Ransacking Paris (26 page)

I see now that most of my daily life in Paris was the same as my life in the Mountains and is the same as my life now in Sydney; I dislike drinking tea out of thick-rimmed mugs, I much prefer to have sex in the afternoons (always have), I never go out without wearing kohl and feel undressed if I forget to put earrings on, I cannot bear my feet getting too hot in bed, I always compare my body to other women's in the street, mostly unfavourably but sometimes favourably, I cut avocados neatly and find it disturbing when others dig into them with a spoon, I reverse toilet rolls in public toilets if the paper unrolls from the bottom instead of the top, I am happy to write at a messy desk for months and then take pleasure one day in tidying it up to perfection, I love the feel of early morning streets, the cool air and the unloading of boxes and produce and the early morning smells of bitumen and coffee.

*

Our choir was performing in the late afternoon in the Fête de la Musique. On the last Thursday before the performance Marc reminded us again that we needed to know all the words so that we could sing without looking at our song sheets.

‘
Sauf Parti
,' he said with a smile. Except Patti.

When we had sung in the community hall for our families and friends and for the CD launch, the instructions to make sure we knew all the words were always ‘
Sauf Parti
.' I nodded and smiled back. I didn't mind at all; it didn't matter if I had to hold the words in front of me. I did try to learn them, but even practising every day, only the choruses of ‘
La Paysanne
' and ‘
Petit Poucet
' stayed with me. I sang along to our taped rehearsals at home, hoping the neighbours wouldn't mind my repeated attempts at ‘
La Paysanne
', the rousing chorus of which – even now, if no-one is listening – I can belt out:

En route, allons les gâs!

Jetons nos vieux sabots

Marchons, marchons

En des sillons plus larges et plus beaux.

En route, let's go boys

Throw away our old clogs

Let's walk on, walk on

In wider and more beautiful furrows.

Posters had appeared around the streets and the Fête was listed in the
Pariscope
with performances in every
quartier
. There were soloists – opera,
chanson
, rap – choirs, quartets, chamber orchestras, guitarists, jazz drummers, on every street corner and square. Every performance was allocated a particular place, a square or street corner or hall, and a time, so that audiences could select particular musicians or simply wander around their
quartier
from Mozart to African chanting to the
chanson
of Jacques Brel.

Marc gave us a handwritten sheet with our running order, location and time, and added instructions to meet beforehand for a last-minute rehearsal and voice warm-up. Our allocated spot was on a small square on the Quai de Valmy along one side of Canal St-Martin which runs through eastern Paris, joining the Seine to the Canal d'Ourcq in the north. From Bastille, the canal runs underground for a while and when it emerges it's crossed by high curved footbridges and has locks for the tourist barges that make their slow way up and down. It's mostly in the tenth arrondissement, which also contains the vast Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est, so it's a crossroads
quartier
for people from all over Europe and Africa. In the years since living in Paris, as I return each year, I've become familiar with the canal and the quays; I ride my
velib
, free city bike, up the canal and back each day for exercise when I'm visiting, but back then I didn't know the area at all.

I caught the Metro to Colonel Fabien, the nearest station according to Marc's instructions:
179 Quai de Valmy (10
è
me). Metro Colonel Fabien
. Anthony was coming later, and Camilla too, to hear me sing. I kept looking at the paper, checking and rechecking the address.
I was rushed and felt hot – I had wanted to leave plenty of time, but a quick meeting with Vicky had turned into a conversation and now I might be late.

I found the quay easily and I could see some people gathering in the distance but realised that must have been another performance as the street numbers were going in the wrong direction. I turned and headed up the other way. As I drew near I started to feel unsure. There didn't seem to be anyone about. There was no square, just the canal on one side and the street and footpath on the other. Not even people shopping. Where was my choir? Where was our audience? Perhaps I'd got the date wrong. I looked at Marc's scrawl headed
Programme du 20 Juin
. That was today. And the time.
Rendezvous à 16h30
. It was already nearly 5 o'clock, I was late. I looked again at the street number on the paper and the number on the wall.
179 Quai de Valmy
.
Nothing and nobody here. Had they all arranged to meet somewhere else and hadn't told me? My heart began to thump and although it was only a mild day I was sweating. Even in that moment I knew my feelings were out of proportion to what was happening, but it didn't stop the knotting in my stomach.

