L'Avventura

By Etienne Beauregard

Stevie is 7 years old in 1971. His tranquil life with his parents, grandmother, and four older sisters is about to take a turn for the worse. The bourgeois society he lives in, a French city called Nantes, is not ready for the sequence of events that are going to create havoc in Stevie's universe. Feeling hard done by destiny, despite his young age, he embarks on a road where few adults are able to follow. Thus, Stevie explores all aspects of life in this candid and bare-it-all account of his 'not for the faint-hearted' routine. During his drifting and solitary journey, he encounters people of various ages and backgrounds. The story paints a vivid portrait of life in the early part of the 70s, clearly depicting its sounds, images, and culture. This is the story of the coming of age of an extraordinary boy narrated at the first person by Etienne Beauregard in this dramatic debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Etienne Beauregard
• Release date: Oct 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463294758

Etienne Beauregard

Etienne Beauregard is one of the many pen names of a multipolar author who prefers to change his style, genre, and even language before self-publishing anything. Please, submit your review. Destructive criticism welcome!

Book preview

Prologue

I woke up that day like on any other day, feeling alive, kicking and breathing. The air carried a faint whiff of patchouli coming from the women in my house and of the ghost of wood fires that, once upon a time, used to bring the disused fireplace in my parents’ bedroom to life.

It was the beginning of the summer 1972 in Nantes, a port city on the River Loire, historically affiliated to the north-western French region of Brittany. I was seven and a half years old.

We lived in an amazing apartment occupying the entire top floor of a neo-classic building dating back to the French Revolution. Built as one of the very first structures surrounding the opulent gated park called Le Cours Cambronne, our home was listed on the registry of Historical Monuments of France. To us though, it was just a tatty old flat…

It was a sunny first day of the week and my mother had opened the windows to air the place. Despite the early hour, I could already hear loud music climbing up the shaft at the back of our building. It was the radio of the concierge Madame Garapin appropriately blaring out the latest hit song by Claude François Le Lundi au Soleil (Sunny Monday).

These were good days… There seemed to be ‘plenty enough’ dough for the good people of France to make brioche, as Marie-Antoinette had once famously suggested, albeit in a far better turn of phrase. I was then too young to understand how oppressed and exploited by the conservative ruling class the blue-collar workers were at that time. Most of us who had the chance to live so well during this angelic period and in this blessed city of Nantes, whose wealth had by the way come from the slave trade, had absolutely no idea about nor any interest in their struggle. The joyous vibe around us kept us blind.

Madame Garapin’s radio was now broadcasting the 8 o’clock news bulletin and all seemed to be just fine in this beautiful world…

President George Pompidou was at the helm of France’s Fifth Republic. His Prime Minister Jaques Chaban-Delmas and his Defense Minister Michel Debré looked all the same to me: shorthaired strict-looking men in dark suits, just like my dad who was also very fond of another similar-looking man: Richard Nixon.

The Vietnam War was still raging. The Red Fiery Summer offensive by the People’s Army of Vietnam against the American forces and their allies had been particularly brutal. According to various news agency reports, close to 100,000 troops across both sides had lost their lives during this particularly fierce 6-month campaign.

As Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henri Kissinger, was keeping himself as busy as a blue-arsed fly whilst trying to extinguish the multiple fires his country’s foreign policy had started.

Although his administration was as staunchly anti-communist as his predecessors were, Richard Nixon had established new grounds for a promising détente with both China and the Soviet Union after respectively visiting both countries in February and May.

Despite the US President’s trip to Moscow, the image portrayed by his Russian counterpart Leonid Brezhnev in the West, including France, was that of a dangerous actor with his fingers well glued to his country’s nuclear arsenal launch-button.

Amidst the cold and not-so-cold wars, the youth in 1972 was turning the other cheek while enjoying a life-style mostly geared towards laid-back, peace loving and even sometimes deeply spiritual pursuits.

Between the weekly shootings, car bombings, hijackings and hostage taking incidents perpetrated by various terrorist organisations such as the Irish Republican Army, the Basque Nationalist ETA, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and the left-wing Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary factions, the summer 1972 was fun…

At the cinemas, Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns with their spellbinding musical scores by Ennio Morricone, and countless French belly-tickling B-Movies topping the French box office managed to keep the youngsters out of mischief.

Since the far-reaching civil unrest by the French students in May 1968, the government had learned how to use the audio-visual means of communication to their advantage. The state-owned national agency for radio and television ORTF, responsible for the program selection of the main and only French TV channel La Premiere Chaîne, had launched a daily variety show during the sacrosanct French lunch break called Midi-Trente. While bringing the mainstream musicians such as Johnny Halliday and Mireille Mathieu into the fray of people’s homes, its ultra-popular presenter Danielle Gilbert also even occasionally invited international pop singers. Hence, a well-entertained population was unlikely to create havoc.

