day ten
It’s ironic that an exhibition on the achievements of Arabs in science and technology coincides with the blazing cars. I’m about to marvel at the gigantic contribution they have made to mathematics (think algebra and algorithm, for instance), geography, medicine, chemistry, and more mundane but useful pursuits such as irrigation. In the Métro to the Institut du Monde Arabe, I give up my place to an elderly gentleman whose wife has taken the jumpseat alongside me. Smiling, he thanks me, telling me I am ‘très aimable’ — a gentleman, in other words. (It’s just an expression, and doesn’t really mean ‘very loveable’.) Their dress is careful and correct, his tweed sports jacket fitting perfectly. Métro trains accelerate quickly and as we pull out of the Cité station I lose my balance for an instant. The old chap grabs and steadies me. I thank him. The couple and I change trains at Odéon and, as we get out, he and his wife say goodbye to me.
The institute was an item in President François Mitterand’s programme of great architectural works built between 1981 and 1995. A joint venture of France and several Arab nations, it houses a museum, library and auditorium. But it’s most well known for its eight-hundred-square-metre south-facing wall. From the broad plaza at its base, the wall is like a chessboard of Turkish tiles. But, rather than the usual blue and white, each tile is composed of shining metallic rings and rectangles. Thirty thousand light-sensitive irises open and close according to the amount of sun striking them. Their purpose is to control the heat and illumination inside the institute, but the building as a whole is the kind of extravagant architectural gesture that’s characteristic of Parisian history — the Eiffel Tower being the best known. Moreover, critics say the institute’s wall has never really worked properly.
I walk straight into the exhibition — no queues — and I wish Paris’s European French and African French and North African French and Levantine French would come here in droves to see the display. It’s sparse, but stylish and orderly, exposing an immense treasury of Arab intellect. There are ancient astronomical charts, engraved brass devices that determine the positions of heavenly bodies, life-sized diagrams showing blood circulation, audiovisuals explaining ingenious irrigation systems and war machines, sound grabs of Arabian music accompanying explanations of its complexities, and pages and pages under glass of early Arabian discoveries in mathematics that built on Greek and Indian work.
The Arabian contribution to human culture is simply overwhelming, yet most of us are ignorant of it. I wish the flics who stop the boys in the Métro would come here, look and think. Look up, too. How many of us realise that, while many names of heavenly bodies have Greek and Latin origins, many hundreds of others were either renamed or discovered by Arabs? (Al Dab’aran, A’crab, Al Zirr and Sched’ar have a singular poetry.) Look up, look up, this exhibition demands of us. I am moved by a video clip of a white-haired European-French intellectual who frames in a matter of minutes the contribution of Arab minds to humanity. It’s remiss of me not to note his name, but I feel now that it looked Jewish.
I ask myself many questions as I sit down for a late lunch at the ground-floor Café Litteraire. Why can’t humans be less prejudiced? Why aren’t we more reasonable? Why are we so unkind to others? Why are we naturally racist? In short, why are humans human? I’m reminded of something you hear constantly about particularly bad human behavior. Someone — often a chorus — will scream, ‘What an animal! This hoon acted like animal! He committed an animal act!’ ‘No, he didn’t,’ I’m always tempted to reply. ‘It was the act of a human... Other animals don’t behave so badly.’
My table is of marble, my deep vinyl bench-seat is comfortable and floor-to-ceiling glass gives onto the plaza. Institute employees take a smoking break. At a distant table, an elderly French couple play hide-and-seek with their toddling granddaughter. Beyond the plaza you might expect to see several Arab-leaning restaurants. But all I see is one of Groupe Flo’s answers to fast food — prompt porterhouse in the shape of a Buffalo Grill.
A laminated list of a dozen or so dishes in the Litteraire has colour photographs of such offerings as the assiette dégustation, which features eight Lebanese titbits (four cold, four hot) including tabouli, hummus and smoked eggplant (12.50 euros). Dips and salad with slices of marinated meats costs the same.
