Ransacking Paris (15 page)

The first night we were all together we played Scrabble in Camille's,
but there were letters missing – someone had taken most of the ‘e's – and we didn't get far. In the next few days both boys explored all over Paris, walking from Montmartre down to the Seine and all the way up to the Eiffel Tower, but when they were back at rue Simart, they took up all the available space with their bodies and backpacks and clothes and youth. I bought a coat-stand to shift the small mountains of hats, gloves, scarves and coats off the lounge chairs. It fell over with the lopsided weight nearly every time either of the boys hung their coats up.

I announced we were going to take them both to see the lights in the Champs Élysées.

‘Okay, but I'll just go myself,' Patrick said.

‘No, I want you to come with us.'

‘Why? I can work out how to get there.'

‘It's traditional. Parents take their kids to see the Chrissie lights in the Champs Élysées.' I knew how I sounded before I'd finished the sentence.

‘You want us to be like little kids. Swinging hands.' Matt grinned. They were ganging up on me.

‘Yep. That's it. Indulge me.'

We did go, rugged up in gloves and hats and scarves, and there were children everywhere, bundled up in woollen coats or parkas, their faces shiny in the cold. We walked up from Concorde towards the Arc de Triomphe with thousands of others, a stream of sightseers enchanted by pretty lights. The roundabout near Concorde had a halo of lights in the middle like a vast swarm of bees, and the gardens – where Proust's narrator played and chased his friend Gilberte – were festooned with golden shapes and patterns, and the chestnut trees all the way up the avenue glittered, a glorious silvery-gold blaze. Near the top we sat in a café on the terrace and had extraordinarily expensive hot chocolate. Up close in the chestnut tree in front of us we could see the lights strung along each branch.

‘Is this what you imagined, us all together in Paris at Christmas?' Matt looked at me quizzically. ‘It's not bad, is it?'

Patrick didn't say anything. They were both used to my attempts to make life fit a perfect imaginary version. A couple with three children walked past, one of them crying to be picked up. The father carried a large parcel and the mother was carrying the baby but they both looked down and made encouraging noises. A white terrier hopped around the child, trying to be of use.

‘To our boys,' said Anthony, and lifted his cup of hot chocolate with one hand and, under the table, held my gloved hand with the other.

‘It's cold,' said Patrick after a while. ‘Let's go.'

‘I've booked a proper house for Christmas,' I said. ‘It's in Languedoc in the south-east. La Livinière.'

‘Are we going to have a Christmas tree and presents?' asked Matt.

‘If you are good children. A Christmas tree and a turkey and an open fire,' Anthony said.

*

Christmas on the farm was always hot. A branch was lopped from one of the tired pines in the top paddock and put in a bucket full of rocks to hold it up. There was anticipation and sticky-taped presents and Mass in the town church and a hot Christmas dinner in the hot middle of the day. Sweat on the vinyl kitchen chairs, roast chicken and roast potatoes and pumpkin and tomato sauce, wrapping paper and cards still lying about, the old plaster nativity scene with the paint chipped off Mary and Joseph, Christmas stockings from Coles. And then the long, slow afternoon. One year someone was given a plastic slide viewer of Switzerland and at first I thought it was magical. Snowy peaks and grassy meadows and chalets. But there were only eight pictures and once I'd clicked through them a few times, that was it. It wasn't enough to transform a flat Christmas afternoon.

*

Even though it was in the south, it would be cold in Languedoc, which meant I needed a book for days around a fire. Perhaps a novel – I could leave the memoirists to themselves for Christmas. In WH Smith's bookshop I pulled out novels I had always wanted to read but not got around to and ones I thought I ought to read one day. None seemed what I needed. As I stood there in front of tens of thousands of books, there was a sense of looking for exactly the right tincture for some wound. I felt stiff, heavy. A sense of grief had been with me the whole time in Paris and I couldn't quite see what it was. The painful shoulder seemed an obvious metaphor; I was carrying something heavy that I needed to put down. I had to be quiet and still, let the right book come to me.

I moved over to the memoir section but still didn't see anything. Then just as I was about to give up I pulled out
My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle
by the film-maker Marcel Pagnol. I turned it over – the back cover said it was about his boyhood exploring the wild hills in the south-east of France. Before I even opened it, I knew this was the book, that there was some revelation waiting for me. I started reading it as soon as I got back to the apartment.

