All Is Given

by Linda Neil

  Finding presents wasn’t as simple as it once was, though. Dior had been out of the question ever since its head designer, John Galliano, had made anti-Semitic remarks at a kosher café in the Marais. Guerlain had been crossed off the list too, after its namesake CEO had made remarks about ‘les nègres’ in a television interview. Chanel and Fendi were suspect because they employed Karl Lagerfeld, who was not only pro-fur but had insulted overweight women as being unhealthy and ugly. So instead of visiting the big perfumeries along the boulevard, I sought out the smaller shops in the Arcades des Champs-Élysées, searching for an unknown scent or lipstick that I could take home and announce as a true Parisian discovery. As I headed towards the arcades, I walked past a dimly lit movie memorabilia shop called Images des Antiquités and saw in the window, between photographs of Steve McQueen and Audrey Hepburn, an image of Greta I had once seen in The Allure of Garbo.

  It was a shot from the film Mata Hari, in which Greta played a treacherous and glamorous spy. In it she looked away and down from the camera; her hands cradled her face; her profile all sharp edges and sleek angles. A web of lashes veiled her eyes. Her face was a perfect white mask, her mouth a dark gleaming slit.

  Her face of course had not changed. A photograph never ages: that’s what it does best; it remembers something perfectly. My face, on the other hand, had aged; it was already sagging slightly, its cheeks no longer rosy, its skin dulled by the cold, sleepless struggle of Paris.

  I remembered this exact image because of a terrible thing I had done when I was eleven and a half. It was as if Paris, with its insistence on memory, had drawn my shame out of the forgotten crypts where I had consigned it like the rotting skulls piled high in the underground corridors beneath the city.

  My family had returned home from a holiday on the Gold Coast to find that my father and I had been called to the Toowong library. Dad thought it might be for a book that hadn’t been returned, or an overdue fine perhaps. He was presented, however, with a violation of what he regarded as the sanctity of a book. On the counter of the returns section, between my father and the head librarian, was The Allure of Garbo, with a page cut out.

  Though it was comically obvious I was the culprit, I didn’t confess to the crime. Then. Or ever. So the facts of the violation have remained hidden: that I couldn’t take the book with me on our beach holiday; and that I couldn’t bear the thought of not having it for a whole month. That the week before we left for the Gold Coast I had taken the book out for my normal weekly loan and, using one of my father’s razor blades, I had carefully sliced out a page with one of my favourite pictures of Greta’s inscrutable face: the one from Mata Hari.

  I thought no one would notice it missing. It was just one face among a hundred faces, and I only needed one face to sustain me through our holiday. But an eagle-eyed librarian had noticed it gone and brought the vandalism to the attention of the head librarian. I could tell by her outrage towards me, mitigated only a little by the obvious pity she had for the parent of such a monster, that she took the transgression personally. As did my father.

  Perhaps if it had been Shakespeare whose image I had cut from the binding, there might have been some indulgent smiling about my precociousness. But a glamour shot of an old actress? That seemed inexplicable.

  I would have to be punished. Of course. Witnessing my father’s humiliation felt like enough punishment for me, but the librarian chose to teach me a lesson by threatening to incinerate the book. Whether she went through with it or not, the immolation of the book seemed to symbolise the dreams of my life so far going up in flames.

  My mother found me the next day curled up in bed crying.

  Why did you do it? she asked. It’s not like a magazine that you can just tear the page out – something she did all the time with recipes or knitting patterns.

  Through the fringe of my wet lashes, Mum’s face was almost beatific. We would fight for so much of my future but no matter what I did, what changes I made, I would never ever be as naturally pretty as my mother.

  I was too ashamed to tell her. I really was. But I got the words out anyway.

  I’ll never be beautiful.

  Being beautiful isn’t everything, you know. In the end it’s hardly anything at all.

  It’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to tell me there was hope for me. But she was too practical to massage my vanity. I tried to explain.

  I just wanted … I just needed, I spluttered, as she rested her hand on my shoulder, something different … something to hope for. So I wouldn’t feel so hopeless and weird and … and ugly.

  I wasn’t supposed to worry about such trivial things. We were too practical, too sensible for that. We put our heads down, accepted what the good Lord gave us, did our work and got on with things. That’s how we survived, people like us. But I wanted to be able to look at something, settle my gaze on somebody and feel that there was somewhere to rest, to think, to contemplate, to be contemplated. I needed to believe that something magical had a place in the world – in the real world, as well as the invented world of film and movie stars.

  We all like to wish upon a star, Mum said then, completely out of character. Or at least the character I knew.

  I just needed … I just need, I sobbed.

  You have to learn not to give in to your needs. You don’t need a picture out of a book. You don’t know anything about this woman’s life. You think things mean something when perhaps they don’t mean anything at all.

  I don’t need to know. I just want to look, I told her as she sighed and left the room to serve out dinner for the rest of the family. It makes me feel hopeful when I look … that’s all. Like looking at the sky at night. You can see shapes in the stars.

