Ransacking Paris (14 page)

Because stories keep going, a couple of years later when I gave Trish a copy of the book about Dina, she did write a song for her, a sad love song, and sang it when I did a reading of my book at The Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris. That was in the future, but I like the way stories thread back and forth over time, connecting things that might otherwise have been lost or left flapping in the wind. It makes time past and time present seem to be, not a line, but arcs of a spiral. Trish finished writing
Terre Rouge
after I left Paris and performed it for a season on a nightclub barge on the Canal St-Martin. I didn't see it, but Camilla, who had also become a friend of Trish's, directed it. I heard the Paris audiences loved it.

*

Days and weeks had found a rhythm. I wrote each morning, immersed in life after Dina had died, the long slow connection with Theo, trying to stitch it together. I had begun to think of it as a kind of song and that I was trying to find the pattern of notes. I wrote pieces and arranged them as if they were notes: four or five short pieces, a run of quarter beats, and longer pieces, whole beats, or longer still, a note held as long as a breath would allow.

While I was writing, I listened to bellbirds and magpies in the Blue Mountains, to the sound of Theo's near-silent crying, to Dina's breath gargling in her throat as her weak lungs struggled to draw air. As I tried to re-create those sounds, those days, I felt as if they inhabited me, that my body and heart were living there and not in Paris. My body felt warm while I wrote, but afterwards, I was cold. I finished about two o'clock each day and when I lifted my head the sound of police sirens and cries from the street rose to my room on the fifth floor.

In the afternoon I returned to the present where there were ordinary tasks: I had my new trousers taken up at the Nigerian sewing shop across the street, I bought bath cleaner at the supermarket and ginger and honey at the African shop, I had massages with Tristan de Parcevaux, and studied French verbs on the internet. In the evenings I had a drink with Camilla or a conversation with Sylvie, and went to choir every Thursday night.

At choir I had learned that ‘
Qui a tué Grand-maman?
' was an environmental protest song and I was getting the hang of muttering through the wordy lines of a
chanson
.
We had added a few more to our repertoire, ‘
J'en ai marre
', ‘I've Had Enough', which I understood was a general angry complaint about poverty and hard work and lack of love, and a folk song
,
‘
J'ai vu le Loup, le Renard et la Belette
', ‘I Saw the Wolf, the Fox and the Weasel'. They were fun but the Bach cantata, No 11, Choral 6, I loved and was now brave enough to say so. I didn't understand any of the German words, but the slow rich sound and rhythm reminded me of the swing of the incense crucible in the Friday night Benediction service of my childhood, the comforting weight of a belief I no longer had. The priest chanted and the faithful responded, incense filled the air. Here in the room in the rue Amandiers each note felt like a solid step underfoot, and each one inevitably led to the next one.

‘
J'en ai assez de Bach
,' the young woman next to me grumbled. I've had enough of Bach.

‘
Non, j'adore Bach
,' I defended. Marc nodded approvingly.

We started learning an English song too, Janis Joplin's ‘Mercedes Benz', one of my all-time favourites. I had sung it when I was sixteen walking up the middle of the road one night on a weekend away from boarding school, my first time in Sydney without my parents, the first time I'd had a beer or two. I was with a school friend who had introduced me to Janis Joplin's torn soul, and we sang loudly in the quiet street. ‘Oh Lord,' we yelled into the night.

‘For Parti,' Marc said, and asked me to read it out loud with the correct English pronunciation. I read it, delighted to be the one who was the authority on a song for the first time, but when we sang it, I couldn't help but blend in with the French accents: ‘Ma fren orll drive Porchez, Ay muz make amen.'

Marie-Louise had taken me under her wing and invited me home to practise French with her. She told me she loved French with all her heart and wanted to protect it – I understood – from my murdering ways. There was a kind of intensity in her that made me nervous though, and made me fear doing violence to her language. I had started to see that the passion to communicate mattered more to me than sounding perfect; I improved more with Sylvie because we wanted to understand each other more than we wanted to be correct.

