Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  ‘Is the shower good?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the first question Australians always ask. Yes, it’s good. I used to live in rue Simart,’ she replied. ‘After my children left home.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I replied, before I’d even seen it.

  The choir in the Marais ought to have been the beginning and end of singing in Paris, but I regained courage and found a booklet, Chanter à Paris, listing all the choirs in Paris. I studied it carefully, limiting my choices to those open to beginners, and picked the one that was easiest to get to. It was past enrolment day, September was the rentrée, the beginning of the year for schoolchildren, universities, community classes and even for new book publications, but I thought if I turned up on the evening of the first class I would be allowed in. I wrote in my diary: Choeur, 6 pm jeudi, Choir 6pm Thursday, rue des Amandiers, Metro Ménilmontant.

  I set off in plenty of time the following Thursday, catching the Metro at Anvers on the line that took me directly to Ménilmontant. I had begun to love the Metro, the constant and changing flood of other people’s lives passing mine. It was an underground labyrinth where the whole world might cross paths, a streaming set of stories seated next to each other for a few minutes; a beautiful young Muslim mother in a blue robe with a white veil looking like the Virgin Mary; two middle-aged Indians with a beat-box singing a rap song; an accordionist playing ‘Those Were the Days’; two Americans anxiously wondering aloud who might steal from them; an African girl with hair like Diana Ross’s in the 1960s; the man whose skin was patched black and white like a Dalmatian dog, a pure black patch on one cheek and over his nose, the rest of his face pure white, his neck and arms dappled. I wanted to step inside them, to know the shimmer of their consciousness as they looked out at the world.

  I had a sense of hunger at first, of need, but then it induced a tender reverie, a kind of daydreaming with physical warmth, a pleasurable loss of urgency about anything. I thought of Rousseau who said he ‘preferred to dream awake than asleep’ and Proust who said reverie was his favourite emotion, a dreaminess that came paradoxically from a momentary insight into the nature of things. And Stendhal too wrote, ‘In Paris I was an impassioned dreamer, gazing at the sky and always on the point of being run over by a cabriolet’, and, better still, ‘I am witty no more than once a week and then only for five minutes; I prefer to daydream.’

  I liked Stendhal right away. He’s a curious cup of tea; he tells the truth, but he pretends to hide. For a start, his memoir is called The Life of Henry Brulard, one of his many pseudonyms. He claims on the title page that it is a novel and adds, ‘To the messieurs of Police. There is nothing political in this novel. The scheme is a hothead of every kind who grows weary and slowly sees the light and ends up devoting himself to the cult of luxurious town-houses.’

  None of that is true, it’s all a sardonic screen. Behind it he writes with sharp honesty so it’s unsurprising when he says his two pet aversions are vagueness and hypocrisy. He says he has no pretensions to truthfulness except where it concerns his feelings because he’s never had much memory for the facts, an escape route of course, but I’m inclined to believe him. He reveals more of himself in hiding; he has more actual truthfulness than Rousseau, who protests his honesty so passionately. Rousseau’s claim that he bares his soul as God has seen it makes me squirm; can’t he see? Fooling yourself is worse than fooling other people.

  I like Stendhal when he says near the beginning of his memoir: ‘I ought to write my life […] The idea appealed to me. Yes, but the terrible quantity of Is and Mes. That would be enough to put the most well-disposed reader’s back up.’ Indeed. It’s always the first problem for any writer who won’t go to the bother of constructing a fiction. Not everyone can be as bold as Montaigne and say, with a shrug, ‘Therefore, Farewell dear Reader.’ Stendhal puts his case without argument or defence: ‘I ought to write my life, perhaps in the end, when it is finished in two or three years time, I shall know what I’ve been, cheerful or sad, a witty man or a fool, a man of courage or fearful, in sum happy or unhappy in fact …’

  It sounds simple enough, not too ambitious, but it doesn’t take long to realise Stendhal is nothing if not ironic. In the end he puts aside his fear of egoism: ‘My confessions won’t exist thirty years after they are printed if the reader finds the Is and Mes too tiresome; all the same I shall have had the pleasure of writing them and of conducting a thorough examination of my conscience.’

