All Is Given

by Linda Neil

  Facts were supposed to protect us from the perils of the weather. So were the layers of zinc cream my mother rubbed across my back, as well as my face and shoulders, whenever we went to the beach after my bad sunburn. In the days and nights after the incident, I hadn’t slept much. Mum had stayed up with me, pressing cold packs onto my back. As she tut-tutted about me learning my lesson, I lay curled up on my side, oblivious to potential scarring, a foetal Proust, before I knew who or what Proust was, remembering, as if I were an old man and not a young girl, days long past. And even though I was only eleven and a half and had never been kissed or held by a lover or suffered through unrequited – or requited – love, in my feverish delirium I knew I had already experienced physical ecstasy and done amazing things: like snorkelling from one white stretch of sand to another; contemplating the unknown things on the bed of a river that both spills out into and receives the sea; walking barefoot along the beach in my favourite leopard-print one-piece swimsuit, collecting shells and stones that I imagined had been thrown up on the sand at my feet for strictly metaphorical reasons. I believed then in messages, as well as facts. But I kept their meaning to myself.

  *

  I spent what I call ‘my first winter in Paris’ living in a small studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier right by the Mémorial de la Shoah. The main entrance to the Cité on Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville is just across from Pont Marie, which is said to be the most romantic bridge in the world. Lovers from all over the globe converge on or near the bridge, most popularly at twilight, for kisses and embraces and sweet murmurings of eternal love.

  I say I had my first winter, but for the most part it was spring. That year, March and April were unseasonably cold and wet, even for the Parisians, who loved to complain about the weather. For a Queenslander with a history of sunstroke and long Christmas holidays baking in the heat, it felt like the worst winter I had ever known.

  I’d arrived in late February having been delayed by work in Australia. That was my official explanation anyway. It was true, but there was also an unofficial reason: my irrational fear of the cold. I had discussed this fear at length with my Parisian friend Marie, who assured me that I would adapt and cope by eating heavier food and dressing in layers. She advised me to invest in a good woollen coat, a pair of waterproof boots and a nice scarf and hat that I could put on and take off easily, as I would be moving regularly from the heated indoors to a sometimes bleak outdoors. The rituals for coping with cold weather seemed complicated and daunting, not to mention pricey.

  Of course, the opportunity to live and work in Paris for six months made my fear seem embarrassingly trivial. But as I had neither experience nor facts to fortify myself with, I was anxious of what the cold might do to my body and psyche. The cold remained an ominous mystery for which no layers of attire or understanding could prepare me.

  Contrary to my fears, the weather was surprisingly balmy during my first week in Paris. I was able to get through my jet lag and gradually establish a routine. During the first few weeks in a new place I try to orientate myself in the local area, and in Paris I established a walking route from the Cité to the Mémorial de la Shoah up to Rue de Rivoli, then left along to Rue des Archives where, after a couple of blocks, I would buy The Times and the International Herald Tribune from the Agora newsagent. I would then walk a few metres back down towards the Hôtel de Ville, and end up in Starbucks, where I would order a tea latte and read the day’s news. The pleasure of reading a newspaper was something I rediscovered during my time in Paris.

  The second day I walked along this route, it was very early, and when I got to Starbucks there were plenty of seats near the window, where I could read in natural light. A young woman sat down opposite me and opened her computer. I returned her smile – out of courtesy, but also out of delight at observing that she looked a lot like Marie, who also had long black curls, fair skin and penetrating but gentle eyes.

  I smiled again and asked in my rudimentary French: Ça va?

  Ça va et vous?

  And so our conversation, which continued for over an hour and two cups of my favourite Earl Grey latte, began.

  Mathilde studied Fine Arts and worked part-time at the Louvre. The thing she first divulged to me was her outrage at being approached that morning for a threesome with a man and his wife, just down Rue des Archives on her way to Starbucks.

