Chapter 50
June 23, 1951
She emerges nauseous to sunshine flooding her hotel room, glaring sunshine that makes her temples throb painfully but disperses the fragments of the long nightmare, mid-morning sunshine (her watch marks 9:45) and she’s still in bed, something which never happens and today of all days, won’t she be late for the appointment? She knows she’s ill but forces herself up, goes over to the table, unsteady on her feet, and squints at the administrative-blue summons enjoining her to present herself at the Visa Department of the Préfecture de Paris at 11:30am in view of obtaining her Permanent Resident carte de séjour. She sits down, waiting for the dizziness to go away, and tries to focus on her mother’s letter received the day before, confirming the earlier jubilant phone call: now that her father had rallied and was out of danger there was no point her returning to Denver, all that expense.
She washes from head to foot at the washbasin, carefully avoiding her poor image in the mirror, and dresses quickly. She decides to skip breakfast. Maybe fresh air outside will settle her stomach and clear her head. She takes her book and leaves the hotel. Halfway down the block her brain starts to function and she realizes the metro is in the other direction.
She takes a few steps down the metro stairs. The nausea worsens at the idea of underground corridors instead of sky. She pulls back and up and decides on surface transportation to the Prefecture.
Near the bus-stop bystanders have gathered. She hears a tense American voice and calming French voices.
A woman says: “Don’t get excited, it’s not our fault if you don’t speak French.”
Another bystander says in English: “Combs? You want perhaps to buy combs?”
The American voice, tense to the breaking point: “No! No!”
Helen joins the group. He’s a tall very nice-looking young man, a little wild-eyed with frustration. Holding a heavy valise in one hand and clutching a guidebook in the other, he looks as if he’d gotten off the boat train from Le Havre that very morning.
“Can I help you?” At her question, in English, the bystanders drift away, leaving them by themselves.
“Nobody understands me here. No, they understand but they won’t tell me where it is. I don’t want to buy a comb.”
He could use one, she thinks. His hair is as wild as his eyes. But he looks nice that way. She asks him just what it is he’s looking for. His eyes are blue.
“They refuse to tell me where the Catacombs are.”
“It’s not worth visiting. I’ve been there. Nothing but bones and skulls. I was glad to get out of it into the sunshine. It’s such a nice day. Have you ever been to the flower market by the Seine? Or to the Eiffel Tower? Or the Luxembourg Gardens?”
She breaks off, embarrassed. Won’t he think she’s trying to maneuver him into going to the flower market or to the Eiffel Tower or the Luxembourg Gardens with her? Isn’t that exactly what she’s trying to do? He’s so lost. That appeals to her even more than his good looks. Maybe she’ll be able to calm him down. All her friends back in Denver said she was good with lost bewildered people. It’ll get you into trouble one of these days, they often said.
But she has to go to the Prefecture immediately. And he’s set on going to the Catacombs, God alone knows why. He says it again, that where he wants to go is to the Catacombs.
Stupidly (as she’ll soon realize) she walks with him back to the metro she hadn’t wanted to go down to. She shows him the big map under glass, points at the line to take, the station to get off at, change for this other line and then get off here at Denfert-Rochereau. Denfert-Rochereau is where there’s a big green lion.
“I don’t want to go to the zoo. I want to go to the Catacombs.”
“It’s a statue, a big old bronze lion. That’s why it’s green. Anyhow a real lion at the zoo wouldn’t be green would it? An Irish lion maybe.”
“There are no lions in Ireland. Or snakes either. I’ll get lost. Come with me to the Catacombs.”
A small cloud veils the sun. A chilly wind starts up.
“I can’t. I have an appointment,” she says to his back. Already he’s going down the steps. He’s sure to take the wrong line. Strongly tempted to join him, she takes three steps down out of the sunshine, which has returned, and then pulls back and up again.
“Line Eight,” she cries to his dwindling back. Somebody will tell him how to get to Denfert-Rochereau and somebody else, once he gets there, how to get to the Catacombs, opposite the metro station, on the other side of the Avenue du Général Leclerc.
She walks back and takes the bus. It’s only when the big green recumbent lion looms in the windshield that she realizes she shouldn’t have sent him down into the confusing metro corridors. She wonders what’s wrong with her brain today, acting like a brand-new tourist herself. She sees the entrance to the Catacombs and scrutinizes the crowd even though she knows he’s still wandering in the corridors below.