A waiter tells me that, because it’s late, only the couscous is available. There was a terrific run on other items at midday, apparently. Everything but the couscous is sold out. It’s a couscous ‘maison’, though, which is priced at 12 euros. I take it, and order a half-bottle of Clos St Thomas, a Lebanese rosé from the Békaa Valley. (The Lebanese would probably argue about that spelling, putting a ‘q’ where the ‘k’ is. I’m of the T. E. Lawrence — of Arabia — school of thought: in the same manuscript he often spelt proper names in several different ways. There is no ‘right’ way when transliterating from a language that uses different symbols.)
Fairly quickly a huge plateful of food is put in front of me. There’s the hindquarter of an enormous chook, big cylinders of carrot and chunks of celery, turnip pieces, swatches of cabbage, a few chickpeas and a dune of couscous. And it’s all rather tasty, the chicken tender and juicy, but only lukewarm. I ask for chilli (which they don’t understand in France — in an Arab restaurant you must ask for ‘harissa’) and salt and pepper for good measure.
In a place where service is desultory, these seasonings arrive promptly and I enjoy my tepid tucker. The wine, which is nicely cold, I like much more. It’s rich and fruity, but also bone dry. A lovely drink, and I’m quaffing it fast, gulping it as if I’ve got a whole bottle in front of me (which, as W. C. Fields pointed out, is better than a frontal lobotomy). Interested to know more, I search the label. It’s 14.5 per cent alcohol! And I’m guzzling it like mineral water. Soon I’m tremendously contented. Here I am, an atheist of Methodist upbringing in a Muslim museum nearing Christmas, the happiest day of the Christian year. Everyone around me seems reposed and cheerful, too; smiles beaming. Even the grossly overweight American couple four benches along are finding Paris exhilerating. She’s reading to him from a guidebook. They are agog at the treats they’re about to experience.
In a few minutes, I’ll stroll by the Seine through the Tino Rossi garden, which commemorates an actor and singer said to be the most famous Corsican after Napoleon. During my first Christmases in France there was always a moment — after the turkey with chestnut stuffing — when one of my sisters-inlaw, usually Bénédicte, the youngest, clamoured for Tino Rossi to be ‘put on’. What ‘went on’ the turntable was a sweetly crooned rendition of his most famous song, Petit Papa Noël. He first recorded it in 1946, and in a very short time it sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. And, although Tino Rossi died in 1983 in his seventies, he and his song still sell thousands of copies a year.
In the run-up to the Christmases of the early 1970s, I remember Tino being invited on to every variety show on French television. The hosts and viewers wanted only one song — Petit Papa Noël. The ballad is exemplarily saccharine, but Tino did have a lovely light tenor. It begins with an introduction that sets the scene of a ‘belle nuit de Noël ’. Snow has spread its white overcoat (I’m translating direct here), children are urged to say a final prayer before a sandman weighs heavily on their eyelids, and then comes the refrain:
Petit Papa Noël
Quand tu descendras du ciel
Avec des jouets par milliers
N’oublie pas mon petit soulier.
Little Father Christmas, it says, when you come down from the sky with your thousands of toys don’t forget my little shoe. (Christmas presents are stacked against French children’s shoes.)
It’s silly, trite and consumerist, but it has become a synecdoche for the warmth and love with which I — a funny foreigner — was embraced by a French family all those years ago. By my wife-to-be-then-wife, of course. But also by a mother-in-law who had lost her husband to cancer at forty-eight. Who got up at dawn for the rest of her life to continue
running the butcher’s shop. Who handled the money. Who made sure Marcel, the shop’s chef, went to the market, bought the meat and broke it down correctly, managed the apprentice and maintained the business. Who ensured that he was well looked after in return for his labours. Who kept her clients, including Salvador Dali, satisfied with the range and quality of her produce. Who brought up a gaggle of wonderful daughters and a son while she ran the shop. And, what with the reminiscences, the taste of chestnut stuffing in my mouth, a light spicy whiff of couscous in my nostrils and the words of Petit Papa Noël scrolling in some of the deepest veins of my memory, Tino’s renowned voice clear, his diction perfect, and the Lebanese rosé — let’s not forget the Lebanese rosé — going down a treat, I start weeping. Within seconds, I’m crying bucketloads. Not sobbing — no convulsions — but I am weeping rather heavily. I cover my face with my handkerchief and blow my nose. Nothing works, and I sit back, sip the rosé, let the emotion overwhelm me, remember, and cry my heart out.
