Ransacking Paris (16 page)

‘It's Annie Ernaux's
Une Femme
– about her mother's death. I liked your book
A Very Easy Death
about your mother as well – and of course,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
. You might think it strange – I'm from a different class, totally different family patterns – but I recognised so much of myself in you as a girl.' I blurt out as much as I dare, not wanting to annoy her.

But she's interested in the fact that so much of my inner life as a young woman was the same as hers and points out there were similar cultural influences of Catholicism and, of course, being women. I want to say that our ways parted when we became adults, that I had babies and continued to study and write more slowly, but that I didn't feel disempowered bringing up children. But she is the woman who said, ‘Women should not have the choice [to stay at home and care for their babies] precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.' If I admit anything I will be relegated to the ranks of the misguided.

‘May I ask about Sartre – how much did admiration underpin your love for him?' I ask instead.

‘He was my double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence,' she responds. It's what I thought she might say but it still sounds unexpectedly intense. Although I admire him deeply, I can't imagine speaking of Anthony in that way, not aloud at least. I show her a photograph I'd found of the two of them, Simone and Jean-Paul, working together in Café de Flore. She picks it up and smiles with real delight. I'm bowled over by the way her face changes, all the severity is gone, her eyes crease and she looks girlish. There's a certain closeness between us, but still a sense that de Beauvoir is in control. She is more friendly now, but I will not be one of her chosen ones, I suspect because I have nothing to offer her that she doesn't already have. We say we must meet again, but no date or time is set.

*

I made a balcony garden when I first arrived at the rue Simart. A tiny plot of earth. I had never lived in an apartment before I came to Paris so I wasn't sure how it was done, how to just live indoors. I recalled that de Beauvoir as a small child had loved creating a world under the table in her family's apartment, but I wasn't used to enclosure. The childhood farm, even though it was the smallest in the district, still stretched out in every direction, so that every time I looked out, stepped out, there was earth and sky.

My mother tried to make a garden on the farm, to make the world smaller, prettier. The yard was bare dirt during droughts and overgrown with marshmallow grass when it rained, but over the years my brothers dug flower plots for her. She planted stocks, pansies, poppies, sweet-peas and geraniums and we all helped bucket water to them in the long summer. We knew the flowers were some kind of talisman against harshness, we could see it on her face as she gazed at the sweet-peas in the evenings and exclaimed about their scent and their delicate colours, mauve and pink and white.

The yard in the Blue Mountains was mostly native bush, gum trees and grevilleas, bottlebrush, banksias, ti-tree, and there was a creek at the bottom, but near the house there was a rough lawn and garden beds. In breaks from writing, I wandered around with a cup of coffee in one hand, pulling out weeds, and after a while realised I found it soothing. I planted the same old-fashioned flowers as my mother, and raked endless gum leaves and pinched laterals in the tomatoes and, in the spring, picked pansies and stocks, but the weed-pulling was more satisfying than anything else.

Voltaire said at the end of
Candide
, after all trials and foolishness, the only useful thing to do was ‘to cultivate a garden'. In Paris I bought window-boxes and hooks and dirt and geraniums and hung my garden on the balcony railing. I felt as if I were planting myself as I put the soft-leaved cuttings in the dirt. I like geraniums – they were the only flowers in my mother's garden that lived through droughts when everything else had died. When I read the bleak Henry Lawson story ‘Water Them Geraniums', telling of a woman living in hardship in the country, I knew what it meant. Keep one thing alive at least, resist the forces of desolation.

Here in Paris, geraniums were simply pretty. Mine weren't flowering yet, I had to wait until spring, and because my garden was so high up, I worried at first that the bees might not find them until I found out bees didn't like geraniums anyway. I tended the plants with care, watering them once a week and turning the soil over with a kitchen fork. Because it was a garden on the fifth floor and with fresh-bought dirt, no weeds appeared. I wondered if the geraniums would survive the cold, but in January other balconies had pots out so I left mine out as well.

I still missed the bush though, especially in the cold. I remembered the coastal bush in Sydney, foreign to me when I was a young student as everything is when you haven't known it in childhood. There were ruffled paperbark and lilli pillis and Moreton Bay figs with dangling buttress roots clinging to sandstone. A country almost impossible to imagine in Paris. I thought of the child Stendhal saying to his aunt, ‘So there's a country where orange-trees grow out in the open?' He was talking about Provence, not Australia, of course, but it's the same astonishment that there are places where nature does unimaginable things. Fig roots melting onto sandstone as they spread out to find enough nourishment on rock, wild fruits that I didn't dare taste, seed pods shaped like devils.

In rue Simart, I had the photograph of Baron Rock on my writing desk – it is always within sight when I write. Years ago I had written on the back, ‘This is a photograph of my heart.' When French film-maker Agn
è
s Varda said, ‘If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes', I knew it was true. Inside me, even on the outside, it feels sometimes that there are the low hills and plains and dry creeks of the central western country, Wiradjuri country west of the Blue Mountains. It doesn't feel as if it is located in my mind, but in my body, imprinted as if pressed on wet clay, and when I look at that country it is as if I am looking at myself. And yet I don't, and probably couldn't, live there. I found myself thinking of it often in the rue Simart and I had to wonder then, what am I doing here, so far away from my own landscape?

*

When I was a teenager I went for long walks across the countryside, sometimes with brothers and sisters, but more often alone. It was my only chance to be solitary, not talking or walking with anyone, with only paddocks and scrubby gum trees around me. I climbed over boundary fences, carefully lifting the barbed wire, and walked across foreign paddocks and up into the hills owned by a neighbouring farmer. Sometimes I found things: a buzzing swarm of bees hanging in a wattle tree, fossils embedded in stone in a creek bed, a goanna, but mostly I just walked. My mind roamed, I saw a kookaburra on a fence post, felt the wind in my hair, listened to the soft shirring of she-oaks, learning that most of life happens on the inside.

