Debray sighs. “What a load of crap.”
Badinter lights a cigarette.
Moati eats Chokinis.
Attali: “He decided to move to the left. He thinks it’s necessary to contain the Communist Party. But it puts off moderate left-wing voters.”
Debray: “No, what you call a moderate left-wing voter, I would call a centrist. Or a radical Valoisian, at a push. Those people will vote for the Right, no matter what. They’re Giscardians.”
Fabius: “Including left-wing radicals?”
Debray: “Naturally.”
Lang: “All right, and the canines?”
Moati: “We’ve booked him an appointment with a dentist in the Marais. He’s going to give him a smile like Paul Newman’s.”
Fabius: “Age?”
Attali: “Experience.”
Debray: “Madagascar?”
Fabius: “Who cares? Everyone’s forgotten it.”
Attali: “He was minister of the colonies in ’51, and the massacres took place in ’47. Sure, he said some unfortunate things, but he doesn’t have blood on his hands.”
Badinter says nothing. Neither does Debray. Moati drinks his hot chocolate.
Lang: “But there’s that film where you see him in a colonial helmet in front of Africans in loincloths…”
Moati: “The TV stations won’t show those images again.”
Fabius: “Colonialism is a bad subject for the Right. They won’t want to get into this.”
Attali: “That’s true for the Algerian War too. First and foremost, Algeria is de Gaulle’s betrayal. It’s sensitive. Giscard won’t take any risks with the pied-noir vote.”
Debray: “And the Communists?”
Fabius: “If Marchais plays the Algerian card, we’ll play Messerschmitt. In politics, as in every other aspect of life, it’s not in anyone’s interests to dig up the past.”
Attali: “And if he insists, we’ll hit him with the Nazi-Soviet Pact!”
Fabius: “Okay, fine. And the positives?”
Silence.
They pour themselves more coffee.
Fabius lights a cigarette.
Jack Lang: “Well, his image is of a man of letters.”
Attali: “Who cares? The French vote for Badinguet, not for Victor Hugo.”
Lang: “He’s a great orator.”
Debray: “Yeah.”
Moati: “No.”
Fabius: “Robert?”
Badinter: “Yes and no.”
Debray: “He’s a crowd-pleaser.”
Badinter: “He’s good when he has the time to develop his line of thought, and when he’s feeling confident.”
Moati: “But he’s no good on TV.”
Lang: “He’s good when he goes head-to-head.”
Attali: “But not face-to-face.”
Badinter: “He’s uncomfortable when anyone resists or contradicts him. He knows how to construct an argument, but he doesn’t like being interrupted. As powerful as he can be at a rally, with the crowd behind him, he can be equally abstruse and boring with journalists.”
Fabius: “That’s because on TV he usually despises whoever’s interviewing him.”
Lang: “He likes to take his time, to warm up slowly. Onstage, he can do that, feel his way forward, test out his rhetoric, adapt to his audience. On TV, that’s impossible.”
Moati: “But TV’s not going to change for him.”
Attali: “Well, not in the next year anyway. Once we’re in power…”
Alclass="underline" “… we fire Elkabbach!” (laughter)
Lang: “He has to think about TV like a giant rally. He has to tell himself that the crowd is right behind the camera.”
Moati: “He needs to watch out for waxing lyrical, though. It’s okay at a rally, but it doesn’t work in a studio.”
Attali: “He has to learn to be more concise and direct.”
Moati: “He has to improve. He has to train for it. We’ll make him rehearse.”
Fabius: “Hmm, he’s going to love that.”
28
After four or five days, Hamed finally decides to go home, at least to check whether he might have a clean T-shirt lying around somewhere, so he drags himself up the six or seven flights of stairs that lead to his attic room, where he can’t take a shower because there’s no bathroom but he can at least collapse on his bed for a few hours to purge himself of physical and nervous fatigue and the vanity of the world and existence. But when he turns the key in the lock, he feels something odd and notices that the door has been forced, so he gently pushes it open—it creaks discreetly—and finds his room in a state of chaos: the bed turned over, the drawers pulled out, the baseboard torn off, his clothes spread all over the floor, his fridge open with a bottle of Banga left intact in the door, the mirror over the sink broken into several pieces, his cans of Gini and 7 Up scattered to the far corners of the room, his collection of Yacht Magazine torn out page by page as well as his comic-book history of France (the volume on the French Revolution and the one on Napoleon seem to have disappeared), his dictionary and his books thrown haphazardly around, the tape from his music cassettes unraveled and his stereo partially dismantled.
Hamed respools a Supertramp tape, puts it in the cassette player, and presses PLAY to see if it still works. Then he collapses onto his upside-down mattress and falls asleep, fully clothed, door wide open, to the opening chords of “The Logical Song,” thinking that when he was young he, too, thought that life was a miracle, beautiful and magical, but that, while things have certainly changed, he doesn’t yet feel very responsible nor very radical.