  I didn’t even notice that phrase of Stendhal’s when I first read it, ‘the pleasure of examining my conscience’. It was what each member of my family did every day when I was a child. We were taught to ask ourselves in the evenings, had we been good, which mostly meant had we obeyed our parents and not argued with our brothers and sisters, or at least not gotten into an all-out brawl with them. Kneeling on the lino next to my bed, making a sign of the cross, praying for the salvation of the Communists, promising to be good. It was earnest and dogmatic, but by the time I was a teenager it had become a habit of self-examination that has lasted a lifetime. Did I speak to the prostitute on the corner with an open heart or was I secretly judgmental? Was it pride that made me flee from the choir in the Marais? I’d never thought of it as a pleasure before Stendhal, but he’s right. It’s the careful spreading out of what actually happened, not accepting the self-serving version that is instantly manufactured; it’s the pleasure of seeing what the heart is made of, a multi-striped thing of light and dark.

  It means that Stendhal can admit, for example, that despite his passion for the rights of the common people, his tastes are aloof and aristocratic: ‘I love the people, I detest their oppressors, but it would be a constant torment for me to live with the people’, because ‘the people are always dirty’.

  Not just, it would be trying, but rather a ‘constant torment’ for him to have lived in the disorder of my childhood: encrusted tomato sauce bottle on the table, a mountain of unironed clothes in the corner, a broken fibro and tin lavatory in the back yard, coats on the bed at night in winter when there were not enough blankets. I’d like to be able to tell Stendhal it wasn’t harsh or difficult, it was just the way things were. C’est la vie. I would admit to him that when I reached adolescence and realised how other people lived, it became embarrassing, but I didn’t feel disadvantaged, because my mother had ingrained in us a disdain for people with money. We looked down on the rich.

  *

  What else can I report about Stendhal?

  His given name was Marie-Henri Beyle. He was born into an haut-bourgeois family in Grenoble in south-east France in 1783 and died in 1842. He detested most of his family except his adored mother, his refined Aunt Elizabeth and his generous, cultivated grandfather. His mother died when he was seven years old making him yet another motherless writer. He was a lonely and unhappy child, kept separate from other children most of his childhood, but finding them noisy and rough when he was finally allowed to mix with them. He didn’t like crudeness and vulgarity: ‘I avert my gaze and my memory from anything low’, a confession that made me feel let off the hook as I have a similar prissiness – no fart or poo jokes for me. He called it his espagnolism, his ‘accursed Spanish character’, a refinement he inherited from his aunt. He joined the army for a period, loved Italy, loved many women but had sex with only six of them and wrote novels, The Black and the Red and The Charterhouse of Parma, for which he became famous – but not until the twentieth century. He was a man of sardonic wit who liked Montaigne, but thought Rousseau bombastic, although when he was a boy he was in ‘raptures of delight and voluptuousness’ reading one of Rousseau’s love stories.

  I want to select an elegant café for coffee with Stendhal. He would wrinkle his fastidious nose at Camille’s with its cigarette butts and lotto tickets on the unwashed floor, and the cool, relaxed Zebra à Montmartre in rue des Abbesses would be too easy-going. I decide on Angelina’s in the rue de Rivoli, understated white with gilt tr
im, but when we arrive there’s a queue. He makes a few disparaging comments about the tourists in the rue de Rivoli as we wait, and I laugh, revealing our shared aesthetic snobbery. When we are seated he orders a short black – he loves coffee, but if he drinks too much of it, it brings on neuralgia. I’m nervous at first, hiding my dirty fingernails in my lap – I always have dirty fingernails at important meetings – because I know he can’t bear dirtiness, but there’s an unexpected humour and gentleness in his expression, which helps me relax. We talk about reading and writers we admire. ‘I’m a great fan of Montaigne,’ I say, knowing we have that in common.

  ‘Know Thyself?’ Stendhal replies. It’s the inscription on the Delphi Temple, which Montaigne liked to quote. His tone is sardonic but also yearning as if he equally doubts and hopes it’s possible. He changes the topic, suddenly claiming that he couldn’t love Paris because it had no mountains, and worse, it had pruned trees. The conversation darts from his family to politics to gossip and back to writing. I confess my own lack of ribald humour and he shrugs. ‘This espagnolism prevents me from being a comic genius,’ he says, but again his voice is ironic. He confesses his sensitivity to his writing being criticised when he was young, and his wait for genius to arrive: ‘I wish someone had told me just write for two hours every day, genius or no.’ I realise I like him but I’m unsure whether he likes me – he is difficult to read. We end up arranging to meet again, but somewhere we don’t have to wait in line.

