Ransacking Paris (13 page)

Ernaux writes that she wanted to sink into the earth. She hid her hands under her desk, filled with shame and terrified one of the girls sitting next to her would know it was her. In that moment she realised it was the smell of a ‘cleaning lady', an inferior. She hated Jeanne but, even more, herself.

It was a secret humiliation, no-one outed her, and as far as I know, the girl next to me at the bubblers didn't reveal my secret – although I don't know why not because I would have been an easy target – but I felt the shame and the fear just as Ernaux described it. To be uncovered, not just as different but as inferior, was a terrifying thought. I already knew what happened to girls who were judged as different and inferior.

In that small town, apart from the Wiradjuri who lived on the edge of our lives, almost everyone was of English and Irish descent, fair-skinned and utterly certain there was no other way to be. Cathy Dantrinos, who sat near me in class and whose only crime was having a Greek father, had olive skin and black hair and was belittled and mocked every day. Her thick plait was mocked, her thick legs were mocked and her mother, who also, oh how embarrassing, wore a thick plait, was mocked. For the first few days when I arrived at the school I talked to Cathy, until a stream of girls came up to me, making it clear it would be the same for me if I continued along this dangerous path. I abandoned Cathy to her fate.

Annie Ernaux broke with her past, with her ancestors, saying at the end of the chapter, ‘I had just broken with generations of women who washed with bleach.' Reading that sentence, I felt the sting. It was a small enough break in a world scarred by ruptures, but on opposite sides of the world the dirty girl and the bleached-clean girl had both submitted to the rule of their betters and made it their business to slip by unnoticed. I've just begun to think that my writing life may have been a journey back to that grubby girl before she knew what other people thought of her.

*

Anthony and I were both robbed in the streets within a week of each other. I was getting into the train at Anvers Metro on the way to choir with my folder of songs tucked under my arm and shoulder bag slung on my back as usual. The crowd surged onto the train and there was jostling as the signal for closing the doors sounded, but people were smiling and good-humoured as we were pushed up against each other. I felt the push of the man who had leapt in behind me and turned around to see that he had got in safely, then turned away and reached in to hold the centre pole so as I wouldn't fall. As the doors shut I looked out and was surprised to see the same dark-haired man walking away along the platform. I realised instantly what might have happened and slipped my bag off my shoulder to check. The wallet was missing. There were sympathetic noises from the other travellers and several pointed at the man we could still see walking away on the platform, but the train was pulling out. It had been well executed and we were all too late.

I told Marie-Louise and three or four others at choir about it and they were upset for me, taking it personally that one of their own had robbed a visitor. Strangely though, it made me feel less like a visitor and I felt pleased to have a story to tell them. Marie-Louise offered me money for my fare home, but I said it was okay, I had a weekly Metro ticket still in my pocket.

I thought about going to the police to report it, but it seemed pointless and there hadn't been much money in the wallet anyway, no more than twenty euros. I cancelled my credit cards and wrote it off to experience. But within a couple of days Anthony was mugged down at place des Abbesses, pushed over and his wallet taken. He had gone down there one evening to see if he could buy some marijuana from the teenagers who were always kicking a soccer ball around the square – the same boys we had seen on our first day – but they had knocked him down and expertly slipped his wallet out of his pocket. He wasn't hurt – and I wasn't overly sympathetic – but we decided two robberies were worth the bother of reporting so we went to the police station in rue Clignancourt near our apartment.

We sat and waited for a few minutes, watching entranced as two groups of police officers greeted each other with three kisses each in the bare foyer.

‘We must be in Paris,' Anthony said.

I nodded. The only other time I'd been in a police station was the small police-cottage in my hometown when Matt's bike had been stolen from my mother's back yard. No-one had kissed anyone there.

We were allocated one of the policemen who transcribed the events as we explained them in simple French:
voleur
, thief, and
portefeuille
, wallet, but not
marijuana
.
He didn't ask many questions, just let us tell the two stories, although he did ask if my thief was an Arab. It seemed a leading question and I was surprised.

‘I'm not sure. He could have been. He had black hair.'

‘No. If you are not sure, I can't write anything.'

It was an odd exchange, which I didn't know how to read. I thought it was a racist question but then his refusal to write any details of the thief's appearance on the grounds of my uncertainty suggested that it wasn't.

