Ransacking Paris (10 page)

I want to select an elegant café for coffee with Stendhal. He would wrinkle his fastidious nose at Camille's with its cigarette butts and lotto tickets on the unwashed floor, and the cool, relaxed Zebra à Montmartre in rue des Abbesses would be too easy-going. I decide on Angelina's in the rue de Rivoli, understated white with gilt trim, but when we arrive there's a queue. He makes a few disparaging comments about the tourists in the rue de Rivoli as we wait, and I laugh, revealing our shared aesthetic snobbery. When we are seated he orders a short black – he loves coffee, but if he drinks too much of it, it brings on neuralgia. I'm nervous at first, hiding my dirty fingernails in my lap – I always have dirty fingernails at important meetings – because I know he can't bear dirtiness, but there's an unexpected humour and gentleness in his expression, which helps me relax. We talk about reading and writers we admire. ‘I'm a great fan of Montaigne,' I say, knowing we have that in common.

‘Know Thyself?' Stendhal replies. It's the inscription on the Delphi Temple, which Montaigne liked to quote. His tone is sardonic but also yearning as if he equally doubts and hopes it's possible. He changes the topic, suddenly claiming that he couldn't love Paris because it had no mountains, and worse, it had pruned trees. The conversation darts from his family to politics to gossip and back to writing. I confess my own lack of ribald humour and he shrugs. ‘This
espagnolism
prevents me from being a comic genius,' he says, but again his voice is ironic. He confesses his sensitivity to his writing being criticised when he was young, and his wait for genius to arrive: ‘I wish someone had told me just write for two hours every day, genius or no.' I realise I like him but I'm unsure whether he likes me – he is difficult to read. We end up arranging to meet again, but somewhere we don't have to wait in line.

*

Because I was early on the way to choir, I got out of the Metro at Belleville, a couple of stops before Ménilmontant. I was in the twentieth arrondissement, a traditionally working-class neighbourhood. In the 1930s de Beauvoir came up here when she was a young woman to teach literature to the workers. It's where many migrants from France's former Southeast Asian colonies have settled, mainly Vietnamese; the cafés and
épiceries
and greengrocers sell Asian meals and spices and vegetables, bok choy and lemongrass and Vietnamese basil. It's also the area where artists and writers live, the current bohemian
quartier,
because the rents are cheaper. It looked rundown, untidy, bustling, not at all like the
studied bohemian kitsch of Montmartre.

In the butcher's there were rows of ducks, yellowish and naked, and large chunks of dark red meat marked ‘
cheval
', horse. There were many cafés but they were not funky or cool; the floors were a bit grubby and everyone smoked. I saw a few people in track pants; an old Vietnamese man wearing a beret, the first I'd seen in Paris; an African woman in a long dress of swirling red ochre and sea-blue with a baby in a matching sling on her back; Algerian men in groups, lounging and smoking. I wandered up the boulevard de Belleville, absorbing a new sense of Paris. There were no ‘sights' in Belleville, just people living their lives. Here nothing was for show. I started to think I might just be able to slide under the rough surface here.

I turned up rue Ménilmontant and found the community hall in rue des Amandiers. It looked familiar, like a community centre built in the suburbs in the 1970s in Australia, brick with a glass front. I found the office, enrolled and paid my fee. Then I wandered hesitantly along corridors, peering through doors where people were doing yoga or pottery or painting, until I found a room with a loose circle of people still milling about, some of them holding sheets of music. They hadn't started yet.

‘
Choeur
?
' I said.

A young man in jeans and waistcoat nodded. He was handing out the sheets of song music. I greeted him and he smiled and gave me a small sheaf of pages.

‘
Je m'appelle Marc. Tu t'appelle quoi?
' he asked. My name is Marc. What's yours? I was startled that he had used
tu
. I had been carefully saying
vous
in every situation for the past three months, obeying Mrs Berman's rule that one only used
tu
for children or people in your family.

‘My name's Patti,' I answered in French.

‘
Bonjour Parti
,' he said, mispronouncing my name. ‘Welcome to choir.'

‘
Merci
,' I answered and stepped back, hoping the exchange was over.

I looked around the rest of the group. There were fifteen or so women and four or five men, ranging in age from thirties to fifties and looking strangely like the choir I'd been in at home in the Blue Mountains, the same mixture of personalities and even of looks: the busy, neat, curly-haired woman, the tall pretty one, the barrel-chested bloke. They were still introducing themselves to each other, smiling and chatting. Everyone seemed to use
tu
. Several asked my name, and then, when they heard my accent and where I was from, I quickly became ‘Parti d'Australie'. It was a joke, which I didn't get for several weeks. To their ears, my name sounded like
partir
, the verb ‘to leave', so my name was ‘Left from Australia'.

I looked at the half-dozen song sheets. The first two were ‘
Petit Poucet
', ‘Little Thumb', and ‘
Qui a tué Grand-maman?
', ‘Who Killed Grandma?', which I figured must be traditional folk songs, and then one in Spanish, ‘
Ai Linda
,' and a choral section from a Bach cantata and another song in French called ‘
La Paysanne
', ‘The Peasant', and ‘
Asikatali
', an African song I had already learned.

‘I know this one,' I said in French to the woman next to me.

‘Oh really?' she said, smiling. Her name was Marie-Louise and I liked the look of her intelligent gaze. She could see I was near the deep end and would keep an eye out for me.

