Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  I never could make up my mind whether tipping or not tipping was more cowardly in the circumstances. Maybe any action becomes cowardly once you stop to reason about it. Conscience doth make cowards of us all, eh, mamma mia? If you start an argument with yourself, that make two people at least, and when you have two people, one of them starts appeasing the other.

  Anyway, I’ve found this apartment. It will only cost 30,000 old francs a month, plus the utilities (there’s a gas hot-water heater over the bathtub) and a small donation to the concierge at New Year’s. The place has its drawbacks but it’s a lot better than the chambres de bonne a lot of kids rent in the mansards of old buildings. You ought to see those rooms, like a series of dog-houses under the eaves, where the maids used to be kept. No heat or running water, the usual foul toilet in the hall, and a common tap with a rusty basin underneath where you go to fill your pitcher and empty your slops. No bathtub or bidet on the whole floor; I guess they expected the maids to be dirty. The advantage is that, being high up, you generally have a nice view, through a slanting skylight. There are whole families—mostly Spaniards and Algerians—living in some of those holes.

  It’s an education, looking for an apartment. Quite a few French families want to rent you a room where you share a bathroom and toilet with them and maybe have the use of the kitchen to make your morning coffee. They call it an apartment. You waste a lot of time that way, answering ads. They won’t admit on the telephone that the place doesn’t have a separate entrance—une seule clef. At first I didn’t know how to say that and if I said une seule porte—like una porta sola—they’d say, “Oui, oui, monsieur, une seule porte.” Even when they get the idea, they pretend to be surprised, as though a separate entrance was something unheard of and the only reason you could want one was to give orgies or sell your body to French queers.

  I got my present pad through the grapevine. The desk clerk at my last hotel knew about it and told the owner I was per bene. The putative heating is included in the rent, and there’s a two-burner hot plate and a few chipped dishes and a coffeepot. I can wash the dishes in the bathtub. The only thing is, there isn’t much light. It looks out on a shaft that goes down to what they call a courette, where the garbage cans are kept. But I’ll be here mostly in the evenings and anyway the days are getting shorter, as the landlady pointed out. I.e., when I get up in the morning and come back in the afternoon it will be dark outside anyhow. She had fixed the place up for her son, who was a student; hence the amenities. There are even some home-made bookshelves. It is on a landing, up a few steps from the service entrance of her own apartment. I have to use the service stairs.

  At night, the big main door on the ground floor is locked at ten o’clock. If I come in after that, I ring for the concierge to push a button that opens the door. The signal is six short rings; otherwise, she won’t open, in case I might be a clochard or a burglar. The Parisians spend a lot of time worrying about burglars and prowlers. In those hotels I was staying in, the chambermaid, on receiving a tip, would immediately start warning me about the other denizens—they stole. “Méfiez-vous, monsieur.” I was urged to be sure to lock my door when I was inside and to put my watch and money under my pillow while I was sleeping. I found this quite unpleasant. It made me look at anybody I passed on the stairs with a sort of smutty curiosity, as though they might have it “in them” to be a thief. Like wondering whether a woman you see waiting on a corner could be a prostitute. The French are a suspicious people.

  But in fact there’s a lot of theft in those Left Bank flops. You would be surprised. In one place I was staying—on the rue St.-André-des-Arts—a kid had his typewriter taken, a new Olivetti. It turned out that it wasn’t even his; he’d borrowed it from a girl friend who typed manuscripts for a living. He reported it to the police, but they just shrugged. Too common an occurrence in that precinct. The way this kid, who was Dutch, reconstructed it, somebody must have lifted his key from the board downstairs, while the desk clerk was elsewhere (half the time in those hotels there’s nobody at the desk; you have to ring a handbell to get somebody to come), and gone up to his room and helped himself. The Dutchman wanted the police to search all the rooms; he reasoned that it had to be someone in the hotel, who had heard him typing. But the police told him that whoever stole the typewriter would have gone out and sold it right away. They even implied, when he started making a scene, that he might have sold it himself and then reported that he had been robbed.

