Ransacking Paris (11 page)

I'd like to think that it makes no difference where the writing desk is, but I can't help believing the third floor of a tower in the south-west of France might have its uses – especially with a hundred-metre ambulatory above the chateau gardens. My thoughts too tend to doze off if I squat them down.

And then, on the beams of his tower writing room, Montaigne carved ‘I decide nothing. I understand nothing. I suspend judgment. I examine', the words of the Skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus. I imagine him walking up and down in his room – in the absence of the ambulatory which he never got around to building – glancing every now and then at the words just in case he should ever fool himself into thinking he really did know something. One day I will go on a pilgrimage to his tower, run my fingers over the words and let them roughen my fingertips and seep in through my pores.

He also wrote about the part of writing that happens outside the tower – the part of the reader or listener who receives the words. He said, ‘Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer.' Without the speaker or listener it is as if nothing is written – the tree falling soundlessly in the forest. It means every word is completed in a different way, every reader reads a different book. But until the book is read, each word belongs to the writer.

I was nearing the end of the draft I was working on and the words still belonged more to me. I kept writing every morning, trying to create the place where Dina had lived and died, conscious that one of the people reading my words would be Theo. He was almost fifteen now and however carefully I chose, he would finish the story in his own way. He and his father were coming over to Paris in a few months and I wanted to make sure I had a draft finished by the time they arrived. There is so much of the thief even in writing one's own experience of being because it always involves other people – and even if it didn't, it is still a kind of thieving of the flesh and blood substance of everyday life in order to create it in a parallel reality. I didn't want to thieve from Theo while he was with me, even though Stendhal says that the instinct to steal comes from what he called ‘a reverence for what is true'.

I want to believe Stendhal is right, that the constant thieving
is
a search for what is true. Proust wrote about the urgent task of his narrator ‘recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone' that offered to yield a secret revelation if only he found the words. The daily blue of the sky in childhood and the pearl grey in Paris, the restless longing of a freckled girl on the veranda of a farmhouse, a baguette and cheese on a kitchen stool at twilight, the ripple of unease as a woman envies a story of annihilation on a wall-plaque in the Marais, the bewilderment in the heart of Rousseau and de Sévigné and Stendhal and Theo whose mothers never came back into the room. It's what I search for and find so rarely; it's so fine and transparent, like a tiny dagger made of crystal, it's easily lost. I've never been able to hold on to it for long. It means I have to keep ransacking, trying to find it over and over again.

*

Anthony and I set out to explore our new
quartier
. Our apartment was on the corner of rue Simart and rue Eugène Sue with a
boulangerie
diagonally across from us and a
tabac
and a
crèche
on the other two corners. Although it was still the eighteenth arrondissement it was a different world from the rue des Trois Frères, a borderland between the bourgeois area around Metro Jules Joffrin and the African
quartier
on the other side of boulevard Barb
è
s-Rochechouart. In our street there were hole-in-the-wall places with sewing machines offering clothing repairs and an internet café selling phone cards, an African restaurant and a tea-house with couches and large hookahs, and up the road, a bar called Le Temps Perdu – although I doubt it was referring to Proust's Lost Time. In the streets there were tall Senegalese and Malian men in long robes, peacock blue and emerald green, and women in brilliant scarlet and azure and ochre dresses carrying babies in matching slings on their backs alongside pale-skinned and soberly suited businesswomen and men going to their offices.

I discovered that rue Eugène Sue was named after the novelist who wrote
The Wandering Jew
,
that the street at the top was rue Labat where Sarah Kofman had lived as a child hidden from the Nazis, that rue Goutte d'Or further up towards Metro Chateau Rouge was where Émile Zola set his most famous novel,
L'Assommoir
. It was inscribed, but it wasn't romantic Paris, there were no monuments and no tourists and it wasn't especially tidy and clean and life was going on in full view all the time. I found myself becoming addicted to watching the street life below and looking into other apartments from my fifth-floor eyrie, a sticky-beak pleasure that I'd never had before.

