[Clock! Sinister, terrifying, inscrutable god ... The thirst of the abyss is unquenchable; the water clock runs dry.][69]

From then on clock faces spiked with pointed hands pursued me endlessly in the city. As Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy: “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time.”[70]

I lived in a shabby hotel in the Chalons quarter, next to the Gare de Lyon. A room rented by the week, with a tiny sink. The single light bulb gave out a pale, gloomy light that was insufficient for reading. Strange little cheap Chinese restaurants crowded both sides of the meagerly lit street. Puddles of household waste water glittered here and there on the lower end of the roadway like a urinal that never drained away. Drug dealing and black market trafficking of every kind took place late into the night.

I crossed this dismal little street early each morning to catch the first subway at 5:30, so as to arrive on time in the industrial suburb west of Paris. It took me more than an hour and a half to get from the Gare de Lyon to Nanterre. During this commute I tried to keep my eyes open and read Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in the old Costes edition. I read and reread the same pages in the subway till it reached the Pont de Neuilly, then transferred to a bus. Then a quick coffee in the bistrot across from the factory gate.

The guards closed the gate at the beginning of the shift. If I was late, they phoned the chief foreman before letting me in. One day my foreman said sarcastically, “It looks like we’re going to have to give you an alarm clock.”

I continued my studies at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. When I obtained diplomas for three years of industrial electricity theory, I qualified for hands-on lab work. There were only a dozen places in the school’s laboratory, and they were reserved for the students with the best exam scores. Leaving the factory on the evening of the test, I arrived a bit late at the school. But somehow I managed to worm my way through the packed room to be one of the first to hand in my papers. It sometimes happened that among those who had the same scores, whoever handed his in first was selected. With relief, I learned that I was admitted. I slipped away quickly. In the crowd behind me I heard someone whisper: “That Chink pulled a fast one!”

I was confused and I was ashamed. For my own survival, I had sunk to struggling against my fellow creatures. But if I got through the lab courses, I would perhaps be able to find a less painful way to make ends meet.

Then the tuberculosis bacilli played me a dirty trick. The factory doctor called me in one day after work. “Your test was positive. We can’t keep you at work. You have to go get cured.”

The social worker, sympathetic as before, showed me the procedures I needed to follow to get unemployment and health benefits. It was understood that I could get my job back once I was cured.

I took advantage of this time free from the brutalizing routine of the factory to try to clarify my ideas and commitments, past and future. During the same period I continued to take technical classes in electricity at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.

After a couple months of rest, it was back to the daily grind. This time I was on the night shift. A deathly silence reigned on all the floors. The motionless assembly lines, machines, and presses slept an iron sleep, seeming to be renewing their energy so as to be ready to extract the next day’s living labor.

The first few nights were the hardest. I found it impossible to recuperate on daytime sleep, and this upside-down life left me constantly exhausted. After two weeks on the night shift, I asked to return to my former day crew.

I was put back on the assembly line, still in charge of maintaining the electrical controls for the welding machines, but this time for fenders and doors rather than chassis. The sheet metal parts, suspended from an overhead belt, twisted about like a venomous caterpillar above my head. As they advanced, the worker had to apply the weld at the precise instant that each piece arrived. One piece passes, another arrives. Man himself becomes a part of the machinery.

Once when I had to replace a pair of worn electrodes on a suspended welding machine, I cut the current and the line stopped. The repair took me about twenty minutes. Then I reconnected the current, but it took the assembly line another ten minutes to start moving again. This was extremely upsetting to the managers, who were all breathing down my neck. As I was calmly replacing my tools, Gaido shouted:

“That interruption of the line cost the company five million francs! Don’t you understand? You can’t just cut the current like that!”

“At school I was warned never to work with the power on,” I replied.

This incident did not cause me any further trouble, but the welders were annoyed because of the bonus they forfeited. Other members of my team, French workers who were stronger than I, could have done the same repair in five or ten minutes, and they would not have cut off the current. But I was following the correct rule of the trade, without taking into account the bosses’ measure of time. I hadn’t forgotten the old electrician who was electrocuted in the basement while changing a fuze without cutting off the electricity.

From then on I was assigned to do repair work in the shop. The pace of work was less frantic than on the assembly line, but repairing the machines required considerable strength. It strained my back to drag heavy cast-iron machine parts to the work bench or to secure them between the mastodon jaws of the vise.

“Is that how you do it in your country?” Gaido snarled at me once when he saw me make an awkward move.

I felt his remark to be a racist slur, but at the moment I couldn’t think of any good retort to the fascist. I fumed over it for a week.

Then, in April 1954, I resigned.

“Where else are you going?” Gaido asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t kid me, you must have already found something else.”

“No, nothing.”

“Well, think it over.”

When the period for giving notice had passed, Gaido and my team boss kept insisting that I reconsider my decision. But I was sick of the whole scene. My fellow workers seemed uninterested in anything outside the daily grind of “Commute, work, commute, sleep ...” There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to make them aware of their slavish condition.

Do what must be done, come what may! Finally in May 1954 I returned my tools. Goodbye, Simca!