In the Tino Rossi garden, which borders the river, I can’t find a plaque or bust of the great man. But it’s about four hundred metres long and fifty wide and I’d be surprised if there weren’t some recognition somewhere. The sun penetrates heavy cloud for a second or two every quarter-hour. The air, clear and cold, smells faintly manured and icy. Constructed a few metres above river level, the garden itself must be relatively recent. It’s a spacious mixture of paved areas, swirling rockeries, shrubs, specimen trees, grassy knolls and steps down to the quayside, here called the Port Saint-Bernard. Quite a few pedestrians are out strolling. The river in this part of town seems a little wider, the city more spacious, the buildings on either side less imposing. Tino Rossi’s garden could be a river-park virtually anywhere. London, say, by the lower Thames. It’s good for my composure.
I head upstream, taking an exit from Tino’s garden outside the very much larger, classical and alleyed Jardin des Plantes. I have in mind a particular pilgrimage — to the Gare d’Austerlitz. It’s only a few hundred metres and I’m there quickly. In recent years, Austerlitz, the protagonist of W. G. Sebald’s eponymous novel, and the station itself have garnered a small amount of fame. Sebald’s Austerlitz had the idea that his father left Paris from this station soon after the Germans entered the city. He envisaged his father leaning out of the window of his compartment, ‘and I saw the white clouds of smoke rising from the locomotive as it began to move ponderously away’. It was, Austerlitz thought, the ‘most mysterious of all the railway terminals of Paris’. He was fascinated by the way Métro trains roll over the iron viaduct ‘into the station’s upper storey, quite as if the facade were swallowing them up’. He was also entranced by the immense gabled curtain of glass — held intact by ornate ironwork — that hangs above the far end of the platforms.
But, although it’s a theme that resonates through this great book, Austerlitz failed to note the station’s darkest aspect: the block capitals that are chiselled into a massive, white marble plaque on the western wall. From this station on 14 May 1941, says the stone, 3700 Jewish men were deported to their deaths at Auschwitz. Furthermore, between 19 and 22 July 1942, 7800 Jews, including 4000 children, were consigned to Auschwitz — and death — from this station. Signed by a group called the ‘sons and daughters of deported French Jews’, the inscription finishes, ‘Let us never forget’.
In the station’s bookshop I buy an intensely moving paperback. It’s the story of Coluche’s charity, ‘Les restaurants du coeur’. Not the full story — just the first twenty years. Coluche was the funniest man in France in the early 1980s. Millions listened to his radio show on Europe 1. His stand-up seasons in big venues sold out. He wore a t-shirt, blue-and-white striped overalls and ludicrous shoes in canary-yellow. I have one of his LPs. In a strong Parisian accent that bent and smeared vowels and consonants into a sometimes jokey, sometimes lugubrious, whine, he’d complain equally about flics and hitch-hikers, the government, bureaucrats and hoons, punctuating it with outrageous little ditties. He never forgot his origins — how could he?
In the 1950s, Michel Colucci was the son of poor Italian immigrants in a southern Parisian suburb. His father died young, and his mother, a florist, did what she could to bring up her family. In the toughest times, Michel dreamt of a world where those who had lots of money shared it with those who had none. Silly boy! Then he became Coluche of the corrosive humour, a prince of subversive satire, with comments like: ‘When I was little in our house the hardest times were the end of the month. Especially the last thirty days.’ And: ‘If there are blokes who have money and are pissed off because it doesn’t bring them happiness they only need say so: we’ll always find poor people stupid enough to steal it from them.’