I wanted to think that the French were not racists; they had welcomed black Americans, musicians and performers, most famously Josephine Baker, in the 1920s. It wasn't until after I got to know Sylvie that I realised it was another romantic illusion.

There was a mix-up on my first rendezvous with Sylvie. She had told me the awnings of the café were white, but the awnings on the café named Le Relais Odéon were green so I was unsure whether I was in the right place. I was a few minutes late, so I rushed back into Metro Odéon and out again at St Michel to check another café near the Metro station there. I eventually and literally bumped into Sylvie coming out of the Metro. I was hot and bothered and Sylvie was embarrassed at having described the place incorrectly, but we both settled down inside the quiet elegance of Le Relais Odéon. It had wrought-iron railings and painted ceilings and perfect waiters. We sat in the window and Sylvie told me it had been her favourite place to watch people when she first came back to Paris.

‘I watched the women because I wanted to learn how to be a true French woman.'

She smiled a little self-consciously, aware of her naivety, but I wondered what she had looked at. Was it their clothes – dark, well-cut, with intriguing details – the way they walked, the tilt of their heads, the movement of their mouths as they talked to each other? It seemed to me that French women looked different in all those ways when I sat and watched, especially in this
quartier
, the sixth arrondissement.
This was literary and intellectual Paris, near the Sorbonne and the Latin
quartier
and surrounded by publishing houses where words and ideas are still currency, where the student uprising of May '68 raged, where my conception of Paris had been born and was nourished every day.

The sixth arrondissement stretches from the Seine to the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens, bordered on one side by boulevard St Michel and crossed by boulevard St Germain. In between, there are nests of narrow streets crammed with shops and galleries and cr
ê
peries where I always lost my sense of direction. Around the corner from where we sat, in the rue de l'Ancienne Comédie, François Procope had opened the first coffee shop in Paris in 1689 – we could go in and bump into Voltaire and Rousseau, although they probably wouldn't be speaking to each other. After Voltaire read Rousseau's
Of
the
Social Contract
he sent a note to him saying, ‘I have received your new book against the human race and I thank you for it […] One longs, on reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.' Ouch. It was a most civilised way of drawing blood. We might be safer in Le Relais Odéon, watching from behind glass.

I ordered a coffee and Sylvie had a hot chocolate and a croissant. We sat, both of us a little shy, and tried to tell our stories.

Sylvie was born in Paris, but her mother and father were of Indian ‘
origine
' as the French so exactly put it; she was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired. But she had not come from a disadvantaged background. Because her father was a diplomat, she and her brother had grown up in Brazil, Senegal and the French Congo with visits back to France until she moved permanently to Paris in senior high school. I felt the envy of the exotic that only someone relentlessly Anglo-Celtic who had lived on the same few acres all her childhood could feel. How dull, unchanging, homogenous my life was. This, I thought, was exactly why I had come to Paris. To see and touch difference.

‘I grew up on a farm in Australia and never knew anything else every day of my childhood,' I admitted. It was a dreary story with not even a change of scenery to hold attention.

‘How lucky you are to have a home, a landscape that knows you,' she exclaimed. I felt a jolt of surprise when she said that. How did she know that secret truth when I had hardly articulated it to myself?

She tried to explain how living in so many countries had created an uncertain identity, which was further complicated by the fact of her dark skin. When she was in South America or Africa, she said to those who asked, ‘Of course, I am a French girl,' and as she repeated it to me, her voice was indignant. How dare she be questioned about her right to be called French. She felt completely French even though she recognised that she physically resembled the people in Senegal and Brazil more than she did the other diplomatic families.

‘But when I came back to Paris, I didn't know who I was. I felt like I didn't know how to be French. I was confused and felt like an outsider.'

I know it sounds improbable that with my limited French we could have articulated such things, but we did. We were strangers but there was something happening between us. A few times in my life I have had an instant intimate connection with a stranger, as I did with Vicky, but never before in another language. For the first time, I threw a few words of French into the air with the feeling they would be caught and put together. There was something brilliant about the way Sylvie leapt towards meaning from my fragments.

‘
À dimanche
,' we said as we parted. See you on Sunday. We were friends already.

