Ransacking Paris (9 page)

I knew Simone de Beauvoir had lived in the boulevard Raspail when she was ‘a happy and somewhat opinionated child' and a ‘dutiful daughter'. It was not difficult to imagine her pressing the
porte
button to unlock her apartment building door and walking along the street to school, immersed in her own sense of self, her sense of being a separate individual. I was a student in Paris too, carrying my books and the desire to know alongside Simone in the cool morning air, smiling happily at no-one.

I swung through the gates of the language school and into a building of corridors and classrooms. In one of those doublings of time, the chalky hot smell of my high school classroom and the glaring summer light and the feeling of being caught forever in a desolate town trembled under the cool Paris morning. All those years ago Mrs Berman came and took our small class to the library and we had our French lessons there, surrounded by books before present-time existed.

I found the classroom and sat down. All the other students were at least twenty years younger than I was.

‘
Je m'appelle Didier
,' said the teacher. My name is Didier. That was easy. I could do this.

It didn't take long after that to realise my written French had betrayed me into a class higher than I had a hope of understanding. I couldn't answer any of the questions, I had no clue as to what I should be doing. The young Indian next to me chatted and asked Didier questions. Teacher's pet, I thought.
I
was the clever student; I was the one who could answer all the questions.

The two pretty Japanese girls in the next row stumbled through their answers and Didier smiled at them. I kept my head down and tried not to catch his eye.

The two hours were up. I waited until most of the students had left and approached Didier, who was packing up his books and papers.

‘
Cette classe est trop difficile pour moi
,' I said. ‘
J'ai besoin d'une autre classe
.' This class is too difficult for me. I need another class.

‘It's only your first day,' he said in accented English. ‘Take some more time.'

‘No, it's too hard,' I said, relieved to understand something again. ‘I need an easier class.'

‘Okay, I have another class that is more easy. You come to that. I speak a little English there. Tomorrow.'

I turned up the next day, a little less jauntily this time, but relieved when Didier greeted me with a smile and a clear, ‘
Comment allez-vous
?'

I sat down with another mix of travellers and migrants from Poland, Japan, India, the USA and the Middle East. As promised, Didier used some English and two- or three-word French instructions, which I could follow. He handed out a sheet of paper with conversation topics and lists of vocabulary and asked us to practise a short conversation with the person next to us.

We began halting, laughing exchanges, helping each other out with words and guessing what might be being said. Didier walked around the class, listening to each conversation, correcting grammar and pronunciation and providing the right French word when we looked at him helplessly. The woman I was speaking to was a doctor from Istanbul, nearer my age than any of the others. We laughed together, recognising each other's embarrassment at failing to be good at everything. Then we changed partners and I talked to a Japanese teenager who worked in IT and who was serious about his sentences. I felt pressure again, the desire to say everything perfectly. I wanted to have all the words in the right order, the tenses correct, before I even began the sentence. I told him the same things that I had told the Turkish doctor.

I went to class each day for a few weeks. As we relaxed with each other we spoke more and more in a
Franglais
in a variety of accents – Japanese, American, Hindi. Didier tried to correct us, but the urge to communicate was starting to overcome the desire to speak correctly. If I kept coming, in a few months I would be able to talk to all the people in the class easily, but not to anyone speaking actual French.

On the last day I gave Didier a card I had found in a shop which sold Australian postcards off the boulevard Raspail. I'd bought an elegant black-and-white image of the Sydney Opera House and wrote on the back,
chez moi
, my house, and
merci
. Didier smiled when he saw it. I had made a little joke in French.