  Then I heard about a Swedish au pair girl, in that same hotel, who left her gold watch in the communal bathroom in the soap-dish; when she missed it, ten minutes later, it was gone. An American girl found her crying on the stairs and went with her to the police station. “My golden watch!” she kept saying. You’d think that thieves, being hard up themselves, would have a fellow-feeling; I mean, steal from people who could afford it. But of course people who can afford it stay in hotels where the clientele is “above” stealing watches and typewriters. I guess the world is a vicious circle.

  I think I will like Paris better now that I’m no longer a member of its floating population, which can be fairly sordid. The food, at my age level, is fairly sordid too. There are a few foyers with a table d’hôte, for students, that are not so bad, but they’re crowded and when the novelty wears off they’re not a great improvement on eating in commons at home, except that you can have wine. The bread and croissants are great, of course, but the French don’t know how to make a sandwich. And I miss salads and orange juice and tuna fish. They hardly ever serve vegetables, except French fries. There’s nothing here to compare with the spinach in the Automat, for instance. And I miss the stand-up bars in Italy, where you can have a healthy snack and a cappuccino. What I like best in the restaurants here is the crudités, but you can’t sit down and order crudités and a glass of milk; you have to be force-fed with the entire menu. Sometimes I just have a dozen praires (which are cheaper than oysters), standing up, on the street, for lunch.

  I’ve started doing my own cooking, with a vegetable binge. No icebox, needless to say, in this apartment, but that doesn’t matter with the present room temperature. Besides, the French, like the Italians, only buy what they need for one day. I had a shock, though, yesterday, when I went to do my marketing at the Marché Buci—that big outdoor market, near the Odéon. At one stall, I asked for a carrot, and the type refused to sell me one. He said I had to buy a kilo. Like you, dearest Ma, I started to argue. I wanted to know why. How it would damage him to sell me one carrot or one apple or one pear. I explained that I didn’t have an icebox and that I was just one person. “Ça ne me regarde pas,” he growled. Finally we compromised on a pound. That’s quite a lot of carrots for a single man. While he was weighing them, I got into conversation with an Italian, who had been watching me and smiling—very nice, about the babbo’s age, an intellectual. He said that in Italy not only would they sell you one carrot but divide it in four. According to him, this only proved that Italy is a poor country, while France is a rich country. I said the Italians had more heart than the French, even if they gyp you sometimes. The French grudge gypping you, Mother. Maybe, I said, people in poor countries had more heart than people in rich countries. After all, Poverty used to be represented as a Virtue. I hadn’t noticed any statues of Poverty on French churches.

  By the way, did you know that most of the statues on the churches here have had their heads chopped off? In the French Revolution. And in the Wars of Religion, this Italian told me. But he agreed that Dame Poverty was not seen as a Virtue in France, which he seemed to think was a good thing.

  After I had bought a pound of carrots, three cucumbers, a pound of tomatoes, a pound of onions, and a huge cooked beet, we went to a café around the corner, near the statue of Danton, and continued the discussion. He thought it was funny that an American should idealize poverty, and when I told him that in America you could buy one carrot even in a supermarket, he seemed skeptical. Perhaps in the Negro sections, he said. No, I said
, anywhere. It was a free country; you could buy as much or as little as you wanted. I had to admit, though, that as far as I knew you couldn’t buy one cigarette at a time, the way you can in Italy. And I realize now I ought to have mentioned those carrots in plastic bags, which sort of bear out his point. It’s odd they slipped my mind.

  Anyway, he explained that in Paris you could buy a single carrot or onion or lemon in a grocery store. That’s different from a market. Only in a grocery store you pay more than you would pay if you bought the carrot at the market. But since you can’t, the point is academic. I said maybe students who lived in the quarter could get up a pool to buy a kilo a day of vegetables and fruit at the market and then divide it up. Take turns doing the shopping. He said I was defining a co-operative.

