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.
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