On the way home from classes I sometimes got out of the Metro at Pigalle and walked up the steps to rue des Abbesses. There was often a transvestite street-worker in a mini-skirt and fishnet stockings on the corner of the rue André Antoine, the narrow alley below the steps. She was stockily built and looked Tahitian, with a broad nose and thick black hair. Every time I passed her she said, ‘
Bonjour Madame
,' and I answered, ‘
Bonjour Madame
.' The first time I was startled as I hadn't been greeted by a prostitute in the street before, but after that, it was the same as any polite exchange with people you see regularly but don't really know, acknowledging each other sharing the same space. It made me feel at home for that moment. In fact, I began getting out at Pigalle, just to greet her. To her I was part of this place, just like the two little boys who often played in the alley and the beggar with the smelly overcoat and swollen legs who sometimes rested there. One day I saw her talking to a young mother who had a baby in her arms and a boy standing in the folds of her skirt. I looked at the boy, bored and swinging the skirt, and felt envious of all of them. There was nothing any of them needed of me.

With the aid of my
Larousse
, the French bible of verb conjugations, I constructed a note asking for a conversation partner and put it on the wall of our building, outside on the street.

That afternoon the telephone rang, a young woman named Cosette. ‘Have you read Victor Hugo? Like that,' she said. Meaning, I guessed, like Cosette in
Les Misérables
. She lived in the same apartment block and suggested we go to the
piscine
, swimming pool, together the next morning. Apparently she had some children whom she had promised to take to the pool.

The next day I turned up at her apartment, hiding my towel and cossie in my bag in case that wasn't the arrangement we had made. A woman in her early twenties came to the door, curly blonde hair, short and slim. Inside was a teenage girl sitting at a table and a younger teenage boy half-lying amongst the sheets of a sofa bed watching television. I was confused. There was no way Cosette was old enough to be the mother of either of them and, besides, they were both African looking. I was introduced to Ornella and Augustin, who greeted me politely. In a garbled way I gathered that Cosette looked after them, but it appeared they lived there as they were still in their pyjamas.

The kids dressed and we all piled into Cosette's car and headed south right across Paris to Portes de Sèvres pool. I smiled a lot and pretended I knew what Cosette was chatting about. I learned that she was a mathematics
professeur
, which at that stage I thought meant professor. So young to be a professor! Finally at the pool, we changed into our cossies then walked out into the brilliant sunshine. The blue sky and water, the concrete, looked and felt like summer in my hometown in Australia. Cosette stripped off her bikini top, revealing sturdy shoulders and tanned breasts, and dived into the pool. I looked down at the loose skin on my arms and decided not to undress.

Ornella and I chatted laboriously and I understood that she was waiting to go to university where she wanted to study English literature. ‘
J'adore l'Anglais
,' she said. Whew! Now there was something I could talk about. We spoke for several minutes before the effort embarrassed and tired us both. Cosette, out of the pool, chatted to a couple of young men. She was so at ease, so French, in her nakedness that I wanted to be her.

I had several more conversations with Cosette. I found out she was from Normandy, that she was doing a PhD in mathematics, and that she had a dream to live in Cairns in tropical Australia because she wanted to be warm all year round. I wondered aloud if everyone longed for elsewhere, and Cosette smiled. Most of the time I left with a headache from the strain of trying to listen. The two teenagers were with her each time, which meant it was mostly noisy, and there were just too many voices to follow. I needed quiet conversation with one person if I was to get anywhere at all.

Although Cosette lived in the same building as I did, in one of those random mismatchings, I didn't even bump into her in the hall or courtyard or street after that. I sometimes wonder if she ever got to Cairns.

By the end of September it was noticeably cooler. The days were still warm but in the mornings and evenings the air was fresh. I'd never been much of an early riser, but I enjoyed getting up in the mornings and walking down to the
boulangerie
with the morning city smells of coffee and hot bread and old motor oil on the cobbles. The twinges of pain in my shoulder and arm had become an occasional dull ache, especially at night – I thought it must be the hard futon – and a walk in the morning helped ease it out.

