“When you showed up, I had this strong feeling. I told myself, this chick is looking for trouble. Turns out I was right.”
“You don’t want trouble,” I said. “I get it. We can pretend we never had this conversation.”
The moon had advanced. It brimmed over the hill, pouring its yellow light.
“How about you give me the details,” Burdmoore said, “and maybe I will choose trouble. Or I won’t. But you leave it to me, sister, to decide what I want.”
IF YOU WERE FROM THE DRUNK TANK, the holding cell, the reform school, the orphanage, or the streets, you had a leg up with Guy Debord. There were a few, in that crowd around Debord, Bruno wrote, who came and went from the prisons, and one guy who had been in a penal colony for murdering a guard.
There were the criminals and delinquents on the one hand, and on the other the intellectuals like Guy. Guy was committed to rejecting society, while the hoodlums lived their rejection instead of thinking about it.
At the end of the war, young Bruno had been transported to Paris to be reunited with his family. After it was confirmed that he had no family, he was shuttled among institutions. This went on for several years. Finally, he opted to flee. He didn’t look back, and no one came in search of him. There was a community, he said, of boys like him, kids who looked out for one another and made their home on the streets of Paris.
The Moulinards had asked about his early history in that storied era, the 1950s on the Left Bank. Bruno told them he was fifteen when he first met Debord. That was in ’53. Guy was older by six years, and this gap—between a fifteen-year-old orphan living by his wits, and a twenty-one-year-old Guy, who was enormously cultivated, with a lot of opinions, a nice apartment on rue Racine, a girlfriend with a car—was a chasm.
Guy was mysterious and bookish. Bruno had no interest in books. He felt there was no need, he told the Moulinards, to bother with books, given that Guy read them all the time, and Guy tended to relay to Bruno when there was something in those books that Bruno should know about. In exchange, Bruno taught Guy about the fundamentals of hoodlum survival.
The girls Bruno’s age, who had been similarly heaved up parentless onto the shores of postwar Paris, whether from concentration camps or from safekeeping in the countryside, these girls were housed in orphanages managed by strict nuns. The boys who were out on the streets were the lucky ones, Bruno said, and so they tried to share their good luck with the girls, by helping them escape these grim nunneries so that they, too, could enjoy their fundamental disposition as vagrants. It is bad enough to be a vagrant, Bruno said. But to be locked into a nunnery, and barred from enjoying your vagrancy? This was worse.
Some of them, both girls and boys, made their home at tables and chairs outside the Café Dupont-Latin, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. It was there that Bruno first met Guy and was exposed to the fad of existentialism, popular among the old bar philosophers. Bruno took to their hobby of drinking, but not philosophy. Sometimes the younger ones, bored by existentialism, would ditch the bar for some house whose owners were at work or out of town, where they drank stolen dry wines like Entre-Deux-Mers and stolen sweet wines like Banyuls, and if they weren’t sweet enough for the youngest orphans, it was Bruno’s job to add sugar.
Trauma twists us, Bruno said, and because of my guilt over my family—my brother, especially, murdered by the Nazis at age twelve—I felt a certain protective obligation to the little ones. I became their older brother, and I stirred the sugar in their drinks.
The Dupont-Latin, Bruno said, was merely a point of embarkation, the gateway to a strange journey whose next destination, around the time of his seventeenth birthday, was a different bar, the Mabillon, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
You asked about the early days, he said, and this is how they went: In the morning, we drank in the streets. In the evenings, we drank at the Mabillon. For multi-hour stretches, Guy disappeared, presumably to go read books. Meanwhile, I panhandled and stole, to have money to buy drinks. And on occasion, I fell into bed with someone I coveted.
Arrested for petty theft, Bruno was sent to a reformatory where boys punched each other from morning until night. Bruno would lie in his bunk and dream of being eighteen, so that he could be sent to a proper prison. That was how blinkered my mind was, he said, by the war, by the loss of my family, by the reckless abandon that was my guiding principle.
After the reformatory, he rejoined Debord and the rest, who were now at Chez Moineau on the Rue du Four. This was 1955. The scene was more intellectual by then, Bruno said. They had a journal, even.
Guy believed that true art never devolved into actual art, it had to be lived as a gesture, like going into Notre Dame Cathedral and yelling “God is dead,” or stumbling home drunk, on foot, because there was a rail strike, and declaring that your drunken meandering was a new way of mapping the city. If you sold art or published under your own name or had a job, you were considered a lowlife. I was as guilty as Guy, Bruno said, for my pretentions in this regard. The rules for inclusion in our group were arbitrary and strict, and there were purges.
The value of us non-thinkers in the group, Bruno wrote to the Moulinards, was measured by how much we drank and how much we stole, whether it was bottles of wine from the cellar of the Brasserie Lipp, or a car on a side street that was waiting to be hot-wired. Bruno said his specialty was rifling hotel rooms.