We started with warm-ups, chanting up and down the scale using each of the vowels and then exercising the mouth and lips with the delicious word
pamplemousse
, which turned out to be the word for ordinary sourish grapefruit. Then we started with ‘
Petit Poucet
'
.
The French rhythms were odd to my ears and hard to remember and the long, muttering phrasing left me dashing over syllables to reach the end at approximately the same time as the others. Next we tried ‘
La Paysanne
',
which resembled ‘
La Marseillaise
' with lots of patriotic sounding ‘
Marchons, Marchons
'. In both the chorus was easier to sing, the strong beats more like English song rhythms. Then we started learning the first couple of lines of the Bach. The others in the choir grumbled about the difficulty of the German but to my surprise I found it easier than the French, the longer phrasing easier to fit in. I loved the sound of it too, the slow richness of it compared to the rushing French songs, but I didn't dare say so.

The two hours were over sooner than I expected. A few more people asked my name and where I was from as I put my song sheets in my bag. What was I doing here? Was I going to stay? I felt shy but at the same time realised I was enjoying being an object of interest. At least someone other than Anthony knew I was here, would notice if I turned up or not.

Marc said, ‘
À jeudi
?
' See you next Thursday?

‘
Oui
,' I said.

I walked out of the Centre d'Animation with the other women, chorusing ‘
Au revoir
' and ‘
À jeudi
'
and swung my bag along the street to the Metro and surged down the steps with all the other people in the cool dark evening.

The weekend before we moved I received another phone call about the French conversation notice I'd put on the wall. It was Sylvie, whose mother lived in my building. Even though I'd started to pack, I arranged for her to come to the studio that evening.

At the appointed time there was a knock and I opened the door to see a young woman who looked Indian. To my shame my first thought was a disappointed ‘Oh, she's not French!' It was the Mrs Berman effect again.

‘
Bonjour
, Patti?' she said with a shy smile. She was pretty with wide cheekbones and long black hair and was wearing a short skirt and jacket, almost looking like she was going to the office, but somehow not quite.

‘
Entrez, s'il vous pla
î
t
.' She stepped in and we sat opposite each other on my couch, both smiling nervously. We exchanged information about ourselves in French and English, her English as halting as my French. She suggested we speak French one week then English the next so we could help each other. She said she used to practise with an Englishman for a year, but he went back home and there was the shadow of something in her eyes that made me wonder if he had been her lover.

‘
Quel est votre métier?
' I asked. What is your work?

‘
Consultante financière
,' Sylvie said.

That was easy to understand even with my limited vocabulary. I had never met anyone who knew anything about money. What would we say to each other?

‘
Et votre métier?
' she asked.

‘
Je suis écrivain
,' I said. I'm a writer.

Sylvie burst into a wide smile. ‘You have written some books?'

‘
Oui
.' I got up and grabbed the books I had carted in my suitcase from Australia, and put them in Sylvie's lap, aware that I was ‘showing off' like my mother said never to do. She picked them up one by one, examining the covers and turning them over to slowly read the back cover blurbs. She looked up, her eyes alight.

‘I love books. I love to read. It's the most important thing in the world,' she exclaimed. She loved books and reading more than anything – and I had found her by posting a note on a wall! We looked at each other, delighted. I told her we were moving to the other side of Montmartre during the week and didn't know anywhere there we could meet. She said she lived in the sixteenth arrondissement just on the other side of the
périphérique
, the ring-road around Paris, too far away, but suggested we rendezvous at Le Relais Odéon on boulevard St Germain in central Paris next Sunday morning. It was on the Left Bank in the sixth, easy for us both to get to and opposite a Metro stop.

‘Ze café on ze corner, zis is white,' Sylvie said. She sounded just like Mam'zelle.

It was easy to move to the new apartment as we had no furniture, only clothes, a few books and laptops. The only real effort was getting our things up the five flights of stairs. We hadn't seen the place, except from the outside, but my faith in Susie Laporte was vindicated. A short hall opened into a large room with French doors on all sides leading on to a wraparound balcony – the light poured in and, because it was on a corner, I could see all the way down two streets. From one position on the balcony we could even see the cupola of Sacré-Coeur. There was a desk for Anthony in one of the high-ceilinged bedrooms and space for a desk in the other. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and the room quickly filled with steam.

The only thing that was needed was a desk for me. A few weeks earlier we had passed a market selling second-hand household goods at place des Abbesses and wandered around looking at bits and pieces of furniture, appliances, stacks of old linen and lace, children's toys. I had wished aloud that I could buy something for the studio so I could feel like I really lived here.

‘Buying furniture doesn't make you belong,' Anthony said.

But I thought the opposite. How could I not feel at home if I was hauling a table or a bed up the street to my apartment? Don't things weight us to the ground, stop us floating away? I thought about the Wiradjuri and how they'd had no need of apartments or furniture to feel at home. It made me suspect that I knew I couldn't belong in this place and had to weight myself to the ground with anything I could find.

In fact I didn't have enough money to buy a desk, I was living on my savings, so I made one from two metal trestles that Anthony bought at a hardware shop, and a piece of building board I found in passage Ramey around the corner. The passage was one of those places where people left furniture or appliances they didn't want. Whatever was left there – a table, a fridge, shelves – was always gone in a day or two, someone always wanted what someone else had finished with. After carrying the board up the five flights with the help of Anthony, I put it on the trestles against the wall where, when I was seated, I could look sideways out the French doors and see the balcony and chimneys of the buildings opposite. Then I arranged the desk-light, my laptop and printer and notes. I was ready again.

The ritual preparation of a room for writing is a long tradition, the making of a space for thinking and imagining. Montaigne wrote of his writing room in his chateau near Bergerac:

It is on the third storey of a tower […] a large drawing room. It was formerly the most useless place in my house: now I spend most days of my life there, and for most hours of each day […] If I feared the bother as little as the expense – and the bother drives me away from any task – I could erect a level gallery on either side, a hundred yards long and twelve yards wide […] Every place of retreat needs an ambulatory. My thoughts doze off if I squat them down.