One afternoon after finishing work for the day, I went to see an exhibition of masks at the Musée d'Orsay. It presented masks mainly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists but there were some from Roman times and medieval Africa and Europe and from Asia and Polynesia as well. The program said, ‘Revealing while concealing, serving both spiritual and worldly pleasure, the mask goes back to the dawn of time.' It struck me that almost every culture had wanted to make a representation of the human face that could be worn over the actual face. I wondered who first thought, let's make another face for myself. And what did they want to reveal in their mask-face? Forbidden thoughts and feelings? Or was it to hide what was too fragile to reveal? Montaigne said, ‘We must remove the mask' but perhaps it was more useful to study the mask.

On the walls and in the cabinets of the d'Orsay there were death masks and Noh theatre masks from Japan, stone grotesques from Roman gates, ceremonial masks made of feathers and mud and grasses from Africa and New Guinea, plaster artists' masks for studio drawing practice and a Medusa mask with snake hair.

I thought of Jean-Jacques' masks at home on our mantelpiece, the ferociously beaked bird-man made of papier mâché. He had moved to Sydney and was enrolled at art school by then and one day when he was visiting, he had shown Matt and me how to make masks using torn-up paper pasted on inflated balloons. We had spent an afternoon making a mask each; mine was a friendly-looking witch with a hooked nose and Matt's was a happy moon-face. We left them to dry for a few days and then painted them, mine blue and his pink, both of them in sunny contrast to the bird-man mask.

It wasn't long after he moved to Sydney that Jean-Jacques started using heroin again. He had been a junkie before he came to Australia, but he'd been clean for a couple of years when we first met him. I don't know why he started using again
–
perhaps it was the break-up with Olive which came soon after they moved to Sydney, or perhaps it was just that he liked living near the edge. He reminded me of a moth flying at a flame, a kid who can't help going too far out on the branch.

Each time Anthony visited Jean-Jacques in Sydney he came home with increasingly worrying tales. He had stopped going to art school, he was living in a squat in Darlinghurst, he was dealing drugs, he had sores on his body, he was too thin, dangerous people had threatened him with iron bars. Every now and then Jean-Jacques came to stay with us in the Blue Mountains to withdraw but each time he would return to Sydney and pick up the needle again. He still had the sweetness of heart that had drawn us both to him, but there was violence in him as well. He talked about standover men and police bashing him and stealing his money. He sometimes brought a girl, Shayla, with him who was also a junkie and worked as a prostitute. My clearest memory of her is her sitting thin and damaged on our veranda, painting baby Patrick's fingernails with pink nail polish.

All these years later Anthony had heard back from Jean-Jacques. The email address on the driving school website had reached him. He wrote, ‘I am very exciting', which made us both laugh. He had always said that and we had never corrected him. Over the years we often repeated it to each other when we were looking forward to something: I am very exciting. He told us that he and Ana – he was still with his Spanish girlfriend, Ana! – had three children and they lived in Lausanne. Anthony wrote back, saying we would come and visit them, but Jean-Jacques replied immediately, insisting they would visit us. He wanted to see us in Paris, he said. It was already late October and getting cold – they might come in November if they could, but otherwise it would be some time early the following year.

Writing was making my shoulder and back pain worse; it was difficult to sit at my laptop for more than a few minutes at a time. When I was out, even my small daypack felt like a sack of stones and at night it took a few hours of tossing and turning before I could go to sleep. I didn't want to admit that I was in pain; I was ashamed. I wrote in my diary: ‘Here I am in Paris with dreams fulfilled and I whinge because my back hurts! But it bloody does.'

I looked up the word for pain,
douleur
, and went to see a doctor who, I checked online, spoke English. He turned out to speak less English than I spoke French, so we tried to work out the nature of the
douleur
in simplified French. He told me to take codeine and gave me the contact details of Tristan de Parcevaux, a physiotherapist with a clinic not far from our old studio. The medieval name alone was enough for me to make an appointment as soon as I got home.

