While we are packing up, I can’t help but sneak looks at him. I feel self-conscious and I wonder how I am coming across to them all, but especially to him. I can’t stop thinking about how he is A. Very. Good. Looking. Person.
And I watch him brush charcoal off his hands again, and I ogle, and I feel something.
‘I like your apple, p’tit kangourou,’ he says, maybe noticing me staring (how embarrassing!). ‘Your pear could use some work, but it’s not bad.’
Yes. I am definitely feeling things.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Your pear is perfect.’
We smile at each other. He thinks my apple is good! So much smiling.
‘Me, I’m Olivier,’ he says. Olivier.
For a near-constant daydreamer, I’m astonished to realise I have never felt less in my body than I do right now. ‘I’m Sofie,’ I manage to say.
Véronique has disappeared from the atelier, and the other students are milling about, some leaving, some putting their drawings in large folios so they can carry them home.
I try to bring myself back to the ground, and I tap softly (respectfully) on Olivier’s folio, an expensive-looking brown leather, which he is closing up with a zipper that goes around and around. ‘This is really nice,’ I say. The leather is so smooth under my finger that I know it is way out of my price range.
‘It was a gift from my grandmother,’ he replies.
‘Olivier, I’m going,’ says a girl with long black hair. She is wearing a woollen dress, and I think her name is Amandine. She is friends with Léa.
‘À tout de suite,’ he replies. Be right there.
‘Bye, Sofie,’ she says in English. Her tone is friendly but her face is serious.
‘What do you think of our atelier?’ Olivier asks, gesturing about with his hands. I notice his long fingers and neat, perfect fingernails. We are the last two people left in the classroom.
I look around again in wonder. ‘It’s incredible,’ I say. ‘I am going to make great art in here.’
He rests one of those very same hands, with its pianist fingers, on my arm for just a moment, and laughs. ‘I like this confidence.’
I’m momentarily embarrassed to come across as arrogant, but just smile like I meant to say it.
‘What is your preferred material?’ he asks me. I must look confused (I am) because he adds, ‘What kind of art – sorry, great art – do you like to make?’
‘I like to draw. My pear was a little sad today, but I do mostly like to make realistic pencil drawings. I love the little details.’ I really do feel that I can create great art in this space.
‘For me,’ he says, ‘I love painting.’ He pushes off the bench and heads to the other side of the room, where there are huge wooden shelves for storing canvases.
‘Oh, so do I,’ I say, following. In the back of my mind I’m also buzzing – I am speaking French with a French person and we’re talking about things that matter to us. This is what I came here for!
‘I am going to make my piece for the exhibition in oils,’ Olivier says, pulling down a canvas and running his hand across it before turning it around for me to see.
It’s a half-finished painting, but astonishing even so. It’s the shadowy corner of a room, material draping down one side – perhaps a curtain – and the arms and torso of a person – a woman – sitting in an armchair, wearing a thin dress that dips into all her curves. The way the skin is painted is so realistic I can practically see the hair on her arms. The top half of the painting is still a sketch, but you can see her hand holding something up (a mirror?). He’s planning her face in profile, and she’s beautiful. I wonder if she’s a real person.
‘This is your painting?’ I ask, pointing and hoping it doesn’t sound rude.
Olivier smiles (his smile is dazzling). ‘Yes. I’m trying to capture the Romantic style, but make it modern. You see?’ He points to the rough box the woman is holding. ‘Here I will have her holding her phone.’
‘Oh, this is clever,’ I say. I feel, suddenly, like I am wasting my time with my current medium of pen and pencil and the occasional acrylic paint. Not to mention my unclever re-creations of tiny beautifuls – I’ve not thought to subvert a classic style and make it modern.
‘And the exhibition, what’s that?’ I ask.
‘In May we will be showing our work in an exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts. It’s a type of audition. Professors and artists from the university will be able to see our work.’
My head spins. For all my dreaming and planning over the past twelve months, there is still so little I have anticipated. I hope I’ll be allowed to take part in the exhibition. I hope I’ll get to know Olivier better.
Olivier slides his canvas back onto the shelf, smiles at me and says, ‘Okay, well, until next time.’
‘Until next time,’ I say, sorry to see him go. But I stand here, in the now-empty atelier, and the next five months roll out ahead of me paved with possibility.
The first week in Paris goes by both in a flash and at a crawl.
Claudette seems so much more artistic than Léon, when he’s supposed to be the artist. I’m still not entirely sure what her job is – something in a gallery – but she gets up quite early and wears sharp outfits with beautiful, bright scarves or neat blazers (or both, sometimes). She plays music in whichever room she’s in, sometimes in multiple rooms. For a tiny flat they have a lot of radios and bluetooth speakers.
My mum sings along to the radio, usually pretty badly. Claudette isn’t like that, but you can tell she’s really listening to the music.
I have never eaten so much food in my life. Every morning I have a breakfast tartine – bread with butter and jam. Claudette makes me a hot chocolate while she makes coffee for the rest of the family. Then there are the school lunches – always a hot meal, always a dessert.
