Radicals
1
It was on the evening of the French election when they had their bags packed and were ready to leave. What they didn’t know was whether the bag would be packed for their usual summer vacation in Brittany, or to escape France and live incognito in another European nation. They were terrorists in Italy in the 1970s, escaped into France and lived for a decade under false names and with false papers, before giving themselves up and serving jail terms. For more than fifteen years, they had been living as fully acknowledged citizens, and had even gone to court to defend their rights. A couple of years earlier, after a far-right government came to power in Italy, the French president was willing to hand them back over to the Italians, and they fought a case they won. But they feared a far-right victory in France and weren’t so convinced that if the equivalent party were elected in their adopted country, they would not have the chance again to defend themselves in a court of law. For most people, an election, even when an extreme party is likely to gain power, is a cause of little more than mild anxiety. For Davide and Claudia, it was a source of dread — and, in turn, immense relief when National Rally failed to win power.
Robin was telling me this a couple of months later in the very flat where they had packed, and been ready to leave. Robin was watering the plants. Davide and Claudia were presently in the holiday home they bought collectively with six other radicals, living the communal life as best they could within a system they still no longer liked, but didn’t any longer despise. They knew, Robin said, their life wasn’t so bad under capitalism, but knew also it could have been better for everyone had it been eradicated. They really believed that it was possible to bring it down, and that we would now be living in a world without borders, without undue wealth, and without ever greater forms of injustice. I wasn’t completely inclined to disagree, as I’d been in Paris a week and saw destitution that wasn’t so different from Edinburgh’s. Yet in the French capital, it seemed not just more pronounced, but more abject. I saw one man sitting in his own fresh urine, the trickle running along the pavement; I saw another pushing a trolley full of her life’s belongings, shouting about something I couldn’t understand but where the words maison and mari were used, and I inferred that perhaps after she broke up with her husband he had got the house and she was left on the street. A third person was emptying a bin and throwing the contents everywhere. He then picked up from the ground, where everything had fallen, a half-baguette and what looked like a couple of slices of salami in an open package. He walked off, the trash left on the pavement. Moments later, a rat started nibbling at some of the remaining items.
These incidents would happen in the same part of the city where people would step out of BMWs, Mercedes and Porsches and, in their Givenchy dresses or their Artioli Lama Nero Croc Shoes, walk for a couple of metres the very pavements they would share with rats and the homeless, on their way to a restaurant, hotel or shop that would not have allowed the destitute entrance and whose rats may have greater chances of getting in but a higher mortality rate if they did. Whatever the capitalism that Davide and Claudia had been fighting seemed to me encapsulated in these images of the homeless and the rats, the rich and the shops and restaurants. I had passed store windows with jewellery priced at a hundred thousand pounds, and saw along from it a person seated on a wooden box, a cushion underneath him, asking for small change. I passed restaurants with entrees costing more than 80 euros, and a few yards away someone was looking in the bin for one of those tossed-away baguettes. Robin said David and Claudia never saw themselves as fighting against wealth; they were looking to spread the wealth there was, and did it more recently in their own lives materially - by helping out at a food charity, and in the political bookshop they owned, one he said we could pass by after we had finished our tea at their place.
2
Though I knew Paris moderately well, had visited the city half a dozen times in the last fifteen years, I knew one or two areas better than others, and I usually stayed at a close friend’s place in the Marais. We would spend a couple of days together after I arrived, he would go off on whatever holiday he’d planned, I’d water the plants, and he would return. We would hang out for another day or two, and then I’d go back to Scotland. This year, he was going to be around for most of my stay, and he arranged for me to occupy a friend’s place nearby. The friend would be gone for ten days. The only chore would be to water a few plants in return for the flat. Sam was of course fluent in French (as well as Italian and Spanish) but wasn’t what I’d call cartographically adventurous. There were whole areas of the city he had never explored, and knew it chiefly through the cinemas he would visit, the cafes and bars he would meet people in, and the restaurants he enjoyed frequenting. He didn’t have a lot of money, if a lot meant stepping out of a Lamborghini and buying a ring for 100,000 euros, but he had enough for a life of modest consumption. Between the translation work he did for the European Union and the money he spent with friends visiting cinemas, restaurants, and so on, his Paris was circumscribed by such albeit enviable limits.
I met some of these friends during those years, and like Sam, they were usually about to take off on or return from a holiday. It wouldn’t be fair to say they were all complacent people, but I did believe their lives were limited by their relative luxury — they always had money to spend, and this expenditure perhaps contained their curiosity. A philosopher once proposed that the limits of our language were the limits of our world. Maybe for Sam and others, the limits of their world rested on the relative lack of limits in their wealth. I wondered how much more so this may have been for the person who would step out of an expensive car and into an exorbitant jewellery shop.
Such thoughts occurred to me during my various visits to Paris, and were helped along in more recent years by the friendship with Robin. Robin had less money than anybody I knew, and yet when we met, he always had more stories to tell than anyone else in my acquaintance. He had been working for more than a decade as a night porter in a hospital in the south of the city, and when I visited him there a couple of years ago, it was another opportunity to explore areas of Paris I would otherwise not have known. While Sam’s social world was occasionally augmented or diminished by a colleague coming or going in an environment where the ambitious moved on and the deemed mediocre would be let go, Robin’s was erratic and broader, discussing not just ex-terrorists but clandestine immigrants who had crossed four borders to get to France, not only the French aristocracy (his brother was married to a woman whose father owned a chateau and vast amounts of land), but also some of those in the hospital, patients who would sometimes wander down to reception and talk to him for fifteen minutes because they couldn’t sleep. Most were not young, and some admitted they were scared of dying, and they would tell him stories from their past. Though he shouldn’t have, he sometimes made them tea and asked them to sit with him, listening intently as they spoke about things they said they had never talked about with family and friends.
3
After finishing our tea, we left the flat on Rue de la Mare and continued in the direction of the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Cross of Ménilmontant. On the way, we passed by the bookshop, which was closed. It had laid back opening times in August and would be staffed by whoever hadn’t gone away. But at the moment nobody was around - a hand-written sign said it would open again on Tuesday from 10-5. I said the handwriting looked familiar — Robin acknowledged it was his own, and a couple of people he knew were coming to Paris the next day, and asked him to put a note on the door. Robin said he sometimes did a shift there himself, but never in August - I knew it was his busiest month at the hospital as he was the only porter who didn’t go away during the holiday period. When he was free, he liked walking the quiet streets of the city, aware that it gave him time to look at the architecture instead of at people. During the rest of the year whatever he often thought about the people of his city, as he despised the vanity, the wealth, the consumption, they fascinated him too — and he could devote hours to sitting in terrace cafes, or wandering the streets, looking at the way a man would ease himself off his motorbike, a woman might inspect herself in the mirror. Sometimes it might be an elderly person whose main mission of the day was negotiating getting a bag full of shopping back to her home, or another, no less young, with their shopping next to them in a bistro, taking a cafe noisette and reading a newspaper. He noticed he sometimes felt a yearning more for the person far from young, seated at the cafe smoking a cigarette and concentrated on whatever article they were reading, usually in one of the three major papers — Le Monde, Liberation or Le Figaro — than for the young beauty seated nearby scrolling on the phone and then readjusting her hair for a selfie.