Montaigne says we should have family and home and health if we can but ‘we should set aside a room for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establish there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum'. I think I was starting to make that room then as I walked across the paddocks, but before I was twenty I had met Anthony and lived with him and our babies and a dozen others in large share houses. Montaigne argued we don't need to live alone to have a room for ourselves at the back of busy lives, but I think I didn't have enough time to put up the framework for mine or find its shape. I lived for a long time out the front in the shop, which was full of delights. Here in Paris was the first time I was alone again since wandering across the paddocks in my childhood.

The threads connecting me to others were still in place. The row of hand-made Christmas cards from friends hung on string across one wall in the rue Simart. There was the drawing from Phil, the cartoonist, and the note from Theo and his father, and the cards from Jean-Jacques and from Camilla, and the tiny plastic Christmas tree with a present for Vicky when she arrived back from seeing her family, and one for my niece when she came back through from Germany. Outside, the women in the
boulangerie
across the road knew me and we had a chat each time I went in there. I only had to say ‘
comme d'habitude
', the usual, and they would carefully wrap my
framboiserie
in a paper pyramid each day. A vegetable-seller at one of the stalls in the markets knew me too, and the waiter at Café de la Place.

At choir, Marc offered another English song, David Bowie's ‘The Man Who Sold the World'.

‘
Pour Parti
,' he said again, and asked me to explain it to the choir.

I had no hope of deconstructing Bowie lyrics in French so I told them it was
surréaliste
,
that it didn't really make sense at all. Marc smiled and everyone nodded thoughtfully. I had become the authority on English song lyrics.

Each week we tried the Bach cantata, which I still loved and which everyone else still grumbled about. Its yearning richness stirred some longing in me and I could feel my voice giving in to the notes. One evening as I sang happily, I suddenly realised everyone was leaning in and following my voice. I was the one keeping the tune! In my chest and throat the rich notes rose and held, reached down again, held. For the first time in my life I felt the notes and their unfolding inside me like soft round fruit, plums or peaches, in my mouth. For this one glorious song, ‘
Nun lieget alles unter dir
', I was necessary. I looked up the words: ‘Now everything is subject to you.'

I still met with Sylvie every Sunday morning, always sitting in the same place in the window at Le Relais Odéon and we smiled with delight when we saw each other. Sometimes we talked politics and one day I told her of the shameful refugee camps in the desert in Australia. Then she told me that when she'd had a job interview at a finance firm, the employer, seeing her dark skin, said the criteria had changed and she was no longer suitable. She explained that because her name was French, they hadn't realised until they saw her that she was not white. Other applicants with African or Arabic or Indian names would have been screened out already.

I said I had thought that Paris was not racist, that it had welcomed the African-Americans right back in the 1920s and 1930s and later, when they were still segregated in their home country – what about Josephine Baker and James Baldwin and Nina Simone?

‘It's different if you are a singer or dancer or musician or painter. Or writer. All the rules are put aside in Paris if you are an artist,' she said, ‘but for everyone else it's the same as anywhere. There are more racist places than Paris, but we are not immune here.'

Other times we talked about our families. I told her my father did not even get to high school and missed half of primary school helping out on his father's farm, but he always believed I could do anything I wanted. Sylvie told me her father, the diplomat, had directed her to have a sensible job so she had become a financial consultant, although this was not her dream.

There was a rhythm to our rendezvous, we were part of the scenery of Le Relais Odéon, and the young waiter knew us. I wondered what he made of it, the way I stumbled along in French one week, then chatted away in English the next. At times Sylvie would get carried away and speed up her French and I'd grasp maybe three or four words per sentence. Leap as I might, I'd fall flat in the gaps between. Sometimes I had to wait until the English Sunday to check what it was exactly we had been talking about on the French Sunday.

One afternoon I arrived first at Le Relais Odéon and was startled to see that it was closed and the interior looked sooty and disordered. There was a handwritten note on the door which said there had been an ‘
incendie
'. I waited until Sylvie arrived and we both exclaimed over the misfortune. We stood in the cold street at a loss, wondering where else we could meet. I suggested Les Éditeurs, a café nearby on the Carrefour de l'Odéon that I had visited with Anthony a few weeks before. We had both been drawn in by the name – ‘The Publishers' – and inside the walls were lined with books, which customers could take out and read if they wanted. Sylvie liked it straight away and we settled in under the bookshelves and ordered our coffees.

It was French Sunday so Sylvie started. She talked about her brother who wrote poetry and how she admired his sensitivity. He too had been influenced by their father to choose a sensible career, but poetry was his love. Then we discussed writing songs as poetry and then singing and I talked about my choir. I said that this week I realised I was carrying the Bach song. That somehow I had slipped inside the song and let it come out of my heart and soul instead of standing outside it fearfully. It seemed like a kind of magic to me, not just my singing, but that human beings sang at all, that we had an instrument inside our bodies.

Singing and music were still something I knew so little about and were so powerful that they seemed like the activities of the gods. I had been to a musical exhibition at the Cité de la Musique during the week, where, as I walked around the museum, performers played musical instruments from different cultures and periods. I heard the harpsichord as Montaigne might have heard it, the instrument beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the thrumming of African drums and tambours, and two violins singing Mozart. I'd thought as I had many times before that music was the highest gift. To me there was no doubt.

‘Music is the highest art,' I said to Sylvie, ‘the greatest gift.'

‘But no, it's literature, of course. You remember when I first met you, I said it's the most important thing,' said Sylvie.