  It sank me to learn that I’m too small an economic unit to take part in the French way of life. I love those street markets—so colorful—and I’d counted on haunting them every day after school with my filet. What’s the point of being in Europe if you have to line up in a grocery store, which is usually part of a chain, just like at home? This Italian said not to be discouraged: I could still buy fish and meat and cheeses at those market stalls, and in time, if they got to know me, the vegetable- and fruit-sellers might relent; I could become “l’américain du Marché Buci.”

  When we parted, he asked me to come around to his place some evening for dinner; he has kids but much younger than me. If I go (I’m supposed to call him, since I have no phone), it will be the first time I’ve been in a French household, except that he isn’t French. He left Italy under Mussolini, like the babbo, and his wife is Russian.

  Unfortunately, I haven’t made many contacts here. In my course in French civilization, we’re all foreigners, obviously. The only student I’ve had any real talks with is a Norwegian named Dag, who is a sort of Marxist troll. He wants me to go to Poland with him during Christmas vacation. There are some Smith girls I met at a place called Reid Hall where they have supplementary classes, in English, but they stick pretty much together. I asked one to go rowing with me the other day on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, but her afternoons are all sewed up with her peer group doing art appreciation at the Louvre. On Saturdays and Sundays the lake is too crowded.

  I don’t see how anybody gets to know any French students, unless they have a letter of introduction. I’ve tried going to cafés where they’re said to hang out, but they’re mostly full of Americans who have heard the same rumor. And if they aren’t full of Americans, nobody will talk to me. I’ve actually gone as far as asking for a light. The place to find French students is at the movies. They seem to spend all their time there.

  That reminds me. Did you know that you’re supposed to tip the usher in a French movie house? I didn’t know and got hissed at by the woman the other day when I went to see an Antonioni flick. All the students in the vicinity stopped necking and turned to ogle me as I stumbled into my seat. I gather I was being called a “sale américain,” but if she knew I was an American, she might have enlightened me about the local custom. It must happen all the time with foreigners. But I suppose that’s what makes her mad. Usually when I’m in some place like a stand-up coffee bar, I watch what the other customers do and follow their example, but in a movie house, you’re literally in the dark. This little incident wrecked the film for me. I hardly saw Monica Vitti because of the rage I was in. The picture was half over before I finally grasped what my big crime of omission had been. Then it was too late to rectify it—at least without getting stared at some more. Besides, I couldn’t see how much the other customers were giving. In case you want to know, it’s a franc on the Champs-Elysées and fifty centimes in the little places. The clerk at my hotel told me.

  At home I never thought I was much of a conformist. But I now see that I was without knowing it. I did what everybody else did without being aware I was copying them. Here I mind being different. Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man. The tourists have it better. I don’t sneer any more when I see them being carted around in those double-decker buses with earphones on their ears. I envy them. They’ve all told each other who they are and where they come from, and to the French they’re part of the landscape, like the Tour Eiffel—nobody notices them, except other tourists. Here nobody knows who I am, as a person, which is all right with me, but I can’t fade into the foliage either. If I still had Aunt Millie’s camera and were willing to carry it, it might make me invisible to the French. Just another tourist. It occurs to me that that’s why, unconsciously, the men are all draped with cameras and light meters and the old women have their glasses slung around their necks—to show they belong to the species, tourist, which allows them to disappear as individuals.

  You were right. I haven’t used the motorbike much. Last Sunday, I took a run out to Senlis, to look at the church, which is older than Notre-Dame. I think I like Gothic, at least here in France. It reminds me of the forests these people came out of—druidical. The church in Senlis has a greenish light, as if you were in a sacred wood, with stone boughs meeting overhead in the bosky side aisles and the deambulatory—all that interlacing and those bent perspectives. They treat stone as if it was pliant, like branches. And the choir is a sort of clearing in the forest. While I was there, to complete the illusion, a swallow flew through.