He was offering the most predictable of images, he admitted, but better for him the predictability of the older person than the younger one. He would look at those two faces and see in one a history he wished to discern, while in the other, he couldn’t quite see a future, as he saw in the other a past. When he would hear politicians speak of young people and their futures, they would talk only in economic terms, and though he didn’t expect the political parties to do much after so many years of making most people relatively poorer, he knew that even if they were to do something, there would be little in it that would improve anybody’s life, because they only thought about money and status, privilege and material purpose.
He managed to offer this with no sense of cynicism, only the sort of forlorn hope that if he had been a generation older, maybe he would have lobbed bricks at police officers and fought for freedoms that needed to be creative and not just economic. I well knew that he was actively involved in immigration rights, but I also knew that he became interested when a radio station set up to support immigrants asked him to host a show. Friends there wished he would take his love for music and share it with listeners. He usually did a show once a week, but insisted to me that he did so for selfish reasons. If another station had asked and they weren’t Fascist or corporate, he would have said yes to them instead. He didn’t want to do good, he insisted, just be as free and creative as the circumstances allowed. Part of the problem with politicians was that they wanted to do good all the time, or wished to pocket vast sums of public cash. Either way, nothing improved, and he credited it to a lack of imagination.
He told me this when we took a seat for twenty minutes in the small garden after I’d been discussing my latest project, a sociological work on the degrees politicians tended to take and how it stifled imaginative possibilities in British public life. It had started out as idle curiosity and developed into a project that my university managed to help fund. Many politicians studied economics, politics, law, business, and occasionally history or geography. Or a science. Almost none of them studied literature, art, architecture, or music; almost nobody had a background in an imaginative subject. Much was understandably being made in the UK of how few people from poorer backgrounds were going into politics (or many elite professions), but I thought it was perhaps almost equally important that so few studying creative degrees were entering parliament. He supposed that was where Davide and Claudia and their friends differed from many interested in politics today. They were of a generation who didn’t just think the political was the personal — it was also the creative. He didn’t need to tell a sociologist like me very much about 1968 and the various consequences, but it was interesting knowing that a key slogan of the time was “all power to the imagination” and that it was one Davide and Claudia’s friends lived by, as though any political transformation couldn’t be had without creativity sitting behind it. A lot of the friends they made in France were teachers and academics, people who may not have entered these professions had it not been for the educational changes that came about after 1968. They might not have shared Davide and Claudia’s desire for violent revolution (nor did Davide and Claudia, except for the two years when they were involved in the Red Brigades). Yet they did all share this need to see politics as an imaginative process.
When Davide and Claudia asked him what motivated him to get involved at the radio station, he admitted it wasn’t chiefly immigrants’ rights; it was a desire to play good music. He needed to say this because his interest in so many other areas of his life, from his political involvements to his emotional ones, almost all came from listening to bands from the age of fourteen to forty. He would have been saying what others wanted to hear over what he wanted to express had he said otherwise. He didn’t expect that the station would reject him, but he did expect at least an inhale of breath as he said this to Claudia, Davide, and others who were all at the pub as they asked if he wanted to have his own show. Instead, most concurred — why improve a life if it is to the detriment of one’s own existence? Better to improve the lives of others while improving one’s own, as a couple of people, close long-term friends of Davide and Claudia, said that this was one of the problems of political discourse today: that you were somehow fighting for others, whether it was for the planet, for immigrants, for the less well-off.
I said to Robin, weren’t those seeking greater rights for trans and gays fighting for themselves? Yes, but think of all the people who are marching with them; think of how many people on gay pride marches aren’t themselves gay? I said, wasn’t this a sign of solidarity, and wasn’t it a good thing that so many would share a belief in a cause or concern that didn’t directly impact on them? Robin looked discouraged, as if rather than thinking through the intricacy of his point, he fell into the despondent belief that he was never one for abstract reasoning: it was why he failed his baccalaureate three times, and ended up working as a porter in a hospital. He’d expressed this on two or three occasions during our friendship, and on each occasion it rested on a point I’d countered. I suspect he reacted similarly to others who would question an argument he was making.
I didn’t at all think that his reasoning was weak because he wasn’t bright enough to make a stronger point, and yet I understood why he never pursued a degree, and perhaps understood it better than he did, as someone who has spent the last fifteen years in a university environment, taking only a year out after my undergrad degree. How often had I read or listened to papers that were contained by the parameters of competent argumentation, by a variation of that philosopher’s claim: the limits of their arguments were the limits of immediate coherence? Anything that looked like it might question the contained possibilities of the paper would be neatly rejected, and a talk would have an anodyne air of achievement so modest that all handclapping would inevitably be polite. The speaker has mastered the codes of polite discussion and contained concepts, and didn’t feel the need to interrogate them. Robin clearly lacked the argumentative skill of stating the obvious, however convoluted, and justifying it, and I tried to explain to him, as we talked, that I wasn’t disagreeing with him, and certainly not undermining him — I just wanted him to push a bit further. I sensed his perspective on this was correct, and wondered if the move to the far right by many wasn’t only or especially out of prejudice. It was almost out of exhaustion that people couldn’t any longer make sense of the various positions they ought to take.
4
Robin returned to speaking of the young woman he saw scrolling on her phone, and said he didn’t doubt she wasn’t political, but what interested him was that she chiefly seemed unimaginative. He believed that a lack of imagination was itself however political: that this young white woman, who perhaps wanted nothing more than to go abroad twice a year for a summer holiday and some winter sun, who wanted to continue the augmentative work that he saw in her lip fillers, and would like a partner who would keep her in the life to which she wished to be accustomed, wouldn’t vote for a far-right party because she wished harm on others. But she wouldn’t feel she had to think very hard about her vote. It would neither tax her mind nor demand much from her imagination. He acknowledged that what he was offering was projection and prejudice; that half an hour observing this person was hardly enough time to offer the assumptions he was making. But he would see an increasing number of people who seemed to him unimaginatively leaning towards a political position he supposed they would accept rather than that they would fight to defend. He didn’t see this woman and many others campaigning, protesting, and fighting for their rights. Their right was to be left alone and immersed in consumerism. Whatever party might best leave them to this would get their vote, though not much more by way of encouragement.
