Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  The only thing that was needed was a desk for me. A few weeks earlier we had passed a market selling second-hand household goods at place des Abbesses and wandered around looking at bits and pieces of furniture, appliances, stacks of old linen and lace, children’s toys. I had wished aloud that I could buy something for the studio so I could feel like I really lived here.

  ‘Buying furniture doesn’t make you belong,’ Anthony said.

  But I thought the opposite. How could I not feel at home if I was hauling a table or a bed up the street to my apartment? Don’t things weight us to the ground, stop us floating away? I thought about the Wiradjuri and how they’d had no need of apartments or furniture to feel at home. It made me suspect that I knew I couldn’t belong in this place and had to weight myself to the ground with anything I could find.

  In fact I didn’t have enough money to buy a desk, I was living on my savings, so I made one from two metal trestles that Anthony bought at a hardware shop, and a piece of building board I found in passage Ramey around the corner. The passage was one of those places where people left furniture or appliances they didn’t want. Whatever was left there – a table, a fridge, shelves – was always gone in a day or two, someone always wanted what someone else had finished with. After carrying the board up the five flights with the help of Anthony, I put it on the trestles against the wall where, when I was seated, I could look sideways out the French doors and see the balcony and chimneys of the buildings opposite. Then I arranged the desk-light, my laptop and printer and notes. I was ready again.

  The ritual preparation of a room for writing is a long tradition, the making of a space for thinking and imagining. Montaigne wrote of his writing room in his chateau near Bergerac:

  It is on the third storey of a tower […] a large drawing room. It was formerly the most useless place in my house: now I spend most days of my life there, and for most hours of each day […] If I feared the bother as little as the expense – and the bother drives me away from any task – I could erect a level gallery on either side, a hundred yards long and twelve yards wide […] Every place of retreat needs an ambulatory. My thoughts doze off if I squat them down.

  I’d like to think that it makes no difference where the writing desk is, but I can’t help believing the third floor of a tower in the south-west of France might have its uses – especially with a hundred-metre ambulatory above the chateau gardens. My thoughts too tend to doze off if I squat them down.

  And then, on the beams of his tower writing room, Montaigne carved ‘I decide nothing. I understand nothing. I suspend judgment. I examine’, the words of the Skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus. I imagine him walking up and down in his room – in the absence of the ambulatory which he never got around to building – glancing every now and then at the words just in case he should ever fool himself into thinking he really did know something. One day I will go on a pilgrimage to his tower, run my fingers over the words and let them roughen my fingertips and seep in through my pores.

  He also wrote about the part of writing that happens outside the tower – the part of the reader or listener who receives the words. He said, ‘Words belong half to the speaker, half to the hearer.’ Without the speaker or listener it is as if nothing is written – the tree falling soundlessly in the forest. It means every word is completed in a different way, every reader reads a different book. But until the book is read, each word belongs to the writer.

  I was nearing the end of the draft I was working on and the words still belonged more to me. I kept writing every morning, trying to create the place where Dina had lived and died, conscious that one of the people reading my words would be Theo. He was almost fifteen now and however carefully I chose, he would finish the story in his own way. He and his father were coming over to Paris in a few months and I wanted to make sure I had a draft finished by the time they arrived. There is so much of the thief even in writing one’s own experience of being because it always involves other people – and even if it didn’t, it is still a kind of thieving of the flesh and blood substance of everyday life in order to create it in a parallel reality. I didn’t want to thieve from Theo while he was with me, even though Stendhal says that the instinct to steal comes from what he called ‘a reverence for what is true’.

  I want to believe Stendhal is right, that the constant thieving is a search for what is true. Proust wrote about the urgent task of his narrator ‘recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone’ that offered to yield a secret revelation if only he found the words. The daily blue of the sky in childhood and the pearl grey in Paris, the restless longing of a freckled girl on the veranda of a farmhouse, a baguette and cheese on a kitchen stool at twilight, the ripple of unease as a woman envies a story of annihilation on a wall-plaque in the Marais, the bewilderment in the heart of Rousseau and de Sévigné and Stendhal and Theo whose mothers never came back into the room. It’s what I search for and find so rarely; it’s so fine and transparent, like a tiny dagger made of crystal, it’s easily lost. I’ve never been able to hold on to it for long. It means I have to keep ransacking, trying to find it over and over again.

