Ransacking Paris (25 page)

*

It was already late May; we had to leave Paris in mid-June to return to Australia. I remember making lists again, what I had done, what I wanted to do, but when I look in my diary I find most pages just contain a time next to a name, ‘Camilla', ‘see Trish in Semele', or an instruction, ‘Ring Mum', or brief information, ‘Felix born today' – my youngest brother and his wife had a baby in the middle of May. I kept tickets for various exhibitions and plays which fill in some of the gaps, and although evidence doesn't really matter because I have not wanted to write a history, I take them out and as mementoes they faithfully give me back to the day and the place and the people.

One Sunday I heard a Congolese choir sing in a church on the other side of Paris. The choir stood in front of the altar, mostly big women in loose dresses, and gave the songs their whole breath and heart and body, and I felt as if I were being shot through with an electric charge. They swayed their hips and arms and stepped back and forth, utterly fluid. At the end they asked people from the audience to join them singing ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot' and some of us stood up and sang. Comin' for to take me away.

Another day I went to hear Trish singing in the chorus in Semele at the Théâtre des Élysées in the rue Montaigne, the glorious sound of endless desire, endless love, filling the theatre. The story of Semele, who desired immortality, and who, of course, was destroyed by her desire, unfolded in a flood of sound and light. There were thunderbolts and gods and hymns – and a huge round bed with satin sheets. I had a balcony seat and felt like one of the gods looking down on the action. Afterwards I had a drink with Trish and a few of the Greek gods and nymphs in the café across the road from the theatre.

Another Sunday I went to a Miró retrospective at the Pompidou Centre and found myself drowning in blue. It looked as if the struggle to find what was essential almost made his art disappear only to be reborn in vast blue canvases. Another day I saw ‘Orientalism' at the Institut du Monde Arabe and it was the opposite: souks, bazaars, gold and scarlet robes, sand, azure sky, Matisse's
La petite mulâtresse
(Mulatto Girl), painted Persian carpets, colour and detail on every centimetre of canvas.

I could only try to see every image, hear every note, be attentive to each part of the world. I sang and listened to my voice merging with the rest of the choir, I walked and felt my stride easing the world forward. Montaigne wrote, ‘When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time I walk.'

I dug in the balcony garden with a kitchen fork and watered my geraniums. I wrote each morning except market mornings when I went with Anthony to the rue Ordener and bought parsley, broccoli and carrots – I knew the best stall and the stall-holder knew me – and still avoided the dark red meat labelled
cheval
. We bought comté cheese in the rue Poteau, after discussing it with the
fromager
, and on the way home we bought tulips from the corner flower shop. I went clothes shopping with Bibi in the Marais and I taped the songs at choir so I could practise them at home for the Fête de la Musique. I rang my mother and talked about my new manuscript as a way of making a spell so that she would stay alive to read it. I met Sylvie every week in Les
É
diteurs and, while I was with her, spoke French with a messy ease, my mantle and cape and stockings awry.

Thirteen

June

Memory is stronger than reality.

Annie Ernaux

I went to see my first play in French. It was
La Nuit des Rois
, The Night of the Kings, or
Twelfth Night
, so I knew I'd be able to follow the story. Still, even after almost a year in Paris I didn't think I was ready for Shakespeare in French – I was there because Bibi had organised it instead of our usual weekly French conversation, booking the tickets and arranging to meet me outside the theatre.

The actors were a travelling company from the south of France and the theatre was in the fourteenth arrondissement near Montparnasse cemetery. When Bibi and I found our seats there were already musicians playing on one corner of the stage. They were dressed as minstrels in gold and red with vests and trailing sleeves and caps, but somehow looking as if these were the clothes they wore every day rather than being costumes for a Renaissance play. They had an easy-going air; it didn't matter what town or village or even what century they landed up in, they were ready for a jig or a song anytime.

‘
Don't worry,' whispered Bibi in French. ‘I'll explain if you don't understand anything.'

A young woman waddled deliberately onto the stage. Her hips and backside were padded out and she exaggerated her side-to-side motion as if she were a wind-up toy. Everyone laughed as she indicated ‘mobile phones off'. It turned out she was the maid, Maria, and as the story unfolded, she nearly stole the show. She only had to appear on stage and the audience laughed.

I don't really remember any of the tangled lovers in the play, what Olivia or Viola or Orsino looked like or wore, only Maria and the other comic characters, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and of course Malvolio with his yellow stockings – he had long, very thin legs – was another scene-stealer as he pranced about trying to win Olivia. ‘She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered …' The production was relaxed and the players were noisy and rough and funny as if they had all tumbled off the back of a caravan after travelling muddy roads from the last village. I couldn't follow all the dialogue but the irreverent mood was infectious. The musicians threaded the story together with such energy that I had more fun than I'd ever had watching Shakespeare.