When she gets out at the Cité stop in sight of the Prefecture, she starts trembling badly. Weak and dizzy, she goes into a café and orders a cup of coffee in a voice she doesn’t recognize as her own. The tremble aggravates to shudder. Something rises up in her that she can’t keep down. Face screwed up, lips compressed, she walks fast to the women’s toilets, locks herself in a cubicle, kneels to the toilet bowl and waits for relief.
But no vomit comes. What comes is a terrifying eruption of tears, painful as though shedding blood. Why is she crying? “Don’t know, don’t know,” she gasps between sobs until she’s able to attach her grief to old things: the loss of her rag doll, the dead kitten, the melting snowman, her beloved grandfather laid out in his best suit, hopeless loves, all those past tears renewed and multiplied, a deluge.
The deluge stops as suddenly as it began. After a while she’s able to get up off her knees. She wipes her face with her handkerchief, leaves the toilets and pays for the untouched coffee. Gripping her book tightly, she slowly walks to the Prefecture.
The place wasn’t far. He’d hoped walking would make things better. But not even halfway there he has to lower himself on a bench for the third time since he left the hotel and wait again for the giddiness and nausea to let up. Between the cars and passersby he catches interrupted glimpses of himself, reflected wavy and insubstantial in the store window across the street, slumped as with the weight of the single-lens Voigtländer reflex around his neck, the wooden tripod like a strange crutch, the shopping-net with the rug and the bottle of wine. The distorted ghost-like image seems to confirm his fear that he’s coming down with something serious.
He finally gets up and wanders blindly in the general direction of the Seine. In an unfamiliar street, signaled by the golden effigy of a horse head, a butcher in a bloody apron is hacksawing a hooked haunch of meat. The sight unleashes a new wave of nausea as he thinks of raw horsemeat sticky with raw egg.
He walks past it and then halts at the sight of a good stretch of wall across the street: arrow-pierced hearts with entwined initials, a high-placed constellation of stars in yellow crayon, a penciled scribble, “Marie, je t’aime!!!” and a gigantic red phallus aimed like a Nazi V2 rocket at the constellation of stars. He decides to photograph it, moves and collides with a young woman stepping out of a building.
For a second they clasp each other for the sake of equilibrium. Then they pull back from that clumsy embrace (he with the tripod and shopping-net, she with a shopping basket), both apologizing. The young woman (pale, plain, ponytailed, with a gold crucifix on a high-buttoned white blouse) turns about and reaches for the heavy door half-open on a cobblestoned courtyard and a shop-window with the scrolled words Tailleur pour Dames et Messieurs. She pulls it shut, apologizes again, and walks down the street the way he has come.
He leaves the street behind him. A quarter of an hour later he halts, sure he’s forgotten something important, vital even. He examines the contents of his pockets. The blue convocation to the Préfecture de Police is there. His passport and his ca
rte de séjour too. So is his wallet. Finally, he realizes he’s forgotten his handkerchief. But he doesn’t have a cold and is unlikely to weep: the two uses of a handkerchief. He walks on, trying to feel relieved at having attached his malaise to something concrete, but finds it insufficient.
The malaise goes on, strengthens, even. Did he miss a class at the Fry-Fitz Academy of Foreign Languages yesterday? Lose the homework? Then he recalls that good stretch of graffitied wall. He hadn’t noticed the name of the street. Unless he returned it would be lost forever. His watch tells him he hasn’t time to return. He hails a cab, feeling even worse.
She sits on a rear bench, absorbed in her book, much closer to the cobblestones and the fog-wreathed gas lamps of London than to the fellow-aliens in the big bureaucratic room awaiting their turn to be processed. At intervals one of the stern-faced female functionaries pops out of one of the cubicles up front and calls out a name, irritated when the foreigner doesn’t instantly respond to her stubbornly Gallicized version of it.
Someone sits down noisily alongside her, jarring her out of the London street a few seconds. The spectacled young man with a camera around his neck places a tripod and a strange shopping-net on the bench. The shopping-net contains a red rug and a bottle of wine. She returns to her book.
A few pages later, a clatter and a muffled crash pull her out of it again. The young man is sitting rigid, staring ahead stiff-faced, ignoring the shopping net and the tripod fallen to his feet. His face slowly collapses, an ugly mudslide into grief. She hesitates between him and the book. When he starts making disquieting sounds, she leans over and asks if she can be of help. Just as she repeats her question one of the female functionaries barks out her name. She remains seated, waiting for reaction. He doesn’t know she exists. With even greater asperity, the female functionary cries: “Mademoiselle Ford, Hélène!”
She gives him a quick touch meant to comfort. Visibly it doesn’t. She gets up and hurries into the cubicle.