I wasn’t quite sure what he was saying, but I supposed that no amount of political activity was going to galvanise this woman into voting for the left, because there wasn’t the imagination to activate it. Yet I knew he was saying more than that: many who were voting for the left were also unimaginative and, while this woman he guessed was selfishly so, many who were left-leaning were unselfishly so. The problem was one of vision, and better he announced that people have imagination than the right or wrong politics, because without this imaginative aspect, the right descends into Fascism, the left into Stalinism. His final statement seemed like a leap, but I felt he was intuitively right and that, in many ways, the woman he described wanted nothing more than to mind her own business, no matter the hurt, pain, and exploitation that may have been the consequence of her desires. And in turn, many on the left wished to make such a woman feel terrible about this without knowing how to make things very much better. They were caught in their prescriptive morality just as the young woman was lost in her oblivious scrolling.
I asked him about the bookshop, its customers, and its staff, yet just after doing so and before he answered, we both noticed a couple who were attractive enough to be modestly conspicuous in their looks, but what drew our attention was more their interest in things rather than each other. Their energy contained what seemed like a recent attraction but, unlike many infatuated couples, they weren’t only interested in themselves. While they held hands and stopped for a lingering kiss, they also, a moment later, looked up and seemed preoccupied with what they saw on a rooftop. We looked up as well, and noticed she must have been describing to him a detail about the window, as we guessed they might have been architecture students. After we passed, Robin said: in young people like this, I have hope. He didn’t say more and somehow didn’t need to — as if he saw in them the political as the imaginative contained by the observant. They could look at the world beyond themselves and see in it creative possibilities rather than mundane materialism or moral sanctimoniousness.
Was I projecting as much onto this couple as Robin had done with the woman at the cafe? Perhaps, but it was as though we saw in them an interest in a passion for each other that needn’t negate a feeling for the world. It seemed this was what Robin wished for, and anything political must be contained by it. I thought of another slogan of ’68. “Be realistic: demand the impossible! Under the cobbles, the beach! It is forbidden to forbid!”
5
We continued walking for another hour around the area, and Robin pointed out cafes and converted flats, places that put local artists on their walls and bands from the district would play several nights a week. You could buy an espresso for a euro, and if a customer looked trustworthy enough, they would leave the cafe for twenty minutes to run an errand, as a random stranger looked after the place. One flat he pointed out to me was a former clothes shop the couple bought and turned into a thrift store. Then, when they were evicted from their apartment after the children of the elderly couple they were renting from wished to sell, they closed the shop and turned it into their flat. I noticed a couple of rails outside it. He said they would still sell the odd item, and sometimes sell to people online, but they never really saw what they had as a business and didn’t see themselves as retired. They were friends of Davide and sometimes helped out in the bookshop. I asked if they were as radical, and he said in their own way they might have been - they never used violence to express it, though.
We stopped for a couple of hours at a Salon de Thé in a square at the foot of the steps to the church. Robin said they did great mint tea, but he always asked them to make it without sugar, then added a third of a cube that they would bring with the cup and saucer. He liked mint tea, but he also liked his teeth, and he recommended I ask for the same. He often came here after a shift in the bookshop, but preferred it in the summer when he usually popped by after watering the plants for someone, or feeding their cat. Several people knew he was always in Paris during August and would pop in, no matter if he lived on Rue de Batignolle and worked in Beaugranelle. He never found covering much of the city exhausting; it was more purposeful and adventurous. He liked excuses to visit different parts of Paris, believing that, unlike many a Parisian, it stopped him seeming provincial. I remember when he first told me this, he laughed, saying that there is nothing more provincial than a Parisian who rarely leaves their quarter. The villager knows there is Paris; the city dweller doesn’t know they have turned their life into that of a villager. He wanted to remember he was living in a city, and by covering parts of it so distant from others, felt he could justify the term a city dweller. He got around with a combination of the Velib, the metro, the bus and his own two feet.
6
I wondered if Robin was in his own way as political as Davide, Claudia and other people he knew from their generation. After all, as I said to him, playing sociology lecturer, if Guy Debord came up with the term deriver in the fifties to suggest the many ways a person could explore, without much deliberation, usually urban spaces, and his society of the spectacle of the sixties was so important to May ’68, then it was as if he chose the former, while David and Claudia investigated the further reaches of the latter. He was constantly looking for ways to understand the urban space from as many angles as he could find; David and Claudia wished to undermine the society they were disgusted by. He said there might be some truth to what I was saying, but he also supposed that when they accepted their crimes, they also perhaps acknowledged society wasn’t so terrible. It was far more capitalistic than they would like, but gains had been made in race, gender and generally in education. They might have served three years in a French prison in the mid-eighties, but they had been serving it under France’s first-ever socialist government, however compromised. But what if France had succumbed to the far-right, and will it do so soon enough? And wasn’t Davide and Claudia’s country now run by a far-right party, whatever measures its leader was taking to give the impression of pragmatic, relative centrism? Robin wondered whether his need to see the political in smaller gestures, and insisting that any manifestation of it should pass through his own preoccupations, might not now seem selfish. His ideas were all very well for a society that may be far from perfect, but what if it was leaning much closer to Fascism than it was when Davide and Claudia were trying to bring the system down?
7
A couple of evenings later, I met up with Sam for a drink at a terrace cafe on Rue Froissart, before we went on to a restaurant nearby, and planned to join friends of his afterwards at a wine bar somewhere in the Mairee. I asked Sam if he had been worried about the election, and he said, of course, but admitted that his personal fears were alleviated by Marine Le Pen’s claim that she didn’t want to leave the European Union. His job wasn’t under threat, and he couldn’t pretend that left him feeling no more than mild anxiety with the vote. Had she insisted on leaving, that anxiety would have been a lot greater. As we sat on the terrace drinking a beer, he added that we have to admit to ourselves that whatever we may wish for in life more broadly, we are aware in our sense of well-being, the things that matter most to us. He admitted that what mattered most to him was that he felt safe personally and professionally, that he could maintain the remaining payments on his mortgage over the next five years, and that he could enjoy a social life that I knew contained a dozen friends and three ex-girlfriends. He was single now, but he didn’t expect to be so for long.