  The other afternoon I took the Métro and a bus and went to see St.-Denis, which is the first important Gothic in France, right in the middle of a working-class suburb. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong day, so that I couldn’t see the choir, where the kings of France are buried; I didn’t mind missing them, but the choir is the original Gothic of the Abbé Suger. Probably Bob knows about him. Next Sunday I’m going to Chartres, but I’ll break down and take the train, I guess. It’s easier than riding Rosinante through the Sunday traffic. That would be quixotic.

  Everybody I meet advises me to sell the motorbike. For one thing, it constitutes a parking problem. They don’t have parking places for two-wheeled vehicles, the way they do in Rome and Perugia. Which I guess is another proof that France is a rich country, while Italy is a poor country. And if you park it by the curb you can get a ticket. For the last couple of weeks it’s been left in the court of an apartment house near that military hotel, where there’s a concierge whose dog I’ve made friends with. But I can’t keep it there indefinitely; being out in the open isn’t doing the new paint job any good. I hardly ever ride it in Paris, except to go to the Bois, rowing, to keep myself in shape, and that time I wrote you about, when I went chestnutting in the Parc de St.-Cloud. I’d been hoping the concierge in my apartment building would let me park it in the cellar, but it turns out that the cellar is divided up into individual caves, locked and padlocked, that belong to the individual tenants, and I’m not entitled to one. Anyway, they’re very damp; you can’t even store a suitcase in them without its growing whiskers.

  If I knew somebody who had a house in the country, I could store it with them for the winter. But I don’t. That salesman who helped me out said I should advertise it for sale at the PX. The general could fix it up so that I could post a notice on the bulletin board. Maybe if I did that, I could find it a good home. By the way, the general said his wife could get me anything I wanted at the PX: cigarettes, liquor, canned stuff. It appears that she could even get me a typewriter for one-third less than you have to pay (I quote) stateside. They had me to dinner with their teen-age daughter.

  What do you think about the ethics of using the PX? I don’t mean for liquor or cigarettes. But it might be nice to have some tuna fish and peanut butter. And they carry Danish milk there. I can resist the edibles, though. What really tempts me is the idea of a typewriter. And possibly a steam-iron to press my clothes. The PX store is supposed to be for the military and Embassy personnel only; you have to have a card to get in. But the general says the regulations are aimed at preventing PX-buying for resale, which is unfair to the local economy. I wouldn’t be hu
rting the local economy if I bought a typewriter at the PX because I wouldn’t get a typewriter at all unless I got it there. Which I guess proves that I don’t need a typewriter. The same with the iron. I can worry along without them. Which presumably answers my question.

  I think you would be against buying stuff at the PX because you wouldn’t want to be the kind of person who loaded up at the PX. I agree there’s something antipatico in the idea. When I went to the general’s apartment for dinner, I got a taste of PX-living. We had a big canned American ham, which the general carved with an electric slicer; it was baked with Dole’s pineapple and brown sugar and with it were canned potato balls and frozen peas and lima beans, followed by American vanilla ice cream and Hershey’s chocolate sauce and FFV cookies. They thought I might be homesick, they said. Before dinner, I had a shot of Jack Daniel and afterward Maxwell House coffee, made in an electric percolator, and chocolate mints. The wife kept announcing the brand names, like those butlers you see in the movies calling out the names of the guests. After dinner, we listened to rock ’n’ roll on their hi-fi set. And they showed me all over the apartment; the kitchen was like an appliance salesroom or an ad for Revere copperware. They even get their light bulbs from the PX.

  They feel that having all this junk around is a political act; they’re a sort of showcase of the American way of life for the general’s French colleagues at SHAPE or wherever he is. The wives, said Mrs. General, would give their eyeteeth for her outsize General Motors refrigerator, not to mention her pop-up toaster, her electric knife-sharpener and can-opener, her washing-machine and dryer, her floor-waxer, et cetera. I blushed for her when she said that, but possibly she’s right. Possibly the locals do envy them their easy access to all these goodies, symbolized by the PX card. What shocked me was learning that even little kids have PX cards. Their daughter has had one practically from the time she could walk.