Ransacking Paris (19 page)

‘You know, it made me feel violent.' I lowered my voice. ‘I wanted to punch her.'

Vicky glanced at me, startled.

‘So did I. I wanted to … to hit her, hard,' she said. ‘Make her stop.'

We looked at each other in shame-faced relief, remembering the leap to violence in our chests. I felt as if I had been unmasked; it was a kind of freedom. And then we talked, back and forth, hardly stopping for breath.

‘The gypsies are marginalised. It's not her fault.'

‘Often they can't speak much French – they're from Romania. And mostly they have never been to school.'

‘And probably no work papers.'

‘The women have to support the whole family, or more, and they have learned only to beg.'

‘How can the children learn dignity? Who is responsible?'

We both took sips of wine. I could feel the shame spreading in my body, a kind of stain starting in my heart. We were silent a bit longer than was comfortable.

‘But why does it make us angry?' I asked finally.

‘It's not the begging, it's her manner. There's something about being servile …' Vicky said.

‘Servile! That's the word. That's it.' For a moment I was grateful to have an exact name.

We continued, often not looking each other in the eye, dodging around our judgment and the disturbing desire for violence, then tiptoeing towards it, trying to see why servility enraged instead of engendering compassion. If we two reacted like that, two well-behaved women from opposite sides of the world and different backgrounds, then we were, most likely, not the only ones.

‘It's why I like defiant children,' I said. ‘I get irritated with kids who won't argue back. They make me feel like a tyrant.'

That was getting somewhere near it, the unwelcome sense of being seen to have crushing power. It was a lump in the soul that neither of us wanted to have, and the gypsy woman had made us feel its cartilaginous shape. I thought of the bishop of Nanterre galloping over people in the streets of Paris.
Trit trot, trit trot
.

‘
Madame, vous finissez?
' The waiter was picking up my glass. I nodded.

‘I'd like another one, please.'

‘And the same with animals,' said Vicky. ‘It's why I like cats. They are never servile, but dogs can be.'

We both spoke with a mixture of shame and pride. Side-stepping towards it, shuffling back. We kept our voices low. Even though we were speaking in English I didn't want anyone at the next table to overhear us. It was there, whatever it was, in us both and it was not something for the general light of day, but it had marked us. I don't think I got very far with understanding it; it still feels like something of a knot, not large, but dark. Afterwards, when I returned to my reading, I couldn't find anything, even in Montaigne, to help me see it any more clearly.

Ten

March

Our true self is not entirely within.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I finished a draft of the manuscript. It's always a relief to finish but this time it felt like perfect timing. It was two weeks before Theo and Kit arrived. Theo's mother had died more than ten years earlier, but I still didn't want to be writing about her – and him – right in front of his eyes.

I was relieved to have the last piece, the closing scene of the story: Theo and I were walking up the street from our house; I was teaching him a song I'd learned at choir: ‘We are going/Heaven knows where we are go-o-ing'. It was rough, there was work to do, but I knew there was a sense of the moment between us that I had wanted to re-create.

Every now and then, the perception of a moment is impressed so sharply in waxy memory that words can be formed in the indents. In the moment of perception I feel the clear imprint calmly, although, in recall, there is urgency, the effort to see each aspect of the moment: Theo's pale face and winning smile as he sings with me, the slope of the hill underfoot, the yellowish light filtering through snow clouds. Then I feel absorbed in the whole as if it is happening again, and in the end, there is relief – and pleasure – when the words are found. It feels as if the moment has not really been remade, but given form for the first time. Proust said that after he had written his first piece when he was a teenager – it was about glimpsing three steeples appearing ‘like three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight' – he had such a sense of happiness that ‘as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice'. I burst out laughing when I first read that, the image of the boy-writer singing like a chook who has laid an egg – oh my, I have just made something new from my own body! I remembered our scraggy chooks and their eggs in dusty nests under the wheat harvester, or on the seat of the old truck or, once or twice, a pullet dropping her first egg in the yard without any care at all. I liked scooping them up when they were warm and clean and fresh, and feeling them nestle, perfect in the palm of my hand.

*

Before Theo and Kit arrived, Anthony and I made a trip to Istanbul so I could have my passport stamped from outside the European Union. Our long-stay visas hadn't arrived in time before we'd left Australia, which meant we couldn't legally stay in Europe more than six months. It was a bit risky – and if we'd been African, very risky – but a trip outside the European Union would re-establish our legal status. It sounds extravagant to dash off to Turkey, but it was easy to book cheap flights with a local airline – one, as it happened, that was later grounded after one of its planes crashed into the Red Sea – and to find a cheap, hot-pink hotel in Istanbul. It was only for four or five days, just enough to leave a bright impression in the still grey days of March.