What Sam wanted politically was more or less what he’d had for the last seven years, someone steadying the boat rather than rocking it. As he said this, I thought about how much steadiness someone might need after the two attacks in Paris at the beginning and near the end of 2015. Sam had been living in the city for well over a decade, was in a cafe not so far from the attacks near the canal, and indirectly knew two or three people who had been killed that November evening. I was in no position to judge, living in a country where the closest to a terrorist act in the last twenty years had been at Glasgow airport in 2007, one that caused more damage to the participants than the victims. One died of his injuries; the other was serving a life sentence.
I supposed for a long time after the November attacks, taking a coffee on a terrace could seem like an act of heroism and, as we sat in what seemed like fearlessness, Sam admitted people were twitchy and edgy for some months as I wondered if the greater heroism still was in sitting inside, risking getting trapped in a cafe interior rather than at least having the chance to leave one’s outside chair and run down the street. He acknowledged there were a few occasions when he sat on the terrace feeling brave but not quite so defiant that he would risk going inside. He remembered coming down with a lengthy cold he believed he may not have caught otherwise. A minor addition to the many consequences of November 13th. Even to use a word like fearlessness was a product of the attacks, who except for the occasional gangster would have used it before in the context of taking a coffee? But sitting with others on a warm late July evening, with many in T-shirts or summer dresses, November felt very far away, let alone the early winter of 2015. As I heard various languages spoken — English, French, Swedish, and Spanish — I supposed some were tourists and, like myself, didn’t feel threatened either. It was as though the symbolic and economic were so strong that the city could recover quickly from so rupturing an event, a wound promptly stitched up by Western prowess. I remember reading somewhere that while for a long time Beirut had been known as the Paris of the Middle East, it looked as though after the events of 2015, Paris was soon going to be the Beirut of Europe. Whatever the cultural richness of Lebanon, it was unlikely to match that of Paris, and financially, its relative wealth turned to ruin. In 1970, its GDP was comparable to Saudi Arabia; over fifty years later, it was 20 billion a year while Saudi Arabia’s was more than a trillion. France’s was three times the latter, and who could deny its cultural and financial capital, so to speak?
8
When we met up with the others later in the evening, I found myself in conversation with an Austrian colleague of Sam’s whom I had briefly met twice, but with whom I’d never chatted. I mentioned the discussion with Sam earlier, saying that Paris must have been a paranoid and frightened place for a few months after the violence, and he didn’t disagree. But what was odd, he admitted, was this fear wasn’t quite accompanied by a shift in lifestyle for many, including himself, but a reaffirmation of it. While eating out and going for a drink might have been viewed as enjoyable luxuries before, after the November incidents, they become defiant choices. If radical Islam wanted to undermine the indulgent West, there were many members of the middle classes suddenly seeing in their consumerism a political will, however absurd that may sound. More seriously, he also believed it gave the European Union a greater focus and purpose, no matter the numerous parties of the right who threatened to take their countries out. He laughed, saying who would have thought the UK would be the first to exit? Anyway, he added, the union seemed to have a purpose when European values were under siege, and he and others felt, at work and at play, they were defending a set of values, however idiotic that might sound. There were eight of us around the table that evening, drinking cocktails and beers, all of us having come from various restaurants, while no doubt all passing on the streets people less well off than ourselves. It was almost as if what gave the city its insouciance was the ability people had to pass the poor with no sense of their presence as living beings. They could be stepped over and skirted around but rarely acknowledged, while in Scotland, no matter the ever-increasing homelessness problem, bypassers felt implicated, shamefully turning away or quietly dropping a pound or two into a paper cup, a squished down hat.
Sometimes, in Scotland, you might even talk to the person on the street. In Paris, the homeless often talked to themselves. As I was speaking to Sam’s colleague, a person pro-actively picked himself up off the pavement, his trousers held up with one hand rather than a belt, and entered the bar with his other hand outstretched. A waiter was as swift at removing him from the premises as he had a few minutes earlier promptly delivered drinks to our table, and the beggar muttered a few words, returning to his designated spot on the curb.
8
When I next met up with Robin a couple of days before returning to Scotland, I told him about the homeless person and how swiftly and deftly he was returned to his place on the street. It was almost as if it were part of the waiter’s skill set, as though he were as attentive to the homeless and their capacity to be a nuisance as he was to the paying customers. Robin said I should have got up and left myself after the person was turned out, saying it should be the homeless person’s right to ask people for money, and the customer could then choose whether to give it or not. He asked me where we were sitting, and I said inside the cafe, and I supposed this gave the waiter the right to stop the person from entering. Robin asked if the man was then allowed to ask those seated on the chairs and at the tables on the terrace. I thought for a moment and said no — that when a little later the man got up again and asked those on the terrace if they could spare some change, the waiter shooed him away as though he were an invasive pigeon. Robin said as far as he was concerned the pavement belonged to us all — the person with no money was entitled to use it, and for a sum, the cafe was allowed to put tables and chairs on it. But this was a public space — the waiter had no right to remove him from that area. He asked me how I felt about the situation, and I explained how I believed people usually reacted in Scotland. It was as though we were caught between our humanity and inhumanity, our decency and our selfishness. Sometimes I gave money; sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I walked past; sometimes I stopped and said hello. Occasionally, I detoured a little to avoid facing the person at all.
I knew Robin was also involved in various other movements linked to the radio station, including a group that tried to find various forms of accommodation for people without papers and who were on the streets. I expected him to judge my ambivalent interactions with the Scottish homeless; instead, he supposed what I did was humanly healthy — to be unsure of how to react, to wonder how often we should give, and how much, is all part of the difficulty involved in living in a contemporary urban space awash in excessive consumption and too much misery. He said it well aware that misery and excessive consumption were symbiotic — in many instances, of course, people were in poverty partly because of consuming alcohol or drugs. What he did believe, though, was the general indifference many showed towards those in desperate situations was a hardening of selfishness, and that couldn’t be good for individuals or for society. It wasn’t enough to use as an excuse that all we can attend to is the immediacy of the family unit. Who can survive without interacting with the broader community?
Robin and Sam had met only twice, just once at length, and on that second occasion it was with a group of Sam’s colleagues, one of whom had since left the EU to work in an equity company. Robin fell out with him that evening. Sam didn’t much like the colleague either, but for Robin, Sam was associated with him, and whenever I proposed an occasion involving both Sam and Robin, Robin always declined. He asked me how Sam and the others responded to the person on the street, and I said they didn’t respond at all — they saw it as part of Parisian life. While they weren’t insulting to the beggar, a couple of people in the group did find my body language mildly funny, saying that my various expressions of discomfort, my obvious concern for the homeless man, but my unwillingness to say anything to the waiter, showed it would take me a long time to be a true Parisian. They added that my concern made me look provincial; they had friends and relatives who would come to Paris for a visit and react similarly, and reckoned it was almost a sign of how well someone knew the city. To know it well was to be indifferent to such concerns, or so engaged that it becomes a political reaction. I wasn’t sure how Robin would respond to such a claim, but when I related this, he more than smiled without quite laughing.