  So typical of Paris, she harrumphed. It’s no wonder we Parisian girls have a reputation for not smiling. Why should we give our smiles away for free? Here in Paris a smile is an invitation so we learn to keep our heads – and our mouths – down.

  I thought of similar conversations I’d had with Marie, who’d also told me of her relief, upon arriving in Australia, that smiles were given and accepted freely without hidden meaning or immediate sexualising. The freedom to smile was radical, she said. Her face had changed through the release of her smile; it not only liberated her mouth, lips and teeth, but exercised the muscles in her cheeks, and widened and lifted her eyes as well. It also gave her more courage – or was it also freedom? – to meet the eyes of another. After a year of smiling, her face had changed shape in the same way a body might after exercise. It was reformed physically and reborn philosophically.

  I remembered, too, my mother’s decoding of a smile and its meaning, contained in the advice she often repeated to her students as well as to her friends and children: Smile and the world smiles with you. Or in the famous Charlie Chaplin song about smiling through heartache, which she had once sung with breaking voice after her mother died. She believed in staying positive, and saw it as a corrective to my propensity for drama and tears.

  But what if a smile became impossible? Or dangerous? Or subversive? What songs would be written, or sung, memorialised or remembered in a Parisian coffee shop then?

  These questions occupied me only briefly; as far as I was concerned, my smile would never be threatened. It was still something I took for granted, an innocent part of my exchange with the beautiful Mathilde.

  Our talk ranged over a variety of topics – Paris, the world, the history of painting, Starbucks, sex, shopping, the upcoming election – and ended in her offer to take me on a private tour of the Louvre at twilight, after the tourists had dispersed for the day. Even more significantly, though, she told me about the Forum des Images, the cinema archive centre in the heart of Les Halles. We had been discussing things to do in the cold, when the wind and rain might make it impossible to walk the streets or spend any time outdoors. Mathilde suggested I do what she did: spend the bleakest days at the Forum, where a ticket cost only five euros and where, if you had the time and the desire, you could educate yourself in the entire history of world film.

  Later that day, I looked up the website for the Forum. Like many French sites, the pages looked at first to be overloaded with information. After a frustrating hour or so, I began to understand not only the idiosyncratic precision with which the site’s information had been catalogued, but also how the Forum presented its films – usually in seasons with a common theme. There were, for instance, films about the forest, about the wild, about the war, about royalty; films from the New Wave, or literary adaptations.

  Despite my best intentions, I didn’t make it to the Forum in March, or even April. I was spectacularly derailed by both the weather and a bout of terrible insomnia that kept me up for nights at a stretch – I often felt I would fall over with fatigue. Defeated, I withdrew into my small, centrally heated room, and hibernated in the dark – like a bear, I wrote in emails home. For the first time I experienced what winter in the northern hemisphere might mean to someone raised in Australia.

  Memories of summer became my consolation as I struggled through the cold days and even colder sleepless nights. This was ironic, considering how extreme I had always found the Queensland heat, how much I longed for coolness when I was sweltering through an Australian summer. In the lingerin
g remains of a Parisian winter, remembering heat became almost Proustian. I lay in bed propped up under blankets and recollected a golden age – literally – of summers that warmed my fair skin and encouraged smiles on my freckled face. My memories, like this city, were rendered into poetic, beautiful fragments: pristine, static, inflexible to reinterpretation. The imagined narratives of my history became my defence against the cold and, like Balzac and Proust, I began to scribble them down in the dim light of my atelier.

  I omitted all references to sunburn, the grit of sand in my shoes, the burning bitumen under my thonged feet. I didn’t mention the mosquitoes drawing my blood as I tossed and turned under nets with holes big enough to allow squadrons of insects through.