Anthony arrived back from a week in Jordan talking to students and it was the weekend. We headed for the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the north-east of Paris, not far, as the crow flies, from Montmartre. It's a hilly park with grassy slopes where, we noticed, people were allowed to lie about. There were oak-filled glades and paths lined with chestnuts and clusters of cedars and pines and beeches. There was also a lake with a sheer cliff rising from it, on the summit of which was a temple, the Temple de la Sibylle, and further around, a torrent falling over an abyss into a cave. It didn't take long to realise that everything, the lake and cliff, the torrent and even the cave, was fake, the artfully arranged rocks and waterfalls puzzling the eye for a moment before the artifice was revealed.

The park was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century on a bare hill near the gibbets of Montfaucon where the corpses of criminals were left hanging until they rotted. The area was notorious for the smell and the carrion birds and the sheer terror of dozens of human bodies decomposing in the midday sun. The Age of Romanticism reclaimed the hill for a version of natural beauty, the park designer trying to imitate Rousseau's drama-filled version of wild nature: ‘Never does a plain, however beautiful it may be, seem so to me. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid.'

I thought of the Blue Mountains where our boys had grown up, the sandstone cliffs and rocky streams and waterfalls, so different from the plains and undulating hills where I was raised. I was used to subtle changes in form and colour, long stretches of grey-green eucalypts, yellowing wheat paddocks, gradual inclines. I wondered how much landscape shapes longings and even stories, whether my boys needed wilder country than I did, more dramatic tales?

‘A good place for kids to play,' said Anthony.

‘I was just thinking of our boys,' I said. We were stretched out on the grass by the lake looking up at the cliff, me propped on my elbows, Anthony leaning with his back against my knees. ‘Not kids anymore.'

Anthony nodded, his eyes shut. He reached his arm backward and I took his hand.

‘I wonder if Patrick has heard about his application for Amsterdam?' I said.

‘He would have told us. If he does get in Matt will be the only one left back home.'

We were going to talk about our boys. It was a recurring conversation, a reweaving of the pattern of our lives with them. It wasn't woven every day, not even every week, but once we started there was a deep pleasure that both of us extended as long as we could. It was not done in front of other people, it was a private weaving, not fit for others to see. At the same time, there was fear that the gods might hear us. Don't let the wanton gods know, speak in low voices. Don't let them know of the older boy who made a sculpture of string and Christmas baubles in the back yard, don't let them hear of the younger who whistled ‘Ode to Joy' on the veranda, don't let them see both boys sitting around a campfire watching sparks disappear into the night, don't let them smell their soapy after-bath-in-pyjamas bodies.

None of the memoirists except Madame de Sévigné writes of the visceral absorption in one's children. Montaigne says he doesn't like babies and de Beauvoir's disdain is famous: to have more children ‘was to go on playing the same old tune,
ad infinitum
'. I thought of Madame de Sévigné, criticised over the centuries for her outpouring about her daughter: ‘Do you think I don't kiss with all my heart your lovely cheeks and bosom? Do you think I can embrace you without infinite affection? Do you think affection can ever go further than mine?'

It's not how I would ever talk to or write to my children; it's too dramatic for me, like the fake Rousseau landscape, and yet, I know it speaks to the unsayable depth of my feeling. And Anthony's. Today, when the boys are on the other side of the world, love and some nostalgia well up and there is a tone in our voices that no-one else ever hears. It's over now, the daily care of small bodies and tender minds, and although they no longer orbit around us, we can't yet let go being the centre of their lives.

Five

October

I entreat the reader, should I ever find one, to remember that I have no pretensions to truthfulness except in what concerns my feelings; as for the facts I have never had much memory.

Stendhal

By early October the days were a couple of hours shorter than they had been when we arrived. I missed the long evenings, the feeling of endless ease that had been so enticing. In the mornings I awoke on the hard futon to an airless chilliness. The sky was often overcast, creating flat grey days where nothing seemed to move and, even when it was sunny, the studio didn't get any direct sunlight so the chill deepened. I noticed it more because the arm that had been aching seemed to get colder than the other one, as if the blood wasn't circulating through it. And my back was starting to ache. Apart from the occasional twinge from sitting hunched at the computer, I had never really had problems with my body before and simply expected it to go away. I had to admit that it had been getting worse for a while now.