Robin believed they were probably right in their analysis: it took someone who knew the city well to be either so indifferent or so engaged, and many an argument with his parents over the years rested on their irritated obliviousness and his sometimes infuriated insistence that he was wasting his time. The world is what it is, they often said - why change it? They lived in a two-floor apartment not far from where Sam worked, and no doubt frequented some of the same cafes and restaurants. They lived well, and no doubt believed the world would remain what it was as long as they continued living comfortably within it. I asked Robin if he managed to remain political partly because he continued working in a job that didn’t pay well and, as he often said, was seen by many as work without social status. He said he remembered watching a film not long after he got the job at the hospital. A character in it says that when people earn much over the minimum wage, they are no longer capable of thinking certain thoughts. He supposed if nothing else, he always had in mind those on low wages, as he was one of those workers himself. Yet he’d never gone on strike for more money, and any cause he had fought over was someone else’s.
We were walking around by the Bastille before continuing to the Cinematheque, next to Parc de Bercy, to see a film by the very director who had made the one he had just mentioned. He said as the filmmaker was so important to the events of ’68, we should pay a little indirect homage before seeing the film, and he took me down a side street where we found graffiti saying, ‘Be realistic: demand the impossible! Under the cobbles, the beach! It is forbidden to forbid!” He liked the idea it had been there ever since 1968, but he said that would have been impossible: he discovered the place was built in the early 1970s. From another perspective, he liked that even more, with slogans from the era never quite going away, and finding themselves once again on the walls of newer Parisian buildings. After this briefest of art exhibitions, we moved towards Boulevard de Bastille before continuing along Rue de Bercy. As we walked, I wondered if I might have noticed in Robin a contradiction, one that I didn’t want to catch him out over but that I suspected he would find easy to explain. On our chat a few days earlier, he mentioned that when he started at the station, he didn’t wish to fight chiefly for the rights of others, but selfishly to play his music in an environment he admired and respected.
I asked why he didn’t extend this selfishness to protecting his earning capacity and his employment rights. He answered succinctly and said he always thought his job was a necessary salary. It needn’t be anything more. As long as he was paid enough, he didn’t feel any desire to push for a greater wage. I asked if others felt the same, and he said he didn’t know — there had never been a threat of a strike at the hospital, as he admitted this might seem odd given how in British minds the French only needed half an opportunity to down tools. But he was never put into a position where he would have been expected to defend the rights of his co-workers and in the process his own. Those who didn’t like the hours or the pay went elsewhere — he was the hospital’s longest serving night porter.
9
On the plane back to Edinburgh, I thought about how secure seemed Robin’s job, and how insecure Sam’s happened to be. It wasn’t only that a change of government could take the country out of the EU, and leave Sam without work. It also rested on the cutbacks they would often talk about, the performance targets he was expected to meet, the ambitions of various directors coming in for three years, and trying to hire their own people while finding ways to remove those already there. Sam might have had the security of a good salary. but also had the precarity of wondering if the mortgage would be paid in a year’s time. He had an ongoing need to protect his job, and I knew that, while it wasn’t something that kept him up at night, it did make him stay up late on quite a few occasions to meet deadlines that made his work more flexible than he would have wished. Robin turned up at 8 in the evening and left at 8 the next morning, worked rarely more than 6 days a month and, while there, was fed and watered. He would get dinner shortly after arriving, could make tea or coffee whenever he wished unless an emergency demanded his presence, and, after getting several hours of sleep, would wake at six to receive the bread and crossaints. He would partake of them himself at 7, before heading home an hour later.
I wondered if he saw his job as political-proof, even if he had far more interest in politics than Sam ever did, and wondered too how those like Davide and Claudia felt living under the political so completely that at any moment they might have to leave the country or risk jail. If they may have believed in the seventies that the political was the personal, many years later they were to find the personal could suddenly become the political — with bags packed to take a holiday or to make an escape. Perhaps they had made the political so personal, so willing to see even people that others would deem sympathetic as necessary to kidnap or kill for the cause, that for the rest of their lives it was only just that the political would impact on theirs. They may have, according to Robin, only been involved in two kidnappings, with the victims released safely once the ransom was paid, but they had been part of an organisation where their colleagues did kill. It is one thing to put some graffiti up on a wall; another to put someone up against it and see it smeared with their blood.
I became so fascinated with the subject that I became no less interested in other European terrorist movements of the time, if terrorists they were, including the Red Army Faction in Germany, ETA in Spain and of course the IRA in Northern Ireland. It became such a preoccupation that winter and spring, I knew I needed to turn it into part of my occupation, and designed it as a course to teach the following year. What interested me was how art could become politic,s as I found myself tracing the line from Dadaism and Surrealism through to Lettrism, which Guy Debord was initially involved in, through to the Situationism he instigated, to the radical groups influenced by Situationist notions. If I’d noted in my research over the last couple of years how few arts graduates would get themselves into politics, all these radical groups had been influenced by indeed an artistic movement. I read a passage proposing that “the trajectories of the SI [Situationist International] and the RAF parted and converged at several points, but they both accelerated around the Watts riots…Young people condemned police brutality and the failed infrastructure of their city, setting fire to parked cars, smashing storefronts, and looting from the wrecked shops.” The writer noted that the Situationists were quick to write on the Watts incident, and in turn, the radical groups could see, in shops going up in flames, Situationism writ large in fire.
During this period, I was in contact with both Robin and Sam, but this would usually take the form of the occasional email or text, and while it was Robin I most wanted to discuss some of the material I’d been exploring, I knew his written English was minimal, even if his spoken English was close to fluent. I would wait. I suppose I wanted to know if those Robin knew who became involved in radical action believed that they would have been better trying to change the minds of the young rather than kidnapping and killing those who were often older, established, bourgeois. I knew from my research that some of the films addressing the topic saw it as an Oedipal struggle, with overturning the bourgeois order as a way of getting revenge on oppressive parents or parents they believed would have been Nazis or Fascists, or kidnapping or killing those who had affiliations with them. Had they been thinking too much of the older generation and not enough of the younger one?