When I turned up a couple of days later at the
cabinet
of Tristan de Parcevaux in the rue Durantin, part of me was surprised that he wasn't a twelfth-century knight on his way to Jerusalem, but a good-looking young man about the same age as my older son. Later, when I got to know him better and I confessed that I had imagined him as a knight, he said that he was in fact from a noble family. I thought of his ancestors in their chateau with their fine stables and lands and battles and Crusades and wondered how ordinary or extraordinary our lives would seem to them.

Six

November

The memories of place that one has within resemble a palimpsest.

Annie Ernaux

I like the idea of memory as a palimpsest, a parchment where remains of earlier writing or drawings can be seen through the present text. At times older memories float up and are read before the later ones. Months and days and years are interleaved. I could try to establish dates more accurately – and I do try, making alignments with weather, with political events, who was president in France at the time – but that's not really the point. It seems more accurate to try to make the layers and fragments that form memory. And then stories already told, already written, float in and repeat themselves, the details changing a little, told and retold down the years until the repetitions darken like layers of glue and paper.

I do remember Anthony was in Jordan in early November and I had been alone all week. Although I had joined the choir and made an arrangement to meet Sylvie, I still didn't have anyone else to talk to. Now that I was in a new
quartier
, the shopkeepers didn't yet recognise me either, so I often had that floating sense of being, if not quite invisible, then negligible, as I'd been that hot summer day on the rue St Jacques in the early months. No-one knew I was here, I could disappear for days and it would make no difference to anyone. I began scanning faces when I was out in the lonely hope of accidentally seeing someone I knew from Australia.

One morning I went out
to Café de la Place opposite the town hall of the eighteenth arrondissement and sat in the window, out of the cold, to watch the passers-by. They looked back, cool and appraising. They made me feel as if my gaze didn't exist, as if it wasn't enough to make them avert their eyes. I had lost my sense of ‘Here I am'. I returned to the apartment and wrote in my room on the fifth floor, constructing another time and another place: Dina who had died and seven- year-old Theo who had said, ‘What I really want is to see my mother just one more time.' It was clear that he knew the endless futility of his longing. I had realised then how much of knowing who you are and where you belong is created and shaped in the gaze of others. If no-one sees you, then do you exist? I closed the document and wrote to Matt and Patrick instead, the same email to both. I told them about our new apartment and that there was a spare room with two beds waiting for them in Paris.

Susie Laporte had given me the telephone number of Vicky Cole, who had been a friend of hers when she lived in Paris.

‘You will like her,' she emailed, ‘she likes books.'

Vicky lived in the rue Labat, a couple of minutes' walk away.
I stared at the phone number for days until one afternoon my need to be seen and heard overcame shyness and I sat down and rang it. Vicky, who was born in England but had lived in France most of her life, invited me around for ‘supper' the next night. I had never been invited for supper before – it sounded like a nursery meal from Enid Blyton – and Vicky had a posh voice, but as soon as she opened the door I felt at home; the walls of her entrance hall were covered with books, right up to the ceiling.

She smiled a welcome and greeted me in English. She was about the same height as me, slightly older, and was wearing jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt and a silver and amber necklace. She invited me into her lounge-room where there were more books on tables and on the mantelpiece, and, on a low Afghani coffee table, a tray with cheeses, gherkins,
saucissons
and wine. After it was vacated by an indignant cat, I sat down in an old leather armchair – in the sort of disrepair only the English gentry would have in their living rooms – and we began talking about books.

A couple of hours later we were still talking about books and we kept on talking. I stayed much longer than the acceptable time for an evening with a new acquaintance, but words and ideas were firing between us as we exchanged our stories. Vicky told me that when she was a child at birthday parties a nanny stood behind every child's chair – but she had come to France to escape all that and had brought up her children as a single mother in a village in the south-west of France. She had done all sorts of work: packing cold and smelly crates on a fish farm, sorting tourists' complaints about their showers in rented village houses, and had eventually set up her own holiday accommodation business. And she loved books. She read as easily in French as in English, but seemed to have more English books scattered around. We had read all the same women writers in our youth: Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc, Anaïs Nin, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Alice Walker. I walked back home late that night with the airy feeling and glow on the skin that comes after a passionate exchange about books and ideas. As de Beauvoir said, ‘As long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.'

