Ransacking Paris (18 page)

I knew something of the culture and sociology of gypsies: none of the women were allowed to have any sort of education; practically none of the men could get any sort of work – who would give a gypsy a job? And I knew they were hunted from place to place – we don't want them cluttering up the edge of town or the ring-road with their trucks and caravans and clotheslines – but in those moments rushing along the corridor, I didn't care about any of that. I felt no compassion, no indignation at injustice, no rage against the powerful, only rage against her. I just wanted her to take her children home and teach them to stand up straight and look me in the eye.

When I came back from the dungeon two hours later, each time they were still there in the cold corridor.

*

‘They have Mercedes-Benz at home, you know.' That's what people tell each other, reassuringly, about the gypsies in Paris.

*

There is a vast amount of inequality, violence – and cruelty – in the history of Paris. It seems close and immediate; real blood was spilled on these cobbles right under my feet. There was the day, Friday 13 October 1307, when the members of the Knights Templar were arrested in their walled retreat in the rue du Temple and tortured, and their leader, Jacques Molay, burned at the stake on a barge in the Seine. And St Bartholomew's Day in 1572 when Catholics massacred Huguenots in a bloodbath in the streets of Paris. And the months of the Terror from September 1793 to July 1794 when tens of thousands of heads were chopped off in the place de la Concorde and all over France. And the Prussian siege in 1870 when Parisians had to eat dogs, cats, rats and the zoo animals in the Jardin des Plantes to stay alive. And the rounding up and loading into cattle trains of Jews in the 1940s. And the day in 1961 when the police killed and threw into the Seine more than 200 Algerians who had been peacefully protesting against the war in Algeria.

It's a 2000-year litany of bloody battles, sieges, starvations, massacres, murders, tortures, beheadings, burnings at the stake, dismemberments – and every other means of causing extreme and detailed suffering. That's not to even mention the casual everyday violence of obscene wealth and vicious poverty; workers poisoned by the fumes in tanneries, babies being left in their tens of thousands on doorsteps, the rich galloping their carriages through the narrow streets, trampling underfoot any man, woman or child who couldn't get away fast enough. Madame de Sévigné describes it as if it were entertaining:

Yesterday the Archbishop of Rheims was coming back from Saint-Germain in a great haste, like a whirlwind […] They were passing through Nanterre,
trit trot trit trot
; they met a fellow on horseback […] the coach and six horses knocked the poor fellow and his horse head over heels and passed over them so clean that the coach was tipped up and overturned. Meanwhile, the man and his horse, instead of amusing themselves by being broken on the wheel and maimed, got up again by some miracle and remounted, one on the other, and fled, while the lackeys and coachman and the Archbishop himself started to shout: ‘Stop him! Stop the knave! Give him a good beating!' When telling this story the Archbishop said: ‘If I had got hold of that rascal, I would have broken his arms and cut off his ears.'

Her flippancy is hard to interpret. I still can't decide if she was mocking the Archbishop, a supposed representative of Christ-like love and compassion, or is just amused that the man got away.

Montaigne is not ambiguous; in fact, cruelty is the one topic he is adamant about. His revulsion began when he was fifteen and saw an angry mob skin and ‘joint' a man like a piece of beef and stuff his orifices with salt. And then came the Wars of Religion, a time of extreme violence that began after a massacre of Huguenots in the north-east in 1562 and spread all over France, reaching a horrific degree of violence in the Perigord where he lived:

I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil war; you can find nothing in ancient history more extreme than what we witness every day […] If I had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man's limbs and lop them off and cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures, not from hatred or gain, but for the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony.

Unusual in his time, from his own nature and judgment he saw cruelty as the worst vice of all. ‘I am so soft I cannot even see anyone lop off the head of a chicken without displeasure, and I cannot bear to hear a hare squealing when my hounds get their teeth into it.' And he makes a ready link between those who would be cruel to animals and cruelty to fellow humans: ‘In Rome, once they had broken themselves in by murdering animals they went on to men and to gladiators.'

Even more, and sounding more contemporary than ever, he says: ‘There is a respect and duty in man as a genus which links us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men: and to other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness. Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation.'

As a young child on the farm I could witness violence, or at least its aftermath, without drawing back. Although it wasn't cruelty, which requires the desire to cause pain, farming practices meant the infliction of pain; sheep's throats were cut, chooks' heads were chopped off, cattle were branded with a burning iron, puppies were drowned, lambs and calves were desexed with a sharp knife. My father, who performed all these acts, was in fact a gentle man. It was part of what he had to do as a farmer, so he made sure that axes and knives were razor-sharp so that the act could be done quickly and cleanly. I can see him with the butcher's knife, scraping it this way and that on the whetstone, making sure it was surgically sharp.

I don't think I lacked fellow-feeling for creatures or, if I did, so did my brothers and sisters. We lined up, miniature Madame Defarges – four of us under six years old – watching my father cut the sheep's throat, disembowel it, hang it up on a hook like a large coathanger under the gum tree and skin it. The intestines were given to the dogs, who, in that moment, became unknowable wild animals, snarling as if they had never let us pat and cuddle them. And then one day, I couldn't bear to watch the throat-cutting – the bright blood darkening on the dirt.

It must have been about the same time that I stopped helping out with desexing. It was done with a quick cut of the lambs' testicles, the gonads were drawn out with claws on the other end of the knife, and then the tails were cut off both male and female lambs and tossed into a bucket. It was one of our childhood jobs to catch the lambs in the yard, bring them to the table nailed onto the fence and hold them with both legs forced upwards while my father did the cutting. In memory I can feel the lambs, the woolly back against my chest, my hands grasping the legs tightly. As I grabbed each lamb, I had a quick look to check they were females – the tail-cutting was slightly more bearable than testicle-cutting. And then, by the time I was eleven, I couldn't stand it at all. It was a task my father never insisted on once we said we didn't want to do it.

