We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  Courante, lente, violente, the rhyme ended up here as a transparent layer for an insight. A veil. Behind, the image of you escapes me, but always comes back. I will leave the coincidence as it is. To be willing to unravel it, would lead to disappointment. Now I want you in this sealed room of paintings in which we are imprisoned. But you say, no, you are tired, you quieten. And I fall, and in my fall I hear, my lack of words taking you away.

  Do you know the things Swedenborg did not tell — even less than the things Huysmans wrote? Do you know the Song of Paris, how every century she had taken civilisation and made it dance to her tune? Built it and sung it and dressed it, prepared it for the table, for the night assembly, for the bed? For prayer, for wit, for treachery, for rhetoric, for devotion, for the song’s life and death? I need a map, one I cannot look at because it doesn’t exist other than in words, as a title and as a story called Mappa Mundi, the tale of a character, or a person, who disappears abducted by a shadow in Paris. This is how I like to read about the city. It is of no use, or not much use, to know it only as a spree, or as an aesthetic jolt, returning very sophisticated about it. … After the spree a veil is drawn, a sober, noli me tangere veil. Isis, whose face on a first swift initiation you think you have seen, even to the colour of her eyes, Isis you believe you have kissed, withdraws… and for lover and mistress you are left with an image, remote as Sainte Geneviève where she stands looking upstream, an inviolable city behind her. Upstream, flowing, courante, lente, violente, garbled signal, garbled signal. I want to lift this veil and wake up in the Musée de Cluny, in front of the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, to encounter the enigma of the inscription À MON SEUL DÉSIR for my only desire. But from this fall I won’t wake up, still I stay, they will find me on the carpet, ruined on the floor. So it ends and begins anew, with no song, with a rhyme, with no reason, courante, lente, violente, shall we go?, the ruin, the rhyme, the ruin, curtain, curtain, courante…

  L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante

  L’amour s’en va

  Comme la vie est lente

  Et comme l’Espérance est violente.

  Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure

  Les jours s’en vont je demeure

  All love goes by as water to the sea

  All love goes by

  How slow life seems to me

  How violent the hope of love can be

  Let night come on bells end the day

  The days go by me still I stay

  From Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Pont Mirabeau (tr. Richard Wilbur)

  Moods and Materials

  A dream, 13/14 June 2018

  André Breton, Soluble Fish

  Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum

  Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (tr.

  Marc Lowenthal)

  Giorgio Manganelli, Discorso dell’ombra e dello stemma

  Glenn Gould, The Idea of North Henri Michaux, “My Properties” and “The Night Moves”

  in Darkness Falls (tr. David Ball)

  Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu

  Mary Butts, “Mappa Mundi” in The Complete Stories

  Robert Aldrich, Kiss Me Deadly

  Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch (tr. Richard Dixon)

  Various broken and patched up recollections, summer 2018

  Peacock Pie in Paris

  Adrian Grafe

  Hélène Berr (1921–1944)

  The following lines are freely indebted to some passages from:

  Hélène Berr, Journal 1942–1944, preface by Patrick Modiano,

  Tallandier: Paris, 2008

  I first saw her at the Institut library,

  On Rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine.

  ”Do you have Peacock Pie?”

  They didn’t. “I have it and will gladly lend it to you.”

  We met at the Keats lecture the next day.

  “Keep the book as long as you like.”

  “I’ll return it to you at the end of the year.”

  She told me her name was Hélène.

  She told me many things over the months that followed.

  I took the 92 bus from Montparnasse to the Etoile,

  And walked along Avenue Victor Hugo.

  By the time I reached 40, Rue de Villejust,

  The famous poet’s address, I was holding my breath.

  The concierge handed me a book

  Along with a card addressed to me. It read:

  “You wake to the softest light, the deepest blue”.

  I breathed anew.

  This afternoon I chatted in the Sorbonne courtyard with

  Jane Austen — I mean the girl doing her thesis on

  Jane Austen.

  These students all have the gift

  Of making you feel they like you.

  Today’s Keats lecture I found baffling.

  But I had no doubt it was full of fire and poetry.

  Boulevard Saint-Michel was bathed in sunlight,

  Crowded and lively. I felt the familiar joy

  As I approached Rue Soufflot.

  From there down to Boulevard Saint-Germain

  I always feel I’m in wonderland.