Her processing is laborious. The severe-faced female functionary confuses her with another Helen Ford. By the time she gets out, the weeping young man is gone. She assumes he’s been processed by the other functionary. But his tripod is still there on the floor. Next to it, there’s a little reddish pool. She takes it for strangely anemic blood and then, as the sour smell of wine registers, remembers the sound of breakage.
She takes the tripod and leaves the gray processing room. Like tracing a wounded animal, she follows the red drops in the corridor to a massive door marked Entry Strictly Forbidden to All But Authorized Personnel. She guesses that he’d wanted to hide the shame of uncontrollable tears. She pushes the door open on a long dusty corridor and follows the drops, more widely spaced now, up a steep rickety staircase and sure enough, there he is, in a huddle, back against the wall, still at it.
“Can I help you?” she asks for the fourth time that day. At first she thinks he’s bringing out “No” between sobs and then realizes it’s “Don’t know.”
“You forgot your tripod. You’ve got wine all over your clothes.”
He comes out of it. He looks at the shopping net and mumbles: “The rug’s full of glass. I’ll cut my knees, kneeling.”
“Oh, you’re a Moslem?” she says, for the sake of diversion.
“My name is Seymour Stein,” he mumbles, “but I’m nothing.”
He works the sodden rug out of the net and begins to pick out shards and crumbs of glass. He looks like he needs more diversion, badly.
“Silly question. How could you possibly be a Moslem with that wine? Why do you kneel on the rug, though?”
“I photograph wall graffiti. Some of them are low. I saw nice ones this morning. I don’t remember the street, I’ve lost the street.”
Weeping again, he stuffs the rug into the net, grabs the tripod, scrambles to his feet and heads the wrong way, not back but towards another staircase.
“Where are you going, Seymour?” she says, following him. He jabs his finger at a faded inscription Toilettes on the wall with an arrow pointing at the stairs. She wonders if it isn’t an excuse to get rid of her but she says, “Yes, me too,” and joins him on the staircase.
They hunt about for the toilets in a maze of corridors and end up getting lost. She looks for the wine drops to guide them back but they must have evaporated.
They explore still another shabby corridor. It ends at a closed iron door. He pushes it open. They take a few steps down an immensely long poorly lighted corridor which terminates in darkness. A cold dusty draft starts up, as if somebody in the distant zone of darkness ahead has opened another door. The draft rises to gale force; the iron door clangs shut behind them and goes on clanging in echo before them.
They turn around and find their door locked. They try to walk forward again and haven’t the strength to prevail against the wind. She sinks down into a squat against the wall. “I’m not well,” she says in a faint, apologetic voice.
He joins her in that posture and says he thinks he’s dying. He mumbles the symptoms, starting with the terrible nightmare and then splitting headache, nausea, unmotivated tears and now this weakness. He can’t get up, can’t move.
She tells him that her symptoms are the same. They’re coming down with something, that’s sure. But it can’t be dying, she says, to comfort him. It does feel like dying, though.
“We’ll have to find our way out,” she says but doesn’t move. He doesn’t move either. They can’t.
Another metal door slams faintly far down the corridor, arousing more phantom closures. The wind dies abruptly.
Distant irregular footsteps approach. They open their eyes and see a policeman limping out of the zone of darkness. Attached to his belt is a great metal ring with dozens of big keys that jangle with every swaying step. Time goes by. Finally he stands above them, immensely tall and gaunt.
“What are you doing in this place? Papers!” His voice is imperious and rusty.
They hand him their brand new carte de séjour. He moves clumsily to a bare bulb and examines the documents. Then he goes over to the iron door, unlocks and opens it.
“Your papers are in order. You have no business here. Leave immediately.”
She picks herself up and helps the young man to his feet.
“We’re lost. What is the way out?” she says feebly as they both cross the threshold.
“Your problems on that side of the door are not my concern,” says the policeman. The door clangs shut.
Strength seeps back. They find the wine-drops and soon the way out.
In the sunshine they feel a little better. They slowly walk toward the Latin Quarter. Neither of them has anything particular to do there. Each thinks it’s the other’s way.
Between the Prefecture and the Saint Michel fountain, as they breast insolently healthy crowds, he makes her go carefully into her symptoms, which are his. She’d have preferred other subjects, such as where he comes from and what he does in Paris when he’s not kneeling on a rug. But she has to recite those symptoms a second time.
It’s her fit of unmotivated weeping (it happened half an hour before his, he learns) that particularly alarms him. Doesn’t it mean their central nervous systems are affected by the disease, whatever it is? They both must have it, he tells her.