Before I left that night, Vicky invited me to another rendezvous, a performance at the place des Vosges in the Marais. It was billed as an ‘Evening of Poets and Tigers' – I had already seen a poster for it and thought I'd go. At the end of the same week, we met at her place and walked down to the Metro Marcadet-Poissonniers together. Between us there was the slight uneasiness of a second meeting after an intense first connection. Was the passion really shared? Or were we too open too soon? Like Montaigne, ‘I am able to make and keep exceptional and considered friendships, especially since I seize hungrily upon any acquaintanceship which corresponds to my tastes,' and I was sensitive to the rhythms of making a new friendship. We talked about ordinary things, what we had been doing, the weather.

The ‘Evening of Poets and Tigers' didn't live up to its exotic title. The gates of the square in the place des Vosges had been shut and temporary fencing installed, presumably to keep the tigers in, and by the time we arrived, there were crowds at least four or five deep all around the fencing. I am short and so is Vicky, which meant neither of us could see much. We managed to wriggle forward and spotted a couple of bored-looking tigers lying on a gravelled pathway in the distance. Nothing happened for quite some time. Some French was read aloud but I couldn't tell if it was poetry or an announcement and I didn't want to ask. After another long while, white horses did a display of precision stepping, crossing their hooves this way and that, trying to make up for the poets and tigers not living up to their dangerous names. The crowds stayed although there was little to see except shadowy shapes in the square.

‘I've read that French people will come out and look at a wall if it was rumoured there was something happening on the other side of it,' I said.

Vicky shrugged. I thought of the desire for danger and for something different to happen, even the desire to see destruction. Madame de Sévigné had waited on Notre Dame bridge to see Madame de Brinvilliers, the poisoner, burned on a pyre after being executed: ‘Well, it's all over, Brinvilliers is in the air: after the execution her poor little body was thrown into a very large fire and her ashes scattered to the winds; so we shall inhale her […] no-one has ever seen so many people, nor Paris so excited and engrossed in anything.'

We shall inhale her!
Present-day media vultures have nothing on Madame de Sévigné and the Paris crowds in the seventeenth century! I don't know what the excited and endless need for catastrophe means – or what hunger it feeds – but there seems something like primitive witchcraft in it; if I eat enough of other people's tragedies then I will be protected. I will be the child to run with the valuable news of a disaster, I'll watch the planes fly into buildings for days on end. The crowd rocked the temporary fence, daring it to fall, daring the tigers to care and leap forward and tear someone – someone else – to pieces. It was the same crowd feasting at the guillotine in the place de la Concorde, or standing on Notre Dame bridge watching Madame de Brinvilliers burn. Breathing in the ashes of the poisoner's body.

As we walked back to the train Vicky apologised for the evening as if it had been her responsibility. I said it wasn't her fault that the tigers had not rampaged, nor even stalked around the square.

*

In my zigzagging across Paris, in and out of streets and parks and galleries, gathering a strange mix of nectars, I found ‘
L'Abeille
', ‘The Bee', by the Symbolist poet Paul Val
é
ry.

‘So deadly and delicate your sting,' he begins. He longs for the sharp quick sting of the bee to wake him up. He says that without it, love will die or sleep, and, in my reader's half of the words, he doesn't mean romantic love, but the loving intensity of being awake to life; the bee is a bringer of awareness. I am no great believer in the necessity of pain, but mostly there is no choice in the matter. Since that year in Paris, friends have died – cancer, motor neurone disease, heart failure – and others are suffering ills or loneliness. None of us are old yet, but still, the harvesting has begun. I remember the yellow wheat paddocks of my childhood, the ripe ears, the grain bins filling, the bare spiky stalks left in the ground; I never thought the harvest was sad then.

I dreamed my mother died a few days before her birthday in November. I was showing her around a house, but I knew she had already died. I had a severe pain in my chest and could hardly breathe. In the dream I thought: the pain of someone you love dying is a real physical pain. When I woke up I worried all day that the phone would ring with bad news from Australia. It didn't come then nor for several years, but when it did, the pain I had dreamed was accurate.