*

Jean-Jacques and Ana couldn't come in November. It would be more like March or April the following year. But plans for visitors from Australia were falling into place, the Paris magnet exerting its endless pull: a new friend, Camilla, had already arrived – she was an actress and director who had worked with Matt when he was younger; Theo and his father, Kit, were coming in March; our friend Phil who had drawn the cartoon of us in Paris was arranging to visit early in the New Year; Peter, who heard music in his head, and his wife, Libby, were calling in; my niece Hannah, travelling in Europe, was staying for a day or two as she passed through to somewhere else. And Patrick had been accepted into the University of Amsterdam, starting in the New Year. He was coming to stay for a few weeks in late December and would be with us for Christmas before going on to Amsterdam. I emailed Matt, hoping he would find a way to join us. He was waiting on funding to make a film and lived hand-to-mouth, although he always seemed to get by. I had no income and everything extra in my savings had gone on Patrick's studies, but Matt had always been one of those people whom the world likes and looks after.

I waited on the fifth floor in the rue Simart. Each visitor must climb the narrow staircase and, out of breath, knock on my door. I would bring them along the hall and stun them with the glimpse of the cupola of Sacré-Coeur and the sound of the accordionist playing ‘
Les Temps des Cerises
' in the rue Simart below and then serve them camembert and
vin de pays
from the Arabs on the corner. Other people must see my dream, otherwise it might be said that it did not exist at all.

Seven

December

Nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well.

Michel de Montaigne

The pain in my right arm and shoulder was constant now, and had spread to my back and between my ribs. When I breathed, in and out, it hurt between every rib.

‘Go and see the physio,' Anthony said.

‘I already go three times a week.'

Most of the time the ache was dull, but if I moved my arm suddenly a sharp pain shot through it. Because the autumn leaves on the footpaths were wet and slimy, I often skidded on them and instinctively shot my arm out for balance. There was an instant of calm, and then the searing pain hit and doubled me over, breath held. People looked at me in astonishment. ‘
Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?
' What the matter? What's she carrying on about? There was nothing to see.

One day when Hannah was staying for a week on her travels around Europe, she stood with me at traffic lights and I went to step out onto the pedestrian crossing. She saw a car run the red light and grabbed my arm – the pain shot through me as I bent double in front of her startled face.

Sleeping had become difficult; there was no position that didn't make the pain worse after a few minutes so I lay this way and that for hours. Worst of all, self-pity was creeping damply in to match the cold, grey weather.

I went to another doctor who gave me stronger codeine and an anti-inflammatory. I swallowed as many of both as I was allowed a day; the codeine made me sluggish and the anti-inflammatory gave me ulcers all over my tongue and gums so that I couldn't smile or eat or kiss without it hurting. I knew there was nothing seriously wrong with me, none of it was life-threatening, not even enough to justify calling it suffering. I thought about illness and pain being good for the character and wondered why it was dissolving mine.

Montaigne suffered a variety of illnesses: ‘rheums, fluxions of gout, diarrhoeas, coronary palpitations and migraines', and ‘the stone' or ‘gravel', which sounds like either kidney stones or gallstones, both extremely painful, which is perhaps why he said ‘nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well'.

But he was not one to seek pain as a way of learning; in fact he thought pleasure was both a guide for what we should choose – ‘I have never been bothered by anything I have done in which I found great pleasure' – and our aim – ‘we ought to have given virtue the more favourable, noble and natural name of pleasure'. For him, the only use of pain was the pleasure that came when pain was lifted; the contrast heightened the experience of pleasure.

He did say too that ‘we must learn to suffer what we cannot avoid' and that ‘experience has taught me that we are ruined by impatience'. That struck home. Each time the pain eased I thought, now I'm better, but the next day when it returned, I was consumed with impatience.

Rousseau was often sick as well, even as a child: he ‘was born almost dead and they had little hope of saving me'. As a young man he had long and mysterious illnesses, which he was certain each time were fatal. He knew he was a hypochondriac: ‘There was not an illness of which I read the description that I did not imagine to be mine […] I believed I had them all.' He appears to have had depression when he was young and suffered later on from paranoia and from almost continual maladies including painful ‘urine retention', which meant he had to use a catheter every day.

None of these are romantic illnesses, just painful, and embarrassing to talk about, and they must have shaped his thinking, at least in that they meant he was sidelined and had to observe society from the edge. It meant he also observed himself from the edge; he may have been ‘maddish' as Hume said, intense in his passions, fanatical, but he was also self-aware in some aspects: ‘I have a passionate temperament, and lively and headstrong emotions. Yet my thoughts arise slowly and confusedly, and are never ready until too late.' Oh, mine neither, I need a day or two to think of the quick reply!

