Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  Within a few minutes the dark sky shadowed overhead. A breeze swirled bits of rubbish, pages of a newspaper blew off a café table, and then a flash of lightning followed too quickly by a loud crack of thunder made me jump. It rolled loud and long, seeming to crash from building to building. Large drops of rain began to smack onto the cobbles and onto my arms, slow-motion explosions of water. Because of the dim light, this memory seems to be without colours, like a black-and-white photograph, more convincing in its detail as memories are often more convincing than life.

  The lightning zigzagged, making my heart thump in anticipation of the ear-piercing thunder each time. I felt like a cave dweller attacked by terrifying lights and explosions, but it only lasted about twenty minutes. Anthony found me a few minutes after the storm finished and we held hands and laughed like kids.

  To recover ourselves, and for me to dry off, we had a drink in L’Entr’acte, behind the Comédie Française. It was an ordinary bar restaurant where actors probably came after the show. Perhaps Molière came here for a wine between acts. Legend has it that he died on stage right behind us in the oldest theatre in Paris – like Shakespeare he was an actor as well as a playwright; it seems to have been usual in those days – but in fact he collapsed on stage then died at home not long afterwards. Like St Denis carrying his head over Montmartre, preaching as he went, a good story grew into a better one.

  Montaigne remarked that as stories are handed along, ‘the whole fabric is padded and reshaped so that the most far-off witness is better informed about it than the closest one’. He wasn’t talking about the reshaping due to gaps in recall – which Stendhal describes as ‘large gaps in the fresco where only the brickwork of the wall is to be seen’, the nature of all memory over time – he means the deliberate adding of detail. But I don’t think there’s any real intention to deceive in the elaborating of what happened. It’s as if we can’t help ourselves; it’s in service of the story, it has to be embroidered, shaped, added to. Perhaps St Denis’ hands involuntarily jerked outwards as he was decapitated by the Roman soldiers and the severed head brushed his fingers as it fell. By the end of the week the story was that he had caught his head in his hands and by the end of the next he had carried it over Montmartre. After a few months it was recounted as fact that he had preached a sermon as he went.

  When we came out of L’Entr’acte it was still light, the sky was clear and the air was fresh with that clear electric feeling after storms I remembered from childhood. Out on the farm it had meant momentary relief in a drought and the pleasure of finding destruction: branches torn off, a water tank rolling across the paddock, a brown flood in the usually dry creek. Here in the rue de Montpensier there were only puddles of water and buildings that had been standing solidly for hundreds of years.

  Not long after, I went to an exhibition of self-portraits at the Luxembourg museum. I had seen the poster for it in the Metro, ‘Moi! Autoportraits du XXème siècle’, which showed a Norman Rockwell portrait – he was back-on as he looked in a mirror sketching his own face. I liked the ‘infinite mirrors’ idea of it: the artist who paints self-portraits can never really be outside the frame, but it also reassured that the self was a fit subject to consider; it has always felt like a slippery slope.

  The museum was on one side of the Luxembourg Gardens in the sixth arrondissement not far from Metro Odéon but, not yet knowing my way around that quartier, I came in through the opposite gate off the boulevard St Michel and walked up the gravelled path. Somewhere in these gardens, perhaps on this pathway, Simone de Beauvoir bowled a black hoop in childhood. The gardens where she had played were formal with paths and smooth lawns, statues and massed beds of Japanese wind-flowers, azaleas, amaryllis and lisianthus and, in the middle, a pond with green iron chairs scattered around it. People sat there and read and sunned themselves like cats but no-one lay on the grass; lawns were for beauty’s sake, not for lounging about. Seated around the pond they looked as if they were in Miss Brill, my favourite Katherine Mansfield story about a woman watching the world go by in a park in Paris.

