I had read a bit of the script of Lucien’s film, and I could confirm for Pascal that it was marketplace trash, but I refrained from doing so, since I was supposed to be in love with his friend. (While reading Lucien’s script, I’d thought of what Bruno said about an art that shows you nothing new, H. sapiens as copier and fraud.)
The handsome waitress came over. She addressed Pascal by name. He inquired what I wanted, ordered a coffee for himself and another for me.
“You know each other,” I said as she left.
“We all know each other here. The commune no longer runs the café, but we did all the work to reopen it. We stepped back and Naïs is in charge.” He gestured to the woman. “She’s a local, the daughter of Bruno Lacombe, and it was important that the café be run by someone with deeper ties here.”
“Sorry. Who?” I asked this as if I had no idea who Bruno was.
“Bruno Lacombe. I brought you his book, because it is quoted in ours, which I also brought you, of course. For translating quotes, you’ll want our sources.”
Pascal handed me Bruno’s book, Leaving the World Behind, as well as the book Pascal referred to as “ours,” which had no declared author on its cover, a little sky-blue paperback titled Zones of Incivility. I’d already read it. It was meant to function as a kind of handbook for insurrection, or so my contacts suggested.
“We are not concerned with how to live in this day and age,” the book begins, “but how to live against this day and age.”
Chapter headings offer directives like “form communes,” “create territories,” “employ silence,” and “plunder and obstruct,” but the language stays vague and philosophical. The basic idea is that there are people everywhere who might be ready to reject the insult of their commodified life under late capitalism, and that these people need, first and foremost, to find each other.
I thanked Pascal and looked at both books like they were new to me.
“That is the last thing Lacombe published before he stopped writing.”
“Why did he stop writing?”
It was a question to which I genuinely didn’t know the answer.
“Lacombe feels no need for a public role,” Pascal said. “At this point he writes only to us. He’s developing a unified theory of life and it’s something quite esoteric, to be shared with those who are on his wavelength. Things read by the wrong people can be misunderstood.”
Understood to be the eccentric ideas of a man who has lost the thread of reality.
“The origins of what he’s developing now are in this book. There was a split between him and various Marxist comrades after May ’68. Lacombe alone argued that the proletariat was no longer capable of destroying capitalist society. Instead, the proletariat had become part and parcel of capitalism, a cornerstone of the very world, according to Lacombe, that we must leave.”
I turned over Bruno’s book and looked at the photo of him on the back. It was an image I’d examined, a book I already owned.
“Lacombe sees no point in class-based organizing. His argument is that the wedge between human beings and nature is far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth-century life. That’s a blip, to him. He has gone back to what he considers a fundamental estrangement, which he’s convinced we must address in order to transform consciousness. We draw from his ideas, but only in part, I should say. There are some disagreements.”
In the photo, Bruno is leaning against a country fence post. There is something lamblike and gentle but also hearty about him. He is short, maybe five foot eight (I am also five foot eight, but because I’m a woman I am “tall”). His chest is barrel-like. His face is broad and mild and browned by golden sun. His hair is soft and white, in dramatic contrast with his sun-browned complexion. His white locks fall to his shoulders and are combed over from a deep side-part. His comb-over seems not borne of vanity. It is not a dishonest comb-over meant to falsify, to hide what he has lost and to pretend he has not lost it. Instead, Bruno’s comb-over seems like a guileless celebration of what remains.
Because I spend so much time reading the emails that he sends to Pascal and the group, I go back to this photo of him leaning on a fence post to make the voice come alive. I can’t say that examining Bruno’s photograph or delving into his private correspondence with Le Moulin is promising at this point, as a lead for uncovering Pascal’s plans of sabotage. But I’m driven to keep reading the letters. I get a boost when I see that Bruno’s sent box has a new one.
Naïs Lacombe (I was guessing, with no idea if she shared her father’s surname) came back to the table with our drinks.
I thought I glimpsed what was pleasing about Bruno in the symmetry of his daughter’s face.
Pascal introduced us. She was not friendly. She nodded hello and went back inside.
“She isn’t involved with the commune. Sometimes these very politically active people, critical figures like Lacombe, they live these crazy lives of triumph and failure and sacrifice, surviving on the margins, and they have children who grow up to be completely normal and apolitical. Without the same drive, without even what you might call the need for a symbolic life. Lacombe is someone who has been close to revolutionary movements since the early sixties. And when you talk to Naïs it’s, Have you seen that the price of petrol is going up? It might rain Saturday. My new hens are not good layers.
“His son is the same,” Pascal said. “Country. Works with his hands.”
“Does he live around here also?”
Pascal shook his head. “He’s in the Lozère, east of here. Works for the state.”
I pictured those proletarian hunks painting the crosswalk. They had packed up and left.
“He comes around, now and again.”
I hope I get to meet him, I did not say.
I wanted to ask about the other daughter, the one who had died. In a rare lapse, I had to remind myself that I should appear to know nothing about Bruno.
Pascal will bring it up on his own, I thought. But he didn’t.
He had moved on to the topic of Le Moulin’s own book. A translator, he said, wasn’t just rendering language word by word and sentence by sentence. A translator was a full collaborator, he said, a comrade.
As we chatted, the older sun-grilled couple in their matching Mao caps approached us. The man leaned sideways to read the spines on the other two books Pascal had brought, works of continental philosophy by some Italian. The couple both had notepads out. They began writing down these two books’ titles.
Pascal addressed them in a familiar manner that was not polite. The man asked if Pascal had read something by some other Italian, and Pascal said yes and then quickly, but with some annoyance, summarized what he thought of it.
This sent the couple madly scribbling, each of them nodding and writing down what Pascal said.
The leather cuffs on the woman’s wrists gave her note-taking a guerrilla flair.
Whatever Pascal said, they both wrote down.
He could have said, “There was an old woman,” scribble scribble, “who lived in a shoe.”
He could have said, “A penny saved,” scribble scribble, “is a penny earned.”