I have been judging him too harshly, I realise. He was just another struggling human being. I had judged against his weaknesses too quickly, a flaw in my own character which has always been there. Even when I saw Proust's cork room in the Musée Carnavalet, I wasn't sympathetic. Marcel Proust was asthmatic, allergic to all kinds of dusts and pollens, and couldn't bear noise; he spent much of his life shut away from the world, convinced that he would otherwise die. Instead of compassion, I felt impatience, even faint scorn. There was something in my then robust health that found his sickliness and oversensitivity irritating. I felt the same when I read the interminable – that word conveys my attitude already – pages in
In Search of Lost Time
where the narrator – I can't help thinking it's Proust himself – is waiting for his mother to say goodnight. Just get on with it, for heaven's sake. I'd always been impatient with others' illness, and now with my own obscure ailments.

In the middle of one afternoon I was feeling more than sorry for myself. I was in pain, exhausted from lack of sleep, my mouth was entirely coated with ulcers, it was cold, and Anthony was away in China, in Shanghai. I had a sudden longing to have his comfort, a longing for the phone to ring and to hear his warm voice which was never impatient with illness. I even thought for a second of ringing him, but remembered it was 3 am in China and he always slept like the proverbial log and it was unreasonable to disturb him. And then, within a minute, the phone rang, and of course it was Anthony.

‘How did you know?' I stood there, disbelieving, tears stinging.

‘I woke up suddenly with the thought that you needed to talk to me. So I rang.'

In a way, I don't want to say anything else about that phone call, but there is so little ever said about long marriages – apart from being a source of tedium and disillusionment – that, at the same time, I want to shout out from the rooftops. Communion might be quieter and nearly invisible – tempestuous affairs are given all the good lines – but it is as fine and rare and worth as much as stormy weather. Our connection had always been strongly physical – both of us wondering aloud at times how long we would stay together without sex – and strongly intellectual, dependent on decades of conversation about books. I sometimes wondered if there was anything else between us. Sex and books. And our sons too, of course. And wasn't that more than enough anyway? But the yearning thoughts of a sceptic had travelled across high mountain ranges and cities and seas all the way to Shanghai to wake one man amongst millions from a sound sleep and caused him to make an international phone call to a self-pitying woman in Paris. When I put the phone down I couldn't stop smiling.

It was only a week to Christmas and both the boys were coming from Sydney. Matt in his impetuous way had decided to buy a ticket on his credit card and deal with it later. He would arrive first and then, a few days later, Patrick, on his way to his year at university in Amsterdam.

The weather was cold and damp but Paris sparkled as each
quartier
tried to outdo the other with Christmas lights. There were garlands strung across market streets, moons and shooting stars and mandalas and nativity scenes dancing in the sky above the crowds of shoppers, glittering in the darkness.

When Anthony got back from China we spent an evening going from
quartier
to
quartier
, holding each other's gloved hand and admiring the transformation of the gloomy evening into sparkling fantasy. The strings of small windmills made of lights, gold and red and blue and green, in our old neighbourhood in the rue des Abbesses, were the most beautiful to our loyal eyes, but we didn't go and see the most spectacular in the Champs Élysées that night because we wanted to see them with Matt and Patrick when they arrived. Sylvie had told me it was the custom for parents to take their children to see the Champs Élysées lights in the week before Christmas each year. Carollers wandered down the streets singing to people as they sat in cafés and parents and children drank hot chocolate and watched the lights.

‘
Papa
and
Maman
took us every year when we were back in Paris,' she said.

I thought of children too young to properly remember, but recalling glimpses of singing and cold and stars fallen to earth. One New Year's night when we still lived in Sydney and Matt was a baby, about two years old, Anthony and I took him sleeping from his bed and carried him down to the harbour and climbed onto a ferry. It was nearly midnight. The New Year's Eve fireworks began and Matt woke up to see the sky exploding with red and gold and silver and green stars. The water lapped on the side of the ferry and the cool dark wrapped around him and fountains and bees and dragon's eggs and falling leaves sparkled in every colour. He would not remember the midnight journey from his bed, but underneath conscious memory he would always have the idea that extraordinary things might happen in the dark of night. It seemed to us that it was the beginning of his education. At that time I hadn't read more than the two or three essays of Montaigne's that Mrs Berman had given me in high school, but I know he would have agreed. Education was to enrich the inner being, and ought to be pleasurable, a delight. Waking to the sounds of a spinnet or the sight of golden stars filling the dark, ‘to educate the soul entirely through gentleness and freedom'.