  Up a side alley I came upon a group of people gathering around beehives near a summer-house. They were wearing white overalls and netted hats and gloves, as if they had stepped from a science fiction film or a Sylvia Plath poem. ‘I stand in a column/Of winged, unmiraculous women,/Honey-drudgers.’ I was puzzled – what on earth were beekeepers doing in the middle of Paris? The sight stayed with me: the loose, relaxed arms of the apiarists, their ‘moon suits and funereal veils’, the wooden boxes like the bee-hives along Bushrangers Creek Road, the white gravel under their booted feet, the bright blue lavender and the pink roses behind them. Perhaps this was where the honeycomb in the rue Mouffetard had come from.

  I headed back towards the museum. On one side there was an elaborate Italian fountain with marble statues and balustrades and a narrow pond, built in the seventeenth century by Marie de Médicis, the widow of Henry IV. The Luxembourg museum had been her home, modelled on a palace in Florence, her hometown, and these were her Italian gardens. This was where nineteen-year-old de Beauvoir sat and argued about ‘pluralist ethics’ with Sartre, who took her argument apart until she exclaimed, ‘I am no longer sure what I think, or if I think at all.’ It was the beginning of her accepting Sartre’s opinions as more valuable than her own. I looked at the fountain for a while, mesmerised by the statue of the fearsome Cyclops looking down at two lovers and the atmosphere of drama and myth, shady and mossy in the middle of summer.

  In the exhibition there were self-portraits by Van Gogh, Duchamp, Matisse, Magritte, Monet, Degas, Léger, Kahlo, Miró, Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, Hockney – and nearly everyone else I’d ever heard of. I studied them for much longer than I normally look at paintings, and took notes. They were memoirs in paint, observer and subject in the same tangled relationship.

  What I remember most clearly is the two portraits by Matisse. One was drawn when he was young, detailed and precisely shaded, the other years later, by which time his portrait had become just a few spare lines. I was struck by the way his drawing became less detailed, more pared back to essential shapes, as he grew older. Disturbingly, when I checked the exhibition notes online recently I couldn’t find a record of two pictures by him. But I remember them, and I have my notes which describe both portraits. I can see myself standing there on the polished wooden boards gazing at the small portraits and I remember the white Chinese-style dress I was wearing.

  The other thing I remember is a sentence in the exhibition notes: ‘Jamais je n’ai vu mon visage’, ‘I have never seen my face’. There was a sudden shock of realisation; it was both blindingly obvious and a startling revelation. Of course we never see our own face, only a reflection. And a reflection, of course, is the exact opposite of the way others see us. Those angles, that imbalance, they are all the other way around. I can never see what others see. Stendhal, in his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard, put it even more precisely: ‘The eye cannot see itself.’

  Any truthful portrayal of the self probably has to be a multiple and messy reflection rather than Matisse’s few spare and beautiful lines. How can it be anything else when the mirrors we gaze in are tinted, cracked, murky, overlit, fragmentary, reflecting infinitely? And the one who gazes is just as disjointed. Montaigne said that trying to see himself was like a drunk examining a drunk: ‘I am unable to stabilise my subject: it staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness.’ The observer and the mirror are both disunited and unreliable.

  I have never seen my face.

  Four

  September

  While we are doing nothing the days pass, and our poor lives are made up of those days, and we grow old and die.

  Madame de Sévigné

  One day in September, needing to be amongst trees, I walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and again saw the bee-boxes, but not, this time, the beekeepers. I wasn’t puzzled anymore as I had since found out about the Rucher École,
the beekeeping school. It was founded in 1856 and apparently the honey the school collects is richer and better than anywhere else in France because of the many different flowering plants in the city. The bees love the chestnut trees in the Champs Élysées and the linden trees of the Palais Royale and the lavender and geraniums in the window-boxes and gardens of Paris. What is beginning to puzzle me is why bees seem to be skimming into my mind as I turn over my memories of the year in Paris.

