My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  I would work on the novel during the day, beginning at nine in the morning. I would break for lunch, walk down to the market street on the rue de Seine, buy food at the charcuterie, stop for a baguette, and bring the food back to my room. After lunch I would nap for an hour, rise, wash my face with cold water, then resume writing until five o’clock. There was an exceptional sameness to these days, a habitualness that pleased me immensely. I tried to fill up five legal pages a day, a quota that translated directly into seven typewritten, double-spaced pages. At the end of the first week I had twenty-eight pages. I worked seven days a week during the four months I lived in Paris, and before I left the Grand Hôtel des Balcons I would produce six hundred handwritten pages. It would be the most productive time in my life. I was living in Paris writing about Charleston, South Carolina, obsessed with the sharp beauty and all the prickly, mettlesome dilemmas of the Old South. By day I walked the old streets of Charleston, and by night I would walk the streets of Paris. Every evening I took long, unplanned walks through Paris, going in a different direction each time, trying to memorize and capture the immensity and hieratic radiance of the most beautiful city on earth. Each walk became a gathering of images stored like rare honey in the memory of my promenades through the city. There was the rue Mouffetard, the famous market street with its lush displays of mushrooms scrubbed and white as piano keys; bloodred tomatoes glistening in the rain; endives piled like the severed white ears of elves; wheels of Brie; the careful architecture of cheeses tiered dangerously high. There was the blood of horses on the butcher’s apron in the boucherie chevaline; the stunned lambs’ heads; hanging rabbits with fur left on their feet like socks; and pigs roasting whole on spits in the windows of Greek restaurants. Rue Mouffetard is a symphony of odors. You can close your eyes and describe with accuracy the shops you are passing. In the fish markets, there were the corpses of small eviscerated sharks staring outward toward the street; the trout arranged in rows like notes on a musical scale; prawns long as a man’s hand; the eels split down the middle, hanging from ropes. Always there was a genius for display, order, and symmetry among French shopkeepers, a passion for the dignity of their trade.

  There were the cathedrals that rose out of the city, immense buttressed tongues of stone, eloquent unimaginable canons of faith. Within those walls, the sun filtered through the stained-glass windows like lozenges of light through the tail feathers of peacocks. The windows were a celebration of sunlight. There was Notre Dame at night during a snowstorm with the flakes thickly swirling through the searchlights that illuminated the buttresses and gargoyles. The gargoyles, up close, through the snow, looked like the black dreams of God.

  In the Luxembourg Gardens, there was an old woman who fed the birds with bread and seeds every evening at the same time. She had deep marks beneath her eyes like a pair of unmatched shoes. Her eyes had aged independently of each other and she walked with a cane. The birds and the woman rendezvoused at the same chair daily. She would put seeds in her mouth and the smallest, most courageous of the birds would hover about her face and kiss the seeds from her lips. The pigeons ruled the ground beneath her and would put the smaller birds to flight with rushing, bullying movements of their wings and chests. All around her was the small havoc of wings, the cries and secret language of birds, bread and seeds and wings and the sound of her laughter. When the food was gone, the birds would leave her, and the old woman in her blue coat would limp out of the park toward the rue de Vaugirard.

  There were clochards of Paris—the winos, the dispossessed who lived beneath the bridges and in the metro stations. There were the injured, aggrieved men whom I would find sleeping on heated grates during rainstorms or throwing up on the benches of the metro stations. The vomit in the metro is always red, the color of table wine favored by the clochards. They are licensed by the city of Paris, and it must be a grim existential moment in a human life when you decide to register your name officially as a clochard.

  There was a late-night walk when I came upon the bruised regiments of prostitutes on rue Saint-Denis who can proposition men in five or six languages. Some of the women were very beautiful; some were old, washed-out, desiccated. “I do anything you want, beeg boy,” they would call out to me. “Don’t be afraid, beeg boy. Brigitte be nice to beeg boy.” And it would embarrass me that they unfailingly knew I was an American; I wore my nationality like a cheap cologne. In my imagination, syphilis bacilli, large as dogs, crouched in the dim vestibules and recesses of the disquieting street. In an Algerian district not far away, I witnessed fifty Algerian men bidding on a very young girl in the window. There was an auctioneer in the front of the window chiding the men for their cheapness, and the noise rose in pitch as the bidding grew feverish. The girl was very young, fragile, and she was not smiling. “It’s her first time,” my companion on the walk who spoke French said. “She’s a virgin.” The girl had a small birthmark on her cheek and was very pretty. I wondered about her most private, urgent thoughts at that moment before she stepped forth into the lewd demimonde of the twelfth arrondissement. I wondered how she felt about the eyes of men, of her childhood in France.