  *

  On the sand that stretched alongside Tallebudgera Creek, you could lie down at night and really see the sky full of stars. In the lights of the galaxies, we would discover all kinds of things the Ancient Greeks might have seen: archers, scorpions, warriors, the head of Medusa, other gods and goddesses. We also saw things that made sense to us: shopping trolleys, saucepans, a teapot, the face of a wombat, the bushie who lived in a caravan at the back of the creek, an old woman’s toes. I never saw Garbo’s face in the stars, though, no matter how hard I looked, or how much I wanted to see it there.

  You take for granted things like a sky full of stars until you live, even for a short while, in a place like Paris. Despite its beauty, and the multitude of lights and lanterns, you can’t look up and see a wide, sparkling vista. The French, some say, are perhaps too explicit for the cosmic. Their language lets them go only so far, reined in by a specificity that lends itself to critical thinking and analysis, rather than flights of fancy among the heavens. Whether that’s true or not, the French love their human stars, their own as well as the glamour queens of early Hollywood, whom they honour as mavericks, revolutionaries and artists.

  Roland Barthes once wrote that Greta Garbo’s face ‘plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy’. He continued:

  The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light. She herself knew this … the essence was not to be degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection … The Essence became gradually obscured, progressively veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles: but it never deteriorated … [Garbo’s face] assures the fragile passage from awe to charm.

  I recognised in Barthes’ words what I had felt as a child, what I had needed to feel: a sense of wonder that such a face, and all the ideas and hope it suggested, could exist in the world; and that by looking at pictures in a book I could share that sense of wonder with other admirers from all over the world.

  I had decided to Google Greta while I was in Paris. In contrast to Barthes’ ode to Garbo’s fa
ce, the British writer Zadie Smith saw something completely different in Garbo’s aura. She wrote about Greta’s existential depression and universal ennui, while describing her face as nature’s work of art. Another anonymous blogger described her in later life as a thin, dour Swedish woman. I was shocked to read that after Garbo had retired from glamour she had aged ordinarily. But the most striking thing I came across was Greta’s own words as she remembered herself as a young girl of eleven in Sweden:

  It was eternally grey – those long winter’s nights. My father would be sitting in a corner, scribbling figures on a newspaper. On the other side of the room my mother is repairing ragged old clothes, sighing. We children would be talking in very low voices, or just sitting silently. We are filled with anxiety, as if there is danger in the air … I was always sad as a child, for as long as I can think back.

  *

  About halfway through my swim across Tallebudgera Creek, my legs stopped working. My flippers felt like dead weight in the water and my goggles dug into my eyes. I don’t know to this day if it was cramp or fatigue. But my body seemed to have arrived at its limits and I was unable to continue kicking. Panicked, I gasped for air as I willed my energy down to my feet. I don’t know if help was near or if my father was watching from the shore, because I had set off without telling him what I was trying to do. I had grown impatient with his training, as I often did in those days, and I knew that if I had told him I wanted to try to cross on my own he would have warned me to wait, to practise more.

  As my arms began to weaken and my head began to slip under the water, I had the idea to flip myself onto my back and float on the water. After a couple of tries, I managed to do this, arranging and rearranging my body so it was balanced on the water’s surface.

  From that angle it seemed extraordinary how the sun filled the sky, the way its rays washed the clouds in amber light. Squinting and opening my eyes in rapid succession, like the camera’s eye opening and closing as it films, I thought the sky no longer looked like a sky, but a whole world of messages and signs, a blue and yellow page on which was written the story of my life, with all the things I had done, all the things I would do and dream, and all the things I would fail to do.

  As I looked up, my arms began to rotate at my sides, so that my body spun slowly in the water. Though I felt that I held this position for a long time, it would have been only a minute or so that I floated this way on my back. But it was a minute in which the world seemed filled with endless possibilities, a minute in which I lost my panic and my fear, in which I calmed down and found my strength again.

  After that minute ended, I felt my confidence return. I flipped back over onto my stomach, arced my arms above my head, as I had practised for so many years, and began to swim. Gently at first, then faster and stronger, I churned through the rippling waves until I reached the sand at the other side of the creek, where to my surprise my father was waiting for me with a towel and a Paddle Pop. He was inscrutable as always, and it was hard to tell whether he was angry or impressed. His sense of calm was, as usual, possibly misleading, and I wondered whether he had witnessed my swim from a protective distance. Or whether he had just left me to it, as he would so often in my life.

  *

  The screening of Ninotchka at the Forum des Images was in late July, a month before I was due to leave Paris. I had never seen the film and was excited to see it in the city where it was set. On my way to the Forum, I dropped in at Starbucks near the Hôtel de Ville and ordered the same tea latte I’d been drinking every day since I arrived in February. As I was about to leave, I saw Mathilde sitting at my favourite spot near the window. At least I thought it was Mathilde: she looked completely different. Her once radiant face was pinched and tense, as if she were suffering in some way, although I couldn’t tell whether it was physical, mental or emotional.

  I hurt my back, she told me when I asked her how she was. I was reaching up to examine a painting at the Louvre and I felt something snap. Apparently it’s a muscle spasm. You should have seen me a month ago, I was wearing a back brace. All bent over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  She laughed.