  Writing lit a fire inside me. When the central heating was switched off at midnight I warmed myself with reveries of Australian summers. By staying in my room so much, however, I became even more frightened of the cold. When I did go out I sucked in my chest and bent my body over, like an old woman, to protect myself in the wind. I hid my mouth and its smile under thick wool, and my bleary eyes peered out from the furry overhang of my Russian-style hat, the kind that bear hunters wear in the snow. In my struggle with the cold, I became displaced, in body, in thought, in emotion, in action – alien to myself, to everyone who knew me and even, I imagined, to the strangers who passed me in the street.

  After a month or so of bending over and stomping and complaining about the cold, I noticed with alarm a gradual change to my face. Just as I had witnessed Marie’s transformation by smiling, I saw my face change by not smiling. If a face contains a history of all the smiles that have radiated from it, the absence of smiles wipes something from it. That facial history chronicles periods of stasis and development, of strife and prosperity, of peace and war. After I saw my sinking mouth in the mirror, I would sometimes imagine, in my addled, wakeful dreaming, that a kind of darkness was falling on a great civilisation.

  I began to understand I was depressed that April in Paris. All the songs, the films, the myths, the dreams – not to mention the expectations of my envious friends back home – had told me I should be shopping on the Champs-Élysées, sipping coffee and discussing life at Les Philosophes café in the Marais, or strolling through twilight arm in arm with an older lover across Pont Marie. But I was maudlin and depressed. And because this was Paris, the city of love, where only an exile from the human race could feel down, I felt like a failure. Still, gloom doesn’t always pick its moment – or at least you can’t pick gloom’s descent. I was alone, sleepless and cold, and instead of taking medication to lift my spirits I dreamed of swimming in the Gold Coast waters and feeling sunburn on my back.

  As my face changed, I searched for answers in my own history that might give some clue as to why I had so quickly surrendered to the dark forces of the weather. Peering into the lines that the cold had carved around my eyes, I became focused on a particular period of my history, which was also to do with a face. Not mine, but another face that rarely smiled.

  That face belonged to Greta Garbo, with whom I became obsessed when I was eleven, the same year I crossed Tallebudgera Creek. It was a long, difficult year, an age when new obsessions would energise me. I first encountered her face in a library book, a large hardback printed in black and white. Its title was A Pictorial History of the Movies and it offered readers hundreds of glamour shots and stills from movies, dating from the silent beginnings of American cinema. (They didn’t think to include the films of the French, though, who told me frequently, and ruefully, how they invented cinema as an artform long before Hollywood made a business out of it.)

  The cinema section at our local library consisted of a seemingly random collection of books. I didn’t care whether the books were scholarly or trashy, erudite or populist. I devoured them all. Reading about films satisfied not only my attraction to the mystique and glamour of cinema, but also my curiosity about words and ideas, which often seemed to me as exotic as creatures of the deep might appear to a landlocked person. But it was the images of Garbo, mostly in black and white, that entered my dream consciousness and touched what I imagined in those days was my soul.

  Greta Garbo seemed to be everything I was not, the unimaginable other to my pre-adolescent self: the angled to my round, the exotic to my plain, the profoundly silent to my chatty. While I lived in harsh sunlight, she inhabited an alien, black-and-white world of shadows, as if she were in a dream, or had just been roused from a deep sleep. I was too awake. I was already suffering from the insomnia that would plague me years later in Paris. Instead of sleeping, I read books and dreamed my way into another life. And while it was my mother’s and grandmother’s mantra to keep busy through all of life’s ups and downs – for otherwise the devil might do his work – Greta seemed above this. It was as if she had arrived having completed all her tasks, as if the effort required for doing had ended and being, in all its fullness, had become possible. There was nothing of the devil’s work in or around her.

  In summer, when the heat turned my mother’s face bright red, she would mutter, Oh hell. My face became splotched with red too: we were incongruously coloured for our weather. Though we burned and fretted in summer, we never thought to move back to the part of the world where Greta came from. Looking into her face, rendered inertly in monochrome, I felt the possibility of coolness, of silence and peace.