There was the tiled dome of heaven in the Blue Mosque and frescoed layers of religion in Santa Sophia, the mini-skirts and blue and black hijabs in the street, the rows of carpets with geometric patterns, flowers, birds, vines, and the carpet-sellers offering sweet apple-mint tea. The hawkers in the streets spoke French – ‘
Madame? Madame?
' and I answered, ‘
Non, non
.' We took a boat on the Bosporus to a Crusaders' castle and sat on the grass talking about the knights of France and England who had arrived here – was it to destroy Islam or simply for adventure?

At the ancient markets I saw baskets full of dates, nuts, grapes and figs and thought they must have looked the same when the knights strolled past, even when the first Christians before them wandered by wide-eyed. Afterwards we went to the sixteenth-century
hammam
with its crescent moons and stars, and we were steamed and scrubbed and rubbed and washed to pink newborn perfection. The air was cool on our baby-skin but the sky was high and blue and the light falling on stone walls was like the beginning of time.

One afternoon we visited the Topkapi Palace where the sultans of the Ottoman Empire lived and ruled. I traipsed through the rooms of the harem, the Courtyard of the Eunuchs, the Circumcision Room, the gilded bathroom of the Sultan's mother, and the Treasury with its diamonds and emeralds and pearls. In the early morning I woke to the muezzin's call rising and falling like a bird on unseen currents and felt as if I had fallen into a story.

By the time we got back to Paris, Istanbul felt like a kaleidoscope of colour and light, not quite something we had dreamed, but a tear in the fabric that had let another world in. The woman in the
boulangerie
across the road had noticed I hadn't been in for a few days.

‘
J'étais en vacances à Istanbul
,' I explained and felt like a local. I was on holiday in Istanbul.

I remembered my childhood longing for difference on the endless days of the farm, to see something new, for something else to happen. Every day there were paddocks, and a dry creek, and a few gum trees and cattle and sheep, and Baron Rock and the shabby farmhouse. The seasons changed and work changed with the seasons, harvesting, shearing, ploughing, hay-making, the same every year. Outside the farm, there was school and church and shopping in town. When we drove in through the hills to town I looked up the valleys and wished I could walk along them, wished my father would take a turn off the road, a detour.

People too were the same. Everyone had a mother who stayed at home and a father who owned a farm and everyone was white. And always the same neighbours; they never moved away and no-one moved in, except once, for a year, a family of share-farmers. Rarely, a stranger arrived at the farm; once a man came selling encyclopaedias, and my brothers and sisters and I were so unused to difference we hid behind the water tanks to watch. The only real difference happened in books.

Here, strangers from all over the world walked past my door, there were detours everywhere I looked; countries with palaces full of fairytale treasure were only an hour or two away. I wondered if having difference so easily available meant that people born here did not have to long helplessly for elsewhere.

But then Rousseau always longed for an imaginary place, ‘the castles in Spain' in which he could easily take up residence, and 300 or so years later, Annie Ernaux in a small French town says, ‘When a child and teenager, I lived continually in dream and imagination.' Perhaps the longing for another imagined world is a condition that afflicts some people. It's as if reality can never yield quite enough. Perhaps it comes from endless desire, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist mythology who can never be filled. For Ernaux, by an ‘inverse movement' as she called it, instead of imaginary life, the reality of her own life became the material of her writing. The same thing has happened to me.

*

In one way I have more in common with Annie Ernaux than any of the other memoirists, even de Beauvoir, because we are alive at the same time. We share the globalised world, the flood of information and communication pouring across us: television, mobile phones, satellites, the internet, Skype, Twitter, the mix of cultures, ideas, peoples. We also have in common an uneducated provincial background – and haven't returned to it except in our writing.

What do I know about Ernaux?

She was born in 1940 in a working-class family in a small town in the Seine-Maritime department of Normandy. Just after the war, her parents moved twenty-five kilometres to Yvetot, a cold town on a windy plain, where they ran a café. She was an only child, her older sister dying of diphtheria two years before she was born. Her father, who had been a farmhand, and mother, who had worked in a factory, strove to give her every advantage, although her mother couldn't help saying, ‘You cost us a lot.' She studied at Rouen University, married, had two children, divorced. She lives in Cergy-Pontoise, a satellite town near Paris. Her books,
La Place
, about her father;
Les Années
, ‘a sociology of her self';
Une Femme
, about her mother; and
Retour à Yvetot
, a return to her hometown, explore daily living and the tension between class and writing. Ernaux has spent her writing life reclaiming her past, her father and mother, her class background. She's the only memoirist I've read entirely in French.

*

In
La Place
, Ernaux writes of her father: ‘He ferried me from home to school on his bike. From one bank to the other, come rain or shine. His greatest pride, indeed his mission in life: that I should belong to the world that had spurned him. All the while singing “round and round we row”.'