‘It's not severe pain,' I tried to explain to Anthony. ‘It's more like someone hit me with a baseball bat a week or so ago and it's still aching.'

‘You should see a doctor,' he said.

‘Yeah, but it'll be right.' I was operating under the unsound belief that if I ignored it, it would go away – and, as it happened, I was more or less right, it wasn't anything life-threatening in the end but it did still have several stages to play out. I tried to ease out the ache with hot showers but the thin spray of the dodgy camp shower ran out in two minutes, barely enough time to even wash. I needed a proper shower, a proper bed and sunlight. I wanted to be able to stand up in my bedroom, not crouch on my knees, and I needed to be able to see further than the two metres across the courtyard. I had to find another apartment.

I had taken to sitting on the kitchen stool at the windows in the one spot where, if I gazed upwards, I could see the sky. I hadn't ever noticed it before, but not being able to see far made me feel cramped, more than that, trapped. I sat on a bench in the square at the bottom of Sacré-Coeur with my manuscript and soaked in the weak autumn sunlight and watched children on the carousel, but even out in the streets I couldn't see far enough. In the afternoons after writing I took to heading to the Seine to stand on the bridges so that I could see farther and feel the sense of release it gave me. I didn't know why at first, I just liked standing on the bridges gazing up or down the river, but one day I realised it was because I'd been used to being able to see a long way since the plains and low hills of earliest childhood. A long field of vision; it's odd the things you find you need.

There were practical reasons to move too. One of my travelling nieces was coming to stay, several friends were visiting later on, including Theo and his father, Kit, and both our boys might be coming. And now that it was getting colder, Anthony needed an office to work in and an internet connection at home. I couldn't keep sending him out to Camille's every day. He had put the idea to the international studies office at his university and they agreed to pay part of the rent of a two- bedroom apartment as it was cheaper than renting a separate work space.

It still seemed difficult to act. I wondered if it was the lack of light, or the endless silence when Anthony was away, or was it just that my body was changing? I'd not had a period for several months and my body felt as if it were drying out. Sometimes when I was sitting or walking I was conscious of my vagina as an inverted dagger, cold and empty, and my libido had started to disappear too, for a couple of weeks at a time, leaving me to feel as if a light had gone out. One evening I walked over the pont des Arts and saw laughing people in their twenties picnicking on the bridge with champagne and beer, baguettes and cheese, dining in the middle of the Seine, and I felt a stab of envy. Why couldn't I have been young in Paris and not a middle-aged woman groping for something that was long gone?

‘There's no age limit to being in Paris,' said Anthony. He came and went and when he wasn't there I felt as if I might be a nun in an enclosed order, silent and separated from the whole world. ‘You feel the same to me anyway. In my arms.'

‘Well, I'm not,' I said.

It wasn't just to do with the lack of desire; it was an everyday arid absence. As if sexuality had been central to my personality and without it I was voided. Then it came rushing back, wildly strong, seeming more intense than it ever had been, as if to doubly make up for its absence.

I studied the memoirists, looking for clues about this new flux. Montaigne wrote about his sexuality with extraordinary openness: ‘I yielded as freely and as thoughtlessly as anyone to the pleasure which then seized hold of me: making it last and prolonging it however, rather than making sudden thrusts' – which must have made his sixteenth-century lady readers quite interested in more than his literary technique. Sexuality, he believed, was the steady rhythm under everything: ‘The movement of the whole world tends towards copulation', but then his own virility began to fade: ‘I have been struck off the role of Cupid's attendants' and ‘It is certain that my organs may now be properly called shameful and wretched.' But, of course, he writes nothing of women's organs, the changes in our bodies that are far more radical than they are for men, the end of a rhythm of rich bleeding month by month since childhood, the final loss of the ability to grow entirely new human beings within our own.

