
One child wanted to know where all the people were going..
The demonstrators would be full of enthusiasm
when they began at Denfert and rancorous when they ended at Denfert coming all
the way from the Place de la République.
Occasionally I would take
advantage of Madame Libé’s offer to keep the children and walk up to the Place
after the main crowds had left only some workers and students in conversations
which struck me as being spoken in two different languages. One, the rather casual language of the kids who, when addressing the
workers, tried to put themselves on the same level by speaking slangy French
(“c’est vachement important!” they emphasized to the workers); the workers’
speech was far more formal if grammatically quite different.
The students were, so to speak, my
neighbors. In the courtyard lived an
upper middle class1 bunch of twentyish kids some of whose parents were
absent diplomats , retirees, professional people and the one example of the
proletariat, Madame Libé. Our absent ambassador landlord had marched all of his
grandchildren out into the courtyard one day to inform them that it was she who
ruled the roost and that they had to obey without complaint. Thanks to his absence we occupied one of
their houses. Some of them had inherited
fortunes, others were being supported by the parents. We, my husband and I, were the only young
people who worked. Well, he worked in a
Wall Street based law firm and I stayed home to care for the children; I worked far longer hours than he but this
was not considered to be work except by me.
The courtyard itself was unusual in that,
behind the main building giving onto the Avenue through a porte cochère, there
were brick and plaster houses of different sizes, each with a front garden
stretching inwards and backing onto a larger public garden of the Paris
Observatory. It did not seem as if we
were in a city at all and the life inside this large space was intimate yet
private. An alley separated its two
sets of houses so that all comings and goings were visible. A kind of formal courtesy reined so that no
one really impinged on anyone else.
There was a lack of any sort of familiarity except for the contact the
passing adults had with all the little children who numbered about 12 and were
all ages, sizes and shapes. This crowd
of kids could play outside in their own various gardens but did not really
circulate in the others’ houses until
during and after the events of May because the parents were rebelling against the social strictures of their social class and
were changing their ways by opening up a
bit.
We had moved into this little courtyard
village the year before and were to find ourselves among the “elders” of the
young for we were just 30 and they were in the range of 25 years old. The only people older than we were Madame
Libé who had lived through World War II and the facing neighbors who owned a
big Marseilles newspaper. But were we
as old as I felt myself to be in this context?
The times were quite harsh about age.
Not too long before, a journalist friend of mine had interviewed
Brigitte Bardot who had defined the ages of man for him. Anyone over 27 was what she called a
‘croulant’, decrepit, someone beneath notice.
My friend had been dismayed as he was 45 at the time!. In the month of April 1968, I felt myself to
be aged and the 18 hour workdays with toddler children, endless laundry, electricity and plumbing repairs, shopping, cooking and so on left me
no time to read, write or seek out friends in this foreign place to which we
had migrated.
We would turn over our monthly
rent to the our landlord’s student children in cash. They lived in the other half of the semi-detached house. Their lives seemed very desirable to me for
it had only been a short time ago that my own had become limited so terribly to
strictly domestic travails. When I saw
their freedom, I was daily dismayed. In
addition to the feeling of loss of youth, I felt that, although I loved my
little children passionately, it was a demeaning occupation to be a housewife,
moreover the classification by others into the category ‘mother and housewife’
was unbearable to me.
The neighbors were artists, students,
intellectuals, grandparents, great grandparents and some were young parents who
took their parenthood rather lightly for most people in this courtyard were
related to most of the other people and were not out on a limb the way I felt
myself to be. So many emergencies
relating to the children and no one to fill in for me, especially in this month
of May.
The way my 1968 revolution started was with the
departure of my husband who was off to take a mediterranean so-called cruise
with an Australian legal colleague,
former dean of the law school in Dar es Salaam, who had ditched his very
respectable wife and three children to hook up with a African prostitute who
had picked him up in a Dar Es Salaam bar.
The crew consisted of his companion Zena, her cousins and their toddler
child. They had arrived in Paris from
Dar via London where he had bought his sailboat which this unlikely crew had
docked along the Seine. They had no warm clothing and the child’s teeth were falling out from
illness. When I asked about dental care
for the little one, he replied: ‘Never mind
he is an African child and no African children get dental care! “. I scurried around and located clothes for
the whole bunch shivering from the early spring cold, then they sailed down through the canals to
reach the sea where my husband joined up with them. This event took place at the end of April so,
when the month of May began I found myself alone in the city with some much
appreciated cash on hand which I had asked for in advance. At that prehistoric time women were not
allowed to have separate bank accounts.
He had left me with 700 francs.
This was a crucial figure as the banks we're soon to close and there
were mouths to feed, as the cliché goes.
We heard that the first demonstration was to
start here and to cross the city to the Place de la Republique or the other way
around. The Place Denfert Rochereau was
just at the end of the block of the same name.
Its immense bronze lion had been melted down by the Nazis to make
bullets but was now recast and placed in the center of the place. On one of the first days May Mme Libé and I
and the little children were out of the courtyard on the Avenue watching the
lines of students marching by. I was
very excited but Madame Libé was very frightened. Unlike her, I had not known war or social
unrest except by proxy in Les Misérables
or L’Education Sentimentale. As for the
children, they watched what was going on with little interest. While we were standing there in what seemed
to her like total chaos and to me like an orderly demonstration, one of the
children said to me: “why does Madame Libé always were purple clothes?”. I do not remember what or if I answered but
it was clear that three persons’ realities were quite different from one
another.