  Walks through Paris, each night, each one different, each image a fragment, each fragment a bright sliver of memory always on call. It was always the same Paris and always a new Paris and I never tired of the walks. Walking along the Seine, stepping over the urine of clochards, smelling the perfume of the elegant fur-wrapped women emerging from La Tour d’Argent, peering into the high windows of the houses on the Île Saint-Louis, I could understand perfectly why the city of Paris had inspired so many artists for so many centuries. Such beauty and such decadence, in the old dance of life and lust and human sanctity in cities, creates a flammable desire to match such artistry. You want to prove yourself equal to such a city. In my walks through Paris I got to know the city and felt the first fledgling impulse to write about Paris; felt the old leap and stir as the images navigated the bloodstream, began to circulate in dreams and nightmares until they would one day burst forth as cries of the heart, psalms of the long season, poems of the exhausted flesh, and gargoyles. There is no writing, no art, without gargoyles.

  It was no easy task to find a typist in Paris. Nor was it simple to find a typewriter with an American keyboard. I believed with all my innocent heart that all the keyboards of the Western world were identical. To my horror, the French keyboard looked as though it were assembled by the colicky Parisians whose hobby was playing the accordion. Typists are holy figures to me and I am both devotee and helot of their lightning-fingered craft. Normally I choose my typists with exquisite care, with the caution of the incurable paranoid, for the typist, no matter how discreet or devotional, becomes the writer’s first critic. If you bore your typist, there is at least an outside chance that the world will sleep. I do not like my prose to be used as a nonaddictive substitute for Seconal. But, in Paris, I needed a typist with access to an American typewriter, so I could not exercise any choosiness. I placed an index card on a bulletin board at Shakespeare and Company and received not one inquiry. But one day in my second week—with the accordionist hacking away, the flutist piping, and my radio playing—I heard a furious argument break out down the hall, and it cheered my soul to hear two people screaming obscenities at each other in English. Later, I went down, knocked on the door, and met the man who would become my typist in Paris. He preferred the word “amanuensis.” My amanuensis was named Mike and his girlfriend was called Dorea.

  Mike needed money badly and he assured me he was an expert typist. He had worked his way through college typing term papers, won a coveted award for speed typing, and knew where a cheap American typewriter was for sale in a secondhand shop on the Right Bank. Mike, of course, had never typed a single phoneme in his life, but I would not learn this for several weeks. There was a superheroism, a ghastly brilliance, in Mike’s unlimited capacity for lying. He was opinionated, high-strung, outrageous, one of those priestly fools of the open road you often encounter among youn
g Americans backpacking through Europe. Dorea was quiet as a houseplant except when she was trading obscenities with her love.

  Two weeks later, when Mike brought me the first twenty pages of the typed manuscript, I wanted to sail Mike off the sixth floor like a Frisbee. I had never seen such inept typing, much less paid money for it. But I had also rarely encountered a prevaricator of such remarkable gifts as this eloquent, half-crazed American.

  “Mike,” I yelled, “it looks like you typed this on a French keyboard! I like to have at least one or two words per page spelled right before I hand it to my editor. And each page looks like it’s been painted with Wite-Out.” I held up the first page, which was stiffened and disfigured with that strange liquid typists use to eradicate mistakes.

  “There’s a reason why the typing is so bad, Pat,” Mike answered calmly. “It was because I was distracted by the brilliance of your prose.”

  “What?” I screamed again. “It’s obvious you’ve never typed in your life.”

  “You’re right. I confess it. I knew I couldn’t fool you for long. You see too far into the spirit. My fingers actually trembled with passion as I was swept away by the power of your prose. I couldn’t sleep after I read your work. Dorea will vouch for me, Pat. I looked up from the typewriter and said, ‘Dorea, this man will see right through me. I can hide nothing from this man.’ ”

  I said, “I have never met anyone so full of crap in my life.”

  “See, Dorea,” Mike said, “he sees right through me.”

  “It’s easy to spot a jerk,” Dorea answered, dreamily blowing smoke out the window.

  “I’ve been very distracted, Pat,” Mike said, ignoring her. “But, of course, you already knew that.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Dorea has not had her period,” Mike said.

  “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t have one thing to do with your lousy typing.”

  “Dorea has been indiscreet with another man,” Mike admitted sadly. “It is not my child.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whined, “but this is none of my business.”

  “I will marry Dorea anyway and raise the child as my own. I love her that much. But I know you have seen that already. I’m a slave to love.”

  “Fine,” I said, wishing they would both leave, “but I didn’t see that at all.”

  “I would also like to apologize for making that crack about Gertrude Stein when we met the other day. I do not really hate homosexuals. In fact, I am a reformed homosexual. But, of course, with your insight, you knew that already.”

  “It never even occurred to me.”

  “I was in a mental hospital long ago, but, of course, you knew that. As an artist you know everything about people.”

  “For some reason, Mike, that doesn’t surprise me a bit.”

  “And I was on cocaine the day you hired me to be your typist. Pat, I realize I am obnoxious and offend everyone—”

  “Amen,” Dorea whispered.

