Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “But Rousse is brave! And anyway she is a better painter than she is a photographer.”

  “Actually,” said Zorro, “although it gives me great pain to admit it, she isn’t.”

  Rousse met Jean the very first day she moved to Paris to become an artist. She arrived at the Gare de l’Est with her six-foot portfolio under one arm and manhandled it all the way to the École des Beaux Arts, where she had a place for a masters in plastic arts. Her drawing professor in Strasbourg had told her to go to the 61 bar because it was the sort of place where war correspondents and photographers hung out, so she went to see what it was all about. It was early evening, and by chance Jean was having a drink with Charb. Charb noticed her immediately and invited her to join them. Rousse was a little shy. She said, “No thanks, I’m waiting for someone.”

  “No you’re not,” said Charb. “Come over and tell us your life story. What’s the worst that can happen? Do you think I am going to seduce you?”

  “Are you Emmeline?” Jean asked, standing up and offering his hand. “Yes, you must be! Your professor told me to look out for you. Come and have a glass with us. Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from this rogue!”

  And so it happened like this, happenstance, that Rousse sat down and changed the course of her life. Jean introduced Charb, the hot new cartoonist making his mark. Rousse, of course, knew his work. A shy smile drew across her rosy lips.

  “You should come to the magazine and meet Charlie!” Charb said, warmly encouraged by her freckles and the generous amplitude of her breasts. “Come by on Wednesday, after we have our editorial meeting, and you can see what’s going on. We need young talent!” He had not seen any of her work at that point. “I am practically the youngest person in the place, all those old ’68-ers huffing about!”

  Rousse had a knack for the simple single line, and her style was so elegant and cool and sharp that Charb did not have much trouble convincing Vals, Charlie’s editor at that time, to use her when an illustration was needed for a story. Rousse had come to the capital with the ambition to mix media, to blur the line between paint and photo, art and reportage, to do no less than reinvent the image of the world and how it saw itself. Cartoons were her apprenticeship, a way to learn to draw fast and narratively and make crazy ideas into funny shapes that refracted the news and all its absurdity. She fell right in with Charlie’s crew and became a regular.

  It was Charb who gave Rousse her moniker. He came up with it the first time they went to bed together. Tousling her copper hair, intimate afterglow, they were having a conversation about progressive tax. Charb was a Marxist, for whom all property was theft; Rousse had no politics because she hated politicians, but she did have a house in Strasbourg she had inherited from her grandmother and was paying tax on every year. “Rousse,” said Charb, kissing her deeply. Rousse for red and to echo Rousseau and his old-fashioned égalité. Charb always said that Rousse was too moderate.

  _____

  “Who is Charlie?” I asked Rousse once when we were early friends. Summertime, picnic at the Buttes Chaumont, perched on the steep slope overlooking gothic follies. Little Ahmed had wandered off to make friends with a spaniel.

  “Who is Charlie?” Rousse repeated, considering the question. When she had talked about Charlie, she used personal pronouns as if he were a person, so I assumed he was. She smiled at my mistake, wriggled her toes in the grass, and continued the ruse. “Charlie, let me think how to describe him. Charlie is a naughty schoolboy, a subversive radical, a wheezing old lefty. A Gavroche of the ’68 barricades, a Peter Pan who never grew up. Charlie is the one who says Fuck the President and Fuck the Pope and Fuck Mohammed and Fuck All Authority. We are going to laugh at everything! At everything, do you hear! Even if it’s not funny!”

  “A satirist.”

  “More than that. He’s the mutt who steals the sausages and pees on the mayor’s ankle. He likes to giggle at his own jokes. He is like a ridiculous, offensive, tittering, prurient adolescent, tit-obsessed and scatological. The pope takes it up the arse!”

  “Is he funny or not funny?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s somehow important to be irreverent—not just irreverent, but tasteless too, to not have any limits.”

  “Do you like him?” I asked.

  Rousse threw up her hands at me. “It’s not a him! Oh, I can’t tease you anymore.” She poured more rosé into our paper cups. “It’s a magazine.”

  “Oh.” I felt foolish and also disappointed.

  “But you’re right in a way. It’s a personification, a state of mind, a rebellion. So yes, you can think of it as a person. We gather together and draw Charlie’s world.”