We have dinner as a family each night. I find myself eating things I don’t like very much, but unable to say anything because it’s too impolite. One night we eat a quiche and the egg is wibbling and the ham is extra hammy and have you ever had that feeling of being drawn inside yourself, where it’s a battle between you and the food? You go a bit deaf until you manage to get it down.
Delphine is in and out of the apartment like a spy. I hardly see her. When I do, she’s friendly, though private. Her bedroom door is nearly always closed. I did get a peek in one morning as we crossed paths to the bathroom, and I greedily took in the sight: a keyboard piano with headphones resting on top, two pairs of running shoes lined up by the wardrobe, and a big indoor plant soaking up the winter sun.
True to their word, Claudette and Léon speak only French with me. I’m happy with how much I understand, and I’m finding it easier to express myself, but it’s exhausting. Sometimes when I go to bed, I want to cry with how tired I am and how my head constantly aches.
Crow messages on Saturday morning: Go do something beautiful. It is so unlike her. Usually she’s stuck in the gloomy and the negative. But she is right.
So, because of my quest for beauty, and because I have twenty euros burning a hole in my pocket, I stop at a bakery and buy a pain au chocolat and I head out into the city. I eat it as I walk (which later I find out is a bit of a faux-pas, a French no-no) and the buttery, flaky pastry and the bitter sweetness of the chocolate melt together in my mouth.
I am keeping a list of my expenses so far (most outgoings fall under ‘croissant’ or ‘pain au chocolat’). I am under my budget thanks to all the home-cooked meals and me walking places instead of taking the metro. School is a twenty-minute walk, and apart from that first day I haven’t really gone further afield.
As well as redefining my Parisian style, I have been planning my route around the galleries and museums for at least a year. Maybe longer. The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou. Monet’s garden out in Giverny. I am looking forward to being ab
le to pronounce Giverny.
I want to see that famous half-smiling Mona Lisa.
If you are an adult, it’s a bit expensive to get into the Louvre, but my greatest joy is finding out that entry for people under the age of eighteen is completely free!
I thank my lingering jet lag stars for waking me up early. I listen to music as I walk to the train; I’ve been bingeing on Spotify French playlists ever since I found out I was going on exchange. Playlists that seem to either be whispery sexy women speak-singing over a jazzy piano track, or fastfastfast rapping.
Crow likes the rapping, but she absolutely hates the whispers and says they give her the creeps. ‘The French are obsessed with having people think they’re sexy,’ she had said, and pretended to vom. ‘When in reality they eat really weird things – like, have you ever looked at a snail? – that are not sexy at all.’
So I listen to the rap. I like the way it makes me saunter, makes me feel brave, makes my feet feel confident in where they’re going.
Where I’m going I have to take the brown 11 metro towards Châtelet. While I’m waiting for the train, Delphine texts me: Are you at the museum yet? (I had left a note on the kitchen table. I hadn’t tried to imitate the loopy French handwriting, but I did leave a doodle of me looking at the Mona Lisa.) I hadn’t expected to hear from her, but it makes me feel warm and cared-for.
The train arrives and once I’ve found a seat, I text back: Not yet. Just getting on the metro.
Be careful, sends Delphine. When you get off the train, it’s easy to go the wrong way down at Châtelet–Les Halles. Those metro tunnels are labyrinthine hallways – you walk for 10 full minutes and end up in completely the wrong place.
I had already decided to be careful. The tile-and-concrete design of the metro stations we pass brings to mind toilet blocks, bunkers or psychiatric hospitals. I slip my phone back into my bag – still careful with my things on the metro – and in my mind I’m sketching a new connection from me to my host sister. A line growing and stretching out like a little vine. I hope it gets stronger.
Once at the Louvre and through the security checks – of course, in spite of myself – I beeline for the Mona Lisa and of course, in the cliché of clichés, she’s already surrounded by adoring crowds.
It still gives me a thrill to glimpse her.
We learned last year in class that da Vinci made up a special technique called sfumato to create the light and the depths in this painting. By blending the paint together, he created an effect that’s somehow more real than real. The lines between colours and brushstrokes disappear like smoke. Fumo is Italian for smoke. (In French, smoke is la fumée.)
I didn’t expect so many of the crowding masses to be as interested in sfumato and painterly magic, and so I wander off to look at whatever catches my eye. I almost gasp at the physical size of some of the paintings, and I wonder if they were ever intended to be hung inside people’s houses. There are some taller than our ceilings at home and many more that wouldn’t fit through the doorways … unless you unframed them and rolled them up. I wonder if that’s how they had transported them for safekeeping during the Nazi occupation of Paris?
Imagine having all these paintings in your home. That’s my dream for the future. Tall walls and art everywhere.
Each piece of art in the Louvre sends my heart and soul flying. Liberty Leading the People. The Raft of the Medusa. The Lacemaker, hard at her work. They’re famous, iconic, historical. And here I am, with so much beauty around me I can’t believe it.
And the statues! I already knew about Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss and the Venus de Milo. And they’re stunning, although their smooth white surfaces give off a cold feeling that I hadn’t expected. I love seeing them (tick – there’s a dream come true; tick – there’s another), but they don’t move me like I thought they would.
