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In Marseille, as we lay in the hotel bed, my back to him, pretending I was asleep, he said into my hair, “When I’m inside you it’s like I’m home.”
I’d shivered in disgust. Sensing my shiver as if it were a tremble of love, he squeezed me and whispered, “Sadie.”
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He would stare at me, his gaze focused and direct. This never felt intrusive, on account that it wasn’t quite real. He had stared at hundreds of women, I understood, with those light-filled eyes. René knew his own beauty, used it as a tool, would have stared at whoever he was making love to in order to stir up a sense of urgency. His gaze wasn’t about love. It was about him and what he was after. It had nothing to do with me.
Somewhere on the line, he said, someone had lost fingers, or a hand. But in order to activate the compression for stamping, he said, you had to have both of your hands on the outside of the machine. There was no way to accidentally bring the stamper down on your own hand or arm. To get one hand into the stamper, and bring the stamper down with your other hand, this required skill, he said. These accidents, which happened every few days, could only have been planned and deliberate. People started drinking schnapps at five a.m., he said, when their shift began. They drank schnapps all day long. By the time a worker decided to pull down the stamper with a single hand, having fitted his other arm into the machine, the magic moment when this worker was ready to sacrifice a functioning limb, he was good and drunk, René said, numbed up, and he would not feel much when the stamper swung down with great and smooth and unstoppable force, to crush his hand.
Why would someone do that? I asked.
“To buy an E-Class Mercedes,” René said, as if this were obvious. He sipped his beer. “With the compensation they give you, you can buy a nice car. Plus, you get a pension for life. You never have to work again.”
And this was what had activated him, he said. He had looked down the assembly line and thought, if sacrificing a perfectly good hand was an improvement, if that could elevate the quality of a man’s life, something was wrong.
The company was always angling to chip away break time, to lengthen shifts, to trim bonuses. The union pushed back. There were strikes. René started talking to the more political guys on the line, the strident ones. The radicals. He learned a lot. The union organized a work stoppage. It lasted a couple of weeks, and then Daimler fired everyone. By that point, he didn’t give a shit. He’d become a subversive.
cool backstory
I put the book down and looked out the window. I heard wind, and no truck driving up the road.
Part of attraction is the unpredictable nature of everything, the manner in which you wait, and want.
Good for you, I thought at René, for reducing me to those who wait. But also, go to hell.
Having decided he was not coming, I finished the final two cans of my six-pack and went to sleep.
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.
“We always felt like there was something to honor in the clandestine nature of our communications with him but it’s wearing off.”
There was a time, he said, when a communiqué from Lacombe would come through and they’d all gather around the printer like supplicants, to read these emails full of outré declarations about cave bears and cavemen. But that time had passed.
“My position, and Pascal knows this, it’s not anything I’ve kept hidden, is that you can’t go back. To live in a cave and renounce technology, renounce everything, that’s like”—he laughed—“about the most modern thing a person could ever do.”
I asked how so. It was fine to be curious. I was curious.
“A caveman isn’t rejecting what’s around him. That’s for intellectuals, people who have overthought everything. You have to deal with life as it is. This guy is talking about half a million years ago, but he’s writing about it on a computer. He’s a crudivore, renouncing the cooked, while people have been eating cooked food forever, and he’s renounced agriculture, which the people in this area have been practicing for twelve thousand years.”
Two teenage girls passed by, long-limbed and golden, in very short shorts, and the Serb turned to watch them. One of the girls caught his eye, and nudged the other. The two girls stopped walking and consorted. Anyone new, anyone in a suit, was someone to flirt with.
[...]
The Serb, with native fluency in Jailbait, was chatting up the girls. He was focused on them as if his primary duty was not to guard the subminister but to get into the pants of one of the girls (while no doubt using his security credentials to loosen them both up). The Serb’s heavy brow was less severe, I noticed, now that he was grinning.
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