  “So how did it start?”

  “Charlie was always a mutt, really. Like Snoopy.”

  “Snoopy was the wise one.” I reminded her. “It was Charlie Brown who was the underdog.”

  “Exactly, which is how Charlie got his name. So the story goes: In 1970, de Gaulle died in his home town of Colombey. The headline in the magazine was “Bal tragique à Colombey, 1 mort”—Tragedy at ball in Colombey, 1 dead. The week before, two hundred people had died in a fire in a nightclub. So that’s why it was funny. But the interior minister was not amused. He banned the magazine and so they just changed the name to Charlie and kept publishing. Same stuff. Still obsessed with tits and arse. They cut up a photograph of Brigitte Bardot and dressed her like a Christmas turkey. The authorities covered up her naughty bits with black censor bars. Bête et méchant, said the naysayers. Oh yes, I am very bête and very méchant, said Charlie. I think they were pleased to have caused such offense.

  “Charlie was popular in the 1970s, but then the radical generation who had been its readers all got jobs and Charlie closed down in the eighties. Came back in the nineties. After all, the world was still being run by a bunch of ridiculous dinosaurs. Mitterrand got it in the neck a lot. A scrawny neck, pulled up out of the collar of his shirt like a chicken head. The right-wing Le Pen was also a favorite. There were also plenty of nuns and cocks and bishop’s miters shoved into obscene places. I hate the porno stuff, it’s too easy. Charlie is still such a boy’s club. They are deliberately silly. Throwing ink around their playground. Cheshire cat grin, the complacent and the obese; the sanctimonious and the successful. Mockery, smash all the crockery. Wallop!”

  “Did you get into trouble with the Danish cartoons?” I told Rousse about the riot in Beirut, about being in the bath when Ahmed-the-Wahhabi came in.

  “Charlie was never particularly interested in Muslims, any more than he is interested in any group of people who cling to their own dogmatics. But, of course, sanctimony begs to be ridiculed.”

  Sometimes when I picked Rousse up at Charlie’s offices, she would give me old copies of the magazine that were lying around. For the first time I found myself looking properly at the infamous Danish cartoons. There was a picture of Mohammed with a bomb for a turban, Mohammed in a white robe holding a curved knife with a black censor bar blocking out his eyes, Mohammed with a yellow crescent behind his head that poked up like a pair of devil horns.

  In fact the cartoons were not supposed to be funny. The Danish newspaper had asked several different cartoonists if they would submit a drawing of Mohammed for an editorial that would discuss whether mocking Islam had become a red line taboo in a free society like Denmark. One drawing showed an artist holding up a stick-figure drawing of Mohammed while wearing a turban with the label “PR Stunt” tucked into its folds.

  Charlie had shrugged at the finer points of the debate (to be fair, everyone did) and gleefully reprinted them, saying, “It’s the first time the Danes have been funny!”

  The Grand Mosque of Paris and the Muslim World League and the Union of French Islamic Organizations were not amused and they sued Charlie. Charlie’s response was to put Mohammed on the cover weeping and saying, “It’s hard to be loved by jerks!”

  There was an excellent hoopla around the trial. Rousse was especially gratified that many of th
e people the magazine had loved best to lampoon, the vulgar pols like Sarko and Hollande, supported their right to lampoon. Charlie won the case. Sales shot up.

  Ah, red rags to bulls, who can resist? When France debated the law banning Muslim women from wearing the full face veil in public, Charlie published a cartoon of a naked woman cavorting with a slip of fabric dangling from her ass. Yes to the Burqa! On the inside! Charlie dedicated a whole issue of the magazine to Islam and invited Mohammed to guest edit it. It was called Charia Hebdo. “A hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing!”

  Then someone firebombed Charlie. Rousse was away when it happened. She called me, shocked and confused, she couldn’t get through to Charb. I reassured her: it was OK, it had happened at night when the office was closed, no one was hurt. “Jesus, Kit, we’ve had threats, but we never imagined—not in France!”

