by André Aciman
The real New York I never see either. I see only the New York that either sits in for other places or helps me summon them up. New York is the stand-in, the ersatz of all the things I can remember and cannot have, and may not even want, much less love, but continue to look for, because finding parallels can be more compelling than finding a home, because without parallels, there can’t be a home, even if in the end it is the comparing that we like, not the objects we compare. Outside of comparing, we cannot feel. One may falsify New York to make it more habitable; but by making it more habitable in that way, one also makes certain it remains a falsehood, a figment.
New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere—an analogue city, a surrogate city, a shadow city that allows me to naturalize and neutralize this terrifying, devastating, unlivable megalopolis by letting me think it is something else, somewhere else, that it is indeed far smaller, quainter than I feared, the way certain cities on the Mediterranean are forever small and quaint, with just about the right number of places where people can go, sit, and, like Narcissus leaning over a pool of water, find themselves at every bend, every store window, every sculptured forefront. Straus Park allowed me to place more than one film over the entire city of New York, the way certain guidebooks of Rome do. For each photograph of an ancient ruin there is a series of colored transparencies. When you place the transparency over the picture of a ruin, the missing or fallen parts suddenly reappear, showing you how the Forum and the Colosseum must have looked in their heyday, or how Rome looked in the Middle Ages, and in the late Renaissance, and so on. But when you lift all the plastic sheets, all you see are today’s ruins.
I didn’t want to see the real New York. I’d go backward in time and uncover an older New York, as though New York, like so many cities on the Mediterranean, had an ancient side that was less menacing, that was not so difficult to restore, that had more past than present, and that corresponded to the old-fashioned world I think I come from Hence, my obsession with things that are old and defunct and that seep through, like ancient cobblestones and buried rails from under renewed coats of asphalt and tar. Sealed-off ancient firehouses, ancient stables turned into garages, ghost buildings awaiting demolition, old movie theaters converted into Baptist churches, old marketplaces that are now lost, subway stops that are ghost stations today—these are the ruins I dream of restoring, if only to date the whole world back a bit to my time, the way Herr Appelbaum and Frau Danziger belonged to my time. Going to Straus Park was like traveling elsewhere in time. As Emily Dickinson writes, How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul!
How uncannily appropriate, therefore, to find out fifteen years later that the statue that helped me step back in time was not that of a nymph but of Memory herself. In Greek, her name is Mnemosyne, Zeus’ mistress, mother of the Muses. I had, without knowing it, been coming to the right place after all. This is why I was so disturbed by the imminent demolition of the park: my house of memories would become a ghost park. If part of the city goes, part of us dies as well.
Of course, I had panicked too soon. Straus Park was marvelously restored. After spending more than a year in a foundry, a resurrected statue of Memory remembered her appointed place in the park and resumed her old position. Her fountain is the joy of children and of all the people who lean over to splash their faces on a warm summer day. I go there very often, sometimes to have coffee in the morning after dropping my children off at school. I have now forgotten what the old Straus Park looked like. I do not miss it, but somehow part of me is locked there, too, so that I come here sometimes to remember my summer of many years ago as well, though I am glad those days are gone.
My repeated returns to Straus Park make of New York not only the shadow city of so many other cities I’ve known but a shadow city of itself, reminding me of an earlier New York in my own life, and before that of a New York which existed before I was born and which has nothing to do with me but which I need to see—in old photographs, for example—because, as an exile without a past, I like to peek at others’ foundations to imagine what mine might look like had I been born here, where mine might be if I were to build here. I like to know that Straus Park was once called Schuyler Square, and before that it was known as Bloomingdale Square, and that these are places where everything about me and the city claims a long, continuous, call it a common, ancestral, imaginary past, where nothing ever bolts into sudden being, but where nothing ever disappears, not those I love today, nor those I’ve loved in the past, that Old World people like Herr Appelbaum, who played Gershwin for me on 105th Street one night when he could have played Schubert instead, and Mrs. Danziger, who never escaped the Nazis but brought them with her in her dreams at night, might still sit side by side with Ida Straus, who refused to board the lifeboats when the Titanic sank, and stayed on with her husband—that all these people and all these layers upon layers of histories, warmed-over memories, and overdrawn fantasies should forever go into letting my Straus Park, with its Parisian Frankfurts and Roman Londons, remain forever a tiny, artificial speck on the map of the world that is my center of gravity, from which radiates every road I’ve traveled, and to which I always long to return when I am away.
But perhaps I should spell the mystery out and say what lies at the bottom of all this. Straus Park, this crossroad of the world, this capital of memory, this place where the four fountains of the world and the four quarters within me meet one another is not Paris, is not Rome, could not be London or Amsterdam, Frankfurt or New York. It is, of course, Alexandria.
I come to Straus Park to remember Alexandria, albeit an unreal Alexandria, an Alexandria that does not exist, that I’ve invented or learned to cultivate in Rome as in Paris, so that in the end the Paris and the Rome I retrieve here are really the shadow of the shadow of Alexandria, versions of Alexandria, the remanence of Alexandria, infusing Straus Park itself now, reminding me of something that is not just elsewhere but that is perhaps more in me than it ever was out there, that it is, after all, perhaps just me, a me that is no less a figment of time than this city is a figment of space.