  Though the world referred to her as Garbo, to me she was always Greta, a name that made her seem more capable of the quiet conversations I craved with her. I wanted more than just to stare at her face in a book: I wanted to relate, to know, to understand. If I could have moved her by magic, I would have wished her to step off the page and into my life, to teach me stillness in a world of incessant noise and movement.

  I devoured as much information as I could about her. I discovered that she and I were descended from the same Scandinavian tribe: my great-grandfather was born in Stockholm, where Greta had grown up as Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in the early years of the twentieth century. I also learned that when she first arrived in Hollywood she was a plump, sullen girl with frizzy hair and crooked teeth – her looks were overhauled by her bosses at the studio, but her essence, that ineffable something which Bette Davis called ‘witchcraft’, was already there, all hers.

  There was a picture in a book called The Allure of Garbo that illuminated the difference between Swedish Greta and Hollywood Greta, a transformation that seemed impossible. I looked into the mirror and wondered how puffy rosy cheeks could ever hollow out into contoured angles – I practised sucking in my cheeks, but that only made my mouth look like some weird fish. I tried to flatten down my unruly curls, but they sprang back up. Most difficult of all was trying to teach myself to look blank, and not to smile. It seemed unnatural to train my muscles to come to rest instead of cracking and creasing into all kinds of emotion. If Greta was the Swedish sphinx, I was more like a cartoon clown, Shirley Temple rather than Garbo.

  I didn’t glide or soothe or stare in silence at some unfathomable distance, like Greta does at the end of Queen Christina in one of her, and cinema’s, most iconic images. I clanged and rattled around the world, and my father liked to tease me with the nickname Ding Dong: a bell that never stopped ringing, a brain that never stopped thinking, a face that never stopped moving.

  Searching for more information, I had found The Allure of Garbo in the library. Although the sound of the word allure already suggested something mysterious and luxurious, I checked the dictionary for clarity. I found two definitions: ‘attraction or attractiveness’ and ‘the quality of arousing interest’. The second definition seemed more appropriate – I wasn’t aware of her attractiveness, as it might be perceived by a grown-up; sex had nothing to do with it. Her face aroused in me a curiosity for life, for stories, for mysteries that might be solved. Her face made me want to see.

  The secret of Greta’s fascination seemed to be that she didn’t smile. Her face was at rest, undisturbed,
her thoughts hidden. Sometimes I felt she was teaching me something significant, something that would take me many years to fully understand.

  I imagined my mother – exasperated by such impassivity, which offered up nothing to organise, to mould, to train – telling Greta to cheer up, to keep smiling. And then I imagined Greta, my gorgeous guru, staring past Mum into the distance, refusing to react, in what one enraptured film reviewer called ‘eternal self-possession’.

  *

  From May to July of 2012, the Forum des Images presented a season of Hollywood films that featured Paris. The eclectic program for Paris vu par Hollywood ranged from DW Griffith’s 1916 classic Broken Blossoms to Woody Allen’s recent commercial hit Midnight in Paris. It also included two of Greta’s films: Camille and Ninotchka.

  Camille, known in French as Le roman de Marguerite Gautier, was directed by George Cukor in 1936. The film was based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, who had also adapted his book into a very successful play – its 1852 premiere at Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris met with such acclaim that Verdi turned it into one of his most famous operas, La Traviata.

  Camille was the film through which my obsession with Greta’s face intersected with my mother’s love of old romantic films. One steamy Sunday, I was reading, or staring at, The Allure of Garbo when Mum called me to join her in the lounge room. This invitation was a significant ritual of my childhood: my mother and I would watch a film, while my father absented himself in favour of lawn-mowing duties, or other serious things – reading Keats or Wordsworth, preparing for his lectures on Shakespeare, or solving the Australian cryptic crossword.

  That afternoon, as we watched Camille on the television, my still, silent image of Greta became animated for the first time. During the opening titles, Mum whispered to me: She was so beautiful. But, dear Lord, so was he.