Ransacking Paris (3 page)

We stopped to listen, standing to one side so as not to put him off, but he was concentrating so intently that he didn't seem to see us. He stood upright, his back straight, his elbow out, his thick dark hair, a bit long, tucked behind his ears. He looked as if he had been selected by a film director who wanted to convey the fine beauty of a sensitive boy – his skin was creamy, his lashes long, the hairs still soft on his bare arms and legs – just before his life changed. The notes buzzed in the air, hectic in the summer heat, triggering memory. I was stung by a bee at the water-bubblers at primary school one day. Bees often hung around the bubblers, hoping for water, I suppose, but I didn't notice one alight on my finger until I felt the sharp sting. And then the throbbing ache afterwards and my pride in the ‘blue' the teacher put on it to take the sting away. ‘The bee dies when it stings,' we said to each other, satisfied that there was retribution.

Anthony and I didn't watch and listen for long, but when we left, a small smile and a nod escaped the boy. I walked up the hill, smiling. I might not be able to understand most of what I saw but Montmartre was telling me stories, welcoming me.

*

It was my first day ransacking Montmartre and the pleasure was in a kind of eating – I felt as if I were devouring the world and being nourished. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that she loved to gaze at random strangers; ‘their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me'. It was a confession that revealed her secret soul to me, that strange desire to absorb others, suck them in through the eyes.

I'm told there's a kind of water bug that sucks the insides out of its victim, leaving only its skin, but I have no desire to take anything from the people I watch. I want something more than witnessing though. It isn't so much to invade or know their inner geography, but to gaze out through their eyes, to know what the world looks like to them. To live more than my own life.

Colette too wrote of the ‘inscrutable human beings who plucked me by my sleeve, made me their witness for a moment and then let me go'. When I read that sentence in one of her stories, I felt it hit its mark like an arrow. It was not the responsible witnessing of a parent, but a random and greedy and yet almost reverential gazing at strangers that I'm also addicted to.

What
is
it like for other people to be in the world? Even as a self-absorbed teenager, that was the question: what was it like for other people – passing strangers, people seen out the bus window, families in suburban lounge-rooms – what was it like for them to be here?

It's still the same. It could be just curiosity, which is a good enough motive, and I could just ask, and I do, but it's not a question anyone can answer straight out of their mouths. What
is
it like for you to be in the world? It's elusive, disturbing, so infinitely faceted, that I think the words have to be spread out one by one on the page before they can make any sense at all.

Montaigne described the world as the ‘looking-glass in which we must come to know ourselves from the right slant'. My gaze was more voracious than that. I suspect he was talking about a more detached observation of others to reconsider his picture of himself. But he too was a hungry soul, I think, and he admitted to his own ransacking.

I like Montaigne's truthfulness, but even more I like that he didn't try to convince his readers of his truth. He merely said, ‘these are my humours, my opinions; I give them as things I believe, not as things to be believed'. This is not the way things are, just the way I see them. It astonishes me that he knew that in the sixteenth century. Does it still need to be defended?

Montaigne understood the contradictory nature of who he was: ‘My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow.' He knew he could be a thief one day and a protector the next. It meant he always allowed himself to be unsure: ‘Only fools have made up their minds and are certain.' He knew others wouldn't see it that way, that he would be attacked for self-absorption and vanity, but he didn't appear to care about that. In fact, on the opening page of his
Les Essais
he boldly writes: ‘Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable you should employ your time on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, farewell.'

What beautiful cheek! It's all about me, so see you later!

I'd love to be able to get away with that kind of insouciance, but I don't dare. I will offer a cup of coffee and the best macaroons and a glorious view of Paris, tiled mansards and balconies and red geraniums – please sit down, please stay – as I run about trying to mix up the honey pooling in the waxy cells of memory.

I can't do it alone. Montaigne ransacked the writers of Ancient Rome and Greece in his efforts to know himself. I'll have to keep ransacking Montaigne and de Beauvoir, de Sévigné, Rousseau, Stendhal, Ernaux; rob the bees and the beekeepers.

*

Perhaps I ought to introduce them. Here and there, one by one.

What needs to be known about Michel de Montaigne? Let's see: his dates are 1533–1592; he lived in a chateau in the Perigord in the south-west of France – a landscape which I first saw that year and which has since become almost as familiar to me as the plains of my childhood; he was woken each morning of his childhood by the sweet thrumming of the harpsichord because his father believed a child should not be rudely awoken; he had a Latin tutor from babyhood and learned to speak and read Latin as his mother tongue; he had a dear friend who died and to whom he dedicated his writing; he had a wife and daughter whom he hardly ever mentioned; he was mayor of Bordeaux for several years; he had dark observant eyes and a neat Spanish conquistador-style beard and wore soft hats to cover his prematurely balding head; he came to Paris a few times and travelled as far as Italy; he wrote a book exploring his own nature,
Les Essais
, which every French schoolchild is expected to read.

I arrange to have coffee with Montaigne. We meet in the rue des Martyrs at Café KB (Kooka Boora) because they make good coffee – they have an Australian barista – and it's clear Montaigne couldn't be bothered with a poor brew. He doesn't believe in the value of hardship, seeing such belief as a kind of masochism: ‘As for whacks and afflictions, you can make me do nothing but curse them: they are meant for men whose desires are aroused by only a good whipping.'

We sit at one of the tables on the footpath because it's crowded inside and most people are using their laptops or mobile phones. Montaigne is wearing dark trousers, a white linen shirt and a loosely knotted tie – he's not handsome, but stylish in an easy-going way. He orders a double-shot long black with a Portuguese tart. He's relaxed, and even though I'm impressed by the fact that he speaks four languages, he doesn't make me feel awkward or inadequate.

‘I need to handpick my companions,' he says with a smile. ‘But we must direct our desires and settle on things that are nearest and easiest.'

‘Like the song,' I say. ‘You can't always get what you want.'

He laughs. His brown eyes are attentive and amused. He says he loves the ease of popular culture. Then he adds, as if it were related, that he loves the internet, the access to vast knowledge, the branching connections which he finds himself addicted to, but is troubled by the fact that it does not allow for silence and unfilled time.

‘I can never get to the bottom of things, I look things over, ripple the skin, and sometimes pinch to the bone,' he says.

He talks in a rambling fashion for ages. I enjoy his dry ironic humour and his eclectic mind, the way he explores ideas without dogmatism. We talk about philosophy and books, natural wonders we have seen on television, even exchange, with a smile, stories of our sexual habits and desires. I know he likes talking with women and that these days he acknowledges we are as capable of loving friendship as any man. He admits that for him desire is only really satisfying when it is accompanied by love and I am moved by his sensitivity. We exchange email addresses and decide to stay in contact.

And now, as the fairytales say, it was still the day I set out to explore my new home. In my old world, ten years could go by in a flash, leaving only a buzzing of memories, but in the first weeks in a new world, days are long, perhaps five times as long as usual.

By the time we were back in the rue des Trois Frères we had circled Montmartre, like pilgrims circling a mountain in Tibet. We came in the other end of the street, past the corner shop from the film
Le Fabuleux Destin d'Am
é
lie Poulain
, as several newspaper articles taped to its window explained, and then, in a small square, we discovered the Bateau Lavoir. It was the studio where Picasso and Matisse and many other painters and writers and sculptors worked. It was painted a shiny dark green and the name was lettered in gold above the window. I knew it wasn't exactly the same studio
–
it had burned down thirty or so years ago with only the facade remaining
–
but it felt near enough to the real thing.

Much later I found an old back-and-white photograph of the original Bateau Lavoir and the shabbiness of the building reminded me more of the house I grew up in on the farm than the glossy shop-front with gold lettering I saw that day. The Lavoir where Picasso passed, he said, the most beautiful years of his life, was a shambles of a building patched together with tin and buckled boards and mismatching windows. It looked as if it might fall in on itself any minute and in the wind it had swayed and creaked like the washing boats on the Seine it was named after. It was freezing in winter and boiling in summer, dark and dirty, and there was only one water tap for the whole building. Here in this scrap-yard in 1907, Picasso painted
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
.

But history in Montmartre began a long time before Picasso.

*

Two thousand years ago the Romans built temples to Mars and Mercury on the summit of Montmartre, one of which stood until 944 AD when it was struck by lightning. Two of the columns in St-Pierre, the church hiding in the shadows of Sacré-Coeur, are from the temple of Mercury.

St Denis had his head chopped off in the rue Yvonne le Tac in 250 AD and then picked it up, washed it in a fountain and carried it ten kilometres, preaching a sermon as he went.

When Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV and a Protestant, laid siege to Paris, the Abbess of the Convent on Montmartre, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl called Claude de Beauvilliers, became his mistress and his army stayed at the convent. Parisians called the convent
un magasin des putes
, a shop of prostitutes.

In the sixteenth century St Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuits on Montmartre, some say at St-Pierre on the summit, others say in a small chapel at the foot.

When the Cossacks attacked Montmartre in 1814, one of the four brothers who defended Moulin de la Galette, a mill which is now a restaurant, was cut into four pieces and one piece was put on each sail of the windmill and sent spinning.

Vincent Van Gogh stayed with his brother for a year in the rue Lepic, which crosses rue des Abbesses and winds right up around Montmartre.

During the Prussian Siege of Paris in 1870–71
,
after which the Montmartre Commune seized power, the people had to eat rats and mice and animals from the zoo, tigers and giraffes, and even each other. A restaurant menu extract from the time reads: ‘
civet de chat aux champignons
', cat stew with mushrooms; ‘
cotelettes de chien aux petits pois
', dog chops with peas; ‘
salamis de rats, sauce Robert
', rats in sauce.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Montmartre became a favourite drinking haunt because it was outside the city limits where wine was cheaper. People came to the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir to see red-and-black cloaked Aristide Bruant, and can-can dancer Jane Avril, and La Goulue, who caught coins in her vagina.

All of this happened a few minutes' walk from my studio in the rue des Trois Frères. The stories of Montmartre multiply on plaques on walls, pamphlets in souvenir shops, books in libraries, in Zola's
L'
Assommoir,
in the Montmartre museum and in paintings of its wooded hill-top in the Carnavalet where the history of Paris is displayed.

I didn't know any of these stories when I grew up on the farm – but I longed for them. There I was surrounded by stories of country, rocky hills and whirlwinds and caves and fossils that whispered to me all day long, but they were so quiet I had to strain to listen. I wanted stories with crimson velvet and silver trumpets in them, and steep stairways and falls from grace and artists drinking absinthe and centuries unfolding one from the other with time divided into precise dates.

Forty thousand years of Dreamtime floated like a mist, poetic and sacred, but I could not read anywhere that, in 52 BC or 944 AD or 1590 on the banks of the Macquarie River on the central plains near where I grew up, a battle had been fought, or a temple built, or an artist celebrated, or a saint sacrificed. It wasn't a failure of the Dreamtime, it was my own need for articulation, for time and space to be delineated.

That evening I bought a phone card to call my mother. She lived in a retirement home in town – the farm had been sold years before when my father was still alive – and she was becoming frail, although she resisted using her walking-frame.

I sat down with my cup of tea and punched in the endless sequence of numbers on the phone card. It took several attempts before I got it right but then I heard the phone ringing in Australia and my mother's tentative ‘hello'. There was always a question in my mother's hellos, as if she wasn't going to give anything away until she knew who it was on the line.