10
When arriving in Paris the following summer, I didn’t initially see Robin. It was his mother’s eightieth birthday, and there was an extended family gathering at their holiday home in Brittany. I knew there could sometimes be heated exchanges with his father, warmed-over versions of their arguments when Robin was in his early twenties and deciding what not to do with his life. His father had clearer ideas of Robin’s future than Robin did, and he couldn’t see that Robin’s eschewal of a career wasn’t for want of a will, but his determination to practise it. His father saw prevarication; Robin wanted to make clear this was willpower, not wilfulness, and for much of his twenties family gatherings were interrupted by these altercations. For several years, Robin avoided them, but by the time Robin was in his mid-thirties, his father accepted his son’s life was not his to dictate, and it was as though the arguments they did then have weren’t over parental enforcement and a son’s resistance, but the simmering acknowledgement of an earlier mutual disrespect that could never quite be eradicated. Perhaps if Robin had been a generation or two older, and if he believed his father might have collaborated with the Nazis, he too would have become a terrorist.
Meeting up with Sam before he was leaving the next day, as I would occupy his flat, we went for dinner at a restaurant in the Marais and continued for drinks afterwards at the cafe where we had met some of his friends the previous year, on the Rue Froissart. I sensed he was more worried than usual, and he admitted he was, finding that he no longer felt secure in the job even though there was nothing in particular that indicated he was soon to lose it. For a decade, working for the European Union, he didn’t feel this at all, even as directors came and went, cutbacks were announced, and redundancies were possible. Yet none of this impacted on him emotionally; he never lost any sleep over it. Now he was. It was as though, he admitted, for years he managed to retain a confidence instilled in him as the brilliant student he once was. He had been the dux of his school, found languages easy to learn, and received a first-class degree from an Ancient university. He would have studied for a PhD, he told me, and his professors wished him to do so, but he was offered a good job right away and knew that friends who went on to do post-graduate work may not have done so had they been offered the employment opportunities he was promptly given. He had consistently made his parents proud and continued to do so as long as he remained in a job with status. I wasn’t sure if he was being fair to his parents, just as I knew what he divulged as he reiterated a biography of success that was only offered as a way of understanding the gap between that achievement and what he saw as his impending failure. Nothing he said was new to me, though over the years he told me such details in response to my questions.
After saying he was losing sleep, Sam said he went into work each day as if they were going to tell him to clear his desk, and there he would be at forty-five if not unemployable, probably unlikely to have a job that would pay as well. He said that while for years he could offer sympathy to the city’s homeless and often gave the odd euro, he would now look at them and wonder how they got there. He had five years still to pay on his fifteen-year mortgage and he would struggle to pay it in the job he was thinking of taking if he did have to leave: becoming a secondary school teacher in France, teaching English. He was aware too that if he were to become a teacher, he would be unlikely to be teaching near the city centre and all those pleasant walks to work would become extended commutes.
As we talked, there was nothing at all to indicate his job was not safe, and nothing in the job itself that he disliked. He enjoyed editing people’s copy, making it crisper and clearer, indicating when an argument could be filled out more fully with a couple of examples and so on. No, the job was fine; it was simply the sense he had that everything was so precarious. I wasn’t sure if this should have made me more worried or less worried that, since his job seemed secure, Sam’s feelings of vulnerability lay elsewhere. I asked him about his love life, and he said that when you aren’t presently loving life, it is hard to have one. While before Sam would joke about his unwillingness or inability to settle down, to accept that he would go from one fling to an affair, from one relationship to another, now this was a sign of failure. Sam was leaving the next day to visit his family in Manchester and wouldn’t be back until the night before I would leave. I was hoping a holiday was all he needed to get some perspective on his life in France, but as I saw tension in his face the next morning, as he booked a taxi for eleven to make sure he would make a flight at four, when he would usually take the metro and the RER, I sensed a permeating anxiety.
11
When I arranged a couple of days later to see Robin, he asked if we could meet in the area of the city with the anarchist bookshop. He had three flats to visit where he was watering plants, and he would also check if there had been any post at the store, which had been closed for ten days as everybody was away, with David and Claudia arriving back in Paris in a couple of days to reopen it. We visited their flat first and then carried on up for about ten minutes to an apartment near Pelleport metro in a block of flats built in the 80s that seemed to house anarchists and cops. He supposed that was an exaggeration, but he knew of three other anarchists in the building as well as the person whose plants he was watering, and on several occasions, he’d visited, he had seen cops in uniform coming and going. The municipal dream, he joked: authority figures and those who wished to escape them. And sure enough, as we exited the lift on the 6th floor, a cop in uniform got in. I proposed that there were maybe so many cops in the block because there were so many in it determined to undermine authority, and he said these must be very dedicated cops to live their day and night to keep an eye on the radicals. But maybe I was right, he added.
The flat belonged to a recently retired schoolteacher who was now working two days a week in the bookshop, and might never have become a teacher were it not for the changes made in the education system after 1968, even if she didn’t start teaching until the mid-eighties. And she probably wouldn’t have stayed in the job if she couldn’t have lived in a flat like this one; her salary wouldn’t have otherwise allowed her to do so. Perhaps, he said, she was justifying the activism of her friends, but she said one evening, when they were all a little drunk around at Davide and Claudia, if it weren’t for people like them, who knows what she would have become. Their radicalism allowed her to live a respectable, affordable, even middle-class life. She offered it as a joke, but Robin saw in it a paradox: it took perhaps radicalism to produce a generation of people who could accept the compromises as long as some were made.
As we went along to the third flat he was looking after, I spoke to him about my research, mentioned an excellent article that drew links between the situationists and the Red Army Faction, and distinguished the difference between a happening and a terrorist act. He said he thought that’s what David, Claudia and some of the others lost sight of for a short period: they confused aesthetic possibility with radical insistence. Yet he couldn’t deny that an aspect of that radical insistence may have led to freedoms and social transformations that wouldn’t have changed without that ‘confusion’. He suspected he wouldn’t have got caught in conflating the two, but he wasn’t sure whether that would have been based on discernment or cowardice. Maybe a bit of both. What he did know was that he loved music and liked life, and that might have been enough to retreat from any determined act that would have improved the latter. I never found Robin to be cynical, but there seemed to be potential cynicism in his statement, as there hadn’t been in Sam’s remark, about having no love life when you didn’t love life. Robin consistently liked it, but loved the music life could produce. When I first got to know Robin, he burned for me CDs of music he liked; now, whenever he sent an email, he also offered various links to music he believed I would or should appreciate. When I told him what Sam had said after saying I was a little worried for my friend, that for much of his life thus far he had been living with an underlying awareness of his own brilliance, and now he no longer could, believing he was as interchangeable as anybody else and could thus lose his job at any moment, Robin said it must be difficult for him. As he said it, I thought about the contrast. They were my two closest friends in Paris, but Robin got his failure in early and turned it into, I believe, a great personal success. He lived as he wished and didn’t fear for his job, had a love of music that he never tried to monetise, and a range of friends that had never been predicated on either work or his earning capacity. In every way, it suddenly appeared to me that Robin’s life was secure and Sam’s precarious, no matter Sam’s take-home pay was probably close to seven times that of Robin’s. Sociologically, I would probably say Sam’s life was a neo-liberal success that was now no longer so tenable as an idea, and Robin’s a modest life that wanted to try and live within many of the ideals that were pertinent post-68. Maybe none of us can escape the political as the personal.