Square Lamartine
My romance with Paris begins, as one says of earthquakes, at an epicenter—surrounded by tall, turn-of-the-century buildings, a small empty park, and silent avenues. This is how I always pictured Paris as an adolescent, before ever seeing it. A marchand de tabacs who would sell me cigarettes without asking questions; a pâpeterie where I could buy a longed-for Pelikan pen; the smile of girls outside a vaguely imagined lycée; a secret rendezvous at the cinema.
Before I had ever set foot there, France was already my homeland, the place to which I knew I would eventually return. But everything stood in my way, starting with the fact that in the early 1960s, roughly the time of which I am speaking, my family was still living in Alexandria, decades away from 1960s Paris. There were other inconvenient circumstances as well: many adult members of my family, although educated as French-speakers in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, had somehow managed to become not French but Italian citizens. Then, too, I myself had gone to English schools throughout my childhood and hence knew English better than French—so that, if my mother tongue was French, I still spoke it with a strange accent. (This was part of my problem all around; I spoke several languages with a French accent, except French.)
Here I was, a Jewish boy landlocked in Nasser’s anti-Semitic Egypt, yearning to be back in a France I had never seen and did not even belong to. As we were losing our fortune, and the Egyptian police closed in on us with house inspections, harassing phone calls at night, anonymous letters, secret denunciations, what could be better than to sit at the window in my great-aunt’s bedroom at night and imagine myself staring at the Seine—which, she never tired of telling me when she joined me and glued her forehead to the windowpane, flowed ever so close to her old apartment in Paris? “Can you actually see the Seine from your windows?” I would ask. “No, but it’s scarcely seven minutes awa
y.” And then she would recite the refrain of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le pont Mirabeau”:
Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Let night fall and the hours go by
The days pass on, still I stay
It was of those “scarcely seven minutes away” that I kept thinking during my last months in Egypt as we sold what we could and packed the rest, amid daily squabbles between my mother and her mother-in-law and an aunt who could not help taking sides and always picked the wrong one. I learned to understand in the course of those days that there are places on the planet we simply must accept that we shall never see again. I thought this place was Egypt. Little did I know that, as with men who repeatedly lose women for the same reason, there are families who lose their homes at least once every generation.
I remember exactly the French authors, old and new, I was reading back then: Molière, François Mauriac, Alain-Fournier, Jean Anouilh, Georges Duhamel, Albert Camus. Like the window in my aunt’s bedroom, they looked out onto what seemed the most distantly adjacent spot on earth. All I needed to do was read a sufficient number of pages and I could almost be there, in André Gide’s Paris or Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles, the imagined sound of France blending with the perpetual shouting in Arabic that rose up to my room from the street below.
There was another book that appeared from nowhere one day, mixed in among the volumes my father had dumped in a pile in the packing room, a book I assumed he had no need of but later understood he must have left around in the manner of parents who want their sons to know certain things before they find out about them from more direct and less desirable sources. I devoured it, it devoured me. Each sentence opened up a world so vast and so thrilling that at the end of each night’s perusal I wished I could forget everything I had just read so as to discover it afresh the next morning. “You will find,” I read on one of the pages, “that, when you’re about fourteen or older, should you happen to be walking about at night, certain overdressed women may come up to you and ask you to accompany them. It is better that you do not.”
I was fourteen. But who were these women, and why had none ever approached me? And why was I not already in France, where overdressed women came up from under the cover of night and asked you to accompany them? I looked out the window at my imagined Seine with its imagined bridges and quais that stood seven minutes away from our imagined new home. But this was not Paris; it was still Alexandria.
During our last days in Egypt I learned to my shock that our destination was not to be my imagined Paris but some down-to-earth, working-class neighborhood in Rome. Thus we ended up—my mother, my brother, and I, for my father remained behind for the time being in Egypt—in Italy. We knew no one, barely spoke the language, and did not know where to shop, or how. At night, feeling totally hemmed in by this country we could not love or fathom, we would close the shutters to stave it off. But Italy would not go away: from the buildings surrounding our courtyard there came each evening the echo of an entire society tuned to the same television channel. Sometimes the noise arose from a nearby movie theater, which, on warm summer nights, opened its roof to allow us to hear the roar of laughter or the dubbed voice of Sean Connery. When school started that fall, our twilit street turned sordid, with its grimy groceries, the coffee merchant whose dark quarters looked more like a cave than a shop, the corner bar filling up with workers stopping for wine on the way home from work. How could this be my home?
Then came a miracle. My father, who after leaving Egypt had found a temporary job in France, summoned us for a two-week visit during the winter holiday break, pour voir, just to see. He made our visit seem a mere stopover, Paris on consignment, on spec. More than three decades later, I can still remember what we did on each and every one of those fifteen days.