A great while ago the world began

With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain;

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you every day.

Afterwards Bibi and I found a bar and had a glass of red wine. It was warm so we sat outside and talked about the play and watched passers-by. All the tables were crowded with theatre-goers, laughing and talking as if it were the beginning of the evening.

‘The play has made everyone happy,' Bibi remarked. We were both excited to see Maria, slender now, and Sir Toby walk past, laughing and talking with Viola and Olivia. Of course I told Bibi about the day I arrived in Paris nearly a year earlier and about the actor hanging out the window across the courtyard in the rue des Trois Frères. It seemed like an age ago and just yesterday.

*

It was plummeting towards the end. Time had begun to concertina in that way it does, arrival and departure pressed up against each other. I thought of Annie Ernaux,
‘
je ne suis que du temps qui a passé à travers moi
', I am just time that has passed through me. I am standing in a street and time is streaming through me, imprinting and colouring me like light on transparent film.

I started to think it would be as if the year in Paris had never happened by the time I returned home to my own wintry back yard in the Mountains. Time would close back over it and it would just be a shadowy shape in memory. I had not yet realised that ‘memory is stronger than reality', and that even reality, if the present moment can be called that, is mainly made up of memory. It hasn't really been until now, when I have been trying to write of the year with my book companions in Paris, that I've understood most of life is constructed in the mind. Paris was always an imagined place and living there was always going to feel imaginary. And then, writing about the year has, as writing about anything always does, refashioned my experience of it. As Montaigne remarked
, ‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me'.

I wrote in my diary, ‘I don't want to go back to my ordinary life. No! No!', an isolated protest amongst the usual reminder notes. The handwriting was larger than usual and messier, with too many exclamation marks. It was the usual protest against endings, the futile pushing against time that occupies so much human energy.

*

A series of farewells: I visited Simone de Beauvoir's grave in Montparnasse cemetery. She is buried with Sartre, under the same stone inscribed with both their names, a mingling of their bones for eternity, which I think would have pleased the romantic young de Beauvoir if not the older rationalist. The light on the stone was dappled, patterning the faded bunches of flowers – roses and carnations and a small silver bowl of daisies – and the Metro tickets that other people had left, a gesture of solidarity with Sartre's support of the activists who stole Metro tickets to give to workers. It was a warm and gentle summer's day, melancholic weather for a cemetery; graves are better to visit on cold, bleak days when there's not such a strong reminder of how lovely the earth is.

I'd already visited Rousseau's burial place in the Panth
é
on, a monument in the style of a Greek temple where the Great Men of France are interred. It's an unlikely resting place for a man who only wanted to lie down under an oak. And Stendhal in Montmartre cemetery, his verdigris profile seeming to smile wryly amongst the trees and moss. But not de Sévigné, who died visiting her daughter in Provence. Nor Montaigne, who was buried several times, firstly near his chateau, then at the church of St-Antoine in Bordeaux and, finally, at the University of Bordeaux, although his heart was removed and kept many kilometres away, preserved in the church of St- Michel de Montaigne.

I suspect Montaigne would have been delighted with the fact that there was no certainty or stability in his final resting place and that even his body did not remain whole! He always found it hard to be fixed: ‘I do not know whether I have found it harder to fix my mind in one place or my body.' Now he doesn't have to decide, he can be in many places at once.

Some years afterwards, I stood at my mother's grave in the central west. She did stay alive to read the book I wrote in Paris, even though her peripheral vision was so poor she had to use a ruler to keep herself on the line of text, but in the end none of us could keep her alive forever. She died with my younger brother and me on either side of her bed after nearly two weeks of focused breathing, each breath seeming to take all her concentration. On the last day I stared at her wondering who, exactly, it was who was dying, and it came to me that my mother was a constellation of memories, of pre-memory, of feelings, of shared stories. I had stared and puzzled, knowing this shrunken, dying creature was not my mother, and now I saw it; my mother was a vast constellation inside me where she had always lived. She was a construction, a fiction, within me.

Annie Ernaux said that she wanted ‘to seize the woman who lived outside of me', when she wrote about her mother, but that seems an impossible task. No-one exists ‘outside of me'. I construct every other person and every other person constructs me. Inside my sons, inside Anthony, Vicky, my choir, Tristan de Parcevaux, the Tahitian transvestite on the corner, everyone I pass on the streets, I exist as a fabrication, more or less detailed and probably not looking much like the one I carry of myself.

And places too: the landscape of my childhood, Wiradjuri land, lives in fierce detail inside me; Paris lives in a more impressionist mode. Even with the knowledge of my murderous rage towards a gypsy mother, and the feel of ropes and pulleys in a physiotherapy dungeon, and the smell of urine in alleyways, it is still in soft focus and aglow with warm light. The original imaginary image can never be fully dissolved; it colours everything else after it. Everything, apart from the present moment, this exact instant more fleeting than any clock can measure, is memory.