I still practised French every day, listening to the news with a dictionary open on my knee. The words I learned weren't ones I could often use in daily conversation –
naufrage
, shipwreck;
sinstré
, disaster victim;
ravisseur
, kidnapper – but I could understand what was going on in the world. I liked listening to President Chirac in particular, not because I agreed with any of his politics, but because he enunciated so clearly. ‘
Français et Françaises
,' he would always start solemnly. French men and French women. I wanted to sit to attention, be one of the patriotic French women he was addressing.

I learned more useful words from Tristan de Parcevaux as he massaged my sore body.
Allongez-vous
, lie down;
l'hanche
, the hip;
la boite
, slang for nightclub – he sometimes told me about his weekends. It was an odd way to have French lessons, a young man and a half-naked older woman. I suspected there was more warmth and gaiety in the way we corrected each other's pronunciation than might have been the case if we were both sitting at a desk in a classroom. And then, on my second-last appointment, a ‘thing' happened between us. It was unspoken and, if anyone had been watching, unseeable, but it was something. We were talking, I think it was about his desire to be a musician, and then there was a silence, but not because we had run out of things to say. It's strange that I can't remember our words but I can remember the quality of the silence. It was warm and there was a current of understanding or acknowledgment exchanged, a kind of energy. It wasn't sexual, not on my part and most likely not on his, but there was a tenderness, a knowledge that we had, for some brief moments, connected. There was something exposed in it, a vulnerability. We both hastily resumed our professional selves and pretended it had not happened, but I think of it sometimes. The way human beings can touch each other isn't something to forget.

*

Rousseau and Stendhal often wrote about their passionate feelings, but not about the delicate and transitory. They both seem to have lived most of their relationships entirely in their own heads – or is that what we all do? Perhaps every relationship is imaginary in that we construct a version of the person in our heads to fall in love with. Proust said that the loved person is ‘a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves', but Stendhal and Rousseau both went as far as falling in love with women who were entirely imaginary, Stendhal with a fictional character – ‘I went absolutely berserk, the possession of a real life mistress, then the object of all my desires, wouldn't have plunged me into such a torrent of voluptuousness' – and Rousseau with women he imagined himself: ‘I created for myself societies of perfect creatures, celestial in their virtue and beauty […] I spent countless hours and days, losing all memory of anything else.'

De Beauvoir wrote of her feelings for her friend Zaza when she was a teenager: ‘I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a pounding cataract, as naked and beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.'

To my Anglo-Celtic soul, it sounds extreme – violent, naked, pounding cataract, cliff – and I want to shrug it away as excess. But just as I do, I suddenly remember the long-forgotten years as a teenager when every night I unfolded an imaginary love affair in fine detail in my mind. It's curious that I didn't think of it when I read of Stendhal's and Rousseau's imaginary lovers. Each evening I could hardly wait for the solitude of my bed to imagine the next intricate instalment of love and passion. There were jealous scenes, passionate reconciliations, slow kisses, piercing glances from dark eyes. Cliffs and pounding cataracts; I've had a few in the endless landscapes of the mind.

Still, still, I want to insist, what of the subtle and transitory? A boy's smile as he plays ‘Flight of the Bumblebee' on his violin, a wordless conversation in a physiotherapy clinic, two elderly women helping each other in the street below, the accordionist and his song, beekeepers inspecting hives in a park.

*

I told Sylvie that my sons were coming to Paris. She smiled and said I always glowed when I talked about them.

‘Do I?' I blushed as if she had found me out in some sentimental nonsense. I hadn't thought I was a woman who centred her life around her children; like Simone de Beauvoir, as an adolescent I had wanted to write, not beget children. She famously said that to have children was to keep playing the same old tune, ‘but the scholar, the artist, the writer and the thinker created other worlds, all sweetness and light, in which everything had a purpose'.

I can remember saying something similar as a teenager: why be born simply to give birth in turn? But somewhere along the years I had realised that nothing mattered more. Writing mattered, of course it would always matter, but if I couldn't write again it wouldn't annihilate me. Probably.