However, when I see the Winged Victory of Samothrace I just stand there, beguiled, taken out of myself for a good minute. I see the top of her first, as I come up the stairs, just the tips of her wings. Then, the rest.
She’s a headless woman – well, she would have had a head originally, but she’s lost it somewhere along the way – with magnificent wings spread out behind her, her chest high and proud. She’s made of stone, but she’s also wrapped in drapes of cloth. How is this stonework so strong and intricate, and so full of movement?
She is extraordinary and I want, all of a sudden, to take up stonework and carving.
Am I allowed to touch? (Probably not.) I compromise by sitting and sketching her, attempting to capture her strength and her steadfastness. I sketch from each angle. I take a photo. I resketch.
I brush a lot of eraser crumbies onto the floor of the Louvre this first visit. I’m clearly leaving an impression on Paris already.
Sofie
Crow, it was amazing to see the
Louvre. But I’m so tired. Maybe
I want to come home?
Crow
Don’t come home. You’ve only seen
one gallery. Aren’t there like fifty?
Ha. Probably. But I can’t speak
French, I’m practically in the suburbs,
I don’t know how to talk to my host
family, their daughter’s hardly ever here,
everyone at school thinks I’m boring.
Yes, but you’re in Paris. What’s
it like? It must be beautiful.
Well, this neighbourhood is pretty grey
and concrete. It’s kind of desolate.
Never thought you’d call Paris desolate.
Shut up.
– Overnight chats with Crow
Sunday rolls around, and I struggle to wake up. The morning light coming in my window is dim and gloomy. Even though things are going well, objectively, I suddenly find myself weary and a little bit sad. It’s extremely uncomfortable, especially considering how hard I worked to get here.
The apartment is in a grey building in a street of grey buildings. I’ve seen films about East Berlin, and these are the kind of buildings you’d have seen there. Okay, so some of the buildings have small iron Juliet balconies and window boxes that promise flowers in the spring, but the few trees I can see are bare.
I should have expected this, since it is January and January here means mid-winter.
A little bit of homesickness stabs me and the aftershocks echo with a feeling of creeping disappointment. Maybe this isn’t going to be everything I had been dreaming of?
I message home, but I don’t let them know my wobbles. I reassure them I am alive, eating, safe and warm.
I feel both worried I am wasting my time and impatient for the exchange to be over. And I’m confused at how I can even feel these two competing feelings at the same time. I remind myself this is only my first week. Well, I guess technically now it’s my second. Still. I have all the time in the world. And there is still so long to go.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt alone or abandoned. Mum says on my first day of school, I held her hand and accepted her hug and just as easily accepted her leaving – off I went to the classroom with Mr Rose and all the other little preppies.
But I feel tired in France. I feel lonely here, too. Lonely! I’ve never felt this before. It’s not like I surround myself with lots of people, generally – but I miss my house, my parents, Hana, Crow. I miss feeling like part of the furniture. I want someone to chat with, to hang out with, to laugh with. I like that Delphine texted me yesterday, and I hope she’ll be around a bit more.
Preparing for this trip had involved my whole family, though I was responsible for paying for it – Mum and Dad made that clear right from the start.
I’d made an extra effort to focus in French class, and I labelled things in the house, so we all learned that le frigo is the fridge, un couteau is a knife and la fenêtre is the window. Dad loved his three trip
s a week to la piscine. He also loved laughing a lot when he said piscine (‘piss-in’).
I wish there was someone here I could laugh about the piss-in with.
‘What are you going to do today?’ Léon asks over a hot chocolate at breakfast.
Part of me wants to say, ‘Nothing,’ and just lie in bed doodling all day, but it feels like a really lazy option. By the time I’d gotten up, Delphine was already gone, to running club, according to Claudette.
I had kind of hoped Delphine might want to show me around.
‘I think I’ll go for a walk to explore the quartier,’ I say.
The streets crisscross and take off at angles that make me think I’m heading in completely the wrong direction, but somehow, I turn a corner and things make sense again. Anyway, I don’t really mind getting lost.
As I walk, I video chat with home.
‘Bonjour, my daughter!’ Dad’s voice booms through my headphones as his face appears on the screen.
‘Hi! My brain hurts! I’m so tired!’ I flop onto a park bench. It makes me feel so weirdly happy to see his face beaming at me, too close to the camera eye on the phone.
‘Why does your brain hurt?’ Dad asks, clearly concerned (he has excessively expressive eyebrows).
‘From speaking all this French, of course!’ I throw my free arm emphatically, forgetting I am in public. I should lower my voice, probably.
‘That’s great, Sof!’ says Mum, as a disembodied voice coming from somewhere behind him. ‘Your French must be getting so good.’
‘Not yet,’ I say. ‘It’s hard. But what’s happening at home?’
‘Oh, nothing’s changed.’
‘It’s been a week!’
‘I know. It’s only been a week. You’ve ignored us in a huff longer than this.’
Rude! But true. It’s just the distance is hard. I feel funny talking about it. ‘Have you seen Hana?’ I say instead. ‘Has she come over?’
‘That girl!’ Mum shakes her head. ‘Still in that job.’
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