The city of lights truly had them in diamonds. They hung in catenaries or emphasised commerce in discreet bright signs. Cars, vans and motorcycles, all moving briskly, seemed to be pumping life itself through the avenues. They were the city’s blood. Traffic was even called ‘la circulation’. I expected more tooting of klaxons, though. There was merely a low hum; Paris repressed aural distractions. Like a stripper without her music, it would seduce you by looks alone, in style and silence. Occasionally, the city’s expectant bass line was interrupted by cobblestones, the taxi’s suspension parlaying urgent and sensuous harmonics, a mellifluous brrrrrrrr. We alternated between wide boulevards bordered by lights and narrow dimmer streets, cliffs of buildings on either side. On the tight footpaths I glimpsed the most elegant heels I had ever seen.
The taxi stopped near a corner. ‘C’est là, monsieur,’ said the chauffeur. Indeed, the Hotel Pierwige certainly was. A modest sign hanging vertically above a second-floor balcony announced its name, the letters backlit in a kind of schoolboy modernist font. I wrestled the case through the hotel’s narrow front door.
The reception was cupboard-sized. To the left was an alcove, a partitioned box for keys hanging on the wall behind it. To the right was a door bearing the strict capitals ‘SALLE A MANGER’. Two steps ahead, a wooden staircase began a tight spiral, disappearing heavenwards. A large woman in a floral apron and erratically smudged scarlet lips appeared from a door behind it.
‘Monsieur?’ she enquired. I showed her my docket. She took it, scowled and brushed past me into the alcove with a stern ‘Excusez-moi ’. She swung a hinged counter down in front of her and demanded my passport. She looked at it, then me, several times before pencilling my details into her log. The sevens of Australian citizen number 3870721 were crossed with certainty. Within seconds, I was taped. Was I booking in for life? She jabbed an index finger at the steep staircase, informing me to ascend to the ‘cinquième étage’.
The suitcase and I began a definitive bout. I couldn’t believe that craftsmen still lived who could hew such tightly curled banisters. Each floor had a landing the size of a Muslim prayer mat, three doors opening off it. Many seemed curiously ajar, and from behind some escaped fragments of French. Beyond a half-open door on the fourth floor, two girls lounged on a ruffled bedspread printed with hibiscus. A cloud of sweet smoke hovered above them. They were about twenty; dark, with large eyes. One of them leavened her brunette locks with blonde streaks. She wore what used to be called a negligée — possibly because anyone who appeared in one was clearly negligent when it came to getting dressed. Her hair in a short bob, the other girl had on jeans and a well-balconied bra. Their feet were bare. Without expression, they watched me struggle with the case. I smiled and pushed on to the summit.
My room was small, with a bouncy mattress on an iron frame, a basin in the corner, a narrow window, a single light, and busy wallpaper of indigo daisies. In places, the paper had peeled, then been ripped off. Of honey-coloured hardwood plinths, the floor appeared clean. It shone energetically. A rug the size of a large handkerchief was beside the bed. I swung open the window and threw back its shutters. Paris’s expectant counterpoint invaded the room. I smelt biscuit and heard the distant braying of police vehicles. Hungry, I couldn’t wait to eat, and within minutes I’d dumped the case and spun back down the stairs.
Across the boulevard, an awning of maroon canvas bore the words ‘La Petite Marmite’. At small round tables on the footpath, groups of animated drinkers talked and laughed. Waiters brought them beer and tall glasses containing a finger or two of a golden liquid. When they blended it with water, as they all did, it turned milky. I hadn’t seen liquids change colour since high-school chemistry classes. So magic, too, was part of eating and drinking in France!
A waiter in a long white apron told me to sit inside, by the window. My table was covered with butcher’s paper. Cheap and odd, I thought. A menu was thrust into my hand in seconds. An etiolated basket pressed from thin metal appeared. It contained thick slices of wrist-thin bread. Large holes riddled the bread, and its crust, no doubt, once crackled to the touch. I tried it. If this was the famous baguette, then it was stale.
