Vivienne started to tell me about the roots of unrest among the students at Nanterre, which had grown and transformed into a mass movement joined by the workers. I was growing impatient. I knew for sure that if Vivienne knew about what had happened and what was still happening in Indonesia, she wouldn’t continue to prattle. But I didn’t want to tell her about the bloodbath in my homeland — or at least not yet. But how was I to get her to stop chattering?
I moved from where I was seated to a spot on the bench beside her and touched her beautiful chin. The effect was immediate: she stopped speaking and her green eyes opened wide. Seeing in them a desire that matched my own, I pressed my lips to hers. As if wanting to drink each other, we could not stop kissing and even without a cup of luwak coffee experienced an orgasmic sensation like no other.
Over the next few months, Vivienne and I were two flâneurs, a pair of adventurers, always together, taking in the sights and sounds of Paris. The revolution of May 1968 was out of sight and out of mind, as if it had never happened. France was again a flamboyant place, though one where civility and courtesy reigned.
During this period, Vivienne refrained from forcing me to open up and talk about my past. Whether because of a certain reticence on her part or because of my lock-lipped response to her initial exploratory questions about my life, she didn’t ask — or, more precisely, stopped herself from asking — about certain aspects of my life history. Fair or not, I came to know much more about her than she about me.
Vivienne was the younger of the two children of Laurence and Marianne Deveraux, who lived in Lyon. Her brother Jean worked for the International Red Cross and had, for several years already, been stationed in countries in Africa. She had two first cousins, Marie-Claire and Mathilde, who were also students at the Sorbonne. The difference between the two cousins was that while Marie-Claire was an Earth-mother type, given to hugging everyone she met, Mathilde was much more reserved and looked on people with a suspicious eye. Regardless of any dissimilarity, this trio of stunning brunettes were closely bound by familial ties and friendship and spent much of their free time together, including those days of demonstrations in May when their voices could be heard loud and clear among the crowd.
Vivienne was a very intelligent woman, whose natural curiosity had been nurtured by the intellectual environment of her middle-class family, who placed high stress on academic achievement. But in France, or in the rest of Europe for that matter, intelligence was not very difficult to find.
What distinguished Vivienne from her two cousins was her keen sensitivity. She rapidly grasped that her openness about herself would not automatically elicit a similar frankness on my part about my life history. She knew that my move to Paris had not been the result of my being from a bourgeois family given to quoting Albert Camus as a sign of their academic acumen. She could infer from my reluctance to speak of the past — or maybe it was from the way I carefully counted my franc notes, or maybe from the amount of time I could spend in a used bookstore without buying anything — that it was not of my own volition that I was living in Paris. Something else had brought me here and forced me to stop and stay in Europe.
Intuitively, it seems, Vivienne knew that she could not force me to give an encyclopedic version of my life without alienating me in the process. So it was that she allowed me to gradually feed her drops from the bottle of my memory at my own pace and in my own time.
As a relatively new arrival in Paris, I did not know the city well and, if truth be told, was only familiar with the Metro system in the area where my rundown apartment was located, an arrondissement in which there were several Vietnamese restaurants, whose food, to my great delight, more resembled that of China and Indonesia than European food, which I found to be bland and terribly short on spices.
Vivienne introduced me to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the Palais Mazarin. Using her membership card the first time we went there, she checked out for me several books on literature and politics. The library was so immense as to be awe-inspiring and I was almost afraid to explore the various floors. I promised myself that I would come back alone, one day, which I did soon afterwards.
Vivienne also took me to stores and places in Paris where prices weren’t so hard on the pocketbook of a wayfarer like myself. (I still didn’t know what to call myself. What was I? A refugee? A traveler? An exile? Or maybe something with a little more cachet: a writer or an independent journalist?) Frequently, three friends of mine — Nugroho Dewantoro, Tjai Sin Soe, and Risjaf, who were fellow Indonesians also living off the good graces of the French government — would join the two of us.
Vivienne took me and my three loud-mouthed friends to see the Grand Palais and Notre Dame Cathedral. With her, we explored Île Saint-Louis. We Indonesians were a quartet of gay and carefree ramblers ready to drop the names of locations in Paris in our (as yet unborn) poems and novels — or at least we acted that way, when in fact we were just a band of political exiles acting like thrifty tourists. But maybe it was by being able to laugh at ourselves that we were able to survive. I can’t say.
Exploring the arteries of Paris with Vivienne was enlightening for me. Perhaps because of his talent as a writer, Ernest Hemingway was able to vividly invoke in his writing the special affection he held for Paris, as he did in A Moveable Feast; but Vivienne, as a woman, seemed to better understand the city’s corpus.
I couldn’t say that Paris was for us the “moveable feast” that Hemingway described; but it definitely was “terre d’asile”—our place of exile. Second to that, Paris was the remarkable River Seine, which divided the city into its left and right banks but whose thirty-seven bridges sewed the two halves together. It was also Shakespeare & Co., the celebrated bookstore on Rue de la Bûcherie; and of course it was a park bench on Île Saint-Louis, the site of Vivienne’s and my first unexpected but marvelously prolonged kiss. As our land of exile, Paris was first and foremost for us the roof over our heads and the source of our next meal but it was the sights and sounds of Paris, the city’s intangible delights, which provided sustenance for our souls.
Before meeting Vivienne, and as is true with most tourists and new visitors to Paris, I and my three friends — Mas Nugroho, Tjai, and Risjaf — spent much time strolling the Rive Droite, the right bank of the Seine, in the northern section of Paris where the Champs-Élysées and other prominent sites are located. So impressed were we by the elegance of the northern arrondissements, we promised ourselves that we would explore every one of them before our return home — whenever that might be. But Vivienne, to her great credit, was the one who pointed out the more prosaic but no less interesting sites that were to be found on the left bank of the Seine, the Rive Gauche, where used book-stalls were plentiful. At one of them she introduced me to its proprietor, Monsieur Antoine Martin, a retired policeman who loved literature so much he was content to sit at his stall all day long and read aloud favorite passages from the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras or poems by René Char. The man’s mini-performances always attracted the attention of passersby, who invariably ended up purchasing the book he was reading from, at a low price too.
The days we passed as flâneurs in Paris helped much to enrich my French vocabulary. At first, the only words I knew were oui, non, and ça va; but because Vivienne forced me to add ten new words to my vocabulary every day, I began to study the language more seriously. Even so, it wasn’t her tutorial skills that made me attach myself to her. It was her eyes, definitely her eyes. I wanted to dive into those deep green eyes and remain buried within them forever. And her lips as well … Vivienne’s lips were the lyrics of an unfinished poem. I was convinced that only when her lips were engaged with mine could the poem be completed.