  I don’t remember bees as being significant at the time. I can see they come from Montaigne and his metaphorical bees making ‘honey which is entirely theirs; it is no longer thyme nor marjoram honey’, but I don’t know why they have started multiplying. I do know that Napoleon had chosen them as his symbol. They had represented immortality for the Merovingians, the first line of French kings founded in the fifth century by Childeric and his son, Clovis. Engraved golden bees were found in Childeric’s tomb a thousand years after he died, although some sources say they were actually cicadas. Either way, Napoleon was connecting himself to the origins of France. He wove himself into the story of his country, stamped himself into the fabric, an indelible bee. Even without Childeric, bees are an image of devotion to the common good; they store riches for future need, they are armed with a ferocious sting to defend against intruders. I can only hope the bees flying into my head are intent on making honey rather than stinging.

  *

  It was the evening of my first meeting with the choeur, the choir. I liked that choeur was the word for heart, coeur, but with an ‘h’, like a breath, in it. I felt nervous, but not too jittery. I had been in a choir before, after all, and survived. And I knew Montaigne, whose good opinion I already wanted more than anyone else’s, would approve. He wrote that there was nothing more striking about Socrates than his taking up music and dancing in his older age, to make himself vulnerable by becoming a beginner again.

  I arrived early at the hall in the Marais, up a flight of wooden stairs in one of the narrow streets running off the rue de Rivoli, the spine of central Paris. There were dozens of confident, well-dressed people milling about and chatting to each other, mostly in French, although I did hear a couple of English voices and a couple of Italians. They all knew each other already. The choirmaster arrived, a slender, grey-haired man in a linen shirt, well groomed, with a leather case under his arm. He put it down and looked around the group, nodded at me and said, ‘Bonjour.’

  ‘Bonjour.’ I nodded back, suddenly sure he knew I was from the backblocks without a note of music in me. He talked to the group for a few minutes about term dates and a performance, and then the warm-up began. The choirmaster stretched and wobbled his face, pursed his lips, rubbed his face and we all followed suit. I could do this, it was just like my choir in the Mountains.

  Next were the vocalisations. ‘Ee ee ee oo oo oo ah ah ah.’ Up and down the scales he went. Powerful tenor and soprano and alto voices burst out around me, producing and projecting the notes in full bel canto mode. They had proper voices! This wasn’t a Blue Mountains community choir with a motley collection of people who liked singing. What on earth was I thinking? My squeaky little voice trembled in shock.

  I looked around surreptitiously – perhaps I could slip out. But I was in the middle of a knot of people and couldn’t have walked out without excusing myself several times. A deep breath. I tried to follow the notes in a low voice. The woman next to me looked over. She already knew I was a pretender.

  The choirmaster opened his leather case and sheets of music were handed out. There was excited conversation. Someone’s Requiem. I couldn’t read the music so I looked at the words, trying to make them save me. The group reshuffled into parts. I looked at one woman and raised my eyebrows. ‘Soprano,’ she said. I stood next to her. My voice had slightly more high notes than low.

  The choirmaster tapped with his baton on a stand that had been produced from his case. I breathed out. He will sing the parts and I will copy him the way I did in my choir back home. Then he counted, un, deux, trois, quatre, flicked with his baton and without one note from him, the choir burst into powerful song. Voices soared out around the hall, rising, floating on notes and descending with enormous grace, sopranos as pure as bells, dark honey altos, rich tenors and basses. I tried for a couple of lines – I have to give myself some credit for pointless courage – my voice squeaking more and more with embarrassment until I gave up and simply mouthed the words. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more out of my depth in my life. I mouthed the words for the next two hours until I could safely slip back down the stairs and into the warm September evening.

  If I had been with someone I would have burst out laughing. It was absurd, stupidly naive. Just the kind of thing a country bumpkin would do. We could have laughed immoderately and then had a glass of wine in the Café des Philosophes nearby and not care that we were talking loudly in English. But I was on my own, so I slunk home, my face still burning. I wasn’t Socrates enjoying being the fool at all, just a middle-aged woman hauling the burden of wanting to be good at everything.

  ‘How was it?’ asked Anthony. He has a good voice, not trained but he could sing anything in tune, even songs he last heard when he was a child.

  ‘Terrible,’ I said. ‘They can sing.’