  *

  Because I was early on the way to choir, I got out of the Metro at Belleville, a couple of stops before Ménilmontant. I was in the twentieth arrondissement, a traditionally working-class neighbourhood. In the 1930s de Beauvoir came up here when she was a young woman to teach literature to the workers. It’s where many migrants from France’s former Southeast Asian colonies have settled, mainly Vietnamese; the cafés and épiceries and greengrocers sell Asian meals and spices and vegetables, bok choy and lemongrass and Vietnamese basil. It’s also the area where artists and writers live, the current bohemian quartier, because the rents are cheaper. It looked rundown, untidy, bustling, not at all like the studied bohemian kitsch of Montmartre.

  In the butcher’s there were rows of ducks, yellowish and naked, and large chunks of dark red meat marked ‘cheval’, horse. There were many cafés but they were not funky or cool; the floors were a bit grubby and everyone smoked. I saw a few people in track pants; an old Vietnamese man wearing a beret, the first I’d seen in Paris; an African woman in a long dress of swirling red ochre and sea-blue with a baby in a matching sling on her back; Algerian men in groups, lounging and smoking. I wandered up the boulevard de Belleville, absorbing a new sense of Paris. There were no ‘sights’ in Belleville, just people living their lives. Here nothing was for show. I started to think I might just be able to slide under the rough surface here.

  I turned up rue Ménilmontant and found the community hall in rue des Amandiers. It looked familiar, like a community centre built in the suburbs in the 1970s in Australia, brick with a glass front. I found the office, enrolled and paid my fee. Then I wandered hesitantly along corridors, peering through doors where people were doing yoga or pottery or painting, until I found a room with a loose circle of people still milling about, some of them holding sheets of music. They hadn’t started yet.

  ‘Choeur?’ I said.

  A young man in jeans and waistcoat nodded. He was handing out the sheets of song music. I greeted him and he smiled and gave me a small sheaf of pages.

  ‘Je m’appelle Marc. Tu t’appelle quoi?’ he asked. My name is Marc. What’s yours? I was startled that he had used tu. I had been carefully saying vous in every situation for the past three months, obeying Mrs Berman’s rule that one only used tu for children or people in your family.

  ‘My name’s Patti,’ I answered in French.

  ‘Bonjour Parti,’ he said, mispronouncing my name. ‘Welcome to choir.’

  ‘Merci,’ I answered and stepped back, hoping the exchange was over.

  I looked around the rest of the group. There were fifteen or so women and four or five men, ranging in age from thirties to fifties and looking strangely like the choir I’d been in at home in the Blue Mountains, the same mixture of personalities and even of looks: the busy, neat, curly-haired woman, the tall pretty one, the barrel-chested bloke. They were still introducing themselves to each other, smiling and chatting. Everyone seemed to use tu. Several asked my name, and then, when they heard my accent and where I was from, I quickly became ‘Parti d’Australie’. It was a joke, which I didn’t get for several weeks. To their ears, my name sounded like partir, the verb ‘to leave’, so my name was ‘Left from Australia’.

  I looked at the half-dozen song sheets. The first two were ‘Petit Poucet’, ‘Little Thumb’, and ‘Qui a tué Grand-maman?’, ‘Who Killed Grandma?’, which I figured must be traditional folk songs, and then one in Spanish, ‘Ai Linda,’ and a choral section from a Bach cantata and another song in French called ‘La Paysanne’, ‘The Peasant’, and ‘Asikatali’, an African song I had already learned.

  ‘I know this one,’ I said in French to the woman next to me.

  ‘Oh really?’ she said, smiling. Her name was Marie-Louise and I liked the look of her intelligent gaze. She could see I was near the deep end and would keep an eye out for me.