  *

  Anthony and I set out to explore our new quartier. Our apartment was on the corner of rue Simart and rue Eugène Sue with a boulangerie diagonally across from us and a tabac and a crèche on the other two corners. Although it was still the eighteenth arrondissement it was a different world from the rue des Trois Frères, a borderland between the bourgeois area around Metro Jules Joffrin and the African quartier on the other side of boulevard Barbès-Rochechouart. In our street there were hole-in-the-wall places with sewing machines offering clothing repairs and an internet café selling phone cards, an African restaurant and a tea-house with couches and large hookahs, and up the road, a bar called Le Temps Perdu – although I doubt it was referring to Proust’s Lost Time. In the streets there were tall Senegalese and Malian men in long robes, peacock blue and emerald green, and women in brilliant scarlet and azure and ochre dresses carrying babies in matching slings on their backs alongside pale-skinned and soberly suited businesswomen and men going to their offices.

  I discovered that rue Eugène Sue was named after the novelist who wrote The Wandering Jew, that the street at the top was rue Labat where Sarah Kofman had lived as a child hidden from the Nazis, that rue Goutte d’Or further up towards Metro Chateau Rouge was where Émile Zola set his most famous novel, L’Assommoir. It was inscribed, but it wasn’t romantic Paris, there were no monuments and no tourists and it wasn’t especially tidy and clean and life was going on in full view all the time. I found myself becoming addicted to watching the street life below and looking into other apartments from my fifth-floor eyrie, a sticky-beak pleasure that I’d never had before.

  One afternoon after finishing work for the day, I went to see an exhibition of masks at the Musée d’Orsay. It presented masks mainly from nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists but there were some from Roman times and medieval Africa and Europe and from Asia and Polynesia as well. The program said, ‘Revealing while concealing, serving both spiritual and worldly pleasure, the mask goes back to the dawn of time.’ It struck me that almost every culture had wanted to make a representation of the human face that could be worn over the actual face. I wondered who first thought, let’s make another face for myself. And what did they want to reveal in their mask-face? Forbidden thoughts and feelings? Or was it to hide what was too fragile to reveal? Montaigne said, ‘We must remove the mask’ but perhaps it was more useful to study the mask.

  On the walls and in the cabinets of the d’Orsay there were death masks and Noh theatre masks from Japan, stone grotesques from Roman gates, ceremonial masks made of feathers and mud and grasses from Africa and New Guinea, plaster artists’ masks for studio drawing practice and a Medusa mask with snake hair.

  I thought of Jean-Jacques’ masks at home on our mantelpiece, the ferociously beaked bird-man made of papier
mâché. He had moved to Sydney and was enrolled at art school by then and one day when he was visiting, he had shown Matt and me how to make masks using torn-up paper pasted on inflated balloons. We had spent an afternoon making a mask each; mine was a friendly-looking witch with a hooked nose and Matt’s was a happy moon-face. We left them to dry for a few days and then painted them, mine blue and his pink, both of them in sunny contrast to the bird-man mask.

  It wasn’t long after he moved to Sydney that Jean-Jacques started using heroin again. He had been a junkie before he came to Australia, but he’d been clean for a couple of years when we first met him. I don’t know why he started using again – perhaps it was the break-up with Olive which came soon after they moved to Sydney, or perhaps it was just that he liked living near the edge. He reminded me of a moth flying at a flame, a kid who can’t help going too far out on the branch.

  Each time Anthony visited Jean-Jacques in Sydney he came home with increasingly worrying tales. He had stopped going to art school, he was living in a squat in Darlinghurst, he was dealing drugs, he had sores on his body, he was too thin, dangerous people had threatened him with iron bars. Every now and then Jean-Jacques came to stay with us in the Blue Mountains to withdraw but each time he would return to Sydney and pick up the needle again. He still had the sweetness of heart that had drawn us both to him, but there was violence in him as well. He talked about standover men and police bashing him and stealing his money. He sometimes brought a girl, Shayla, with him who was also a junkie and worked as a prostitute. My clearest memory of her is her sitting thin and damaged on our veranda, painting baby Patrick’s fingernails with pink nail polish.