I thought of my father who did not even get to high school and who was dedicated to giving his eight children entry to a world that would spurn him. He had a short, stocky, peasant build and a harelip, which made him rather shy and unconfident. He had no pretensions, did not want fame or riches, his family and his faith were all that he required, but he believed the ability to think and write well were important because they could be used to persuade others of the value of living truthful lives under God. We had the smallest farm and the largest family in the district, but by going without comforts – no inside toilet, no toilet paper, no heating except for an open fire in one room, no running hot water – he was able to send us all to the convent high school in town.

One day he and I argued about some idea – I can't remember what it was but it must have been a religious idea as that was the only kind of idea that really mattered to my father – and I used my superior education to demolish him. I was dismissive. I was in my twenties by then and had been to university. I don't remember what I said; what I remember is the crushed look in his blue eyes as he replied in a hurt voice, ‘You don't have to come the Queen of Sheba with me.' Even though I was ashamed, I thought, what an odd, old-fashioned expression to use.

I'm not sure where to meet Annie Ernaux for coffee. Even though she lives outside Paris, she would know it better than I do. In the end I want to show her a place with an Australian atmosphere – and where I can have a good coffee – so I'm back at Café KB, the same place I met Montaigne. There's a
brocante
, a second-hand fair, in the rue des Martyrs and the stall outside the café has old ironwork, kitchen appliances, embroidered tablecloths and lamps piled on tables. Annie Ernaux is waiting for me when I arrive, sitting inside at the window watching the crowd. She is elegant and still beautiful, high cheekbones, blue eyes, thick hair dyed a light copper. She looks refined, sensitive, well-groomed, middle-class, nothing about her appearance gives away her origins.

I sit down and put my copy of
Une Femme
on the table.

‘It was the first book I read in French,' I say, forgetting about
Le Petit Prince
. ‘I read it first before my mother died and found it …' I stop to search for the right phrase, ‘so precise, so true. I like the way you name things without poetic effect, you restore their power to move the reader.'

She listens intently and I can see she likes what I am saying. She says that she wants her words to be understood by the people she comes from.

I tell her I loved her ‘washing with bleach' story and recount my ‘dirty girl at the water-bubbler' story. She smiles; we understand each other.

I change topic, wanting to discuss de Beauvoir because I know she is an admirer. I say that I like de Beauvoir too but that I liked her better as a young woman, that she became too adamant when she was older. Annie, I think I can call her Annie, defends her, saying that de Beauvoir tried to live to the full extent of her being and that always has to be admired. We talk for a long time. Annie doesn't like the way the rue des Martyrs had become so
bobo
and has pushed out all the workers, but she likes the relaxed atmosphere of Café Kooka Boora and the easygoing baristas. I invite her to come to Australia one day.

*

Kit and Theo arrived in Paris. It was Theo's first overseas trip, except for when he was two months old and his mother took him to her family home in New Zealand for a week or two. Dina's own mother had died before Theo was born, and then within a few years, she was dead herself. She was thirty-seven, Theo was three. It was a long time ago and he wasn't a little boy anymore – he was tall with dark curls and beautiful eyes – but the loss was still, would probably always be, in him. I thought of Stendhal, whose mother died when he was seven: ‘It came about that all the joys of childhood ended with my mother.' Years after the Paris trip, on his twenty-fourth birthday, Theo wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘I have been sad every day since you died.'

But in Paris he had a reprieve. On the first morning, after he and his father left their bags in our apartment, Anthony and I took Kit and Theo on the Metro down to the Tuileries and stood on the rise above place de la Concorde so that they could see Paris all around them. We looked at the gold-tipped obelisk and in the distance the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe then turned and started walking down the Tuileries towards the first pond.

‘I love Paris! I'm going to come back and live here!' Theo exclaimed. It was only halfway through his first morning. He looked at me and grinned and I grinned back. We walked around the pond and looked at the wooden boats bobbing on the water as a couple of boys poked at them with sticks. The sun wasn't warm but it was bright enough to make the water glitter. I felt a proprietorial thrill, as if the beauty of Paris somehow had been my skilful doing.

Over the next few days a flurry of sightseeing confirmed my skill. I revealed a golden Joan of Arc on her horse and the faces under the Pont Neuf, the Fontaine des Innocents at Ch
â
telet and the mountains of seafood at the Bastille markets. In the backstreets of Montmartre I revealed the café where we played Scrabble and where the air smelled of hash, and the still wintry vineyard opposite the Lapin Agile, the cabaret frequented by Picasso, Utrillo, Modigliani and friends, the statue of Dalida, and the Roman temple column in St-Pierre, all of it magicked out of the air by me.