  I sat down opposite her. I didn’t know how to help her, this beautiful Parisian girl who now looked so worn and damaged. I asked her what therapies she was using to help her recover.

  It’s not the best city to recover in, she grimaced. The best thing of course is swimming. But it’s hard to find a pool that’s not full of people at this time of year. We suffer for so long in the cold that we kind of go crazy in the summer. We pack everything we can into those few warm months, because we know what’s ahead is the long winter. Do you swim?

  We all learn as children in Australia, I said. It’s too dangerous not to. Swimming might help your back, I think.

  I never learned properly, you know. All I do is paddle like a little dog. But at least I’m in the water.

  We talked a bit longer. She told me how she planned to go to the sea if she could, to Brittany or Normandy. Or, if she managed to get some money together, perhaps to Marseilles or Saint-Tropez.

  Or maybe you can invite me to Australia, she teased. I hear it’s gorgeous there, even in winter.

  It’s the best time to be there. The sun’s out, the sky is blue and there’s just a little nip in the air.

  Sounds perfect. She sighed, rearranging herself carefully in the chair. You should write for your country’s tourist department.

  Maybe I should. But when I’m there for too long, I always want to leave. It’s like a puzzle I’m always trying to solve. This pull and push of where I come from.

  Sounds like a luxurious puzzle to have, she mused.

  By the way, I’m sorry we didn’t meet up at the Louvre, I said. I just got really down in the cold and kind of turned in on myself.

  I felt bad about that. Another lost opportunity, I thought. Another possible connection with a human being, ruined by my obsessions.

  It’s called hibernation, she reassured me. Anyway, there’s still time. That’s what we have a lot of in Paris. We have time. The past. The present.

  And the future?

  Not so much, she laughed again. Look around us. We may as well be living in a museum. It drives you crazy sometimes, all that stone and dust. That’s why a lot of young people want to leave. To find the future. But we think if we make time for time, the future will take care of itself.

  I went back to the counter and ordered a coffee for her. Just to say thanks. I asked for the most voluptuous coffee they had in the house. A double mocha with double cream and two spoons of chocolate sprinkled on top. She was delighted when I brought it to her.

  I call it the Mathilde, I said. It’s the most beautiful coffee I could think of. It’s my way of saying thanks to a beautiful girl from Paris.

  What for? She looked puzzled and even a little teary. Look around you. This city is full of beautiful girls. Believe me, I’m nothing special.

  Well, first of all, thanks for telling me about the Forum des Images. I’m heading there now.

  Oh, what’s on?

  A Greta Garbo film called Ninotchka.

  Where she laughs? she squealed delightedly. It’s a classic.

  You’ve seen it?

  I’ve seen a lot of her films, she said, matter-of-fact. We watched some in Film Studies. And, of course, most philosophy students know the essay Barthes wrote about her face. Superb!

  I couldn’t hide my surprise.

  What’s so amusing? she asked, noticing my wry smile.

  I laughed. Just having a Paris moment.

  And second of all? she prompted me.

  Second of all, I echoed. Thanks for reminding me of something I thought I’d forgotten. Or at least missed out on.

  Which is? she quizzed me, curious.

  Paris. I thought I’d failed in Paris, because all I’ve really done is stay in my room remember
ing things from my past.

  That’s what winters are for, she said. Everything goes dark and everything dies. Then spring comes, and there are little glimmers of hope; then summer, and everything comes to life. That’s what we do in Paris. We understand seasons and time. People come and go, but here we are, a memorial to memory and time.

  I stood up to go. I didn’t want to be late for the film, as I had often been. I was tired of seeing the exasperated face of the cashier at the cinema when I arrived, panting and late, at the counter.

  Mathilde laughed again when I explained the reason for my haste, then lifted her mocha coffee and toasted her city. To Paris then.

  Yes, I echoed as I turned to leave. To Paris.

  *

  I did arrive late at the Forum after my unexpected meeting with Mathilde. I bought my ticket for Ninotchka from the disapproving cashier, who refused to leave his post to guide me into the darkened cinema. As I picked my way across bodies to find an empty seat, I felt disorientated after the bright warmth of my day, momentarily blind in the absence of light.

  Five minutes or so after I had settled into my seat, the night scenes of the film abruptly switched to daylight as Greta Garbo, her face grim and determined, strode across a room. I suddenly realised I was surrounded by hundreds of Parisian film-lovers, laughing at the comic actors to whom Greta was playing the ‘straight man’. As I listened to the laughter, I recalled again that sense of wonder and mystery I had felt as a child, that something luminous and magical was touching me. I remembered the young girl I’d been, poring over my copy of A Pictorial History of the Movies, and The Allure of Garbo, while my mother knocked on the door and told me not to read too much or stay up too late, that there was a big world out there and reading about films and staring at exotic faces was not going to give me the tools to get on in life. And, as sometimes happens, I felt time move downward as well as forward: I became aware of textures and meanings that had been hidden from view. I could finally see the vast distance I had crossed in my life, geographically and metaphorically, in order to have arrived there in Les Halles, watching Greta Garbo finally laugh on screen.