The strange fluctuations, the thoughts of lost blood, blood flowing where it shouldn't, blood drying up, started creeping into the story about Theo and his mother
–
two different kinds of life ending. I wrote a series of pieces about blood: menstruation, the weird sisters in Macbeth, Theo's nose bleeding, a vein bursting in the brain. One night I dreamed there was an explosion in my own brain and I woke up with my heart thumping and lay in the dark wondering if my time had come. Lists of small losses accumulated. I dreamed about Dina, that I was her sister and had bought her a pale-green linen dress. I dreamed it so exactly that I got up in the morning and drew it – ‘But,' I said in the dream, ‘she never had a chance to wear it.' I woke up with tears still wet on my face.

I started searching for a new place, somewhere on an upper floor where I could see out. It didn't take long to find an apartment nearby in the rue Simart on the north side of Montmartre. It was on the fifth floor, without a lift admittedly, but that didn't matter because it was high and on a crossroads. It must surely have a long view in four directions, and sunlight. It was owned by Susie Laporte, who turned out to be a cheery Australian from Ballina in northern New South Wales.

‘Is the shower good?' I asked.

‘It's the first question Australians always ask. Yes, it's good. I used to live in rue Simart,' she replied. ‘After my children left home.'

‘I'll take it,' I replied, before I'd even seen it.

The choir in the Marais ought to have been the beginning and end of singing in Paris, but I regained courage and found a booklet,
Chanter à Paris
, listing all the choirs in Paris. I studied it carefully, limiting my choices to those open to beginners, and picked the one that was easiest to get to. It was past enrolment day, September was the
rentrée
, the beginning of the year for schoolchildren, universities, community classes and even for new book publications, but I thought if I turned up on the evening of the first class I would be allowed in. I wrote in my diary:
Choeur, 6 pm jeudi
, Choir 6pm Thursday,
rue des Amandiers, Metro Ménilmontant.

I set off in plenty of time the following Thursday, catching the Metro at Anvers on the line that took me directly to Ménilmontant. I had begun to love the Metro, the constant and changing flood of other people's lives passing mine. It was an underground labyrinth where the whole world might cross paths, a streaming set of stories seated next to each other for a few minutes; a beautiful young Muslim mother in a blue robe with a white veil looking like the Virgin Mary; two middle-aged Indians with a beat-box singing a rap song; an accordionist playing ‘Those Were the Days'; two Americans anxiously wondering aloud who might steal from them; an African girl with hair like Diana Ross's in the 1960s; the man whose skin was patched black and white like a Dalmatian dog, a pure black patch on one cheek and over his nose, the rest of his face pure white, his neck and arms dappled. I wanted to step inside them, to know the shimmer of their consciousness as they looked out at the world.

I had a sense of hunger at first, of need, but then it induced a tender reverie, a kind of daydreaming with physical warmth, a pleasurable loss of urgency about anything. I thought of Rousseau who said he ‘preferred to dream awake than asleep' and Proust who said reverie was his favourite emotion, a dreaminess that came paradoxically from a momentary insight into the nature of things. And Stendhal too wrote, ‘In Paris I was an impassioned dreamer, gazing at the sky and always on the point of being run over by a cabriolet', and, better still, ‘I am witty no more than once a week and then only for five minutes; I prefer to daydream.'

I liked Stendhal right away. He's a curious cup of tea; he tells the truth, but he pretends to hide. For a start, his memoir is called
The Life of Henry Brulard
, one of his many pseudonyms. He claims on the title page that it is a novel and adds, ‘To the messieurs of Police. There is nothing political in this novel. The scheme is a hothead of every kind who grows weary and slowly sees the light and ends up devoting himself to the cult of luxurious town-houses.'

None of that is true, it's all a sardonic screen. Behind it he writes with sharp honesty so it's unsurprising when he says his two pet aversions are vagueness and hypocrisy. He says he has no pretensions to truthfulness except where it concerns his feelings because he's never had much memory for the facts, an escape route of course, but I'm inclined to believe him. He reveals more of himself in hiding; he has more actual truthfulness than Rousseau, who protests his honesty so passionately. Rousseau's claim that he bares his soul as God has seen it makes me squirm; can't he see? Fooling yourself is worse than fooling other people.