  Their offices were trashed, and for a while Charlie had to squat in the Libération building until they could find a new space. Charb, now editor, was assigned a police bodyguard for protection and Rousse tried to hide her concern by being irritated by him. She knew that Charb would not be cowed and she didn’t want him to see her worry. The cover of the issue published after the attack was Charlie wearing round John Lennon glasses, holding a pencil and sloppily kissing a Muslim in a prayer cap. Love Is Stronger Than Hate ran the caption.

  Everyone loved it. The issue sold out.

  “Laughter,” Charb liked to say, “is a human right.”

  Rousse had a regular feature for Charlie called “picture of the week.” She took reportage photographs and copied the well-worn news images of bomb blasts, gun-toting insurgents, stone-throwing teenagers on the West Bank, and put them into a London street with black cabs and double-decker buses going past, or next to a Parisian café full of tourists or against the backdrop of the Colosseum in Rome. She redrew Zorro’s famous picture of the detained Iraqi, hooded and on his knees in front of an American sergeant, at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

  _____

  On the first Sunday of every month, entrance to the Louvre was free, and Rousse and I began a tradition of taking Little Ahmed along to introduce him to the art. We would let Little Ahmed choose in which direction we would get lost. “Let’s go here! Up this staircase! Kit, why does that Roman woman have a pee-pee? Was this statue a good emperor or a tyrant like Saddam? Who cut her arms off? What’s a Pharaoh?” We had only two rules: we avoided the Mona Lisa and we always stopped in front of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa on the way out. Rousse was obsessed with The Raft of the Medusa. For her it was the hinge between fact and representation, between the depiction of horror and the squeamishness of the news magazines.

  There are a million million stories in the Louvre, there is a story in every brush stroke, every chip and carve of marble lip and lintel, stone and stellae, pottery shard, porcelain plate, silver ring, and golden crown. The museum contains the flotsam sum of all civilizations, of all the world. One day we found the Cy Twombly ceiling above the ancient Greek bronzes and we stood amazed at his eternal cerulean blue circles. Then we went into the next room and looked up and there were Braque birds flying above us! Another time we couldn’t find a way out of rooms and rooms and rooms of Poussin. “So repetetive!” Rousse said, “these monumental classical allegories, pompous pompier pictures.” Little Ahmed discovered the gallery for the blind, where you could touch the sculptures. We counted the large number of severed heads of Saint Denis in the medieval French painting wing. “Was my grandfather tortured?” Little Ahmed asked, looking sideways at a multipunctured Saint Sebastian.

  One day we realized that what we had thought was a mossy tarpaulin in an abandoned courtyard was in fact the undulating verdigris roof of the new Islamic wing. This prompted a long conversation about cultural appropriation represented by the Baptismal Bowl of Saint Louis that was formerly a Mamluk banqueting piece. We showed Little Ahmed the proud lions of Babylon and told him all about the laws of Hammurabi.

  Another Sunday, when Little Ahmed was about seven, we found ourselves standing in front of a monolithic Easter Island head. Rousse took his hand and gently explained the concept of abstraction. Little Ahmed listened in his carefully attentive way, head cocked, twirling a dark brown curl with his forefinger. A woman pushing a stroller came in. The toddler in the stroller was squirming and yelling, and his mother bent down and unbuckled him to let him go free. He stopped crying and pushed past us, marching towards the huge face. He stood there with his arms folded across his chest, looking at it intently. The eyeless face stared back. The toddler reached out and pointed and then touched his nose. He seemed to instinctively recognize himself in it. Rousse bent down and whispered in Little Ahmed’s ear, “You see, that is art. Who we are and what we see and how we understand. He sees himself, do you see?” Ahmed nodded up and down several times emphatically; he saw it too.

  “Yes,” I heard him reply, “he thinks it looks like him but it doesn’t. But in a way it does.”

  _____

  Despite all my efforts, probably because of them, Little Ahmed looked up to his father as the ultimate authority in the whole wide world. Ahmed had designed the architecture of this relationship: he never talked down to his son but only up, of grand ideas.

  “You see, habibe, when the Arabs can believe in themselves instead of an old book, they will be great again. Do you believe in yourself, habibe?”

  “I believe . . .” Little Ahmed sucked his bottom lip, searching for something to believe in. “I believe I am not good at divisioning,” he said. (This was true, Little Ahmed was not a natural mathematician; when he was doing his homework, he drew faces in the circles of all the 8s.)