We set off for Languedoc four days before Christmas, the boys' backpacks and our bags and presents stuffed in the boot. It was sleety when we headed off and there were two snowstorms on the way. Snowflakes blew towards the windscreen from a single, ever-disappearing point and snow powdered my head and shoulders as I ran with Anthony and Matt and Patrick into auto-stops for hot coffees and toilet breaks. I remembered photographs of us standing in the snow in the Blue Mountains, Matt in a cardboard box sled, Patrick not quite born yet. Snow on gums and bottlebrush and banksias.

It was evening by the time we reached the medieval steel crucifix marking the turn-off to the village. It wasn't snowing anymore and I could see La Livinière ahead along a winding road through the vineyards, its milk-coffee stone buildings and orange slate roofs looking like a perfected French village. It was lit by the golden light that comes sometimes after the sun has gone down, ‘
entre le chien et le loup
' – between the dog and the wolf – the light between two worlds. We bumped over a walled bridge and suddenly dropped back at least two centuries into cobbled lanes between stone houses, each with brightly painted shutters.

The house on the corner of the rue de la R
é
public and the rue Vieux Pressoir had three whole bedrooms to spread out into, a huge fireplace, and a kitchen with everything you could want including Scrabble and a pile of books. It was cold though, and the air had a faint stony shut-in smell of past human lives, sweet and sour traces of other meals, other habits. I pushed newspaper into the cracks around the windows and pulled the shutters tight. Anthony tacked a blanket over the door, and Matt lit the fire with pine-cones and roots he found in a basket next to the grate.

Next morning we ventured out, rugged up like bears. It took minutes to layer on the coats, hats, gloves and scarves, all tucked in tightly with no chinks to allow the cold air entry. Just up the hill behind our house was a Romanesque church, twelfth century, with arched buttresses joining it to the surrounding buildings. Nearby was a square with a medieval covered market and fountain and on the edge, a cemetery with its gravestones sinking into the earth. Back in the house I read that La Livinière had supplied wine to the Romans and the name had originally been Cella Vinaria, Latin for ‘wine cellar'.

Although there were bare vineyards all around the village, with no resemblance to the wheat paddocks of my childhood, I kept thinking of the farm. The girl I was on the farm. Proust says the ‘better part of our memories exist outside us, in the blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first cracking brushwood fire in a cold grate'. At the edges of rows of vines, bushes clung to the dry soil and the crumbly texture of the dirt brought the memory of walking barefoot in a wheat paddock, the wheat as high as my chest. The smell of wood smoke gave me my father chopping wood. The cold air on my face in the morning when I woke in the whitewashed bedroom brought back a winter's morning walking up the lane to school, frost on the grass. The sharp sweet eddies of lost childhood washed through me in a foreign place.

In front of the pine-cone fire we drank local red wine and played Scrabble. And read. Pagnol kept pulling me into the
garrigue
, the stony hills he roamed as a boy and, strangely, I was that boy as well. I breathed in rosemary and lavender and chalky earth and scraped my legs on a thorny bush, but it wasn't until I was almost finished that I came upon the sentences I had been waiting for. I went upstairs and sat on the bed and cried. Later that night, after I had gone to bed, I recalled the sentences and again cried. Anthony started reading Pagnol as soon as I finished – not because I cried, he didn't see my tears, but because I'd said it was the right book to read in this part of the country.

I went out the next afternoon and bought some holly and arranged it along the mantelpiece. I understood for the first time what it was really for. The fierce green leaves and red berries had only ever been Christmas kitsch before seeing them here in the bare coldness.

Anthony finished reading the book the day after he started. He has always been a passionate reader and will sit and read until he is finished whereas I like to take my time.

‘Did you cry?' I asked.

‘No,' he said. ‘Why should I cry?'

‘Because of these sentences,' I said. I opened the book and read them out: ‘
Such is the life of a man. The long childhood of joy is obliterated by unforgettable grief and sorrow. But there is no need to tell the children so.
'

To my surprise I started crying again. I had thought before it was the cumulative effect of the story, but even on their own the sentences pierced the pleasant surface of things. Patrick and Matt sat by the fire, reading, taking sips of wine, pretending they didn't notice.