Coluche became very rich. Simultaneously, he became concerned. So concerned, in fact, about the state of French politics that he attempted to run for President in 1981. Then, on 26 September 1985, he’d had enough, and wondered aloud on Europe 1 if anyone was interested in sponsoring a canteen in Paris — and later in other big French cities — that would serve two or three thousand free meals a day to the city’s poor and destitute. I have a strong feeling that I’ve heard a recording of this, now famous, public daydream that was stated partly in an off-hand manner but also with a sense of urgency. The ball was rolling.
To establish Les restos du coeur (restaurants of the heart), as Coluche called them, took an immense amount of perserverance in the face of bureaucratic hurdles the height of Everest. But with a group of powerful friends, and by brilliant use of the media, he vaulted them. Ordinary French people donated millions of francs, and the first resto distributed food in joyful chaos on 21 December — less than three months after his original musing. Very quickly every man, woman and child in France was aware of the restos, and Coluche himself was surpised that his ‘silly little idea’, as he called it, had become an enormous project. Six months later — after a successful first winter ‘season’ — Coluche was killed when his motorbike and a truck collided near Cannes. You will find some Frenchmen today who still think it was a conspiracy. Coluche was murdered, they’ll tell you. He was too embarrassing for the French who rule. A recent poll ranked him the fifth greatest man of Gaul.
Today, Les Restaurants du Coeur and Les Relais du Coeur constitute France’s biggest charity. Some 470,000 donors contributed 41 million euros in money or kind to the 2004–2005 winter campaign, with 45,000 aid workers distributing 67 million meals. The organisations put roofs over 2700 heads, had 95 food trucks on the roads and organised 755 cultural events and amusements. Coluche would have loved it. But I shouldn’t be reading this modest history in the Métro’s busy line four. Page 189 tips me over. It’s blank apart from a single quote from Coluche. I suspect it’s from one of his stand-up routines: halfway through, probably, when the audience would be screaming with laughter. There’d be silence while he sniggered and shouted in his flat Parisian smear, ‘Maaaais ouuuuuuuiiii!’ More silence. Laughter. A snigger. ‘My most important project?’ He’d fire the words like rockets into the theatre’s blackness. Silence. ‘To continue living!’ Uproar. Guffaws. And I am crying again.
My niece Magali lives not far from me above the boulevard. Her apartment is on the fifth floor, no lift. (It’s what the French call a don’t-forget-the-bread apartment.) It’s smaller than mine but charming, and in it she not only carries on her day-to-day life but works as a freelance graphic designer. Of less — or more, depending on your gender — importance, is that she is approaching thirty (most people think she looks about nineteen) and has the usual ‘men’ problems of woman her age. She is petite and gorgeous, with long, honey-blonde hair and chestnut eyes. And that very special untouchable-touchable golden skin.
We meet on the median strip at the top of the stairs above Anvers Métro station. She apologises for being five minutes late. Who couldn’t accept it? She’s smiling sweetly, rugged-up and gloved, and wearing a pink knitted bonnet with a big rosette. (Bonnets are huge this winter.) We’re off to the other si
de of town to eat at a steak restaurant that comes highly recommended. Then we have tickets to Paris’s sexiest cabaret, Le Crazy Horse.
I love spending time with Maggie (or Maggie Wheels, or Mag Wheels, as we call her in Australia, after the magnesium-alloy wheels that go on hot cars). She and I can hug and go arm-in-arm in the street and it thrills me when people look at us — Parisian minds are easily read. Mag Wheels looks so young, and I’m realising with pain that I’m a senior — if a junior one. The Métro warms her to an important topic. She’d love to find a husband and have children, but the men she has dated in recent years — and the one she is dating now — are never ready to settle into monogamy and fatherhood. They don’t want to be responsible for bringing up kids. There are too many more exciting things a young man can do these days. I can add nothing except sympathy, agreeing with her right down the line. When I was young, I say, it was fashionable — the done thing — to be partnered up to the hilt and mortgaged even further. And to change nappies. It was what people did. Nowadays, that brand of enrichment is passé.
Paris on a Plate Page 14