That same spirit emanated from the eyes of the brunette woman whose attention remained fixed on the unwashed man with curly hair and eyeglasses. Staring at him, her emerald eyes seemed to protrude from their sockets. As if agitated by the woman’s penetrating gaze, the slovenly man left the woman’s side. Gulping what was left of the beer in the bottle in his hand, he tossed the bottle into a trash can in such a flippantly dismissive manner that he seemed to be speaking of his feelings for the beautiful woman next to him.
I wanted to approach her. The color of her eyes was the green of unripe grapes mixed with the blue of the Indian Ocean. I wished to shelter in their color. Their green was the carpet of grass under my feet; their blue, the stretch of sky over my head. I wanted to rest on that carpet and dangle my feet from that sky. What painter could possibly have created the blue-green color of her eyes? What sculptor could have carved the fluidly sensuous form of her perfect body? My eyes went to her, my body was drawn towards her, yet my legs remained fixed in place, my feet those of a criminal, shackled in steel chains, awaiting execution. The blustering wind of the Parisian spring mocked my hesitation, making me stare down at my miserable earthbound feet.
But then, into my view, came another pair of legs, with faded jeans and a pair of dark blue tennis shoes. Slowly, I raised my eyes to see the blue-green eyes very close to my own.
“Ça va?”
Her blue-green eyes could smile.
She came to me like a line of poetry perfectly complete, restoring my breath which had suddenly ceased.
“Ça va …”
Vivienne Deveraux and I were soon to become two dots which, when melding together, formed a line that traced the pores of the body of Paris. Only a few weeks after our first brief meeting that evening on the Sorbonne campus, nature brought us together again on the Rive Gauche, on the southern bank of the Seine. I was at a kiosk there, studying a display of posters in various artistic styles and formats. Their sight took me back to Indonesia, some of them reminding me of Indonesian painters I knew of who used a garish palette of colors in their work: bright yellow, steaming pink, and vivid purple. But there was also the work of artists reminiscent of the woodblock prints of several Eastern European artists. The posters seemed to shout out at me — though I first had to search my mind for the meaning of their words: “Toute la Presse est Toxique,” “La Lutte Continue …”
“The struggle continues …”
Ah, that voice! It was she, again: Vivienne, the woman with the green eyes and the pair of lips whose only imperfection was that they were not locked with mine. She was standing next to me.
She smiled and pointed at the poster I was viewing with its image of six people in silhouette, whose ages, apparel, and accoutrements showed them to be a mix of workers and students, all with their right arms thrust in the air, in which was written, in jagged letters, the words La Lutte Continue.
“That means ‘the struggle continues,’” she said again in English.
“So, the artist is saying that the spirit of the students and the workers are one, is that it?”
“It is the spirit of the entire French people,” she said emphatically.
I nodded but knew that she could see the skeptical look on my face.
Vivienne invited me to join her at an outdoor café nearby, where she immediately ordered coffee for us, not bothering to first ask what I might want. As in almost every other café I had visited in Paris, the coffee was served in a demitasse, whose size was, to my Indonesian mind, much more appropriate for playing house than for serving a proper cup of coffee. The first time I was served a cup of coffee in Paris, it was so strong and thick and had such an incredibly oily taste that I’d almost had a heart attack. My God, what would they have to put in their coffee to make it more palateable, I wondered, a bucket of sugar and a gallon of cream? And now again, for the umpteenth time, with my first sip, the instant the thick and oil-like liquid touched my tongue, my body recoiled in shock.
Vivienne noticed my reaction and the difficulty I was having in swallowing the coffee. “Don’t you like it?”
“You should try Indonesian coffee,” I said hurriedly, trying to cover my social faux pas. “We have hundreds, even thousands of kinds,” I exaggerated, hoping to impress her with my country of origin. I was sure that she, like most other French people I’d met, knew very little about l’Indonésie. I mentioned some of the kinds of coffee that Indonesia produced — Toraja, Mandailing, luwak, and so on — and explained how in Indonesia coffee was usually prepared using an infusion method, with boiling hot water poured on finely powdered coffee.
As I rambled on, Vivienne smiled patiently, even after I went into detail how luwak is produced. Luwak coffee, I told her, is one of the few benefits of the forced cultivation system implemented by the Dutch in the nineteenth century. The Dutch colonial rulers had prohibited native farmers from picking coffee for their own use, I explained. They didn’t realize that the civet cats which inhabited the coffee groves would eat the coffee berries and later, because they couldn’t digest the actual beans, would defecate them along with their feces on the ground. The natives would then collect the droppings, soak them in water to separate the beans, then roast, grind and them turn them into coffee.
The look on Vivienne’s face was a mixture of humor and incredulity. I could see in her green eyes the question of how a method of production as foul as the one I had described could, as if by magic, produce a cup of coffee which I proceeded to liken to an aphrodisiac. I even went so far as to say that the first sip of luwak coffee could cause a premature ejaculation, so wonderful is its taste.
At this point, Vivienne started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Her laughter came in rolls, causing her to hold her sides and tears to stream from her eyes. Finally she regained control of herself. “Phew! Oh my God. What a story! Thank you for making me laugh so much. For a moment I was able to forget what a fucked up state this country is in!”
I delighted in hearing her laughter. “France, fucked up?”
Suddenly, her laughter stopped. “Yes! The police attacked my friends,” she said. “The campus has been shut down and the politicians don’t know what to do.”
She wasn’t complaining. She was stating things matter-of-factly.
I watched Vivienne’s lips as she spoke. To myself, I thought that when it came to the state of a nation, she had no idea what “fucked up” meant. Indonesia was rarely covered in the press, not even in leading news media such as Le Monde and Le Figaro. What the typical French person might know is that Indonesia is a country located somewhere in Southeast Asia not too far from Vietnam. (The only Asian countries the French seemed to know were China and North and South Vietnam.)
For Vivienne and her equally agitated friends to whom she had just referred, the futility of the Vietnam conflict served as tinder for the anti-government protest movements that had begun to erupt in Europe and the United States. They wouldn’t have heard the names of Indonesia’s political activists who long predated theirs — such as Sukarno, Hatta, Sjahrir, and Tan Malaka. Given that, what could they possibly know about the bloodbath that had taken place in Indonesia in the months and years that followed the events of September 30, 1965? Most of the people I had met, Vivienne included, would probably have had to open an atlas just to find out where Indonesia was.