Somehow Pagnol's words untied the amorphous sadness. Nothing can ever be turned back; childhood was long ago, and now my children's childhood was long ago. Sun, wind, the smell of harvested wheat, the caw of crows, bees in the almond blossoms, the peppery smell of rosemary – a child's heart knows and sees everything. In every life, the kingdom is lost again and again, it must be lost, and nothing will ever bring it back. But there is no need to tell the children so.

The next day was Christmas Eve. Anthony and I tried to make a traditional French Christmas dinner according to the instructions Sylvie had given me before we left Paris. We drove across the bare countryside to the markets in Narbonne, an ancient seat of Roman government, and found
dindes
, turkeys, staring balefully at us from dead eyes. They were too big for four people to eat so we selected a chicken instead and watched the woman hack its legs and head off and stuff them inside the body cavity. Then we found
marrons
, chestnuts;
moules
, mussels; and an extravagantly iced and decorated
Bûche Noel.

I cooked the mussels in wine, Anthony prepared the chicken and roast potatoes and green beans, then we sat around the table on Christmas Eve and ate our Christmas dinner in a village in the south of France. Afterwards, at midnight, we toasted each other with champagne and then, in the middle of the night, I rang my mother in Australia. It was already a hot Christmas morning there.

Eight

January

I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know, to understand, to express itself: I was engaged in the great collective enterprise, which would release me forever from the bonds of loneliness.

Simone de Beauvoir

Back in Paris it was cold and still, the light flat, the kind that robs everything, even Paris, of beauty. The sky was whitish-grey, without the drama of distinct clouds. Buildings looked grim, the chestnuts and plane trees in parks were leafless, people hurried by dressed in black or dark grey, rubbish overflowed from public bins as if the garbos thought it wasn't worth picking anything up in this light. I remembered Degas, ‘Light is my consolation', and thought, it's more than consolation, it's salvation. I tried not to long for a hot Australian summer day: soaring blue sky, bare arms, sweat, squinting eyes, dancing sunlight on waves.

And then on the night before the year changed, it snowed. During the day clouds had started to form out of the white blur, clouds with the tell-tale brownish hue I recognised from winters in the Blue Mountains. I stood at the balcony doors with Patrick in the late evening – Matt and Anthony had gone to see a film – as the flakes started to fall. At first the snow was sparse, dotted over the buildings and the night sky, but it soon filled the air with soundless, moving whiteness. When we looked upwards, the snow seemed to be coming from a point of infinity, when we looked downwards, the
tabac
neon sign over the road gave the flakes a reddish glitter. We watched the Great Silence as it drifted like poetry or grace through the dark, and then we stepped outside onto the balcony in the sharp cold and saw the crossroads below become whiter and whiter until the roads were smooth, and parked cars, a fire hydrant and rubbish bins became simplified, essential shapes. We stood shoulder to shoulder on the cold balcony, neither of us speaking. The snow fell more thickly still, it was midnight and there was no traffic and the streets in either direction were perfectly white, flawless.

‘I'm going to make the first footprints,' said Patrick. He went inside and grabbed his coat and ran down the five flights. I stayed shivering on the balcony and watched him walk across the crossroad, once and back again, making clean sharp footprints. They were distinct even from five floors up, human footprints in the snow, the brief trace of a journey, clear just for those moments until more snow or other traffic obliterated them.

I don't understand the mysteries of the human heart and why it reacts the way it does, but I can't imagine the day I will forget my son's footprints in the snow.

*

Something had shifted in La Livinière. The weight on my shoulder had a clear outline, which didn't mean that it had gone, just that I could see it. Childhood had disappeared forever and I had been too immersed to grieve it when it happened and, in our culture, there are no rituals to acknowledge it. When I had watched, in Matt, and then seven or so years later in Patrick, the slow ending of childhood, I felt each time not just the loss of being able to hold them endlessly in my arms, the physical delights, but the loss of daily actions whose necessity I couldn't question. It wasn't until after they were gone that I realised there is a deep assurance in actions that don't need to be questioned; I never had to ask myself if I needed to feed this child, or keep him warm, or stop him from running across the road. I understood then that initiation ceremonies – incisions, separation, secrets – were as much for the mother to let go of the assurance of necessary action as for the child to step through into his own world.