12
Over the next week, I spent much of it alone. Sam was away, and Robin was doing four night shifts in a row. Other people I knew in the city were vacationing. Each day, I proposed to visit a garden or park and insisted to myself that I would do so on foot. I ruled out the two largest parks— Vincennes and Boulogne — and also smaller gardens. This left me with Monceau, Belleville, Luxembourg, Jardin des Plantes, Clichy-Batignolles, Villet and Buttes Chaumont, and though I could have cheated by visiting gardens quite close to each other at the same time (Luxembourg and Jardin des Plantes; Villette and Buttes Chaumont), that seemed both cartographically and physically lazy. None of them was so close to the Marais that it didn’t constitute a walk of at least 5km, and in some instances twice that distance or more. I pretended I was doing it with a professional interest, and afterwards went online to find out more about their creation. But it was as though I wanted to drift aimlessly through the city without quite having no purpose at all. They were all parks except one that I’d passed through on other occasions, and some were associated with surprisingly painless memories: a bench in Buttes Chaumont where I parted from an American with whom I’d had a five-day fling, after meeting in that most predictable of romantic places for two English language speakers in the city - a well-known bookshop. Another bench and the only other Paris affair — one in Jardin des Plantes, where someone I’d seen during an initial summer I returned to see hoping that it could be continued or re-started, only to be told very understandably in the intervening year that she met someone else, and that studio flat where we lay in her bed looking up through the attic skylight was now occupied by her and another tenant. She would sit there reading poetry and passages from novels with him now, and though of course she didn’t put it quite like that, this was how I received it. Yet there I was five years later, not even sure I was sitting on the same bench as memory had faded enough for the body to feel as though these events had happened, if not to a stranger then merely to a friend.
The only one new to me was Clichy-Batignolles, also known as Martin Luther King Park. It was built on a disused Freight Yard and, like Buttes Chaumont, took the ugly and turned it into the beautiful. Buttes Chaumont was used for dumped sewage and cut-up horse carcasses, and who would know it, wandering amongst its undulating greenery? Clichy Batignolles was flat and full of straight lines, retaining an element of the railway in its geometry, but very far away from it in its bio-diverse execution. On the north-west side of the park were high-rises so futuristic that they could serve as a set for a science fiction (and a futuristic French film I’d seen months earlier may well have been set there). But this seemed a utopian space, one where negative narratives would struggle to grow, and isn’t this what narrative happens to be? Aren’t stories places of struggle and opposition, and this is I suppose what many like Davide and Daniela were interested in doing: changing the story and making history, as if aware of the conflation of the two words in Italian (and rooted in the Latin) made it feasible that the aesthetic and political could equally be combined. Yet walking through Clichy-Batignolles, I found the imagination at work in its creation positive, while I couldn’t find very much of value in the terrorist actions of the seventies. This seemed to go beyond the violence used and also incorporated the values believed in. I sensed even if many of those involved in radical action possessed creative backgrounds, may have been influenced by the Situationists, it was as if their hatred of the older generation meant that much of the energy went into resentment, and couldn’t quite imagine a world of affirmation.
Was I being fair to these various movements that at least tried to counter the market economy we now feel we cannot change? Yet I think they might agree that with different tactics, perhaps more could have been done. In May 68, there were deaths (two) but they were contingent rather than planned, while the radical movements of the 70s absorbed killing into their ethos, and gained far less from it than the various movements of the late 60s that protested the violence of work and war, rather than seeking to perpetrate it themselves. It made sense that such thoughts came to me while sitting on a bench in Martin Luther King Park, looking across at the flats I later discovered were a mixture of market and affordable rentals, and social housing. They were energy-efficient and futuristic, and at the same time individually idiosyncratic. One looked like a 21st-century Gaudí building, another as if it had been built using solar panels. I found it apt that this tranquil park was named after a figure who supported non-violent protest, and wondered if any park had been named after Baader or Meinhof, Moretti or Franceschini. (Though he’d read a street had been named after Bobby Sands, not in Northern Ireland but Tehran.)
Yet this was surely about the failure of the movements rather than the strength of their actions. There was, of course, a park in Paris named after Nelson Mandela, whose ANC was long considered a terrorist group by various governments, including the British. My thoughts on the subject concluded when I exited, crossed the road. I walked through the smaller park at Batignolles before getting a coffee and reading a Henry James story, someone who seemed as antithetical to the notion of art and life interacting, and to engaged action.
13
I only had the chance to see Robin once more before returning to Scotland, and he apologised for failing to be more available. He would have wished to meet the previous day, but he needed to talk to Davide and Daniela. They had returned from Brittany and were preparing to go to Italy. I wondered if I might have missed something monumental in the news, and that National Rally had suddenly seized power. But he said no — the personal can be just as devastating. Daniela’s father was very ill and would almost certainly not be alive much longer. They hadn’t talked since she joined the Red Brigades, but in recent years they sent each other cards on birthdays and at Christmas. She was his only child; her mother had passed away when she was in prison. How could she not go back? Davide didn’t only fail to dissuade her (he didn’t even try) — he insisted he would go back with her. On their return from Britanny, they emptied their suitcases, washed their clothes, and, waiting for them to dry, would leave for Italy the following day. When he saw them the previous night, Robin noted that they initially packed items of special value, aware they might never return. Robin received a text a few hours earlier saying they were having a going-away party that evening at the bookshop. The flight was the following afternoon. He asked me if I wanted to join them all. It was as if I knew some of them now anyway, and this may well be my only chance to meet Daniela and Davide.