The list translated easily. Eggs with mayonnaise, house terrine, herring fillets, roast chicken and ‘bifteck pommes frites’. A guidebook I’d read incredulously claimed that steak-and-chips was the French national dish. A suspicion nestled on my shoulder. The one I’d glimpsed before. Perhaps France and Australia were not so far apart after all. Or were they in friendly competition? My liking for Paris was soaring. Urging even greater rapprochement — a word I didn’t then know — I wondered how French steak-and-chips could possibly be similar to ours. It couldn’t be! After all, in bush towns this gastronomic delight amounted to a thin cross-section of rib cut with a bandsaw. It arrived under a smother of gluey mushroom gravy that tasted of starch. Accompanying chips were always more tanned than a stockman’s face, but a great deal limper than his penis on pay night.
What did I desire? The waiter stood over me. I fumbled with the menu before stammering, ‘Bifteck frites.’
‘Steak and chips,’ he affirmed. ‘Du vin?’
The words slid out sneakily from a starting point somewhere between sinuses and nose cartilage. Surprisingly, I understood them. Wine. I was making phenomenal progress. I returned to the menu. House wines were listed by volume. Presuming the ‘quarts’ and ‘demis’ were of litres, I ordered a quarter carafe of red. ‘Bien!’ said the waiter, who seemed to be treating me like any other normal human being, in contradiction to stories I had heard.
At the next table, a short and shrivelled man with grey hair and a wry smile wiped his plate clean with bread. Cleaning his plate with bread was one thing, but it surprised me when he ate his mop. Using a fork and spoon, he took salad greens from a medium-sized bowl in front of him, warehousing them on the now-pristine crockery. To the bowl he added salt, pepper, vinegar and oil from various small receptacles on the table. After whisking these together with the spoon, he returned the leaves to the bowl and folded the lot over several times. I smiled at him. His grin spread.
Across the room, a plump Frenchman served himself from a large brownstone ceramic. Fillets of thick brown fish dripping oil slid onto his plate. He spooned out rounds of carrot, arcs of onion and a sprig of thyme. His elegant companion hesitated her knife and fork over two breast-like mounds of mayonnaise. Eggs beneath, I supposed. At a table near the door, a sober-looking business type unbuttoned his jacket and began trimming his camembert with a knife.
My steak and wine materialised. Mustard in a small ceramic pot and another pressed-metal basket, this time holding chips, also arrived. I recognised the cut of beef. Back home we called it ‘skirt steak’. It was the lowest form of muscle. My mother minced it for Cornish pasties, which were her only gastronomic flourish (if you could dignify pasties with such a description). She cooked them annually, on account of her forebears, she would say, and then grizzled about the amount of work involved in slicing turnips. Skirt steak was cheap and nasty and I had no idea why a café, even of unknown reputation, would be serving it as the national dish. Surely fillet or porterhouse would leap from a substitutes’ bench if rib-eye wasn’t available? Then I tasted it. Not only tender for a rough cut, it was also delicious. Moreover, once inside its brown-fried exterior, you came across warm-raw, dark maroon flesh. I loved raw meat.
The chips were crisp, their innards of cloudy, blow-away lightness. And what was it about French potatoes that gave them flavour? Spuds were duds where I came from. As a place, I decided quickly, France had increasing attractions. But if the meal had merit, my wine was ugly — sharp and thin.
Salad greens appeared, and I shook salt and pepper onto them. I picked up the oil and was about to add it when my shrivelled friend gestured. ‘Ah, non, monsieur!’ he insisted. His grin had disappeared. His shaking head dictated that I put down the oil.
‘Faites l’espace,’ he said, which was beyond my comprehension. He made
a clearing motion with his hand.
I picked up the spoon and began toying with the leaves. He gestured again. I cleared some to one side. He grinned. I pushed all the leaves to the edge of the bowl. He was delighted. I picked up the oil again. His grin disappeared.
‘Ah, non, monsieur! D’abord, le sel et le poivre.’ I must have looked mystified; he picked up his own salt and pepper. I sprinkled seasoning into the bowl. We smiled at one other. I picked up the oil. His hand shot out, hooking my elbow.
‘Pas encore, monsieur!’ I replaced the oil. ‘En premier, le vinaigre.’
Vinaigre? Had to be. I picked up the vinegar. My instructor smiled. ‘Pas trop!’ He accompanied his insistence with a fingertip and thumb only fractionally apart. Perhaps I shouldn’t add too much. I poured and replaced, then picked up the oil.
‘Bien!’ he said.