Pagnol and de Sévigné are the only memoirists who had anything much to say about it. ‘I confess that the rest of my life is covered in shadow and gloom when I think that I shall spend so much of it far from you,' de Sévigné writes to her daughter, Françoise. And, ‘Three years ago today I experienced one of the deepest sorrows of my life: you went away to Provence, and you are still there. My letter would be long if I wished to unfold all the bitterness I have since felt in consequence of the first one.' I have to admit it starts feeling manipulative. She's clingy, and truthfully, I have too strong a sense of my own separateness to hold on so tightly to someone else, even a child.

Montaigne wrote at length on educating children but he had little to do with his own child because – it pains me to say it – she was a girl. We know Rousseau abandoned his. Stendhal didn't have children and didn't like them, even when he was a child himself, writing of his companions at school, ‘I hadn't met with the gay, friendly, noble companions I had pictured to myself, but in their stead some very selfish young brats'. De Beauvoir didn't have children either and, at least in her memoirs, had both an ideological and innate distaste for them.

I don't mind about Rousseau and Stendhal, but in Montaigne and de Beauvoir, because I love them both –Montaigne more than de Beauvoir – their lack of insight into what it means to love and to bring up a child bothers me. I don't want to admit to limitation in either of them, and yet to not value through experience or imagination the poetry of a teenage son making footprints on a snowy crossroads at midnight seems a serious lack.

*

The following day was New Year's day and Patrick was leaving for Amsterdam. His university course had not started yet, but he wanted to find his accommodation and his bearings in Amsterdam first. He had to go out to Port de Bagnolet on the edge of Paris to catch the bus, so Anthony decided to go with him on the Metro to the bus-station, just to make sure he found his way.

Matt and I walked down the five flights of stairs with them. When we reached the street there was still snow on the edges of the road, slushy and dirty, and light snow was falling and dissolving as it landed on our heads and shoulders. Patrick carried the large Kathmandu backpack we had given him for his eighteenth birthday and was wearing an overcoat and scarf and woolly hat. He had the beginnings of a beard, a smudging down his cheeks and chin, and his eyes were alight with the beginning of an adventure. He looked like any traveller down through the ages, rugged up against the winter cold, carrying his possessions on his back. As I hugged him goodbye I felt the rough woollen fabric of his coat and his slight body underneath.

He and Anthony walked away and then, at the corner, Patrick paused and turned, his backpack swaying. The snow was starting to fall more thickly.

‘The scholar trudges off through the snow to continue his studies in Amsterdam,' he said, and grinned.

He turned back and continued down the hill to the Metro with Anthony, and Matt and I ran back inside and up the stairs. By the time we had got to the French windows, they had both disappeared.

Matt had a video camera with him in Paris and one day he shot Anthony and me as we sat on the couch talking. As soon as I realised the camera was on, I could feel my lips moving in strange shapes. I said I was frightened of cameras. He turned the camera on himself and said wryly, ‘Why is she afraid of cameras? I am not afraid of cameras.'

When he played it back I saw how distorted I looked and how natural he was, his mouth and eyes smiling, his face open to anyone's gaze. I wondered if I knew only how to look, not how to be looked at.

Matt was the next to leave Paris. The film funding that he had been waiting on had come through and he had already shifted into production mode, sitting in front of his laptop for hours, sending emails and writing notes. I remembered when he was a child how he tried to organise Anthony and me, sitting with his arms out on the table; okay, so what time are we leaving? What do we need to take? Let's make a list. He caught a flight back to Sydney and then there were only the two of us.

In the quiet of no more boys, we lay on the couch in each other's arms. I could see the buildings across the road over Anthony's shoulder and I thought, there is a gap in each of us but we have started to grow around it, like gum trees carved for a bora ceremony grow back around their cuts. This new shape with its ridges and hollows is part of us now.

Then Anthony left for a couple of weeks' work back in Australia. I was in Paris alone. I settled down to writing the first morning with a sense of limitless time, a rare experience. I have hardly ever been alone in my life, born into a family where there were already three brothers and one sister, and then another brother in twelve months, then a sister and finally another brother. Five boys and three girls, and we all knew our place in the order. A few years after living in Paris, when my mother died, after her night chant of our names, we all stood at the altar at her funeral, shuffling into the correct order with unspoken knowledge and we all laughed at our private coordinates.

I'm fifth from the top. There are not a lot of roles left for the fifth. I wasn't particularly good, meaning I wasn't inclined to serve others, and I wasn't pretty – freckles and red hair were both disadvantages – but I was considered ‘brainy' as it was called then.