  Sitting by the duck-pond in the Luxembourg,

  I watched the children’s sailboats

  On their curving voyages across the water.

  Someone said: “The Germans are going to win the war”.

  I protested as best I could: “Beauty is not beauty

  If some people are free to enjoy it and others are not”.

  In the Latin Quarter I met a friend.

  I was wearing my jacket

  With the yellow star sewn into the lapel.

  I was scared it would break up our friendship.

  But such a thing did not cross his mind.

  We walked together to the Champ-de-Mars.

  Never did a park seem more aptly named:

  There were Kraut soldiers goose-stepping up and down

  With their necks thrown back. I couldn’t help laughing.

  This morning I talked with Jane Austen

  At her place on Rue Claude Bernard.

  Her father had died in a concentration camp.

  “They will pay for this,” I told her.

  She replied, “They will, but that won’t bring the dead back to life”.

  Her street is so hospitable.

  A few days before, just down the road,

  A woman had given birth on the pavement.

  When I left Jane, there was a sudden downpour:

  The streets were empty, and I had Paris all to myself.

  I walked across Place du Carrousel.

  The Louvre stood stark against the sky,

  Like a whale or what used to be the map of Europe.

  From the Institut I walked to Saint-Séverin,

  Then crossed Notre-Dame Bridge

  And sat down in the gardens behind the cathedral.

  A storm broke out. Hailstones pelted my skin.

  I could have stayed there forever.

  But the keeper threw me out on seeing my yellow star.

  At the last Keats lecture of the year

  Hélène, true to her word, gave me my book back.

  Though I kept an eye out for her at the Institut

  I never saw her again after that.

  She had wrapped it in tissue paper and tied it with a ribbon.

  On a blank card, above her signature she had written:

  “A joy forever! Perhaps this is the only copy of Peacock Pie in Paris”.

  Dreams of the Dead - IX

  Alex Pheby

  Samuel Beckett dreamt this dream in/of Paris in/of the rooms above Shakespeare and Company.

  On the table there are two photographs: one is of a tiger, the other is on a Vichy regime ID card. The tiger growls as it approaches — it must have been photographed with a very long lens, since these animals are aggressive; no one armed only with a camera would be a match for it.

&nbs
p; On the ID card is an old man with glasses and an eye patch, thin and neurotic, but with an intensity of stare that is intimidating. There are other things on the table, certainly — a saucer from which the cup is missing and into which tea has been poured to cool, the guide sheet from a pad of letter paper, three or four cough lozenges rewrapped in crinkled cellophane, that kind of thing — but these two photographs stand out since you are a human being and notice danger and faces. So should you make a pattern of these two things? Draw a conclusion from them? Despite the frailty of the man, he has the spirit of a tiger and should not be taken for granted? That would be too neat.

  Beside the table, one either side, are deux nègres singing from prayer books, their insultingly thick lips mouthing the words to different songs on the same subject, but frozen in place in a world where their music soothes only their owner, and any rebellious inclinations they might have in the quiets of their minds are subservient to the dinner music they produce: their song is an apéritif for the dreamer of this dream.

  You have a ham sandwich in your lap on wax paper. It is too perfect for you to eat. White bread, with the crusts cut off, wafers of pig (which are haram) unsalted butter and no mustard. What conclusions can you draw about a person who wishes, but fails, to eat food like this, whilst being sung to by slaves?

  Draw no conclusions — they are not warranted.

  Outside the room in which you sit a girl is making noise, and you ignore her. You ignore that you are ignoring her, and turn your attention to the back of the room where the man identified by the ID card is sitting in an armchair with an open book on his lap. Beside him is a cat with a kink in its tail. There is no wax paper, but he has a fountain pen, the tip of which is pressed to the page of the book in front of him, unmoving. Surely this is something from which conclusions may be drawn, even if minstrels (genderless) and forbidden sandwiches (neither kosher nor halal) are not worthy of them?

  Resist the temptation, since this is a dream, which is a slippery species of thing, and it can be strangled easily if you can only get a grip on it before it squirms away.

  She’s at it again, calling from the hallway. Doesn’t she understand that she is indoors? She should use her indoor voice! She is not a goatherd on the side of an alp, calling the flock in. It is exasperating to have the attention nagged at constantly, especially in a dream where intrusions from the other world can bring everything to an end in an instant.