*

I wish I could convey the almost panicked delight I took in Paris in those last few weeks. The weather had the softness of early summer, the gentle skies that I've come to love as much as the high, wide, endless skies of home. People sat on benches in the parks, men played boules on any available patch of gravelly dirt, children dug in sandpits and sailed boats on the Tuileries ponds. I walked every day, trying to absorb the sight of chestnuts flowering, of houseboats on the Seine and their clotheslines with singlets and t-shirts pegged out, of accordionists endlessly playing ‘Those Were The Days' on the Metro, of St Denis carrying his head in the park and
Le Passe-Muraille
walking out of the wall with boys playing soccer in front of him. Trying to absorb it all through my skin. When I was in the apartment I gazed at the window where the younger man still laid out the clothes of the older woman and brought her out each day in her wheelchair, and at the line of people who still queued outside the
boulangerie
, over the footpath and onto the street each day just before noon, and at the light falling on chimney pots across the street which still told me what the weather was like before I got out of bed.

I have some photographs: pink geraniums in white pots along a wall in the Tuileries, the stairwell in the rue Simart looking up five flights, the ‘Am
é
lie' shop at the end of the rue des Trois Frères, Colette's grave in Père Lachaise, Anthony rowing on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, me walking down the stairs in Metro Abbesses, Sylvie smiling at Le Relais Odéon. They were mostly taken in the last couple of weeks.

There were too many goodbyes to say. When I arrived at my rendezvous with Sylvie, I saw she had brought another one of her friends to meet me. She was a soft plump woman with thick pre-Raphaelite hair and friendly, but I had wanted Sylvie to myself for our last meeting.

‘You've finished reading Montaigne?' Sylvie asked.

‘I don't think I'll ever finish with Montaigne,' I said. I tried to explain that he had become my friend and that it wasn't just in my mind, that it was an emotion. I realised as I tried to find the words that it was love that I felt.

‘
Je l'adore
,' I exclaimed and Sylvie and her friend laughed.

We talked as we always did, sitting under the rows of books in Café des
É
diteurs. Her friend joined in now and then but mostly she watched us both. I marvelled again that we had met from a note stuck on a wall and we all laughed at the random ways the world can work, the paths that can cross.

Sylvie and I said
au revoir
at the entrance to Metro Odéon near the statue of Danton and as her friend kissed me on both cheeks, she said softly in English, ‘Sylvie really loves you, you know.'

I haven't seen Sylvie again since then.

We had a trip out of Paris in the last few weeks too, to the seaside. One Saturday morning Anthony said he felt like walking on a beach.

‘Are you trying to get ready for Australia?' I asked.

‘Maybe. I just feel like sand and maybe a swim.'

I looked at my fold-out map of France and tried to work out which beach was closest to Paris.

We tossed a change of clothes into a bag and within an hour we were leaving Gare du Nord on a train to Deauville, a watering-hole for the rich in the nineteenth century. On the other side of the river was Trouville, where the working class had lived. We found the Hôtel des Artistes in Trouville and then we walked on the quay and on the beach and took photos of each other and Anthony took photos of fishing boats. There were rows of brightly painted bathing huts, red and yellow and blue, on the beach, but because there was hardly anyone else about they looked like a stage setting. The tide was a long way out, a shimmer of water lay on the flat sand reflecting a light blue sky. It looked as if I could walk out across the ocean and it would never get deep, as if I could walk all the way to England.

Afterwards we walked around the town and discovered, by reading plaques on the walls, that at different times both Gustave Flaubert and Marguerite Duras lived and wrote here by the sea.
Madame Bovary
and
The Lover
. It was a quiet and pretty town, flowers everywhere, intriguing houses scrambled up the steep streets, the sun shone, there was a market selling local
saucissons
and cheeses and it was summer and the sea-light illuminated everything, but I felt subdued. I knew I couldn't keep pretending I lived in Paris anymore. Dashing away to the seaside for the weekend wasn't going to fool anyone.

*

In one of Montaigne's last essays he writes about his ordinary actions and habits; that he doesn't like fruit except for melons, that he only likes to have sex before he goes to sleep, that he likes drinking wine out of a particular shaped glass and could not drink it out of a cup, that he likes a hard bed with too many blankets, that he feels ill at ease without his head covered, that he can't stand not having a clean napkin at meals, that he doesn't like to stay out in the evening dew, that he has trained his bowels to be regular, that he doesn't dream much.

There was something about this recording of ordinary inclinations that moved me deeply, perhaps more deeply than anything else he wrote. It was as if he was giving me a glimpse of the things I would know about him if I lived with him, the daily ordinary habits that everyone, high or low, allows themselves. It felt like a celebration of being here in the world, of the endless wonderful banalities that occupy so much time. He claimed the unheroic, the unspectacular, the mundane, as part of who he was.