I like Stendhal when he says near the beginning of his memoir: ‘I ought to write my life […] The idea appealed to me. Yes, but the terrible quantity of
I
s and
Me
s. That would be enough to put the most well-disposed reader's back up.' Indeed. It's always the first problem for any writer who won't go to the bother of constructing a fiction. Not everyone can be as bold as Montaigne and say, with a shrug, ‘Therefore, Farewell dear Reader.' Stendhal puts his case without argument or defence: ‘I ought to write my life, perhaps in the end, when it is finished in two or three years time, I shall know what I've been, cheerful or sad, a witty man or a fool, a man of courage or fearful, in sum happy or unhappy in fact …'

It sounds simple enough, not too ambitious, but it doesn't take long to realise Stendhal is nothing if not ironic. In the end he puts aside his fear of egoism: ‘My confessions won't exist thirty years after they are printed if the reader finds the
I
s and
Me
s too tiresome; all the same I shall have had the pleasure of writing them and of conducting a thorough examination of my conscience.'

I didn't even notice that phrase of Stendhal's when I first read it, ‘the pleasure of examining my conscience'. It was what each member of my family did every day when I was a child. We were taught to ask ourselves in the evenings, had we been good, which mostly meant had we obeyed our parents and not argued with our brothers and sisters, or at least not gotten into an all-out brawl with them. Kneeling on the lino next to my bed, making a sign of the cross, praying for the salvation of the Communists, promising to be good. It was earnest and dogmatic, but by the time I was a teenager it had become a habit of self-examination that has lasted a lifetime. Did I speak to the prostitute on the corner with an open heart or was I secretly judgmental? Was it pride that made me flee from the choir in the Marais? I'd never thought of it as a pleasure before Stendhal, but he's right. It's the careful spreading out of what actually happened, not accepting the self-serving version that is instantly manufactured; it's the pleasure of seeing what the heart is made of, a multi-striped thing of light and dark.

It means that Stendhal can admit, for example, that despite his passion for the rights of the common people, his tastes are aloof and aristocratic: ‘I love the people, I detest their oppressors, but it would be a constant torment for me to live with the people', because ‘the people are always dirty'.

Not just, it would be trying, but rather a ‘constant torment' for him to have lived in the disorder of my childhood: encrusted tomato sauce bottle on the table, a mountain of unironed clothes in the corner, a broken fibro and tin lavatory in the back yard, coats on the bed at night in winter when there were not enough blankets. I'd like to be able to tell Stendhal it wasn't harsh or difficult, it was just the way things were.
C'est la vie
. I would admit to him that when I reached adolescence and realised how other people lived, it became embarrassing, but I didn't feel disadvantaged, because my mother had ingrained in us a disdain for people with money. We looked down on the rich.

*

What else can I report about Stendhal?

His given name was Marie-Henri Beyle. He was born into an haut-bourgeois family in Grenoble in south-east France in 1783 and died in 1842. He detested most of his family except his adored mother, his refined Aunt Elizabeth and his generous, cultivated grandfather. His mother died when he was seven years old making him yet another motherless writer. He was a lonely and unhappy child, kept separate from other children most of his childhood, but finding them noisy and rough when he was finally allowed to mix with them. He didn't like crudeness and vulgarity: ‘I avert my gaze and my memory from anything low', a confession that made me feel let off the hook as I have a similar prissiness – no fart or poo jokes for me. He called it his
espagnolism
, his ‘accursed Spanish character', a refinement he inherited from his aunt. He joined the army for a period, loved Italy, loved many women but had sex with only six of them and wrote novels,
The Black and the Red
and
The Charterhouse of Parma
, for which he became famous – but not until the twentieth century. He was a man of sardonic wit who liked Montaigne, but thought Rousseau bombastic, although when he was a boy he was in ‘raptures of delight and voluptuousness' reading one of Rousseau's love stories.