I poured and stirred. He smiled. I pulled back the leaves over the sauce and tossed them. A fulfilled pedagogue, he held his arms aloft like a heavyweight champion.
How much discovery could I cram into a first night? Particularly about food, in which I thought I could perhaps nurture an interest. After all, I’d always liked eating, even if its scope had been limited.
Options swirled as the carafe emptied and a short black followed. I felt light and worldly, ready to argue with Sartre or take on the lions at any nominated zoo. Paris was exhilarating, foreign as nowhere else I’d been. Yet also weirdly accommodating. The sensation of being at home rushed me again. The French did things I felt comfortable with. Enjoyed, even. Their directness and logicality made sense to a practical and marginally serious person. Their rituals were peculiar and attractive, but also exotic. What a combination! I forgave them immediately for stealing steak-and-chips. Men don’t generally quiver, but a certain vibration was disturbing me. France was so different from England, which I had been led to believe was part of Europe. Undeniably itself, France was contrary — like me at times. It had a kind of cultural courage, a determination to do things its own way no matter what.
I did a lap of the Left Bank after dinner, taking in the crowds of elegant pedestrians, the nervous traffic, the urgent Parisian police cars and the increasingly complex smell of biscuit.
Finally, I mounted the stairs for bed. They looked sleepier, but nothing else had changed about the girls on the fourth floor. Their door remained open. They smoked still, the fog above their heads thicker. The cloud smelt sweeter and more herbal, and I returned their polite stares for longer. As I continued for the fifth floor, the bobbed one with the balconied bra, dark and quite pretty, flashed the faintest of smiles. She shrugged her shoulders. Slowly. Deliberately? One of the black satin straps supporting her breasts slid over ivory skin to make a loop by her elbow. The faintest pink crest of aureole rose above a lacy black cup. She smiled a fraction more and pouted like a little girl who’s had her doll confiscated. I blushed.
I might have learnt a lot since leaving the Hovercraft. But, in a wholly French sense, I still wasn’t Einstein.
day one
Thirty-four years later, the cars and whitegoods, ships and motorbikes recycled from Hovercraft scrap have long since rusted away. And I touch down forty minutes early at Roissy Charles de Gaulle — or Charles de Gaulle Roissy, if you admire the big general more than the airport. I’ve got toothache. Something I’ve bitten on board, I’m convinced. A small bone in a Chinese stirfry. At least, I hope it’s a gum problem and not a hole or a stirring abscess. My dental health is dodgy at the best of times, and I’m not surprised the molar has blown up. I’m in agony, despite a couple of painkillers and an anti-inflammatory tablet. (Drugs are the first items to go into a skilled voyager’s backpack. Prescription, of course.)
Paris’s main airport hardly helps. Some twenty kilometres to the north-east of the city, it was avant-garde, sculpted in fashionable concrete, when it began operations in 1974. Its main terminal is a ten-storey turret that sprouts seven boarding ‘satellites’. But Roissy these days is among the least practical of international gateways. A pie-shaped plan and subsequent wedges funnel passengers into tight spaces. People get sweaty and irritable. Like every aircraft criss-crossing the skies, ours is full, and we passengers, after brief liberation in corridors, are about to be concentrated yet again in an enclosed space where we will collect our baggage. And it’s early in the morning. And not a lot of us have slept especially well.
Coming from Asia, we are many Chinese. Then there are the twenty or thirty Italians, all jokes and swagger, in Ferrari-red jackets and polo shirts stamped with automotive logos. I guess a works team in rally-car racing. And there are the French themselves, returning from holidays, looking great but preening — just like ducks — as soon as they are let out. Within minutes, there are too many of us waiting for luggage, the delivery of which is not Roissy’s strongest suit. But we have time to spare. Idle time. Time to watch the Italians joking about the ineptitude of the French. To observe Hong Kong Chinese becoming more mystified as the minutes pass. Time in which my tooth bangs a rhythmic throb through the left side of my head. Which famous philosopher said two-thirds of the world’s pain is toothache?
Backpack retrieved, I pass through customs and frontier officials in a jiffy — Roissy’s biggest plus. And it seems I can push my trolley all the way to the train station if I follow what are perhaps the world’s clearest signs. They’re in orange, their white letters in a sharp-edged sans-serif typeface. One problem: there are simply not enough of them. The trail peters out, and I finally ask someone in a uniform. Just keep on walking, he says, right to the other end of the terminal. ‘Tout au bout,’ he shouts after me. ‘Au bout!’
