Something To Live For

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Aux Deux Magots, Chez Lipp, La Rotonde, and others. These silly people were little more than Sartre or Giacommetti wannabees, choking on their papier maïs cigarettes, which were de rigueur. The unspoken motto was dress weird, that makes you an artiste, and be an alcoholic, that makes you a writer. Épatez les bourgeois. Of course. Advocate incest, p********a, rape, insanity, murder, the beauty of Auschwitz architecture, all for the sake of poetry and art––and anything else you can think of that will make you appear Bohemian and arty. Don’t you know? Where have you been, asshole?

In May 1968, less than a year after his arrival and around the time of Rose's first birthday, Solomon photographed the student riots in the Latin Quarter and the burning cars on the Rue Gay-Lussac. The social upheavals in Paris were shot through with anti-American sentiment even though most of the student anger was directed at the French government. When Solomon’s first pictures of the uprising appeared in the American press they seemed to confirm the social and psychological malaise of many young people in the West. Solomon’s photographs were powerful, irreverent, and sometimes humorous.

The United States too was experiencing its own brand of social unrest. The country's psyche was rent asunder by the Vietnam War and photographs of war casualties were fed relentlessly into the public consciousness. Solomon disdained the reasons invoked by the U.S. government for their war in Vietnam. The war was tainted by American hubris, pumped up by half-baked ideas of political smoothies and third-rate thinkers. The images in the press, the TV footage, and the newsreels of the civil rights marches showed the brutality and racism of the Jim Crow laws and exacerbated the country’s already rash ridden body politic. These images were making a dent in the U.S. government's propaganda shield. It was impossible to ignore the violent polarization of America.

Solomon expected that Tatti in New York would see the Paris pictures in the press and contact him. Solomon knew that his photographs were credited only to Gamma. His name appeared nowhere, but he hoped that Tatti would recognize the photographic style or trust his hunch––and get in touch. Solomon had been gone a year from New York, but Tatti had never left any message at Gamma.

It took a few weeks for France to close down in May 1968. There was a general strike and the national railway system ground to a halt. The seaports and airports soon followed suit. Truckers walked out on their jobs and gasoline became scarce. Even the Paris metro functioned erratically. When the trains approached the stations in the Latin Quarter, Odéon, Saint Michel, Saint Germain des Près, Parisians never knew if the subway would stop. That depended on the amount of tear gas wafting down from the streets into the stations. The passengers on the metro platform wore kerchiefs over their faces and frantically waved at the train to stop.

In the mornings the boulevards and thoroughfares of the French capital were filled with people on the move, for a lot of Parisians continued to go to work. No subway, no buses, hardly any cars. So the masses walked. The majority of the walkers were in a good mood, joking, laughing, and even drinking. Some had come from their homes, others had been in riots, at political gatherings, or all night parties and were dressed in blue overalls or suits and ties and some even wore dinner jackets or evening gowns.

The streets in the Latin Quarter were plastered with hundreds of posters produced by the proliferating student presses in the École des Beaux Arts, the Paris universities, basements, and living rooms all over the city. The images and lettering on these posters and pamphlets were crude, in black and white, and even poetic, to wit:

L’imagination au pouvoir.

Ni trusts ni soviets.

CRS=SS

There were a few short-lived public debates where the old guard, right and left wing, was told by students leaders to go f**k themselves. Allez vous faire foutre. And there was still a naiveté among the leftists. The truth, horror, and murderous stench of the Gulag and the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow had not yet unfurled over the West. And rare were French television’s intellectual starlets, who admitted to the terror of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The gray buses of the Corps Républicain de Securité, the riot police, did look menacing and in the evenings at the first sign of any threat to l’ordre public the street battles irrupted. In no time the barricades went up. The students came with crowbars and hammers, dug up the cobblestones in the streets, tore down signs, used trashcans, street furniture, and even appropriated vehicles foolishly abandoned in the Latin Quarter. Cars burned, rocks crashed into police shields, tear gas grenades arched through the air, whistles blew, the Internationale resounded in the alleys. The Théâtre de l’Odéon was occupied by students as was the Cinémathèque.

And there were the free jazz concerts at night, always plenty of cheap food at street canteens, and s*x was in the air. Students kissed and made out in doorways, on benches, in cafes, in full view of the police. People made love, hungrily, quickly, furtively in small apartments where the protesters regrouped after an evening of battling the CRS. Nobody was killed during the riots of May 68. Most of the cobbled streets in Paris were later asphalted over to make the cobblestones inaccessible to future protesters.

A few years later Rose started attending her neighborhood école maternelle. She was often the brunt of anti-American jokes. Solomon thought that since many on the staff were soixante-huitards, "sixty-eighters", they would be more in tune with children's needs. Not in the least. Judging from Rose's comments about her school, it seemed that the main objective of the Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale was to make sure the children became good little citizens with no minds of their own. What had happened to that refreshing élan of May 68? Sadly, most of the teachers at Rose's school spouted shop worn apparatchik pabulum and clung to a knee-jerk nostalgia of a Marxist Arcadia. They criticized everything that did not conform to their vision of a society, where a good fairy tale was Snow White and the Seven Tractors. Before Rose reached the age of six Solomon took her out of the French public school system and placed her in a bi-lingual Montessori school housed on the Quai d'Orsay.