29
A line thirty feet long has formed outside the Gratte-Ciel, which is guarded by a bulky, severe-looking black bouncer. Hamed spots Saïd and Slimane with a tall, wiry lad known as “the Sergeant.” Together, they skip the line, greeting the bouncer by name and telling him that Roland, no, Michel, is waiting for them inside. The doors of the Gratte-Ciel open for them. Inside, they are assailed by a strange smell, like a mix of curry, cinnamon, vanilla, and fishing port. They meet Jean-Paul Goude, who leaves his belt in the cloakroom, and they can tell instantly that he is wasted. Saïd leans toward Hamed to tell him, no, the Giscard years must come to an end, the cost of living is too high, but he has to get some dope. Slimane sees the young Bono Vox at the bar. On the stage, a gothic reggae group is playing a vulgar, ethereal set. The Sergeant is nonchalantly wiggling his hips to the drum machine, behind the beat, watched by the curious, miserable-looking Bono. Yves Mourousi talks to Grace Jones’s stomach. Brazilian dancers slalom between the customers, executing the fluid movements of capoeira. A former minister of some standing under the Fourth Republic tries to touch the breasts of a young, almost famous actress. And there is always that procession of boys and girls wearing live lobsters on their heads or walking them on leashes, the lobster being, for reasons unknown, the fashionable animal in Paris, 1980.
At the entrance, two badly dressed men with mustaches slip the bouncer a five-franc note and he lets them in. They leave their umbrellas in the cloakroom.
Saïd asks Hamed about drugs. Hamed gestures to relax and rolls a joint on a coffee table shaped like a naked woman on all fours, like the one in the Moloko Bar in A Clockwork Orange. Next to Hamed, on a corner sofa, Alice Sapritch takes a drag through her cigarette holder, an imperial smile on her lips, a boa around her neck (a real boa, thinks Hamed, but he also thinks it is a stupid affectation). She leans toward them and yells: “So, my darlings, is this a good night?” Hamed smiles as he lights his joint, but Saïd replies: “For what?”
At the bar, the Sergeant has managed to get Bono to buy him a drink, and Slimane wonders what language the two of them are speaking. In fact, though, they do not appear to be talking to each other. The two mustachioed guys have gone to a corner of the room and ordered a bottle of Polish vodka, the one with bison grass in it, which has the effect of attracting a group of young people of various sexes to their table, with one or two B-list stars in their wake. Near the bar, Victor Pecci (dark-haired, shirt open, diamond earring) is chatting with Vitas Gerulaitis (blond, shirt open, clip earring). Slimane waves to a young anorexic girl who is talking to the singer of Taxi Girl. Just next to him, leaning against a concrete pillar designed to look like a square Doric column, Téléphone’s bassist doesn’t bat an eyelid as a girl licks his cheek, trying to explain to him how people drink tequilas in Orlando. The Sergeant and Bono have disappeared. Slimane is buttonholed by Yves Mourousi. Foucault emerges from the toilets and begins a heated conversation with one of the singers from ABBA. Saïd shouts at Hamed: “I want some drugs, dope, blow, crack, smack, speed, poppers, whatever, but get me something, for fuck’s sake!” Hamed hands him the joint, which he grabs angrily, as if to say “This is what I think of your joint” and puts it to his mouth, sucking greedily, disgustedly on it. In their corner, the two mustaches are hitting it off with their new friends, clinking glasses and exclaiming “Na zdravie!” Jane Birkin is trying to say something to a young man who looks like he could be her brother, but the man makes her repeat it five times before shrugging helplessly. Saïd yells at Hamed: “What’s left? The PAC? Is that the plan?” Hamed realizes Saïd will be unbearable until he’s had his fix, so he grabs him by the shoulders and says, “Listen,” staring into his eyes as he would with someone in a state of shock or smashed out of their mind, and he takes a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket. It’s an invitation for the Adamantium, a club that has just opened opposite the Rex, where a dealer he knows ought to be this evening, supplying the atmosphere for what the flyer calls, above a large drawing of a face that vaguely resembles Lou Reed, a special ’70s night. He asks Alice Sapritch for a pen and carefully writes the name of the dealer on the back of the flyer in block capitals, which he hands solemnly to Saïd, who slides it tenderly into his inside jacket pocket and takes off immediately. In their corner, the two badly dressed men with mustaches look like they’re having a great time; they have invented a new pastis-vodka-Suze cocktail, and Inès de La Fressange has joined them at their table, but when they see Saïd heading toward the exit, they suddenly stop laughing, politely brush aside the attentions of the drummer from Trust, who wants to kiss them while yelling “Brat! Brat!,” and stand up together.