On my way to school this morning, Madame Garapin’s radio was playing L’Avventura by the French band Stone & Charden.

Chapter I: Dreamer

Named after an ancestral oak tree that used to stand on its grounds during its initial construction in 1883, my school, Le Chêne-d'Aron, was a small primary education establishment with only five classrooms. Unfortunately, both the tree and the school had been flattened to the ground during the bombardment by the allied forces on the 23rd of September 1943. Although, the hundred B17 bombers’ mission had merely been to destroy the area of the Port of Nantes harbouring a fleet of assistance ships supporting the German U-Boats, over a thousand civilians had died and thousands of buildings had been destroyed. Thus, it had taken a while for the city and for its people to forgive the American and the British forces for what had been subsequently referred to as somewhat of an ‘unfortunate mishap’… Nevertheless, Le Chêne-d'Aron had been rebuilt in 1957.

Upon arriving near the school, I saw one of my friends waiving at me and I completely forgot to watch the oncoming traffic while crossing the road. I suddenly jumped when I heard a car beep, barely avoiding an accident… These were times when we didn’t dwell on what could or could not have happened. Thus, I simply apologised to the driver raising one of my hands up and held on my satchel with the other while running towards the school entrance.

It was far from being the prettiest of buildings. The post-war architectural style was barren to the core. In fact, there was neither cladding nor any finishing surface on its grey concrete walls and grounds. Somehow, the school planners had been merciful enough to leave a few trees here and there. However, as we did not know better, we couldn’t care less and anyway, for us kids, the most important thing was our friends!

As soon as I crossed the imaginary line between the two pillars at the entrance, I arrived in a different world. Back then, we were very different from nowadays’ seven-year-old children. We were not as savvy with technology because it just didn’t exist back then. So, our minds had to be filled with other stimulating material, and the easiest ones to get hold of were simply the fruits of our imagination.

After playing for a short while with my mates, I sat down at my assigned spot at the back of the classroom besides my usual neighbour, a boy called Arnaud. I have never caught-up with him in his adult life but, back then, he used to frown constantly, making me wonder today if that was due to an undiagnosed form of myopia or if he was simply and utterly unclear about life.

It’s difficult to tell from an old black and white class photo what people had in mind. As far as I am concerned, I looked rather grumpy! Knowing what was going on in my house, I guess it makes sense. So, I can only assume that some of my friends’ look had also something to do with their own family set-ups…

Nevertheless, Arnaud and I were not best mates, but he was just a fine kid who did not bother me nor anyone else. He was just quiet, stoic and as bland as a glass of tepid tap water… I remember when our teacher had once caught both of us daydreaming at the same time. She was in her early 30s or perhaps even younger than that. However, her parting hairstyle right in the middle of her forehead made her look like if she was popping straight out of an episode of The Little House in the Prairie. Dreamers! She had viciously shouted at us, hence branding us with a word, which in her world was meant to be a dreadful thing but, in mine, sounded rather like a compliment…

On my way back from school, I ran past a few more beeping cars while jaywalking across the road. When I arrived near the park, I noticed some slightly older kids playing football in the grass beds. I felt excited knowing I only had a few more days left before the long summer break when I would be able to play there every single day for two and a half months…

When I arrived at home that afternoon, I was told that my dad had gone on a business trip for the rest of the week. Things were usually calmer in our house when he was not around. In fact, he was not a particularly fun guy to be with… He had jumped on German soil during the retreat of Hitler’s forces in the Second World War and as my daddy once told me: Once a paratrooper, always a paratrooper! So, when he was around, the modus operandi in our household was rather strict: breakfast at 7 am; lunch at noon; dinner at 7 pm. However, when the cat was away, the mice were playing… And this literally happened every time he was travelling. Apart from me that evening, I was the only male in town. My mum and my grandmother, who we used to call Mémé, were cooking supper in the kitchen. The poor old lady had been forced to move-in with us after my grandfather, a former officer in the French cavalry during the First World War, who we called Papère, had kicked her out of their home with a gun in his hand further to putting himself in a state of drunken stupor.

After my elder sister Rosy had left France for a year au pair in the USA and had totally out of the blue got married to a Vietnam veteran from Nebraska, I only had three sisters left at home. Despite my young life experience, I knew this was not going to be forever and I enjoyed every moment spent with them… They were hanging around in our living room. Nickie, the oldest amongst them was nonchalantly painting her toenails on the sofa. Meanwhile Marnie was talking to her younger sibling Laurie about a new shop in town that sold cool trousers… They were respectively 22, 21 and 19 and only the youngest wasn’t pregnant. While doing their things, the turntable was playing John Lennon’s Imagine.