‘Sorry, I guess I'm like Madame de Sévigné.'

‘Ah my dear,' she had written to her daughter, ‘how I would love to see a bit of you, hear you, embrace you, watch you go by …' A familiar longing. But I thought of de Beauvoir and how she never found out that feelings as fundamental as disinterest, and even distaste, could be transformed into an adoration filling every cell of the body. I had not been interested in babies either when I was a teenager – I couldn't imagine what it was people saw when they exclaimed ‘what a beautiful baby'. To me they looked red-faced, squashed, bald, and they smelled of milk and poo. I scorned women in my country town who didn't want to go anywhere or do anything except have babies. My mother had observed my lack of interest. After I told her, when I wasn't quite twenty-one, that I was pregnant, she dreamed that I got off the train in my hometown alone, blithely saying I'd left the baby behind in another city.

‘
Non, non
,' Sylvie smiled. ‘But anyway, it's the most important thing for children that their parents believe in them, don't you think?'
she said.

I knew she wasn't talking about believing in their brilliance or beauty and I felt reassured. I had looked at them and recognised them and that was worth something.

Years later I lay on a small camp-bed alongside my dying mother. We, all her many sons and daughters, had been taking turns to stay with her in her last days and that night it was my turn. It was the middle of the night in winter and because the winters are cold in my hometown I had the blankets up to my chin. Her hospital bed was higher than mine so I couldn't see her face but I still lay with my face towards hers. It was quiet, not even the rubber-soled pad of nurses' feet checking other patients could be heard. My mother had not spoken for several days and I thought I would probably never hear her speak again.

Suddenly in the dark I heard her voice, low but quite clear. ‘Kathy,' she said, ‘Peter, Barney, Tim.' I held my breath. ‘Patti, Kevin, Mary, Terry.' They were the names of all her children. All my brothers and sisters. She started again. ‘Kathy, Peter, Barney …' All the way through to the last. And then again. And again.

She told me once that she used to chant our names to herself every night and if she stopped on someone's name she knew something was wrong with that one. One last safekeeping chant of the name of each child before she died.

*

On the day Matt was due we arranged to meet him at Gare du Nord. It's a vast station on the RER, the Île-de-France lines, and the national train lines as well as the Metro, and was being renovated at the time. We tried to give instructions by text.

‘Outside ticket barrier, near Lafayette poster.'

‘Which barrier? There's lots.'

‘On stairs leading up to main concourse then.'

‘?'

‘Stay there, at top of stairs – can see u.'

And there he was, with his open face and warm energy, bounding towards us. His reddish gold hair had darkened as he'd gotten older and it was shorter, no more luxuriant curls, a grown-up man. He was taller than both of us, and more outgoing, more confident and at ease. He had been the sort of child who made friends in a moment and kept them for life, never doubting that he wouldn't be received with the same openness. He had always been ready for adventure, jumping off cliffs into mountain pools and riding his bike along fire trails
and
doing well at school, delighting teachers with his enthusiasm. I often thought, he likes the world and the world likes him. He put his arm over my shoulder as we walked.

That evening he went out after dinner and found Café Oz, an Australian-style café with corrugated-iron walls near the Moulin Rouge. Each evening afterwards he went out to chat to the Australian dancers who met there after performing at the Moulin Rouge and came home in the early hours of the morning.

Patrick arrived a few days later, slipping in from the airport and making his own way to rue Simart. He came in smiling shyly, trying to hide his delight as he had when he was a child and first realised how vulnerable it made him. It was a smile from a better world, I'd often thought, and it made me realise there was such a thing as a pure heart. He had been a child who loved knowledge, the kind that explained medieval trebuchets and how the pyramids were made and the history of architecture. He wandered the student
quartier
in the fifth arrondissement on the first day and went to the Museum of the Middle Ages on the boulevard St Michel. In the evening he drank wine with us. His narrow face and dark hair and his dark-coloured, understated clothes made him look typically French. I wasn't surprised when, a few years later, he went back to Paris by himself and came home with a French girlfriend.