The next day I applied for work at Hispano-Suiza, a well-known brand of luxury cars, in Bois-Colombes [a suburb northwest of Paris]. I had an unusual reception: after registering my identity, the secretary took my fingerprints.

“It’s for National Defense,” she explained before leading me to the employment office.

Upon looking over my certificates from the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and noting my past experience as a repair electrician, the engineer proposed to hire me as a technician. The work consisted of measuring airplane wing vibrations when the attached machine-gun was fired. But the idea of contributing to the fine-tuning of engines of death repelled me, and I turned down their job offer.

After five weeks of being unemployed, I finally found a job as a technician at Mors in Clichy [a working-class suburb north of Paris]. The factory produced railroad signal relays, but also worked for the Navy. It was there that I met Paco Gómez, a survivor of the Spanish Civil War who became my lifelong friend.

Born in 1917, Paco was brought up in Madrid by his seamstress mother. After a period in the Communist Youth and then in the Trotskyist Left Opposition, he joined the POUM. In June 1937, while a delegate at a POUM congress in Barcelona, he was arrested by the Stalinists, who had taken over the Republican Police. After spending a year in various Spanish Republican prisons, he was released and fought on the Pyrenees front in a troop composed mainly of members of the CNT. Upon the victory of Franco’s forces in January 1939, he joined the mass exodus to France and was taken to a refugee concentration camp at Argelès-sur-Mer in Pyrénées-Orientales. French Trotskyists got him out of the camp and brought him to Paris, but he was reinterned in the same camp when he was caught while searching in the south of France for his refugee comrades. Suzanne, a teacher whom he had met in Paris, recontacted him and married him, thereby enabling him to leave the camp and return to Paris.

At Mors, I was assigned to the team of “relay regulators,” and worked sitting down. The work was less arduous than at Simca, but nevertheless very tedious, demanding more dexterity than technical knowledge.

One afternoon at work, I suddenly felt sick. After an X-ray, the factory doctor exclaimed, “You must go to the hospital immediately!”

Once I was in the hospital, they wouldn’t let me leave. A nurse made me wash in a bathtub, then I was confined in a bed for tubercular pleurisy.

What would become of my son Da, whom I had succeeded in bringing over from Saigon just a few months earlier? He had arrived on May 17, 1956. He was twelve years old and did not know a word of French. There I was, “a rooster bringing up a chick,” as the Vietnamese put it. I had enrolled him in the local school just a few steps from our room at 60 Rue Nationale. He had a delightful and very devoted teacher who cut out pictures of objects and pasted them in a copy book to facilitate his learning the new language. Da and I only saw each other in the evening, but were able to spend the weekends together.

While I was hospitalized, Paco and Suzanne took Da to live with them. Suzanne placed him in the school where she herself taught, where he formed a close attachment to three other classmates. They called themselves “the Four Musketeers,” and are still friends.

One time Suzanne brought Da to visit me in the hospital, but he was not allowed to enter the room. Sitting on a bench just outside, he told me about his new life. The white hairs on his head reflected the terrifying night he had spent during the previous year (1955), bullets whistling over his head as he crouched under the bed during the battle between the Binh Xuyen pirates and Ngo Dinh Diem’s mercenaries in the straw hut neighborhood between Saigon and Cholon.

Among the friends from the factory who came to see me in the hospital was old man Guyot.

“Don’t worry! I’ll take care of your son,” he said to me as he placed some oranges on my bed. “I’ll return him to you as good as new!”

Vandenstein, a cable maker at the plant, made the same warmhearted offer.

After two and a half months at the hospital, I was granted a long rest in the Pyrenees. At the beginning of December I entered a sanatorium in Cambo-les-Bains, not far from the Spanish border. It was called “Les Terrasses” [The Terraces] and consisted of a group of multistoried buildings and pavilions built on wooded terraces overlooking the Nive River. In front of the sanatorium, beyond the curtain of autumn-colored trees that hid the river, rose the rounded peaks of the Lower Pyrenees. I was finally seeing that blue sky country of the South that Brassens’s companion dreamed of in the film Porte des Lilas, full of the drifting clouds I so loved. I started to paint.

One of the paradoxes of my life: In prison or in a hospital I have felt free, freed from worrying about how to get my daily rice. At the Central Prison in Saigon we were able to meet and discuss things without worrying about being spied on by the cops, whose surveillance was so prevalent everywhere else. In the hospital or the sanatorium, apart from the periods of treatment, I was able to breathe freely, living outside the realm of time to gain and time to lose.

The smell of turpentine and paint disturbed my roommate, so the doctor gave me a room of my own in the neighboring pavilion. My window opened onto a splendid view of Mt. Ursuya and the poetic banks of the Nive.

In the factory, time dominated me, devouring the moments of my life. Here, I was intoxicated with space, with the poetry of the trees, the song of the river, the melodious silence of the mountains.

I drew and painted like a bird sings, like one of those prehistoric men drawing, painting, carving, or leaving impressions of his hands on the walls of caves. It was an internal necessity, like the silkworm: