Ransacking Paris (4 page)

‘
Bonjour Maman
,' I said.

‘Oh for heaven's sake,' she said. But I could tell she was thrilled. ‘How are you?'

I was good. Everything was good. In front of me next to the photo of Baron Rock was a sketch that one of my friends, a cartoonist, had made before we left. It showed a couple sitting outside a café looking at a
Paris Match
headline announcing ‘
Anthony et Patti arrivent à Paris
.' ‘Ah, Paris will be like ze thirties again,' one of them remarks. I had blushed at my long-out-of-date dream.

‘It's the best of all possible worlds, Mum,' I said. And then I told her of my adventures, displaying my day in Paris like a pretty thing I had found for her. As if I were a child and not a woman with adult children of my own.

Three

August

What's the use of knowing the movements of stars if we don't know our own minds and hearts?

Michel de Montaigne

The
Am
é
lie
shop in the rue des Trois Frères had a sloping counter outside with baskets of fruit and vegetables artfully arranged and garlands of grapes and vine leaves twisted along the awning, looking as pretty as a picture-book. Inside it was an ordinary corner shop. I was buying the usual milk, apples, cheese, honey and cereal, using the shop as a mini-supermarket. I was afraid to try the
fromagerie
with its thousands of unrecognisable cheeses, or the
marchand des l
é
gumes
, greengrocer, or the
pharmacie
, or the
épicerie
,
deli, or the
cave
, wine shop. If I went into those shops I would have to be able to discuss what I wanted – I had loitered outside the
fromagerie
a number of times and had observed the lengthy discussions between the shopkeeper and customer. In the corner shop, all I had to do was say hello, I thought.

‘
Bonjour
,' the shopkeeper said.

‘
Bonjour
,' I replied.

‘
Il blah de blah aujourd'hui. Blah blah du soleil blah
,'
he responded sociably.

I nodded, blushing. I remembered the advice Jean-Jacques had given during our fireside lessons – when you don't understand, he said, consider what people usually say in the situation; in a shop, as you are paying, it's ‘do you want a bag' or something about the weather. I did hear
soleil
so he must have been saying something about the weather, surely okay to agree to. But then who knows? Whenever anyone spoke to me since I'd arrived I'd not understood anything more than occasional words from Mrs Berman's vocabulary lists. It was as if my ears were stuffed with a strange cotton wool that blurred most words and let one or two through but not enough to respond with any safety.

Still, I had been trying my shop French every day. ‘
Je voudrais une baguette, s'il vous pla
î
t
.' I'd like a bread stick, please.
I believed in language immersion theory; if I just listened to French enough, its meaning would seep through my pores and into my brain like a kind of dye, the way it did with children. The way it did with Montaigne, who learned Latin from babyhood ‘without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without tears'. His father not only engaged a Latin tutor when he was a baby, he insisted on all the servants learning a few words too, so the nurse and maids all spoke to him in the language of the Ancient Romans. It became his mother tongue of course, and Gascon, a local dialect, was his second language, and French his third. He said that even after not using it much in his adult life, when anything surprising or demanding happened he burst into Latin. Asking for bread would have been no problem:
da mihi pauxillum panis?

I didn't have enough money for a tutor and, besides, now that I was surrounded by all things French, surely I would pick it up? I did have those lists from Mrs Berman after all, stored in exactly the same order I had learned them, they must all come together into sentences one day. All I needed to do was practise.

I bought newspapers –
Lib
é
ration
, and
Le Monde
– and painstakingly decoded the front page and the arts pages; I easily read all the ads on the Metro; I studied my French textbook, which I still had from Jean-Jacques' fireside lessons. And I watched television. There was a small set in the dark under the mezzanine, so I began watching a quiz show each evening. The questions were repeated a number of times and were written up on the screen as well:
Qui est l'auteur du roman Les Misérables? a)
É
mile Zola, b) Honoré de Balzac, c) Victor Hugo d) Guy de Maupassant.
I could read that easily – I even knew the correct answer. As long as I could see the words I was fine. I sat with my dictionary on my lap, looking up new words and attempting to memorise them.

Anthony worked for a university trying to persuade international students to study in Australia, which meant he had to travel often in Europe and Asia. After much argument, his boss had agreed that he could work from Paris, especially now that his main region was Europe. Back home he had an office at the university, but here he had to work from our tiny studio. I found it hard to write with someone in the same room – thinking is a noisy business and takes up a lot of space – and so did my manuscript. I had already written a hundred or so pages; they were spread out on the floor and I was literally piecing them together. I had claimed the old-fashioned writing desk and Anthony sat on the lounge with his laptop on a chair. He stepped carefully over my pages to get to the kitchen or bathroom.

The studio had no wifi connection but I found an internet café at place des Abbesses right next to the Metro. There weren't many on the ‘tourist side' of Montmartre but I discovered later there were plenty on the north side, ‘behind' the hill. It was a poorer area with a lot of French-Africans so there were telephone and internet shops in every street for people to connect with their mothers and sons and wives back in Mali or Senegal or Gambia.

Anthony soon started going out to cafés to work; Camille's in the next street was his favourite.

‘You're tossing me out on the streets,' he said.

‘I could go instead,' I offered, unconvincingly. It was a ritual
–
we both knew it would be him. I had always worked at home, and besides, he needed a smoke. All the cafés still allowed smoking then, so he sat outside Camille's and worked on his laptop and smoked and watched the passers-by.

I struggled with Dina's story. I had begun writing it in an old beach-house then daily life had taken over. It had been difficult from the start, but now that I was working on the third section, the period after she had died, I didn't know how to go forward at all. It wasn't just because it wasn't clear what stories to include, but that I felt more emotionally tender. It was ten years since she had died and I thought it shouldn't have been too demanding, but I found writing made the experience of her death more intense than perhaps it had been in life.

I kept thinking how young she was. I hadn't realised it at the time because she had been older than I was and now she was younger, thirty-seven years old forever, dark-haired, eyes sparkling, unchanged – and Theo was motherless forever. The writing pulled things out of the dark and made me feel how near death always was. I was spending too much time staring at the screen and crossing paragraphs and pages out in my notebook.

One hot morning I sat down early, determined to unfold the next part of her story. Anthony was away in Lyon in the south-east for a few days' work and I wanted to take advantage of uninterrupted time. We were practised at staying out of each other's way, but here in such a small space and with the temptations of Paris outside the door, it was easy for both of us to down tools and take off. Today with only myself to struggle with, I could stay and work it out. I opened the laptop and read what I had written the morning before. Just as I began to write a new sentence, someone upstairs picked up a hammer and started banging.

Bang! Bang! I waited. There was a pause. Then it started again and this time continued in a perfectly regular rhythm for several minutes. How long does it take to bang a nail in? My shoulders tensed and my head started thumping. Then it stopped. All done. I sighed and picked up my pen. If I scribbled a few things by hand first, the writing would flow more easily. Then it started again. I looked at my watch as if by timing it I could control it. It continued in the same unvarying rhythm, on and on. I should go up and yell at him to stop. What was the word for hammer? I looked it up:
marteau
. But who was I kidding? I was a foreigner in his country – I wasn't going to start yelling
arrêtez
,
stop,
with the bloody
marteau
in a bad accent.

I'm sure Montaigne and de Sévigné and Stendhal and all the rest never had to put up with hammers banging while they wrote. They would have just told the servant or workman to stop and that would have been the end of it. I flicked open Montaigne: ‘I have a mind which is delicate and easy to distract: when it withdraws aside to concentrate, the least buzzing of a fly is enough to murder it.' I couldn't help laughing; there he was in his tower, annoyed by a fly buzzing in through the open window, trying to ignore it, but soon chasing it around the room with a rolled-up manuscript.

After an hour of stopping and starting and several imagined violent retributions, I faced the fact that the hammering was never going to end. I grabbed my map-book and keys and headed out.

In the streets it was hot and quiet. The
boulangerie
in the rue des Abbesses and the
fromagerie
were both closed and had handwritten signs on the door:
congé annuel.
Annual leave. I was puzzled – so the whole shop just closed for the summer? Surely they wouldn't just shut up shop and go – no-one did that. I discovered that was exactly what the French did, that summer holidays were a sacred right of the republic and many shops had blinds drawn and signs on the doors. There was a slow, dozy feeling in the streets, as if most people were away or indoors and if you did have something to do in Paris, you ought to do it slowly. There were fewer cars parked in the street too, less traffic, and fewer people walking about, except, I soon noticed, in the tourist areas, which were more crowded. The banging faded out of my brain in the bright heat.

There were a few things I could attend to. One was finding a choir. I wasn't really a singer, had only started to learn a couple of years earlier and could barely hold a tune, but I wanted to continue. I had been in a choir in the Mountains for only a year and I knew I would lose courage if I didn't keep going now. Singing was part of the story about Dina and Theo. Dina had been a singer, but I was also drawn to the deep connection in singing with others, something beyond the grasp of intellect. Even though my voice was weak, I had felt at least moments of communion when it merged with everyone else's. It's curious, the release of being at one with others, almost as if we were made for it.

On the way down to the Metro I decided to go to Shakespeare's bookshop to find a
Fusac
, a magazine for expatriates listing accommodation, jobs, things to buy – and classes. And I would pick up a
Pariscope
, the ‘what's on' magazine. I could find a singing class in one of those.

Shakespeare and Company is on the Left Bank in the rue de la Bûcherie, directly across the Seine from Notre Dame. It was started in the 1950s by an American, George Whitman, who named it after Sylvia Beach's bookshop of the same name. Sylvia, also American, was famous as a supporter of writers during the mythologised golden years of expatriate writers in Paris, the years of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce – and she was the first person to publish James Joyce's
Ulysses
when no publisher would take it on. I had already visited the bookshop once and liked its ramshackle dimness and uncertain towers of books.

The
Fusac
magazines were stacked outside the door of the bookshop in a rack. I didn't go in this time because I knew I'd be trapped in there for hours, pulling books off the shelves and stacks, filled with both desire and a kind of hopelessness that always nibbled at my frayed edges in bookshops. All the books I'd never read. I grabbed the magazine, went to the news-stand around the corner in the boulevard St Michel and bought a
Pariscope
, then headed up away from the bottleneck of tourist cafés around Fontaine St Michel.

I turned into the rue St Jacques, the main road south from Paris for hundreds of years, and then further up the hill came to the rue Pierre et Marie Curie. Along one side of the street was the Foundation Curie, a severe-looking building. Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist, had worked in this very street! She was the only woman I'd heard of who was a scientist and in high school I had toyed, for a while, with the idea of following in her footsteps. Montaigne said there was no use knowing ‘the movements of stars if we don't know our own minds and hearts', but I wanted to know the movement of the stars no matter what use it was
–
all of it, from the structure of atoms and wave theory right out to galaxies and black holes and how one single particle came into being from non-existence and unleashed the whole universe. Fortunately for science, I realised even before I left high school that I was too inclined to make things up and that I would have been one of those scientists disgraced for fudging test results to fit my favourite theory. I liked the stories too much to let the facts get in the way.

I found a café and sat down outside. It was a quiet street, no tourists.

‘
Bonjour
,' I said.

‘Do you want a menu?' said the waiter in English.

I shook my head, dispirited. What was it about the way I said
bonjour
that gave me away?

‘
Un café crème
,' I muttered.

He shrugged as if I'd said I wanted sugar in my wine and walked away. I was just another tourist trying to extract meaning from other people's daily lives.

I opened the
Fusac
and read through notices for yoga retreats and children's drama classes and English lessons until I saw a small announcement about a choir. It was in French and indicated that no audition was required. It also said that a ‘
bon niveau
', good level, was expected, but I clung to ‘no audition'. If I didn't have to sing alone I'd be okay. Standing next to a strong singer I could hold a tune. The choir met in the Marais, the oldest part of Paris in the fourth arrondissement. I wrote the date and address in my diary.