*

I went to concerts every Sunday: sacred music in St-Louis on the Île St Louis, choir at the American church, a chamber concert in St-Jean de Montmartre at place des Abbesses, pianists playing Brahms at St-Merri near the Pompidou Centre. Sometimes my lack of musical background meant I couldn't understand the blur of sound and I became restless and sat in my overcoat – the churches were always cold – wondering why I was still trying to join a club where my ignorance held me back at the door of grace and beauty, trying to see in.

Then I met an opera singer, an Australian woman, Trish. I'd gone to an exhibition of paintings at the Australian Embassy and she had turned up, as I had, in the hope of meeting new people. I don't remember any of the paintings at the exhibition or even who the artist was, but I have a photograph of myself there in a pink and green dress, which, in the narcissistic hierarchy of memory, I remember I bought at Porte de Clignancourt, the flea markets in the north of Paris. I talked to Trish about my manuscript, how I had taken singing lessons back home, and that I had joined a choir in the twentieth arrondissement. She told me she had come from Adelaide to study singing in Strasbourg in her twenties and had never gone home. She had married a Frenchman and had two sons, but she couldn't sing while she was married and ended up leaving him. It wasn't that her husband prevented her from singing, she just lost her voice.

She was sexy-looking, with green eyes and long brown hair, and had an earthy laugh, and I liked her right away. She said she was currently performing in a concert of songs from Mozart operas – she was a mezzo-soprano – and asked me to come and see it.

‘It'll be fun,' she said. ‘We don't take ourselves too seriously.'

The following week I turned up at the theatre, which was down a lane in the eleventh arrondissement. I climbed up narrow stairs leading to steep rows of seats that looked as if they might tip me over onto the stage if I tripped. The dusty red velvet stage-curtains appeared to have been there since the nineteenth century at least.

A series of sketches unfolded: a man in a loud shirt sitting in a striped deckchair, a nurses and doctors surgery scene with everyone in clinical white, Roman soldiers, Trish as an Italian housewife wearing a headscarf and glasses – each with glorious songs from
Don Giovanni
,
Cosi Fan Tutte
,
The Magic Flute
,
The Marriage of Figaro
. The singers fell about with slapstick humour, acting as if their soaring voices were effortless, accidental. The program explained that they wanted to explore Mozart's
gout de l'espièglerie
, his taste for cheekiness and his childish spirit. I relaxed. It didn't have to be solemn, reverential. Their voices were rich, powerful; they could do somersaults at the same time and still sing. Trish's dark earthy mezzo reached effortlessly low and skimmed the high notes as she clowned around on the end of a telephone acting the gossipy fool.

Afterwards we had a drink in a nearby bar. The waiter hovered around Trish and asked if she was free later. A couple of men at the next table started flirting with her.

‘Like bees to a honey-pot,' I said.

She laughed. It was an everyday dance for her, the stepping forward and back of attraction. She smiled at them and returned to our conversation.

‘I'm trying to compose a set of songs about Australia,' she said.

‘Even though you've been living here for twenty years?'

‘Proabably because I have. I'm working on a series, the whole piece will be called
Terre Rouge
, Red Earth. But I need to listen to Aboriginal music, didgeridoo and sticks and chanting.'

‘But what kind of songs are you writing?'

‘I'm writing them to perform myself, so I guess you would call them arias. It's not folk or rock'n'roll or jazz anyway.'

‘And you want to combine that with didgeridoo?'

We continued talking, both of us offering bits of our work. I envied Trish her voice, her capacity to make music, her entry into a world of sound that seemed to me beyond words. Like Stendhal I had come from ‘an essentially unmusical family'. Like him I was trying to sing, but as he said, there was little that could be done about it. I could only respond with more words. I told Trish that Dina in the book I was writing had sung in a rock'n'roll band for a while and that when I wrote about her tragedy, a beautiful young mother leaving a little boy forever, I had thought someone should write a sad love song about it.