Of course, I’d met people before whom I’d known of without meeting them, and how often do people say when meeting someone new that they have heard a lot about them? And too, sometimes, one has the chance to meet a celebrity, having watched their films or listened to their music. This seemed an odd combination of both, and with added notoriety. Davide and Daniela may not have killed anyone, but had they not been part of a murderous organisation, and wouldn’t others have proposed killing to further their political goals? I was used to going to academic conferences where people might say in the pub afterwards they could for a burger, but that was about the limit of their aggression, and based on a hungry stomach over a hunger for ideas to be put into action. My thoughts were those of an ensconced scholar, wishing for a better world and writing about its absence, yet feeling under little obligation to do much more about it than write for journals and offer a few provocations in a classroom. I knew if I were to say no to more forceful action, it would reflect a cowardice I probably sometimes practised in my work, convincing myself an argument needed to be bolstered with more facts when what it probably needed was more adventurous thinking. I’d be meeting people who practised adventurousness in more than thought.
Robin added that there would be numerous people there, many who had no interest or involvement in politics but happened to be part of the broader community. I would comprehend a little bit more of Paris, and it would be the opposite of the peripatetic solitude I told him I’d been practising over the last week.
14
Robin helped set up the bookshop for the party, and I met him in the early evening at Jourdain metro, where we then carried along to the store. He said it was already busy and, as we approached, there must have been at least fifty people outside, and the two cafes at the corner nearest the shop were also full and the terraces crowded. It was a Wednesday night in August. Robin said he was surprised by how many people had turned out. It would be almost embarrassing if Daniele and Davide were to return in a few weeks, and added that ideally they would wait six months and come back, getting a welcome as big as their farewell. I felt more overwhelmed than intimidated, impressed by the number, and also moved by the sense of solidarity. I asked Robin if everyone was in sympathy with their actions in the past, and he said quite a few were, but others had been impressed by their actions in the relative present: their work at the radio, the bookshop, their involvement in a homeless group. He supposed they were active; everyone admired that.
At around 9, a band started playing in the shop, but after twenty minutes and so many keen to listen to them, they were persuaded to stop for five minutes and move their gear outside, easy enough to do as they played at the front of the shop and still used the electricity from inside it. They were a band who’d been performing in the city for a decade but were without papers until a year ago, and now played gigs that could be more openly publicised and earn money on which they could pay tax. An immigrant success story, Robin said - however long it took for the state to view them as such. The cafes were serving food, but there were far more hungry mouths than they could feed, and those who could murder a burger or a pie, a pizza or a salad (murder seemed too strong a word for such a dish), could smell cooking from several of the flats. Within thirty minutes, two large tables were taken out from the back of a van and set up. Robin said they were usually used to feed the homeless, and didn’t doubt there would be a few faces at the party who would recognise them as tables they had supped on.
If I might have feared meeting Davide and Daniela, I needn’t have done — they were neither intimidating nor available, and I said hello to them in the briefest of exchanges while so many people that night wished to command their attention. Robin realised that some of those who were there that evening were under the assumption that Davide and Daniela were going back as a political act, to face imprisonment, and they were determined to make clear to everyone that they were returning for the most personal of reasons, no matter if there might be political consequences. They could have made this misapprehension clear with a loudspeaker, but though used on many occasions in their political life, this appeared to be a statement they needed to clear-up conversationally.
I left at 1 in the morning, and said goodbye to Robin, hoping to see him again the following summer, and that, as always, he was welcome in Scotland. He said he should come; he hadn’t been there since a family trip when he was fifteen. Yet I wondered whether our friendship was predicated on Paris - I couldn’t imagine a holiday with him, and I thought this with a feeling for the love of the city with which I so associated him, rather than any sense that we might not get along elsewhere.
15
I awaited Sam’s return, making sure the flat was as tidy as when I found it, even if its initial tidiness was evident due to the cleaner who came the day before he left for England. It was an easy place to keep neat. Unlike Robin’s, which was a clutter of records, CDs, tattered second-hand books, and magazines, Sam’s seemed almost a temporary residence. He had a couple of plants and some abstract paintings on the wall; everything else was practical. He owned no books, reading everything off the computer or tablet, and no music system or CDs. His cleaner acknowledged that his flat was ideal, and though he paid her for three hours, he knew it probably didn’t take her more than an hour and a half. He offered it with no sense of criticism; more with the pride of someone happy to have few possessions. Like many of Sam’s comments, it was difficult to read them politically, while almost everything Robin would say was, if not inflected with the political, informed by its possibility.
Yet while looking around the flat after cleaning it, I saw perhaps for the first time that Sam always viewed it as a temporary residence, even though he had lived in it for a decade and would in several years have paid off the mortgage. What I often saw as its minimalism, I began to see, when thinking of how Sam was feeling before he left, the flat was empty in a way that was more than material.
I expected his mood to be still despondent, but instead, as I opened the door and he entered the apartment, he appeared less happy to see me than joyful, and as we started to chat, I realised he wasn’t in a jovial mood because he was seeing me again, or returning to Paris, or more specifically, returning to his home. It was that, while in Manchester, he met again, for the first time in fifteen years, someone he knew from school, a girl he once fancied, had long since forgotten about, but where those teenage feelings returned as they talked in a Cheadle Hume pub after recognising each other, despite the passing years and their mutually inebriated state. They met up again the next day and the day after. I asked the usual questions: whether she was single, what she did, and where she lived. She recently left her law job in London, six month earlier had parted from a boyfriend she couldn’t imagine marrying after five years together, and was living at home again with her parents while she sorted out her next move. The next move would be, he said, that she was moving to Paris, would work in a cafe, improve her French, live with him, and then they would both decide what their next move would be. With other people and in other circumstances, I might have met such remarks with scepticism, but it was as if Sam hadn’t met someone who had swept him off his feet, and where many a future problem is swept under the carpet. It was more that he had landed on his feet, finding in another person what he couldn’t find in himself. I thought of Robin and how much more self-contained he always seemed to be, and that his affairs of the heart were not falsely diagnosed as partners for life and wondered too if he might be the perfect revolutionary, someone who saw failure early, stood up to his parents, and showed little interest in money or status. Maybe the revolutionary isn’t someone who is willing to kill others, but who can kill within themselves the various values that society presently lives by. One’s ruthlessness needn’t be aggressive but merely assertive, and perhaps the latter has always been a stronger force than the former. At the moment I saw in Sam a belief in others that wasn’t too far removed from what I supposed was also evident in Davide and Claudia: a love of another person who is at least as important as themselves. In Robin, I saw instead someone who seemed to believe in himself and the possibilities in the world, and somehow wished the two to conjoin. It was as if he was more interested in conjugations over the conjugal, the multiplication of energies over the creation of couples. Where I stood, both personally and politically, I couldn’t quite say — but knew in my work I couldn’t find such a place in which to try and answer it. But where would that place be, I wondered.
© Tony McKibbin