In that era, so long before your time, he told the Moulinards, you had to lock the door of a hotel. It didn’t lock automatically. Many people would forget to lock their room once they returned to it. The rooms that Bruno entered were generally occupied by people he hoped were sleeping.
I got very good at making no noise and at seeing in the dark, he said. I admit with some chagrin that perhaps I originally learned to see with my fingers, to see by touch, not in the caves, but in dark hotel rooms where strangers slept, as I felt for items to steal.
The results were random and inconsistent. A shoehorn. An ice bucket. A woman’s toiletry case. Or he would get lucky and find a wallet or purse. Once, he grabbed a velvet bag that felt to have metal parts inside, which turned out to be a disassembled MAC 50, a French army pistol.
Some of the others who stole got more ambitious. They began to pilfer lead from the lamps in the Catacombs, not unlike the way people today steal copper wire, Bruno said. Lead then, like copper now, was valuable and could be resold. From there, for the more serious thieves, it was jewelry stores, armed stickups, arrest, and then a choice: prison or the Foreign Legion.
Watching the others go to prison, or to Algeria to fight for colonial France, Bruno had a revelation that he could change course, that his own commitment to mayhem was not inevitable, not total. He stopped thieving. He gave up drinking. He got a job punching tickets in the metro, rented a maid’s room out in the nineteenth. He made plans to enroll in school. He was still a teenager. Guy Debord shunned him, and the others followed suit. Working, enrolling in school, these things were just not done. You were meant to reject society completely, to fling yourself headlong into a world without the old structures.
Bruno punched tickets in the metro by day, and by night, he took up reading. At the age of twenty, he left Paris to study earth science in Lyon.
Upon graduating, he was contracted to teach high school students in the city of Rodez, famous, he told the Moulinards, for its enormous cathedral, and also for its mental hospital, which had once housed the playwright Antonin Artaud.
He was not aware, until he arrived there for his first day of work, that it was a reform school. The pedagogical principles were punishment and cruelty, which brought Bruno back to his own childhood, fighting bare-knuckled to survive in the reformatory. It was not by accident, he told the Moulinards, that he had somehow landed at this awful school in Rodez. Bruno was certain it was fate.
While the other teachers beat their students with a closed fist or a belt or a cane, Bruno vowed a gentle approach. He treated his students like peers, like equals. They worked together, and a communal feeling took hold. It was this spirit, he said, that formed who he is now.
The sentimental education he underwent in Rodez had created in him, he wrote to the Moulinards, a deep belief that life is precious, and that when it is treated as precious, it is made so.
The lessons that I took as a teacher in Rodez, he said, have outlasted everything else, all the twists and turns through my history. The ideas that I developed are in fact one idea, he said: Children will choose love over brutality, if given the chance. Adults will do the same, if given the chance.
All acts of savagery originate with authority, he wrote.
The work to be done, he told them, is a refusal of savagery.
Pascal (he rarely singled out Pascal in these emails, and so I took particular note), you will undoubtedly find my position “romantic,” and even “hopelessly” so.
I have been called worse. And I’ll admit that what I find romantic is your continued interest in the mystique of Debord. And yet I’ve surely been no help in undoing that mystique, and instead, I have probably even built him up a little more in your eyes. You are excused because you are young enough to know only the legend, and not the reality. I don’t disavow my own history, my association with Debord. At the same time, I shudder to think of those who keep the flame, manage the legend, who believe that the twin hobbies of drinking and denunciating are signs of life. They are signs of death. But never mind. I left that milieu not to reject it but to find something else. And your question has led me back to Rodez and to a promise I made and that I’ve kept.
I have never been opposed to property destruction, to principled direct action. The Guyenne is under threat and it must be protected. In this we agree. But intimations I get—and here, you’ll have a harsher word for me, perhaps, than “romantic”—but things I hear on cave frequency suggest to me that there is something up ahead, a plan in the offing, over which you and I are not united. If this plan risks the safety, the lives, of people—no matter who they are—you will be making a mistake. A wrong turn.
I want to make myself clear to you, that I deplore violence in all of its forms.
I HAD READ THAT EMAIL from Bruno with a certain investment. The occasions when he went into his personal history were special. They were special occasions.
With a little distance, I had the thought that what Bruno was hearing on his “cave frequency,” that someone might be hurt—surely plain old intuition, but whatever, people are strange, and where does intuitive knowledge originate?—in any case this notion he had was correct, and if he blamed Pascal, all the better.
In the few days since that email, there had been no new correspondence between Bruno and the Moulinards. Perhaps Pascal was stewing over what Bruno said about violence, or the accusation it was Pascal who was the romantic, and not Bruno.
I started to derive childish satisfaction from the prospect that Bruno would blame Pascal and the Moulinards for violence, and not me. As if they were the bad children, and I was the good one. They were acting from fancy, from affectation, acting out. While I was just doing my job. Just trying to get by. To live, and to be.
I now possessed subminister Platon’s full travel itinerary. He would make his appearance at the agricultural fair at the lake in Vantôme at 13:00 hours on the appointed day, one week from now.