  ‘Well, they are in a choir.’

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat in the shadowy courtyard. The evening pooled around me, different from the deep darkness of the evenings in the Mountains, but still returning memories as evenings will. I thought of Dina singing to Theo, and performing in a country rock band, although that was before I met her. It was a long way from requiems, but then, maybe not. Her songs wailed of loss and longing, of grieving for people who are gone; times that have vanished. I glanced down and saw the beginnings of wrinkles on my arms, a faint terrain of cracks. It looked like a new geography on my body. I’d always found wrinkled arms disturbing, even as a child. I didn’t mind wrinkles on the face, that seemed natural, but on the arms they were frightening. Skin drying up, shrivelling, not fitting the body anymore. I wished I had a cardigan to pull over my arms even though it was still warm.

  ‘Guess who I think I’ve found?’ Anthony said. He had joined me in the courtyard, and squatted against the wall. ‘Jean-Jacques.’

  ‘Really? How? He’s here in Paris?’

  ‘No. He’s in Switzerland. I somehow remembered in the back of my brain that his father owned a driving school in Lausanne and I looked it up on the net. And there he was, Jean-Jacques.’

  ‘Are you going to contact him? Was there an email address?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I will.’

  People always come and go from life and after a long enough time, it seems some people won’t come back ever again. Some die and others just disappear. Maybe it was best to leave them where they were. We both sat in silence for a while.

  ‘Why does anyone, me, want to be good at everything?’ I asked into the shadows.

  Anthony shrugged. ‘So our mothers will love us the best?’

  We sat for a while in the warm dark. In early September the evenings were still long enough to sort anything through, even making a fool of myself, long and quiet and just the right pace for reflection. I wondered what I did without a long twilight back home.

  *

  I lay in bed one night when I was seven and my mother counted the freckles on my nose. Forty-seven, she said, or fifty-two, I can’t remember, but I haven’t forgotten the delicious glow I felt at the attention showered on me, me alone. It is the sole memory I have from childhood of being the only one in my mother’s gaze. Every other time, I was one of many – four of us washed in the bath, eight of us fed, three of us told to get some ‘chips’ for the wood stove, five of us doing homework at the kitchen table, two of us yelled at for squabbling about who was supposed to do the washing-up, six of us ferried to Mass. I liked being one of many, proud our family was so much bigger than nearly everyone else’
s, and even after the pleasure of the freckle-counting night, I didn’t realise that I longed to shine in my mother’s eyes. There was no conscious competition for her love and in my memory she treated all eight of her children equally, but I did have the feeling that I wasn’t really her sort of person. Writing that now all these decades later, I still feel my heart fall away. She was secretly rebellious, someone who didn’t like the rules, whereas I wanted to fit in, to look and act ‘right’. I suspect now that I got on her nerves – just enough for her not to acknowledge it to herself. It was only when I was older and found we shared a passion for ideas and reading that I felt I had some credit; I was almost conscious by then of giving her the novels I was reading at university to win her over, to make her see that, underneath, I was worthy of her love.

  When my mother finished counting my freckles, in the midst of my warm glow, she told me I was going to have another baby brother or sister. I didn’t mind; I already had a younger brother and sister and three older brothers and another sister. It was just what happened.

  When I look in any mirror, there’s always my mother standing in the background. I don’t think it can be any other way, although I suppose for some it’s the father. I wanted, still want, her gaze. Montaigne argued that the bond between mother and child is not so deep, that it can be broken by giving the child to a ‘wet-nurse or a nanny goat’. He explained that two of his manservants were suckled on nanny-goats, a common practice when the mother didn’t have enough milk, and it was well-known the nanny-goat would come running as soon as the baby cried. I don’t like to argue with Montaigne, but to me, that only shows that the bond is developed in the smell and sight and sound of nourishment – and that must begin when the baby is still in the womb. The knowledge is not remembered consciously, but it is there, shaping our longings and the desire to please. Couldn’t it be that many great achievements and many terrible ones were born of the desire to regain a mother’s gaze?