The first barricades were to be erected that
night. I was, unlike my neighbors, with the children and not out on the
barricades or elsewhere. The following
morning there was much excitement in the courtyard as our young parent
neighbors had all been out on the barricades and had all been arrested and had
been held prisoner in the city hall of the fifth arrondissement. Their children as well as the others had been
alone overnight in their various apartments and houses in the courtyard. I had heard crying from somewhere but thought that other family members would
be watching over them. Wrongly as it
turned out. The most elderly member of
the courtyard community , their great grandfather, had been a prominent member
of the wartime resistance movement. When
he heard that his grandchildren, their parents, were being held in custody
leaving his great grandchildren unapt ended in the courtyard, he immediately
called unto complain to his old friend, Maurice Grimaud, the Prefet de Police
of Paris. The quick result was that the
grandchildren were sprung from prison within the hour. They came home full of pride at having been
arrested and made their plans for the next nights. This strange situation made me feel even more
isolated as the days wore on. Each new
evening saw the departure of the courtyard parents onto the barricades and each
morning, once sprung, they would return, feed the children and plan the coming
night’s activities
Meanwhile the dozen or so children were at
loose ends. I began marketing on the Rue
Daguerre several times a day as the children would come into our house and eat
up all of the bananas and yoghurts. In
those days I never locked the front door; often I would find a child riffling
through my purse in the hallway or groping into the fridge. Barriers were tumbling down.
One morning, as I was seeing to the laundry
in our bathroom which gave obliquely onto our neighbors’ first story roof, I thought I heard the voice of our chatterbox
three year old daughter. The more I listened the more I recognized her
voice but could not figure out where it was coming from. Opening the window onto the roof I saw her
standing, declaiming over a gaggle of adults, all lying down gazing up at her
in rapt attention. Over their heads were
black anarchist banners draped all around their windows. She was giving a little lecture and they were
stoned into silence. I called to tell
her to come home immediately which she did.
There were young people coming in and out of
the courtyard incessantly. Often I
would see them hesitate in front of our house and point it out. One balmy day, I had the windows open when I
heard one of them say, while pointing, ‘that is where the capitalists
live’. This was so bizarre a concern
which puzzled me until I began to ask myself why we were “capitalists” and I
could find no reason whatsoever meriting such a dirty name. Then, thinking about what it meant, I came to
the realization that the reason we were renting their property was because we
had no capital and could not afford to buy even a broom closet in Paris. We were paying our rental to the neighbors
who were living down and off a great 19th century fortune. By this time the whole city was at a halt, no
garbage disposal, no banks, no gas, no work as all of the factories were on
strike but we did have food and the 700 francs, although considerably
diminished, was still feeding us and supplying bananas to the children of the
neighborhood.
Across the street, in the local hardware
shop, huge refrigerator cardboard boxes were obstructing the sidewalk so I thought it would be fun to bring a few over
and cut doors and windows into them to give the children playhouses. While I was doing this the idea came that not
only would they be playhouses but that I needed to clearly mark them as Banks
with poster paint. Once done the trap
was laid and the first one of the mockers came by, seeing us in the garden next
to the BANKS, asked me: Why BANKS? With
an absolutely straight face I said to him ‘its normal for capitalists to love
banks, don’t you think?’ He was
speechless and continued his way down the courtyard.
We had lent our Volkswagen bug car to a
friend who had parked it in another neighborhood further down the boulevard St;
Michel. When we retrieved it, the car
was plastered with signs saying “yankee go home”. I mentioned this to one of the neighbors
several days later. He looked very
embarrassed because it apparently had been he who had done this. He was the same one who had precipitously
jumped down from his mezzanine yelling ‘yankee go home’ in late April. Years later I was following a much older man
who resembled him limping along a narrow sidewalk.. I called out the first name of the 30 years
ago culprit. He turned around. I could not resist asking him if he was
still anti american. He said he was.
My husband returned from the south of France,
10 days later, having hitchhiked back as
there were no trains and he was lucky to
be picked up by someone who had gas. He
had missed all the excitement. We had
missed him but had managed beautifully including making a small loan to my
sister who had shown up broke so the 700 francs was almost depleted. Life resumed, the banks reopened, no more
barricades, no more bananas and the armed man who would come by every month to
give me the family allowance cash I deserved as the mother of two brought his
offering. Madame Libé calmed down but
never did lose her anxiety about the goings on until she retired to the
country. Our neighbors’ marriages all
broke up and they went off with lovers or to nursed their despair in wanderings to Indian ashrams or South American
native tribes. The children grew up,
some finding the!r way but some of the 12 ended their lives, others became
intellectuals in their turn but, to my knowledge, none became lawyers or
businessmen. True to their parents’
beliefs until this day.
****
About the author, Carol Rose
Living in Paris since 1965 subsequent to a Fulbright stint in 1956 57, I was determined to leave the midwest because of the McCarthy era outrage Here my life has consisted in child rearing, three kids, seeing them through and over some humps and basically they are sound, good parents, living here.with their children. Going back to a former life working in teaching language, dissatisfied, I began undertaking new studies in clinical psychology at Paris VII leading to clinical work with children at St Anne Hospital; specializing in non readers and all sorts of other pathologies. Then that period came to a close and I began to study and do ceramics with several teachers including kristen mckirdy. which I have continued in my country studio. I live with my husband, Tom Rose, both in Paris and in Touraine nearby Chenonceau. I have been writing for myself now since 1969.
No comments:
Post a Comment