  If there is a bird outside the window; or the tolling of Emmanuel, Marie, Gabriel, Anne Geneviève, Denis, Marcel, Étienne, Benoît-Joseph, Maurice, and Jean-Marie; or flagstones being lifted (to reveal la plage) and hurled, they will encroach on the carefully constructed fantasy. It is as fragile as a bubble and can be burst by simply turning your mind to it.

  What is so important anyway? Don’t pay her any mind, it’s not worth the biscuit.

  The figure in the chair is not round-headed, but he has spent a great deal of time in Italy speculating on ideas with more and less success. His work is contradictory, marrying the ineffable with the very much effable, poetry with the everyday, fact and myth, but today he is absolutely motionless. He is like a corpse, or like a puppet, or like a puppet constructed from a corpse, and the positioning of his chair against the undrawn curtains is suspicious. Is there someone behind there, hidden, waiting to perpetrate a fraud on the dreamer? You scan the hem of the curtain, which is faded and threadbare red velvet (if it makes any difference), and indeed, there are a pair of feet, the toes arched so they bring to mind the talons of an eagle, perched on a branch. They march in place, anxiously or excitedly; it is impossible to tell which.

  They are a girl’s feet. Are they her feet? You cannot hear her now in the hallway, so it is not impossible that she has left the shop, gone into the courtyard, climbed up the drainpipe, made it to the window ledge, slipped the latch with a metal ruler or T-square, opened the window, climbed in through the open window, and now stands behind the curtain.

  Puppets can be moved by rods as well as strings, and ventriloquists hollow out a block of wood and place a mechanism inside that allows them to move the mouth, and they slip their arm into the corpse’s sleeve to give the impression that the puppet has one hand that is still alive. Is this what she has done, so that now she shuffles impatiently, waiting for the performance to begin?

  No, there she is again in the hallway, calling for you. But a fake medium can arrange things in a room so that the voices of the dead come from offstage, using a gramophone or pipework such as used on a ship to talk from one deck to another. There are many forms of amplification that one can rig up very easily that could make it seem as if she was in one place when in fact she is in another.

  You return your attention to the writer, to his corpse, to his puppet, but if you are hoping to be distracted from her by something your master will say or do you are unlucky, since the body remains utterly still and there is about his face the quality of a funerary mask such as that of gold made for the mummy of Tutankhamun, or Agamemnon’s that found its way to the tribe of the Mycenae, though neither of those wore glasses and an eyepatch.

  It is surprisingly difficult to ignore something when you are aware of the effort, which is why it is always important to keep yourself occupied. Writing books is a good way of distracting yourself from almost anything — it is such an involved process that it is hard to think of anything else, even when it is in your interests to do so — but if you do not have the talent to write books of your own, or you are always in the presence of people who are very much better at it than you are, you can distract yourself by paying very close attention to the writings of these people as an apprentice carpenter pays attention to his master. The novice can watch carefully all the things the old hand does and, in the privacy afforded you once your master has laid down their tools for the night and has gone to be fêted in Chez Francis and Le Fouquet’s and Les Deux Magots, attempt a panel of your own devising, a bas relief in wood to a similar but not identical scheme as that worked on by your master, and attempt to make the same scene using the same techniques and hope one day either for your skill to grow greater than your master’s or for your master’s skill to diminish, or for your master to die.

  During this uncomfortable period of pupillage, which feels a little like a prolonged arse-fucking, you can alleviate your resentment by making subtle and snide allusions to the faults of your master, who is only a human being, after all, and you can represent him, or his family, in a less than flattering light, but in ways that are entirely deniable, and thereby have the best of both worlds, in that your master will know what you have done but will be unable to chide you for it since that looks an awful lot like paranoia, and to admit you represented something so close to reality that it was recognisable even when disguised is to admit that the apprentice possesses a degree of skill his master has yet to admit exists…

  You are interrupted when the corpse moves.

  If the puppeteer is trying for verisimilitude, she is not successful: the effect is unnerving and uncanny, jerky like a seafront fortune-telling-booth swami, gears with thick teeth grinding and belts slipping. The voice she gives him is nothing like his own, except for the Irish accent, though her slight Triestine twang ruins this, too.