After dropping my schoolbag in my room, which was actually in a corner of my parents’ bedroom, I went straight into the common area where things usually happened and where the world used to often be reinvented time after time by imaginative philosophical drifters who had fallen under the spell of my sisters… I had been sitting quietly for a while under the dining table at the other end of the huge open space and the three girls were no longer noticing I was there when the front door bell rung…

It was one of their friends, a young chap called Lionel. I liked him because he wore a suede jacket and a cowboy hat! He had brought with him Ennio Morricone’s newly released soundtrack of Sergio Leonne’s latest movie Once Upon a Time in the West.

Hey Stevie, come here! He said to me, hence ‘americanising’ my first name, which was actually Stéphane. In fact, it was my sisters who used to nickname me that way after their favourite actor: The King of Cool himself, Steve McQueen… I came forward and he asked me, Have you heard about this movie? while showing me the LP’s cover. Of course! I said, even though I had never been able to see it because of its PG-13 rating. Nevertheless, I had seen enough advertising about it to know exactly what it was about: the Wild West dreamland, with its passion, pretty women, cigarillos, whiskey à gogo, guns, death and dust… Of course, I did know it. This was my world.

Lionel took his hat off, put it on my head, and sat me on his shoulders as if I was riding a horse. He then played The Man with the Harmonica song and faked playing the score himself with an imaginary instrument in front of his mouth… Neither laughing nor crying, nobody in the room said anything. Nowadays, this act would have turned us into prime meme fodder but, in those days, people took anything with a theatrical touch seriously. It was artistry! From my standpoint, perched onto the tall man’s back, it felt as if I really was in the movie’s scene. To this day, almost 50 years later, I still get the chills when I listen to it. Back then on that day, I was in the Californian desert, ready to draw and shoot anyone who would have dared challenging me! The instrumental crescendo leading to that moment when the violins took over your heart and soul and threw them into a 360-degree revolving panoramic scenery was breathtakingly invigorating. Being a kid in the seventies was a recipe for disaster in the making. I was bound to become mad one day and fast as well!

After riding my imaginary horse for a bit longer, it was time to kick Lionel out and have dinner. I don’t remember the food we ate. It must not have been that great then. I do remember however every piece of music, the phantasmagorical sense of fashion, the deeply imaginative movies and the eye-opening television programs. Before going to bed that night, we watched the 8 o’clock news.

The newsreader was still bragging about the car race victory of the Frenchman Henri Pescarolo at the 24 Hours of Le Mans that had taken place two weeks earlier… The Watergate scandal was beginning to hang over President Nixon’s head like a modern-time’s Sword of Damocles … The British authorities had joined their Indian and Chinese counterparts in mourning their dead after the three consecutive air crashes at New Delhi, Hong Kong and Heathrow Airports had killed altogether 281 people… In France, the municipality of Soissons was also mourning the 108 passengers killed in the worst ever train crash in the country on June 14th after a tunnel had collapsed on two oncoming carriages…. In New York, the newly appointed Secretary General of The United Nations Kurt Waldheim was starting to make a name for himself on the world’s political scene, despite some already emerging rumours of his past life as an active Nazi officer during the war... On a brighter note, the latest and sadly what would become NASA’s final mission to send three astronauts to the moon was on schedule. Apollo 17’s crewmembers were in high spirits whilst training hard for their expected moon landing planned in December that year.

I went to bed that night imagining how exciting it would be to go to space one day. The bad news about the weekly plane crashes, terrorist attacks and the Vietnam War did not really phase me. These bad things, which were happening on daily basis did not affect our cosy lives in Nantes. Anyway, there were so many amazing things happening around the world these days that the beautiful people of the 70s always managed to turn the worse situations around into cool stuff. That was true of course, only for those who were on the right side of the fence… For example, one could argue that the rise of the wonderful Hippy Movement had emanated as a direct countermeasure against the Vietnam War… So many beautiful songs and movies were coming through the woodwork just because of the atrocities perpetrated in such faraway fields that normal people would have never heard of if it weren’t for these artful depictions of the unfolding horror. Despite all the misery in the world, the creativity of fashion designers, architects, car manufacturers, publicists, actors and singers made our universe a breeding ground for this amazing vibe. While it was bedtime in my city, dawn had already broken in Saigon and before the violent action of the day had taken its toll, GIs were still managing a smile and a laugh or even two while listening to the latest Harry Nilsson’s Coconut song…

Back to school the following morning, we kids didn’t feel like listening to our teacher. It was hot and the windows were wide-open onto the