I looked down at the paper again, willing it to be different.
179.
Suddenly my brain leapt sideways into a different channel. A French channel. The 7 didn't have a line through it; it was a 1. The street number was 119. It was in the other direction, where I had seen the milling group of people several blocks away in the distance.

I ran about half a kilometre down the quay and arrived at the square just as my choir was arranging itself into sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. They all looked up and exclaimed as I ran up to them, hot, sweaty and breathless. They are pleased to see me, I realised, and felt a rush of delight.

‘Patti, you're late. You've missed the rehearsal.' Marc scolded. He had a stand in front of him and was holding his guitar.

‘I'm really sorry, I thought the one was a seven.'

He shrugged, puzzled, but let it go. He turned and arranged our song sheets on his stand. There was already a crowd of people waiting. I looked around and saw Anthony and Camilla, who must have arrived before me. How had they got the number right? Anthony raised his eyebrows at my sudden late arrival.

‘We thought you had decided not to come,' Marie-Louise whispered. Marc frowned at us. He was ready to start.

He slipped his guitar strap over his shoulder, tapped on the stand, and we began. The first song, ‘
La Pluie
', ‘The Rain', opened with a faint chorus of plinking sounds like rain falling on a roof, the sopranos and tenors and altos alternating, the sound of raindrops rising until it was a clattering storm and then diminishing as the verse began. My breath returned and I could hear each voice and my voice, light and nervous at first. We didn't sound as strong as usual, all of us holding our voices in. We made it through, holding the last note uncertainly, and Marc nodded. He's nervous too, I thought.

The audience applauded, clapping and whooping, and we looked at each other, relieved, smiling. They were our friends and families, there was nothing to worry about. We headed off into ‘
La Paysanne
' and then the rest of our repertoire with gusto, twelve songs altogether – French, Spanish, English, African. We swayed and clapped. Marc kept one hand on the music, and conducted us with the other. On a few songs, he played along with us on his guitar. My voice rose and fell, disappeared in all the other voices, the notes true and strong, sweet and straggling.

I couldn't stop smiling. I was singing in the streets of Paris. I could feel Marie-Louise's shoulder next to mine. My heart had calmed down after beating too hard from running and now my voice felt strong and round in my throat. I kept my gaze on Marc, letting his eyes hold me, hold us all as one.
Marchons, Marchons.
We all belted out the fighting words. The sun was shining in a milky blue sky, that soft pearly colour that I haven't seen anywhere else, the chestnut trees had new leaves, everyone was smiling.
Ma fren orll drive Porchez
.

*

It was a decade ago, the singing. And everything else that happened that year. I really don't know if I have any better idea of what it all meant. It was a year in Paris. I finished a manuscript, I had coffee with Montaigne and all the other memoirists. I discovered many looking-glasses in other centuries, other minds. I found the imaginary world did not disappear when I stepped into it. I grew in different soil, the red-brown earth of Wiradjuri country, and would always belong to it, but I could see my reflection in mirrors in Paris too.

I have been going back there every year to work since then; I stay no more than a couple of months and I teach memoir classes and write and ride around the streets on the squat grey
velib
bikes, dodging buses and taxis. Several times I have gone back up to the rue Simart and I look up at our apartment on the fifth floor and I'm reassured to see the red geraniums are still growing there.

Every time I return I think, this will be the time that I see Paris for what it really is, just another crowded European city with an overweening pride in its beauty and bloody history.

An elegantly arranged pile of limestone.

A criss-cross of urine-smelling alleys and cold windy boulevards.

A glossy tourist copy of its original self.

And every time, usually on a chilly autumn morning, often rainy, or at least grey, a few days after I arrive, my heart lifts with a piercing joy.

Last time I arrived, just a few months ago, it was mid-September and, in the morning, chilly enough to wear a scarf. I took the train into Paris from the airport and dragged my luggage through Châtelet station and up along the streets of the third arrondissement to the rue des Gravilliers where I'd booked a tiny studio. I was going to spend several weeks trying to finish this book. I knew the street, Trish used to live there, an ordinary working street, and I had often visited her, so it felt familiar.

I saw myself reflected in the window of the
boulangerie
opposite the front door.
This great world of ours is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant.

The door was open and I could see the
boulanger
sliding baguettes onto wire racks so I went in to buy an almond croissant for breakfast. The first day.

‘
Bonjour
,' I said, cheerfully.