He was compassionate by temperament, and so was my mother. No creature, man or beast, ought to be hurt if you could help it. For my mother, religion and politics were founded on compassion. She was fiercely sympathetic towards anyone who was ill-treated in any way – Aborigines, refugees – and leapt to the defence of those without power, but it was also a thought-out moral position which she taught all of her children. It makes my rage against the gypsy woman all the more unforgivable.

*

It's probably not so strange that my thoughts were darker in the depths of winter. The cold and grey had seeped into my spirit. Even in the Blue Mountains, wintry for months on end, I hadn't experienced such long and dimly lit cold. I found waking in the dark especially dispiriting and even though it was past time to get out of bed, I often rolled over back into foggy sleep. When I woke again and saw the flat light on the chimney pots across the road, I took refuge in imagining sunlight and warmth in the back yard in the Mountains. Sun on the waratah leaves, on the eucalypts, on my face.

I crept out of bed and started writing later and later each day until, like a proper Parisian, it was 10.30 or 11 am by the time I sat at the trestle desk. I had almost finished what I'd been hoping would be a final draft, but I had thrown so much out that most of what I was writing was new and raw and would have to be rewritten. And there was the added pressure of Kit and Theo arriving the following month. I wanted to have it finished before they came and to let it compost for a few weeks, but the last section still wasn't coming. It was the part after Theo had left the Mountains to live in Melbourne with his father, seven years after his mother's death, and there were years to write about, dozens of visits. It seemed complicated; there were too many comings and goings. I needed to put aside the record, combine some visits, construct the reality of Theo arriving each time, our awkwardness with each other at first, the way he fitted back into our lives.

One afternoon, tired of sitting inside, I persuaded Anthony to come out to the Bois de Boulogne with me. The Bois is a 2000-acre park with lakes and woods and some cultivated gardens and pathways
–
not quite untamed nature, but large and wild enough for a wander. Sometimes the constructed world is enough to sustain, for months it can be enough, but then I need real air, dirt, trees and creeks. We had been out there a few times to row on the Grand Lac when it was still warm, Anthony doing most of the work, pulling strongly around the islands. This time we rented bikes and rode along the bitumen roads and then off along dirt lanes and paths through the bare oaks and chestnuts. There were muddy tracks, tangled undergrowth, briars, grasses, fallen branches, wild herbs – mint and yarrow. Because it was winter, there weren't many people about, not even the prostitutes who worked from vans along the roads leading into the Bois. The air was cold on our faces but it was exhilarating and I could feel my spirits lift.

We stopped at the Bagatelle, an English garden within the Bois, and had to leave our bikes to walk in. In France, an ‘English garden' is one that is a natural messy garden; that is, without the clipped order, the fleurs-de-lys hedges and square trees of a traditional French garden. Its beauty depends on the colour and textures of leaves and flowers, more than on shape.

We came to a rose garden, which wasn't in flower except for the few odd blooms that always seem to come out of season, somehow given the wrong information about the weather and opening out anyway. The garden was in a basin, and we sat down on one of the benches so that we could look down on it from above. Each bed had a low hedge around it delineating the shapes and spaces. I wasn't thinking anything in particular, just looking at the distinct shapes of the gardens and the pattern they made, the way the squares and rectangles and crescents fitted together and how the spaces between them created their own shapes. As I sat there gazing, pieces of writing started to fall into place in my head. It was as if the shapes of the garden had given my brain an idea that I wasn't conscious of and set it to work sorting and shifting and arranging.

Anthony relaxed with his face up to the weak sun, his hands deep in his jacket pockets. We both sat there, an ordinary couple looking at a bare rose garden, neither of us speaking, while the last section of my manuscript came together in my head like bits of an airy jigsaw puzzle.

I don't want to say that writing is always like that, that nature just comes and writes things for me, that I am some sort of vessel, but every now and then, rarely enough, instructions appear that some part of me must be able to read, and I am grateful for that. That's all. I have been back to see the garden in the heat of summer – the scents of red roses and drunken bees stumbling about and every rose colour under the sun, apricot, burgundy, pink-tipped cream, striped, sunset orange – and it's just a pretty garden with intoxicating fragrance filling the air.

Back in the eighteenth arrondissement that night I had a glass of wine with Vicky at Café de la Place. I told her about riding in the woods and about the rose garden and how it had given me what I needed for my writing. She said that if I wanted more nature, why didn't I go to stay at her place at Lacapelle-Biron in the Lot-et-Garonne where she'd raised her two children. I said I might just take her up on that. It was the first time I'd heard the name of the village which has since become part of my life and part of my family's life.

Later I told her about the gypsy woman at Gare St Lazare, about the hunched shoulders, the bowed head, her children, her voice.
S'il vous plai-ai-a
î
t, Madame, S'il vous plai-a
î
t.
Such long plaintive vowels. I needed to confess how enraged the sound of her voice made me.

Vicky smiled in the way people do when you have given yourself away but didn't say anything so I had to keep going.

‘She's … she makes herself inferior. In front of her children,' I accused.

‘I know. I think I've seen her, the same one,' Vicky said. She was still smiling, but I realised it was because she too was going to confess. ‘At the entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens. It's probably the same woman. With her drugged children?'

‘That's what I wondered. They didn't play or even stand up; they just sat there. It was her kids sitting there in the cold and her tone of voice that got to me.'

‘Yes, the whining sound. And the glazed eyes.'

We were silent for a moment, taking a sip of wine, looking at passers-by on their way back from the evening shopping with bags and children in tow. A perfect little girl in a blue coat carried a baguette over her shoulder like a rifle and her mother smiled down at her.