I remember my first visit to the Latin Quarter, where I went with my older girl cousins and their fiancés, all undergraduates and all, apparently, Parisians. On a rainy weekday afternoon we whizzed through narrow streets crowded into two tiny Citroën deux chevaux to catch a Humphrey Bogart revival. One of us jumped out to purchase tickets, another to find snacks, while the rest looked for parking places. After the movie we stopped at a café, where everyone ordered tea.
Another day, on our way to buy cigarettes for everyone, my cousin took me into a record shop. She was looking for Bach’s double-violin concerto. Sitting in a tiny booth, we stole a few minutes to listen to the recording with David Oistrakh as the principal soloist. She found it not to her liking. Did they have Menuhin? They did not. We went across the street, where they had neither Oistrakh nor Menuhin but they did have Heifetz—the best, according to the salesgirl. No, thanks. For the next two weeks, we listened to violinist after violinist. To this day the sound of the double concerto brings to mind those heady first encounters with Paris, when I watched for signs of snow that never came and fell in love with the cool grayness that settled over the city at teatime, presaging evenings when we would crowd into the car and tour Paris-by-night, invariably ending our adventure with crêpes, onion soup, and Vichy candies.
Was it Paris or just the stuffed car and the good fellowship of cousins I had not seen in at least a decade that made me feel I was here to stay? The streets bustling with people my age who spoke my language; the spirited jokes; the movie theaters filled to capacity—this was not just the center of the world, or even the center of my life, it was me. It was my voice, if not when I spoke, then something clearer and deeper, as when I laughed.
Perhaps it was not even a voice but a manner of being in the world that made me love that world and, come to think of it, myself as well.
When after about four days we finally visited my great-aunt in the 16th arrondissement, it was like walking into our old home in Alexandria—smaller, to be sure, but the exact same kind of home: the same feel, the same smell, the same familial injunctions to be quiet and mind our manners. But this apartment was like a finished version of the rough sketch that had been our home in Alexandria. If Egypt was the bass melody, Paris was the full orchestral score, an entire city beaming with the glory of a redeemed déjà vu. Like Saint Augustine thinking back to the time when he had not yet loved God, only to wonder why he could not have known Him sooner, I, too, asked: Why wasn’t I born here, why can’t I live here, when will it happen, why am I here when it seems too late?
My father had said these two weeks were to be a tryout. But preliminaries were totally unnecessary. I was ready to settle in at a moment’s notice.
One night, in a tiny park not far from my great-aunt’s, my father pointed out two girls in their mid-teens: “I’ll bet you anything they live in the neighborhood; they probably go to the Lycée Janson de Sailly.” Immediately, I wanted to be in school.
I was too young to know how to seize any opportunities that might come my way. But presentiments of romance were everywhere. From the way women looked at me, I could tell that this was a language whose syntax I already knew fluently; all I needed was the vocabulary. And then, of course, there were those overdressed women who under cover of night would surely come up and ask me to accompany them. They were the reason I could not wait for the chance to be on my own in Paris—no easy task, since so many relatives were hosting us. But my great-aunt finally gave me my opening. In her refrigerator she liked to keep bottles of water taken from the Lamartine fountain down the block, an artesian well whose water Jacques Hillairet, in his Dictionnaire Historique des rues de Paris, had described as having “un goût fade” (an insipid taste). She assigned me the job of keeping them filled.
Never has anyone managed to turn so simple an errand into so time-consuming a task. There were always people at Square Lamartine, including others my age probably doing the same thing as I for their grandparents or parents. Wedged among them as I waited my turn at the fountain, I became not only a real Parisian but a young Jacob, waiting to meet his Rachel at the well of Beersheba. Next time, I thought, as, day after day, I failed to
muster the courage to speak.
I came every day, sometimes twice, sitting on a bench and reading when the weather was not too cold, dawdling to watch the sunset and the last girls leave before dragging home the heavy bottles stuffed into two plastic net bags, finally calling from a public phone to tell my parents I’d be home in no time. Over tea one evening, my aunt said she was convinced I was smoking, while my grandmother opined that I was just slow and my mother that I must be losing my place to aggressive housewives. As for my father, he credited me with cunning schemes I let him think were successful.
When, by early January, it became clear that we had to return to Rome, I felt I would die before I could board the train. It was leaving on a Saturday evening, and would arrive in Rome on Sunday afternoon; on Monday we would be back in school. All I could think of on my last day at Lamartine was that Sunday evening in Rome—opening our suitcases, putting everything back in its dull place in an apartment from whose shuttered windows indelible sounds would make it impossible to imagine we were still in Paris, even though our suitcases would still smell of Paris, and the sound of Bach would remind me of Paris, as would the cheap pens with the sliding Eiffel Tower I was planning to buy before leaving, or the punched metro ticket, and the residual pack of Vichy candies stuffed inadvertently into my coat pocket to be recovered weeks into our humdrum Roman lives. I thought of Square Lamartine and of the fountain that was right in front of me, but already no longer so. What in Egypt had seemed a dream had come to life, only to slip back into my dreamworld.