‘
Bonjour
,' he said with vast indifference. He looked sensitive and life wasn't the way he had wanted it to be.

The studio was up five flights without a lift, again. I felt defeated for a moment, feeling the weight of my bag, but the landlord came downstairs and carried my bag up the narrow sloping flights. He told me that he was a linguist and also wrote novels – there were three of his books on the shelves beside the bed. The room was just big enough for the bookcase, bed and a table at a window looking onto an inner courtyard and, above it, an expanse of sky.

After the landlord-novelist left and I'd unpacked my laptop and manuscript and clothes I went out walking to stay awake. I always walk all the first day, trying to shake off the jetlagged desolation that always visits me. More than ‘where in the world am I?', it's ‘why in the world am I?' I know joy will come when it wants to, maybe not today, but that's fine, I still have to walk.

I had a few small tasks to do as well, buy a weekly Metro pass, and a
puce
, the word for both a flea and a SIM card, for my mobile phone. I decided to head back to Châtelet first, then to the phone shop in the rue de Rivoli, and then I'd walk along the Seine all the way up to the Port de l'Arsenal near Bastille.

Not far from the rue des Gravilliers a young Iraqi man – a doctor, he said – asked me for directions. People often ask me for directions in Paris, more often than the likely average for any one person could be. Some days it seems that my job is just to wander about helping passers-by find their way. I occasionally know the direction but most often I have to look at my blue map-book,
Paris Pratique
. That particular day, five people asked me which way to go: the Iraqi doctor, an American couple in Châtelet, an elderly French man who must have been from the provinces, a boy on his mobile phone who called out, ‘
Quel direction est Gare de l'Est?
' as I passed by him in the rue St Martin and then, later in the afternoon in the same street, a young African-French woman with a baby tied on her chest asked for directions to the Beaubourg, Pompidou Centre.

‘Just along there,' I said in French, ready to hurry past. ‘You'll be there in a second.'

‘
Une seconde?
' she repeated, puzzled. I looked at her unfocused eyes and suddenly realised that she was blind. She needed me to be more precise. I hesitated for a moment.

‘I could walk with you if you like?' I said.

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘That would be good.'

‘You cannot see at all?'

‘I can see colour and general form.'

‘Your baby can see?'

‘He sees,' she said smiling.

We walked along chatting. Her baby looked sideways at me and I stroked his arm. When the green and blue and red pipes of the Beaubourg appeared, I said ‘
Voila
' and we parted ways.

I smiled as I walked on, absurdly pleased to have been of use. Sometimes it seems that that is enough anywhere in the world.

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge my book companions:

Simone de Beauvoir,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, translated by James Kirkup, HarperPerennial Modern Classics, New York, 2005

Annie Ernaux,
Retour à Yvetot
, Éditions du Mauconduit, Paris, 2013

——
Une Femme
, Gallimard, Paris, 1987

Michel de Montaigne,
The Essays: A Selection
, translated by MA Screech, Penguin Classics, London, 1993

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Confessions
, translated by JM Cohen, Penguin Classics, London, 1953

Madame de Sévigné,
Selected Letters
, translated by Leonard Tancock, Penguin Classics, London, 1982

Stendhal,
The Life of Henry Brulard
, translated by John Sturrock, New York Review of Books, New York, 1995

And:

Colette,
Rainy Moon
, translated by Antonia White, Penguin, London, 1976

Antoine Compagnon,
Un Été Avec Montaigne
, Éditions des Équateurs, Paris, 2013

Sarah Kofman,
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat
, translated by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, Nebraska, 1996

Marcel Pagnol,
My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle
, translated by Rita Barisse, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1986

Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time
, translated by CK Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Vintage, London, 2002

Voltaire,
Candide
, translated by John Butt, Penguin Classics, London, 1979

I also want to acknowledge lines from ‘Stings', in
Ariel
by Sylvia Plath, Faber Paperbacks, London, 1974.

Many thanks are due to my agent, Clare Forster, for encouraging me to write the Paris book; to my publisher, Alexandra Payne, for her faith in it; and to Ian See for his insightful remarks. I also want to thank the wonderful Jo Jarrah for her brilliant editing and Bettina Richter for her endless enthusiasm and determination. And most of all, infinite thanks to Anthony Reeder, my first reader and favourite companion. I hope those dedicated to the facts will forgive the layering of time in this account of my life in Paris.