  We started with warm-ups, chanting up and down the scale using each of the vowels and then exercising the mouth and lips with the delicious word pamplemousse, which turned out to be the word for ordinary sourish grapefruit. Then we started with ‘Petit Poucet’. The French rhythms were odd to my ears and hard to remember and the long, muttering phrasing left me dashing over syllables to reach the end at approximately the same time as the others. Next we tried ‘La Paysanne’, which resembled ‘La Marseillaise’ with lots of patriotic sounding ‘Marchons, Marchons’. In both the chorus was easier to sing, the strong beats more like English song rhythms. Then we started learning the first couple of lines of the Bach. The others in the choir grumbled about the difficulty of the German but to my surprise I found it easier than the French, the longer phrasing easier to fit in. I loved the sound of it too, the slow richness of it compared to the rushing French songs, but I didn’t dare say so.

  The two hours were over sooner than I expected. A few more people asked my name and where I was from as I put my song sheets in my bag. What was I doing here? Was I going to stay? I felt shy but at the same time realised I was enjoying being an object of interest. At least someone other than Anthony knew I was here, would notice if I turned up or not.

  Marc said, ‘À jeudi?’ See you next Thursday?

  ‘Oui,’ I said.

  I walked out of the Centre d’Animation with the other women, chorusing ‘Au revoir’ and ‘À jeudi’ and swung my bag along the street to the Metro and surged down the steps with all the other people in the cool dark evening.

  The weekend before we moved I received another phone call about the French conversation notice I’d put on the wall. It was Sylvie, whose mother lived in my building. Even though I’d started to pack, I arranged for her to come to the studio that evening.

  At the appointed time there was a knock and I opened the door to see a young woman who looked Indian. To my shame my first thought was a disappointed ‘Oh, she’s not French!’ It was the Mrs Berman effect again.

  ‘Bonjour, Patti?’ she said with a shy smile. She was pretty with wide cheekbones and long black hair and was wearing a short skirt and jacket, almost looking like she was going to the office, but somehow not quite.

  ‘Entrez, s’il vous plaît.’ She stepped in and we sat opposite each other on my couch, both smiling nervously. We exchanged information about ourselves in French and English, her English as halting as my French. She suggested we speak French one week then English the next so we could help each other. She said she used to practise with an Englishman for a year, but he went back home and t
here was the shadow of something in her eyes that made me wonder if he had been her lover.

  ‘Quel est votre métier?’ I asked. What is your work?

  ‘Consultante financière,’ Sylvie said.

  That was easy to understand even with my limited vocabulary. I had never met anyone who knew anything about money. What would we say to each other?

  ‘Et votre métier?’ she asked.

  ‘Je suis écrivain,’ I said. I’m a writer.

  Sylvie burst into a wide smile. ‘You have written some books?’

  ‘Oui.’ I got up and grabbed the books I had carted in my suitcase from Australia, and put them in Sylvie’s lap, aware that I was ‘showing off’ like my mother said never to do. She picked them up one by one, examining the covers and turning them over to slowly read the back cover blurbs. She looked up, her eyes alight.

  ‘I love books. I love to read. It’s the most important thing in the world,’ she exclaimed. She loved books and reading more than anything – and I had found her by posting a note on a wall! We looked at each other, delighted. I told her we were moving to the other side of Montmartre during the week and didn’t know anywhere there we could meet. She said she lived in the sixteenth arrondissement just on the other side of the périphérique, the ring-road around Paris, too far away, but suggested we rendezvous at Le Relais Odéon on boulevard St Germain in central Paris next Sunday morning. It was on the Left Bank in the sixth, easy for us both to get to and opposite a Metro stop.

  ‘Ze café on ze corner, zis is white,’ Sylvie said. She sounded just like Mam’zelle.

  It was easy to move to the new apartment as we had no furniture, only clothes, a few books and laptops. The only real effort was getting our things up the five flights of stairs. We hadn’t seen the place, except from the outside, but my faith in Susie Laporte was vindicated. A short hall opened into a large room with French doors on all sides leading on to a wraparound balcony – the light poured in and, because it was on a corner, I could see all the way down two streets. From one position on the balcony we could even see the cupola of Sacré-Coeur. There was a desk for Anthony in one of the high-ceilinged bedrooms and space for a desk in the other. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and the room quickly filled with steam.