  “Don’t worry, it is better to be good at adding,” said his father, who retained a supreme and absolute belief in the academic brilliance of his progeny. (How could it be otherwise?) “You are an only child, you don’t need to divide things up!”

  “I believe I am good at drawing animals, though. Rousse says I have an eye.”

  “You have two eyes.”

  “Yes, two. But also the eye, which is not a real eye but what happens inside your head which makes you see, because you need two eyes to look but a brain to see.”

  “What is this nonsense?”

  “It’s my imagination.”

  “Ah yes. Imagination!” Ahmed drew a circle in the air with his fingertip like a mime drawing a balloon. “Let’s imagine, habibe, the perfect world and you can draw me a picture of it.”

  This was one of Ahmed’s favorite games to play with his son. In their own way, both dreamers. Ahmed had no patience for Monopoly, he didn’t like going to the playground, he had not grown up with computer games so Minecraft completely defeated him. “But you can build your own houses and cities and civilizations,” Little Ahmed had explained one rainy afternoon, pulling on his sleeve, trying to show him his world.

  “OK, how do I build a house?” Block, block, block. “No, not there! I don’t want to put a wall there.” Block, block, block. “How do I delete? Where are the instructions?” Ahmed was irritated because he could not do something that was intuitive for his son. His son had not been irritated back. In this friable heartbreak moment, Little Ahmed was only disappointed. His bottom lip trembled imperceptibly.

  “It doesn’t have instructions because you are supposed to figure it out for yourself,” he explained to his father.

  This was such a perfect mirror of Ahmed’s own philosophy of autodidacticism and self-discipline that he got really angry then. “It’s a stupid game if it doesn’t tell you how to play it!”

  “So imagine, habibe, the perfect picture. Can you draw it, you clever boy?” Elder head bent over the younger, parallel, two heart-shaped hairlines, bronze where the sun touched their temples. Little Ahmed drew a tree and a house and a blond woman and a red-haired woman with a boy standing between them. He colored his hair with his favorite royal blue Crayola crayon.

  “Why is your hair blue?”

  “Because I am
a punk! Rousse has red hair and Kit has white hair and Rousse says if I dye my hair blue and we stand together we can make the tricolor!

  “And where am I?”

  Little Ahmed considered this. I could see he felt bad that he had left his father out of the picture, so he improvised and drew him sitting in a tree cross-legged like a swami.

  “What am I doing up there?” asked his father.

  “You are looking down on everyone and telling them what they are doing wrong,” said his son, as accurate and uncompromising an observer as Rousse.

  I framed the picture and hung it on the wall above my desk. It made me smile to think that as much as Little Ahmed looked up to his father, his father would never be able to fool him as he had me. Little Ahmed had X-ray vision for bullshit.

  TWO

  In the spring that Little Ahmed turned eight, Ahmed finally moved out, into a U.N. apartment near the Eiffel Tower in the bland, grand 7th arrondissement. Little Ahmed went back and forth between us. He didn’t like the new arrangement. He couldn’t quite grasp the idea of two homes, he kept forgetting his colored pencils “in the wrong house”; two or three times he wet his bed and we all worried how he would adjust. At the end of each week he grew anxious and concerned. “Is Aba coming for me tomorrow? Is Aba coming tomorrow or tomorrow tomorrow?” Ahmed kept changing the schedule, and since I was the one who had to tell him and let him down, I was the bad guy. Aba he wanted to please, but could never manage to please enough to make him stay. I was his constant nag: bathtime, bedtime, brush your teeth, say thank you.

  Rousse was the fairy godmother. She took him on special just-you-and-me outings to art supply stores when Ahmed canceled, and explained pastels and chalks and oils and watercolor, the ancient mysteries of lapis blue and the modern technology of zinc white. She brought him two boxes of fifty-six different colored pencils so that he could have them in both his homes. She took him to cafés and let him order Coca-Cola and drew cartoon outlines on paper napkins for him to color in. She told him, “You are helping me with my preliminary sketches.” Little Ahmed would nod earnestly, her devoted apprentice.