The patron saint of smoking

I was looking for Samuel Beckett. He was hard to find. Instead I stumbled across Serge Gainsbourg.

I'm never sure what to make of Gainsbourg. The recent film, which didn't aim at accuracy, deepened my ambivalence - and reminded me how erotic "Je t'aime ... moi non plus" is. So I stopped at Gainsbourg's grave.

I was in the Montparnasse cemetery. I hadn't meant to visit but, as I drifted round the 14th, that was where my feet took me.

The Cimetiere de Montparnasse not a tourist haunt in the way Pere Lachaise is. No-one was hawking pictures of the graves or plans of the cemetery. However there were casual and dedicated strollers as well as the mourners who came to place flowers on family graves. I was pleased to find a helpful plan of which graves were where although that didn't always make them easy to find.

Gainsbourg's grave was plainly a place of pilgrimage. There were flowers, photos, a packet of Gitanes and a colourful selection of cigarette lighters. As I watched, a young couple standing by the grave rolled cigarettes in silence and solemnly lit up. Whatever else he may have been, Gainsbourg has become the patron saint of smokers.

I've been anti-smoking for as long as I can remember. I recall my father's serious illness when I was six. As he was too ill to be moved, hospital staff brought equipment - including, I think, a portable x-ray machine - to the flat where we lived. As he recovered he was warned to give up smoking and struggled for years to overcome the addiction. Now, in his late 80s, he can't stand the stench of cigarette smoke.

But when I watched the young couple, I saw their cigarettes as a form of protest against a controlling state - and that too seemed admirable. France has a history of resistance which is the ground of the national belief in liberty, equality and fraternity. That belief is at the heart of protests from left and right against the forced deportations of "les Roms", the Roma who have travelled from eastern and central Europe, as allowed by law. Some deportations have been stopped by the courts - the grounds can be as slender as finding smoking in public which is not, the tribunal found, a serious public order offence - but many families, seeing their children scared by early-morning police raids, have simply agreed to leave, taking the very small amount of money the French state will pay as inducement or compensation.

It's easy to look away when a small group is under attack. Paris has numerous plaques to remind residents and visitors of the round-ups and deportations carried out by French police during the Occupation - and these are often cited as a reason to oppose the deportation of "les Roms". There's even a plaque commemorating the 1961 police massacre of Algerian protesters, although the French seem less comfortable considering the implications of that episode.

As a tourist I was observing and doing nothing. I strolled round the cemetery contemplating past injustice and resistance.

I chanced on the grave of Dreyfus, who sparked Zola's famous letter "J'accuse" and a huge campaign of resistance. I saw where Sartre and de Beauvoir were together in death, though forced to occupy separate hotel rooms in life, as a plaque on the Hotel Mistral recounts. They were forced by events to make difficult choices and their messy, muddled lives remind me that political involvement can't be limited to those whose lives are above reproach.

As the cemetery was closing, I made another attempt to find Beckett, who chose to stay in occupied France (though he could have escaped to neutral Ireland) and was awarded the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix de Guerre for his activities. He didn't talk much about what he did but I wanted to pay tribute to his courage and reported kindness as well as his plays.

At last I found the grave, thanks to a shabbily-dressed and unshaven man who stood contemplating it. As I paused, the man turned to me. "Samuel Beckett," he said. "En attendant Godot."

I made a slightly stumbling attempt to explain why I thought Beckett a great man, trying to recall the French titles he gave his works when he first wrote them. But the man wasn't listening. "En attendant Godot," he repeated. "Samuel Beckett. En attendant Godot."

Then he bent down and began to clear the blossoms which had obscured the names of Beckett and his partner Suzanne.

I'm not sure what he meant to say. Was he just naming Beckett's most famous work? Was he telling me that in death too Beckett was "waiting for Godot." Or was he himself Godot, arrived too late and tenderly clearing the playwright's tomb?

Invisibility

It's up there on the list of favourite superpowers. "Would you rather be invisible or able to fly?" the quizzes ask. I'd go for flying any day - so long as it's not in a plane. I don't like being shut in. And invisibility, however much fun it might be at first, is a kind of prison.

H.G. Wells' Invisible Man came out of the same era as Sherlock Holmes and pre-dates (but only by a little) the spy stories of the Edwardian era. Their heroes gained a kind of invisibility through their mastery of disguise but would return to safe visibility in the world of comfortable rooms, a housekeeper and a London club. Temporary invisibility was a kind of power. It could even be a route to power. W.H. Auden is thinking of the commnist agent when, in his poem "Our Hunting Fathers", he compares the perfect life of animals with the "mature ambition" to "hunger, work illegally/And be anonymous." He's recalling an account of Lenin given in Ralph Fox's biography.

But permanent invisibility - the kind where you look in mirrors and can't expect to see yourself - that's not such fun. Listening to the follies of others loses its attraction if you can't be seen laughing at the joke. And in the end the invisible are vulnerable to all kinds of cruelty. Unless they're caught by chance in a picture or seen in the background of a story, it's as though they don't exist. They can slip beyond the law and beyond compassion. They are rarely seen as equal or fully human.

There's a sinister term "the disappeared", used mostly of those who vanished in South American states. It's sometimes put another way - that they "were vanished" or "were disappeared". The passive verb alludes indirectly to the involvement of government torture squads or death squads. But the practice of "disappearing" people is older than that. It happened in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - and in democratic France in 1961 when the police massacre of Algerians in central Paris went largely unreported.

Today we have the "ghosts" of Abu Ghraib, who rarely made it into the photos, and the anonymous victims of extraordinary rendition. Presumably they are still carried through British territories and bases at home and abroad. I complained to my MP once. He responded that the British could hardly be expected to search United States planes on a regular basis and that, in any case, the prisoners being "rendered" could always make representation in the British courts through their lawyers. This seemed such a wilful misunderstanding of the facts that I gave up.

Those are the extremes of invisibility. Others choose invisibility because the alternative is worse. The nameless Nigerian deported on a B.A. charter flight last month was briefly noticed, because his fellow passengers objected to his treatment. It didn't help him. He was still deported but the other passengers were thrown off the flight for complaining. One man, on his way to attend his brother's wedding, was held in police cells where the British police confiscated all his money before dumping him, penniless and without a ticket, back at Heathrow. I don't know what happened to the man B.A. deported. I hope he's still alive, and safe.

For others, invisible is a daily fact. Some office workers literally don't see the cleaners in their buildings. Shoppers walk past the beggars and Big Issue sellers and don't pause to look them in the face.

Detective stories between the wars sometimes used invisibility as a clue. The housewife would open the door and take a delivery but later comment on the emptiness of the street. And the readers, accustomed to not seeing the people who served them, would ignore the implied presence of the man, woman or boy who made the delivery. In those stories, the invisible man would often be the killer. Sometimes invisibility is an excellent disguise. And sometimes people who are ignored want to make their presence felt.