Solomon missed America more than ever. He didn't admit it to anybody. And he gave up on Tatti.

PART 2

PARIS 1973

Chapter 3

Paris has grown less gray in the years since Solomon's arrival in June 1967. Most of the important buildings have been cleaned and the gold leafing redone on the bridges and domes. Even the phone system has improved.

The truth is that Solomon hasn't taken a photograph in over a year. He doesn't want to. He doesn't have to. There are hundreds of his pictures out there in the world, in books and museums, on postcards, posters, and even tee shirts. Gamma takes care of the sales and royalties that keep coming in. He is the first to admit that he has been a very lucky man when it comes to making a living with photography. Even at his young age Solomon knows that success is not simply a question of talent. It takes luck. Mostly luck.

Bringing up Rose has shifted and trimmed Solomon's priorities. He still loves photography and feels that he has not betrayed himself. He has taken enough risks, nobody can deny that, but taking more and more daring pictures, even beautiful ones, has ceased to be a priority for him. Solomon never believed in the sole significance of the formal and aesthetic beauty of his photographs. He never fell for the stuffed-shirt arguments of the aesthetes. In fact, he can't stand aesthetes.

Solomon craves meaning in images and he finds it more often in the Louvre's paintings than in his own photographs. And he goes to the Louvre every Sunday. He reminds himself that making the paintings took weeks, months, and even years out of painters' lives. And you've only one life, Solomon reminds himself. He knows the Louvre by heart. He likes the place, it is messy and has an unkempt look about it. The museum is disorganized, you have to know your way around. Tourists even have trouble finding the main entrance. The guards are impolite. Every Sunday in the Louvre Solomon picks out a painting for Demo and Utica and Jesse, one painting for each of his friends. He stands in front of each chosen work for quite a while, up to fifteen minutes sometimes.

Today Solomon has again picked out The Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio. He knows the painting well. Every time he stands in front of it he sees something he hadn't noticed on his previous visit. The painting is a perpetually giving treasure. He recalls the years when Rose was younger and he took her along to the Louvre in the snuggly. Even though she couldn't understand him he talked to her about the paintings. When she was older and the museum visits became boring for her Solomon arranged for Rose to spend Sunday afternoons at friends’ homes while he went alone to the Louvre.

Tomorrow is Monday and after school he has planned a birthday party for Rose at his friend Peggy’s tearoom, a well-known place run by a true American expat. The tearoom has the unusual name of À Priori Thé. To get there Solomon and Rose will walk through the Jardins du Palais Royal. He has often taken her to play in the sandboxes there. He helps fill her red and green plastic buckets with sand. Most of the parents, nearly all mothers, sit around and chat, ever so prim and proper, glancing over in Solomon's direction and wondering why on earth a grown man is playing so enthusiastically with his daughter.

"Ah, mais oui, bien sûr, c'est un papa américain..."

In the Louvre Solomon gently shakes his head, shedding his thoughts about the sandboxes in the Jardins du Palais Royal. He looks at the Caravaggio painting, which is also known as The Virgin with Dirty Feet. The feet are not only smudged but also swollen because Mary drowned off the coast of Ephesus, in today's Turkey, what was then called Asia by the Romans in the first century AD. As in much of Caravaggio's work the people portrayed are of common look and stock, not made up or ornately coiffed. Their hands are rough, their dress simple, and their skin weather beaten, scarred, and wrinkled.

Caravaggio's people resemble men and women who might have communed with Christ. In The Death of the Virgin Mary’s face is less swollen than her feet. The skin on her visage is smooth and serene in the repose of death and not yet grayed by rigor mortis. Her beauty is sullen. Her belly is water logged. She is draped in a red cloth. Historians claim she must have been past her fiftieth year when she drowned. A large, red sail draped over a horizontal beam occupies the top half of the painting. In the background, from the ship's bow or maybe even from beyond, from the coast, comes a glimmer of light. Three men stand by the laid out corpse. One of them wipes the tears from his eyes with clenched fists. A woman sits in the foreground, her head on her knees in despair.

Solomon stands in front of the huge painting. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He sees frustration and silence in Caravaggio’s shadows. The painter had been on the run the last five years of his life, wanted for murder, condemned to death in absentia by the pope. In the end the young master had died from an infected dagger wound on the beach near Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast.

I’ve been on the run for six years now, Solomon tells himself.

When a museum guard walks up to Solomon and tells him he should move along Solomon quietly tells him in exquisite French to mind his own business. The guard moves away. Visitors and tourists stream down the hallway in the Denon wing of the Louvre and they stare at Solomon before turning to the Caravaggio and giving it a determined stare of some ten seconds. The painting must have demanded months of work from the artist, but all he gets now is a few seconds. Caravaggio finished the canvas four years before his death. What, the tourists surely wonder, is this fellow doing here rooted to the spot, staring at the painting, moving his lips, and moving his hands ever so slightly?