She almost feels happy at having a connection with him, even that one. A few minutes later she begins to wonder if there isn’t maybe another, less pathological, connection developing between them. She’s noticed that every few seconds he keeps glancing at her. Also, over and over he asks how she’s feeling. Isn’t that a sure sign of interest? She tries to forget that she’s not the type of girl good-looking men look twice at and that he doesn’t even know her name, hasn’t asked.
He stops before a newspaper kiosk. The tripod falls out of his grasp onto the pavement. It’s Shanghai Flu, he brings out. She has to support him. People have already died of it, he says. Flu in summer time? she says dubiously. She picks up the tripod and looks at th
e newspaper closely. Not here, she assures him. In Australia. It’s winter down there.
They reach the Saint Michel fountain. She’s still holding the tripod. To get him onto a different subject she asks about his graffiti shots. In an hour, if he’s still alive, he’ll be going to the Place de la République, he says. Last week he’d discovered marvelous graffiti on a disaffected garage wall there.
She asks questions, which she hopes sound intelligent, about non-representational photography and wonders if perhaps she might watch him work. If you like, he says, not really enthusiastically, she judges. But then, nicely, he asks again how she’s feeling. A little tired, she says.
By now they’ve reached the Luxembourg Gardens. She suggests resting a little. “A few minutes,” he says. He has to make it to the Place de la République. What’s the hurry? she asks. Won’t the graffiti stay put? He explains that the sun has to strike the wall at a glancing angle to bring out the irregularities, the pits and poster wrinkles and in late June that happens between noon and one.
They sit down on green iron chairs near the splashing fountain. He looks at the children sailing boats with billowing sails, the jet of the fountain blown into a rainbow, the pruned trees twinkling with points of light and for the first time that day he feels at peace.
He turns to her to say that he’s feeling better. She’s slumped forward, deathly pale, mouth half-open, staring down at the ground. Deeply alarmed at what’s awaiting him (that half-hour lag between their symptoms), he touches her shoulder. She looks up slowly into his anxious face. His sympathy makes her feel a little better and color returns to her face. He’s deeply relieved at her quick recovery. He’d probably experience her relapse in half an hour, but a short non-fatal relapse.
There’s no direct bus line to the Place de la République. They get off at the Boulevard Saint Martin stop. At the end of the boulevard looms the giant statue of the Republic with its proffered sprig of laurel. Not a car is in sight but the sidewalks are crowded with onlookers facing the square where police whistles shrill above a murmur like distant surf.
“Sounds like a demonstration,” she says. “You’d better call it off.” He doesn’t answer and strides forward. She has trouble keeping up with him. He must have changed his mind and wants to photograph the action, she thinks.
As they progress, the sound of distant surf slowly strengthens to the chant of a multitude, like a crowd at a football game. He stops and then steps on a bench for a better view of what’s going on ahead. She joins him.
The Place de la République is strangely empty of passersby and traffic. From the windows and the wrought-iron balconies of the surrounding buildings spectators are looking down as at a great oblong bullfight arena. Hundreds of policemen block the avenues and streets converging on the square. Beyond the blue ranks guarding the Boulevard Voltaire thousands of shabby demonstrators advance under a sea of windy French flags punctuated by a scattering of red flags bearing the inscription Parti Communiste Français. An avenue-wide white banner commands in gigantic letters: U.S. GO HOME!
He goes on standing on the bench pale and motionless like a statue. To make him snap out of it she says: “We don’t want to go home yet. We’ve just got our Permanent Resident carte de séjour.”
He doesn’t reply. She steps down.
Suddenly he jumps off the bench and disappears in the crowd.
“Seymour, wait!” To justify the cry for him to wait for her (after all, he doesn’t even know her name, hasn’t bothered asking) she cries: “I’ve got your tripod.”
She weaves through the crowd, running after him, hampered by the heavy wood tripod. She reaches the Place de la République just as the head column of the demonstrators debouches from the Boulevard Voltaire on the other side of the square. They surge forward. Shouts and cries and whistles become deafening. Flocks of pigeons cowering on balconies and windowsills arise in flapping panic and circle overhead. The police fall back and then counterattack. Long supple blackjacks and tightly rolled-up lead-weighted cloaks rise and fall.
She skirts the buildings, running past onlookers in doorways, shops with lowered iron curtains, a butcher, puffy and white among quartered steers and decapitated calves, grasping the bars of his lowered grill possessively as though fearing their imminent expropriation by the communists. She looks around for the strange boy called Seymour, imagining him kneeling before low graffiti, the remaining bottle-shards in the rug lacerating his knees, police clubs bashing his head. A wave of sympathy for the poor bewildered boy effaces her lingering memory of the earlier bewildered boy with the guidebook whose name she hadn’t learned and who, like this one, hadn’t learned hers.