I don't know why I'm thinking of death; it seems a long way off for me, although even when I was a teenager I thought about it often. It wasn't with fear, and certainly not with longing – I wasn't a dark teenager – but with a consciousness that it would happen. De Beauvoir said she was terrified of death, sometimes utterly panicked by the thought of it, but for me it was more of a puzzle. I stood in the heat of the day on the veranda of our farmhouse and tried to imagine not being. It would happen, but the texture of nothingness is impossible to imagine and so the day would ripple and resume.

Montaigne thought about it a great deal when he was young too, but he thought the slow death of youth was more dreadful than actual death. He says, ‘Death is one of the attributes you were created with; death is part of you; [in running away from death] you are running away from yourself; this being which you enjoy is equally divided between life and death.' I wonder if he did feel as calmly about it as he sounds. Non-existence, non-being, has to be a bit confounding whenever it is considered.

Instead of non-existence, other elaborate worlds have been created to live in afterwards – Heaven, Paradise, Valhalla – populated not just by those who have died but also by gods and a hierarchy of heavenly beings. And then ways to communicate with those who lived there had to be developed. Dreams could bring messages from the dead, and so could angels, and certain creatures, birds and cats. In ancient Aegean cultures, bees were the sacred messengers from this world to the dead.

Bees were also messengers from the gods to us. The messages were passed on in honey so that truth could be expressed in scholarship and poetry. Honey-voiced. Honey-tongued. The Oracle at Delphi, the one who had ‘Know Thyself' carved above the temple door, was the Delphic Bee. The priestesses of Artemis and Demeter were known as bees and even Apollo was given his gift of prophecy by the Thriae, a trinity of pre-Hellenic bee goddesses.

Bees were seen as truthful messengers because the ancients thought honey was incorruptible and pure, that nothing was added to the nectar for it to become honey. Pure and incorruptible Truth.
Of course, science has discovered that the bees do add enzymes from their own mouths, chewing it for half an hour or so to break down the complex sugars into simple sugars and then, after they put it in the honeycombs, they fan it with their wings for hours to evaporate water from it. It takes quite a bit of work, really. Making honey.

*

It was cold by mid-November and often grey. When I woke on the fifth floor I could see the orange chimney pots on top of the building across rue Eugène Sue. All the buildings in the street were Haussmannian, built after Baron Haussmann demolished most of medieval Paris in the nineteenth century, cream-coloured limestone, each six storeys with long balconies on the second and fifth floors, the only differences being the colour and design of the iron balcony railings. Ours were blue fern whorls, the building directly opposite, black ovals. As I opened my eyes I could tell what kind of day it was by the light on the chimney pots on the
chambre de bonne
, maid's room, above the black-oval railing: if the orange of the pots was flat it was another grey day; if it was light and golden, then at least the day had started off sunny. I don't normally mind grey weather; in the long drought of my childhood, cloudy, rainy days were longed for, welcomed, but here the low light was wearying.

I had a rendezvous with Tristan de Parcevaux three times a week. I looked forward to the visits, not just because of the massage – which didn't make much difference to my sore shoulder – but because we had begun to talk to each other. He practised his English and I practised my French. I learned that he was a musician in his life outside the physiotherapy rooms, and he learned that I was writing about my friend who had died. For practice, he gave his instructions to me in English and one day when I was lying on my stomach, he said in correct English, ‘Now put your feet to your arse.' I laughed. He was embarrassed when I explained that ‘arse' was not the word a health professional would use. He was more careful in the way he related to me for a while afterwards.

I didn't say much about the pain, even to Anthony. I think I inherited my mother's impatience with whingeing, but it was more that being in pain undermined my sense of self – and self-respect. There was too much suffering in the world to even mention aches and pains. It wasn't me; I didn't have neurotic, undefined problems, and I didn't get depressed. The firmer the ideas one has about oneself the harder it is to see the truth.