  “—but I’m no longer crazy. I have come to realize that it is the world that is insane, not me. I was sick for my whole first month in Paris but then I took a suppository. Americans are prejudiced against suppositories. You should include that in your book. Dorea has been sick for a week and won’t take a suppository. She prefers to be sick. But she is pregnant and a suppository may help her now. We are completely broke and we need the money I’ll make from typing your manuscript. Otherwise, the three of us will die of starvation—Dorea, the baby, and me. But an artist with your compassion would not let a fetus die in the womb of such a fine woman.”

  Mike left my room that day with an advance for his services. He swore they would name the baby after me, even though I learned much later that Dorea was not pregnant. Within a month, after a vast expenditure for Wite-Out, I had trained an excellent typist and a trenchant literary critic to boot. I looked forward to Mike’s visits, to his mad, pixilated, and subversive views of the world, and I kept a package of Gitanes for Dorea to smoke.

  From travel I have observed that the Germans and the Japanese have inherited the earth. In the twentieth century, it was smart politics to be trounced soundly in a world war. Germans were ubiquitous that spring and the Japanese were the most passionate, untiring photographers on earth—they experienced the city of Paris through glass, through square apertures and focused lenses. I took eighteen photographs of Japanese couples on the Pont Royal as I crossed the Seine on the way to check my mail at the American Express office. The Japanese smile as frequently as Americans and their congenial politesse was as innate as their obsessive need to photograph. The Japanese and I dazzled one another with the white gunnery of our smiling. I like smiling nations and I learned to admire Japan as I checked my mail in Paris. A Japanese male without a camera looked undressed to me. They wore Nikons and Minoltas like monocles over their right eyes.

  My first friend at the Grand Hôtel des Balcons was a twenty-two-year-old Japanese man whose passport was stolen in the metro, stranding him in Paris. His stay in Paris was a lonely one. At breakfast one morning, Mr. Hara smiled at me over his croissant, bowed formally, and said, “English velly bad.”

  “Japanese worse,” I replied, pointing to myself.

  “Velly sorry. Bad English,” he said.

  “Very sorry. Bad Japanese,” I answered.

  Mr. Hara had a shining, beautiful face, round as a melon, amber colored. “Speak velly well you, français.”

  “No français, no Japanese,” I said.

  “Français velly hard. I go to Japan soon. I sell Toyota. You know Toyota?”

  “I drive a Datsun,” I answered.

  “Datsun velly bad. Toyota velly good.”

  Mr. Hara and I formed a rather unsteady alliance after this brief unsatisfactory encounter over breakfast. The language gulf was immense and unbridgeable but Mr. Hara was extremely lonely. He would come to my room each morning, bow deeply when I answered the door, and say with unimaginable formality that he would be very proud to have breakfast with me. He bought an English–Japanese dictionary to help facilitate our exchanges. Mostly we grinned idiotically at each other, and I learned from conversing with Mr. Hara that it is as difficult to simplify your language as it is to increase its range. When he finally received a new passport, he invited me to lunch to celebrate his departure from France. Like all foreigners, Mr. Hara had suffered unpardonable indignities from French waiters. All French waiters seem like direct descendants of those hooded men who worked the guillotine for the Directory, and Mr. Hara held them all in bristling contempt. He had discovered a cafeteria in Saint-Germain-des-Prés without waiters, which was the only restaurant in Paris he would enter.

  “I starve without this place,” Mr. Hara said. “French velly bad. French hate Japanese people.”

  “The French hate everybody.”

  He toasted our friendship with a glass of red wine held aloft, then said to me, “Are you mad at Mr. Hara for Pearl Harbor?”

  “No, of course not, Mr. Hara. Are you mad at me for Hiroshima?”

  “Mr. Hara velly solly for Pearl Harbor. Velly solly for the Japanese people. Japan should have attacked France. That would be velly good.”

  “You don’t mean that, Mr. Hara.”

  “Yes,” he said fiercely, “then Mr. Hara would kill all French waiters. They hate Japanese people.”

  As we ate, Mr. Hara began reciting a list of atrocities committed against him in French restaurants. He talked and ate at the same time. He was not dexterous with a fork. He had ordered peas, and I do not think a single pea passed between his lips. There were peas on his shirt, sitting singly and in pairs on his arms, peas in his wine, peas spread across his side of the table, and peas rolling toward mine. When the peas were dispersed, he began dismembering his chicken breast with inelegant, skewering movements of his knife and fork. The chicken hit the floor twice, shooting off his plate like a flushed quail. He would pick it up, apologize, continue his bitter fulminations against the French nation, and beat at the chick
en with his utensils. When the meal was done, I looked at Mr. Hara finishing his pea-flavored wine. When I saw his face, I could not keep from hooting. There were peas mashed on his chin, red cabbage hanging from the buttons of his shirt, chicken morsels on his upper lip. Remnants of his entire meal were scattered over his face and body. He laughed with me; then, staring at his fork, he declared, “Fork velly hard. Chopsticks velly easy. The French invent fork? No, Mr. Pat?”