The walk is good exercise after the jumbo. The whole kilometre or so of it. There are stairs to negotiate and lifts to take and we should none of us ask — let alone write books about — why the cheese-eating French are so slim. How many words are needed to say ‘exercise’? And manual gearshifts. And heavy shop doors that don’t self-open. Even heavier office doors. Stairs in the Métro. And no snacking between meals, I’ll warrant that. And no sweets, lollies, biscuits or processed fats. Or fewer of them (some younger French are changing).
The station is a transport cathedral, its floor in big grey-and-white marble tiles, its buttresses in more lofty concrete. It smells of polished steel, and its background music is the incessant hum of escalators. My credit card fails to work at an automatic ticket machine. It’s par for the course in French railway stations. I stand in a queue of perhaps twenty to reach the single clerk behind glass. There are at least a dozen more guichets. All unwomened. No wonder: this is the France of the thirty-five-hour week.
Back in the station itself there is little movement towards the platforms, which are a long escalator ride below. Why? In big block letters an electronic sign is broadcasting the news: since last night, it says, there has been a railway strike. English and French versions alternate. The English one is wonderful: ‘Trafic,’ it announces, ‘is really affected’. It further advises — fairly summarily, I feel — that ‘you cancel your travel’. Trains usually leave every ten minutes or so for Paris. The first one this morning will not be along for an hour. I wait, sliding about on slippery brushed-alloy benches. (But don’t they look sleek?)
After my enforced wait, I’m finally in the RER, short for the regional express ‘reseau’ or network. These trains are quite speedy, but how long they take to get to Paris depends entirely on how many stations they stop at on the way. And this one, being the first of the morning during a strike, is an omnibus. The dark ochre or mid-blue vinyl of its seats are hosting a forlorn monde within a couple of stops. Passengers are swaddled in overcoats and scarves against the unseasonal chill. Most of them have Arabic or African blood. Their glumness is contagious. It’s as if the greyness of a late-autumn pre-dawn has infused their wrappings and seeped inside. They’re missing the sun. It’s only a few degrees above zero outside, and snow is forecast for later in the week. Very soon, the nippled floor of black rubber is obscured b
y shoes. Presently, you can’t even glimpse the buttercup yellow of the carriage walls. And I and my backpack and my daypack and my laptop in a bag are jammed up against a window. I’m delighted younger seated passengers are between me and several standing women. I couldn’t get up for them if I tried. I’m pleased that none looks pregnant. And my face hurts.
A single change to a Métro line at the Gare du Nord, a two-stop journey, and I’m out and above ground and hiking along the narrow footpath of the rue des Petites Ecuries. The day is turning out fine — ‘clear and cold and lovely,’ as Ernest Hemingway used to describe Parisian winter days. I’m in a fairly new building for the first half of my stay, and I bang on its full-glass frontage until a smiling Iberian greets me and lets me in. He’s Monsieur Da Costa, the concierge. Like every other Parisian caretaker he is Portuguese. Without trying, and in spite of an early 747 and a late RER, I’m precisely on time to take the keys from the owner of my ground-floor studio.
‘Where is Monsieur Montebello?’ I ask Monsieur Da Costa. Swathed in a dark overcoat and scarf, a man of average height and thin build advances towards us from an interior courtyard. The smile on his gaunt face is wide and he extends a hand. Perfect timing, he says. I was lucky, I say, because the RER was on strike. Ah, he laughs, I wouldn’t be in France if I didn’t have to deal with a strike.
Now, you don’t rent a studio in Paris to trip over easels, skid on spilled paint or discover naked young models in its cupboards. (If only!) A studio is simply a one-room flat, and Monsieur Montebello’s is perfect for my purposes. It’s large by Parisian standards, has a quite generous kitchen corner, a big hard bed, a spacious bathroom with a bath (a rarity in itself), an extendable table and a sliding glass door that opens onto a little garden in the courtyard. And it’s all impeccably neat, clean and well lighted. A well-lighted room, that’s what I’d been looking for. And it has been delivered. The walls are white, and Monsieur Montebello has decorated one of them with round mirrors of dinner-plate size. The floor is linoleum pretending to be strips of oak.
Paris on a Plate Page 2