De Beauvoir too thought her future lay in her love of knowledge rather than in being good or pretty, both of us influenced by Jo in
Little Women
whom de Beauvoir considered ‘superior to her sisters, who were either more virtuous or more beautiful than herself, because of her passion for knowledge'. I didn't think I was superior, and both my sisters were also brainy – and pretty – and it didn't make me want to be a scholar. Even as a child I knew I wanted to write books. I remember thinking one day out on the farm, I want to do for readers what writers do for me; make a world in their heads.

The patterns of family, or lack of it, formed all the memoirists as much as time and place. Neither Madame de Sévigné nor Rousseau had brothers or sisters and both lost their mothers as children; Stendhal had a younger sister but he too lost his mother as a child; de Beauvoir had a younger sister, and Montaigne, I've just discovered, was one of eight! He doesn't mention them, except to say he has four brothers, but I can see now that he understands the difficulty of knowing who you are when there are so many other opinions about that. And the difficulty of knowing what makes you part of the family and what makes you distinctive amongst so many.

There is such a strong desire to be like other people – I listen to teenagers walking past my building from their school at the end of the street saying ‘Same, same' eagerly as they listen to each other's lives – but equally, a need for difference. Sometimes I wonder if writing, especially memoir, isn't just a way of doing that: noting similarity and finding distinction. I'm thrilled to find Montaigne one of eight; I'm relieved to have Stendhal share my prissy reaction to crudeness; I recognise I don't have the quick wit and sharp tongue of de Sévigné; I recoil from sharing Rousseau's self-deceit; and with de Beauvoir, it's ‘same, same' all the way through as I read her childhood.

As children and teenagers, Simone and I both liked embroidery but not sewing, couldn't sing in tune, loved reading above all else, suspected the existence of another parallel reality, were ‘no good at jobs requiring finicky precision', were thrilled to join a library and were overcome by the endlessness of books to choose from, wanted briefly to be a nun, had an existential experience of ‘Here I Am', dreaded Hell and often imagined how terrible it would be, identified with Jo as clever but not good or pretty, had detailed sexual-religious imaginings based on public humiliation and degradation – hers involved being a half-naked royal slave stepped on by a tyrant, mine being a half-naked martyr tied up in a square and taunted – experienced a sense of pride in having our first monthly bleed, wanted to be a writer, had ‘a happy disposition', disliked loud voices and coarse language, liked to make public everything that happened to us, were transported by beauty, especially the beauty of Nature, lost God at thirteen, fantasised long romantic stories with fictional lovers, felt sorry for adults because they led ‘a monotonous existence', had an insight that the future was for our own making.

Nothing in this list is remarkable, only that two women born at different times in different cultures and classes shared the same collection of traits. I imagine that millions of others do too.

*

What else needs to be said about de Beauvoir? In my twenties, I thought of her as part of my generation, a contemporary, but she was much nearer to my grandmother's age. She was born in 1908 and yet when she died in 1986 it felt as if one of us had died. She was brought up in a bourgeois family in Paris, a family with money at first, but they came down in the world. She had a sister, Hélène, known as Poupette, and they attended a Catholic school. She was devoted to her faith until she was thirteen, when she stopped believing in God. In June 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom her name would be forever linked. She loved other men – and women – but he was always central. She wrote in
The Second Sex
, ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one', and in the 1970s her star rose as a heroine of feminism and Sartre's faded – at least with women – but she always put him above her. She wrote her most famous novel,
The Mandarins
, the year I was born.

Although I was raised in an uneducated family on a poor farm in Australia and she grew up in a bourgeois apartment in boulevard Raspail and then rue de Rennes in Paris, when I read
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, it felt as if I were reading my own story. It could sound absurdly vain to say that, but I only mean my inner life was so similar to hers as a girl that it makes me think there must be ‘types' who resemble each other closely despite vast differences in background, education and class.

I decided to meet Simone de Beauvoir for coffee at Les Éditeurs in the Carrefour de l'Odéon, because it's lined with books. She wouldn't like her old haunts, Les Deux Magots or Caf
é
de Flore, these days as they are more likely to be the haunts of tourists than intellectuals, and anyway, I want to be somewhere
I
feel at home. I'm nervous enough as it is. She walks in wearing a stylish grey suit, self-possessed and unsmiling. I feel as if I have to establish my credentials, that she will have no patience with me if I try to connect with her emotionally. She orders a short black and asks me about the book I have on the table.