A group of demonstrators, one of them bleeding, runs towards her, pursued by cops with upraised clubs like exclamation-marks. A cop with a face like a fist veers toward her. Doesn’t he take the tripod for a weapon? For a second she wants to throw it away. But it’s not hers. He keeps on coming. Still gripping Seymour’s tripod, her only connection now, she runs into the Rue du Temple, fleeing the tumult. She keeps running till her lungs ache and then stops.
He’s there on a tree-shaded bench, head bowed, asleep. She sits down quietly, props his tripod against the bench between them and waits for him to wake up and take it.
A hard poke in the ribs awakens her. She pulls away from the bunched wooden legs as they jab toward her again. On his side of the bench he’s bent over the tripod, cradled in the crook of his arm like a three-legged lover. He’s screwing or unscrewing something with a penknife. “Damn you,” he mutters and shakes the tripod. “Ow!” she says, not that the second poke in the ribs really hurt but to let him know she’s there on her side of the bench. The screw bounces off the bench and rolls under it. “Damn you,” he mutters and glances at her but of course he’s addressing the tripod. She leans over, recovers the screw and hands it to him. He thanks her. Eyes focussed on the screwing job now, he says:
“It was a relief to see you on the bench when I woke up a while ago. I looked for you back there.”
“Yes, the tripod must be expensive.”
“A fortune new. Genuine cherry wood. Picked it up cheap second hand.”
He finishes the job and looks at her.
“The tripod had nothing to do with it. I was scared for you. Those flics.”
“I was scared for you too. Glad you didn’t try to photograph the garage wall after all. You can always go back another day when things are calmer. How are you feeling now?”
“Jesus, I forgot all about that.” He stares unseeing at a building and she guesses he’s attentive to inner things. “Can’t be sure but I think that maybe I’m feeling a little better. How about you?”
He asks the question anxiously, which is nice, she thinks.
“Better too.”
They get up and stroll down the street, going nowhere in particular. She carries the tripod again. The sun is very hot. For relief they go inside a grimy scaffolded church.
It’s as dank and gloomy as a cellar. They think it’s empty till they hear a violent snore. A bearded old man is slumped in a side pew. His high-buttoned black shoes stand in the aisle. They hold it in. It’s improper to laugh in a church. Both of them move about, looking at niched saints and grimy oil-paintings of martyrdoms and resurrections. A withered flower from a marriage or a funeral lies on the flagstones. The altar is draped in protective canvas. Scaffolding rises about a fissure in the wall.
They both start shivering and sneezing. They hope it’s the dankness of this place and not more symptoms of the illness they share. When they turn to leave they see the old man padding silently to the exit. His shoes still stand in the aisle. “Oh God,” she says. She picks them up and they both hurry out. The old man has disappeared. She goes back inside, places the shoes in the aisle and returns to the church steps where Seymour is waiting.
They stand there blinking in the nice warm sunshine, their faces strained with what resembles grief. Then they can’t hold it in any more and burst ou
t laughing, uncontrollable laughter, weeping from it. When they recover, he says:
“I’m starving. I don’t know your name.”
“Helen. I’m starving too. The restaurants must be closed.”
They buy two golden-crusted baguettes, cold cuts, black olives, green olives, tomatoes, a bag of black cherries and a bottle of good wine to celebrate their recovery. They walk all the way back to the Seine, a good place to picnic, exchanging information about themselves, talking about books and music, each trying to impress the other and succeeding.
They cross the Île de la Cité, going by the Conciergerie, the Palais de Justice and their point of departure, the Préfecture de Police. They cross the Pont Saint Michel, stroll along the quay and finally sit on the low parapet with the Seine directly below and devour the food.
Barges push upstream past them. In the burnished blue sky flights of pigeons swoop down and settle in the riverside trees and then rise again. Enlaced couples stroll by. They finish the wine. He turns to her, still a little anxious.
“How are you feeling, Helen?”
“I’m feeling fine, Seymour. How about you?”
“Well … maybe not too bad. No, better. Much better. Maybe it was all a false alarm. Where do you want to go now?”
“It’s nice just sitting here. We’ve had a long day.”
“Yes, a long day,” he says.
They sit there for a long time, looking at the barges and the flights of pigeons and the enlaced couples going by. When the shadow of the Prefecture and the Conciergerie, that disaffected prison, begins to encroach on them they get up and join those other couples strolling along the river in the sunshine.
The End
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Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die Page 49