  All these years later Anthony had heard back from Jean-Jacques. The email address on the driving school website had reached him. He wrote, ‘I am very exciting’, which made us both laugh. He had always said that and we had never corrected him. Over the years we often repeated it to each other when we were looking forward to something: I am very exciting. He told us that he and Ana – he was still with his Spanish girlfriend, Ana! – had three children and they lived in Lausanne. Anthony wrote back, saying we would come and visit them, but Jean-Jacques replied immediately, insisting they would visit us. He wanted to see us in Paris, he said. It was already late October and getting cold – they might come in November if they could, but otherwise it would be some time early the following year.

  Writing was making my shoulder and back pain worse; it was difficult to sit at my laptop for more than a few minutes at a time. When I was out, even my small daypack felt like a sack of stones and at night it took a few hours of tossing and turning before I could go to sleep. I didn’t want to admit that I was in pain; I was ashamed. I wrote in my diary: ‘Here I am in Paris with dreams fulfilled and I whinge because my back hurts! But it bloody does.’

  I looked up the word for pain, douleur, and went to see a doctor who, I checked online, spoke English. He turned out to speak less English than I spoke French, so we tried to work out the nature of the douleur in simplified French. He told me to take codeine and gave me the contact details of Tristan de Parcevaux, a physiotherapist with a clinic not far from our old studio. The medieval name alone was enough for me to make an appointment as soon as I got home.

  When I turned up a couple of days later at the cabinet of Tristan de Parcevaux in the rue Durantin, part of me was surprised that he wasn’t a twelfth-century knight on his way to Jerusalem, but a good-looking young man about the same age as my older son. Later, when I got to know him better and I confessed that I had imagined him as a knight, he said that he was in fact from a noble family. I thought of his ancestors in their chateau with their fine stables and lands and battles and Crusades and wondered how ordinary or extraordinary our lives would seem to them.

  Six

  November

  The memories of place that one has within resemble a palimpsest.

  Annie Ernaux

  I like the idea of memory as a palimpsest, a parchment where remains of earlier writing or drawings can be seen through the present text. At times older memories float up and are read before the later ones. Months and days and years are interleaved. I could try to establish dates more accurately – and I do try, making alignments with weather, with political events, who was president in France at the time – but that’s not really the point. It seems more accurate to try to make the layers and fragments that form memory. And then stories already told, already written, float in and repeat themselves, the details changing a little, told and retold down the years until the repetitions darken like layers of glue and paper.

  I do remember Anthony was in Jordan in early November and I had been alone all week. Although I had joined the choir and made an arrangement to meet Sylvie, I still didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Now that I was in a new quartier, the shopkeepers didn’t yet recognise me either, so I often had that floating sense of being, if not quite invisible, then negligible, as I’d been that hot summer day on the rue St Jacques in the early months. No-one knew I was here, I could disappear for days and it would make no difference to anyone. I began scanning faces when I was out in the lonely hope of accidentally seeing someone I knew from Australia.

  One morning I went out to Café de la Place opposite the town hall of the eighteenth arrondissement and sat in the window, out of the cold, to watch the passers-by. They looked back, cool and appraising. They made me feel as if my gaze didn’t exist, as if it wasn’t enough to make them avert their eyes. I had lost my sense of ‘Here I am’. I returned to the apartment and wrote in my room on the fifth floor, constructing another time and another place: Dina who had died and seven- year-old Theo who had said, ‘What I really want is to see my mother just one more time.’ It was clear that he knew the endless futility of his longing. I had realised then how much of knowing who you are and where you belong is created and shaped in the gaze of others. If no-one sees you, then do you exist? I closed the document and wrote to Matt and Patrick instead, the same email to both. I told them about our new apartment and that there was a spare room with two beds waiting for them in Paris.

  Susie Laporte had given me the telephone number of Vicky Cole, who had been a friend of hers when she lived in Paris.

  ‘You will like her,’ she emailed, ‘she likes books.’

  Vicky lived in the rue Labat, a couple of minutes’ walk away. I stared at the phone number for days until one afternoon my need to be seen and heard overcame shyness and I sat down and rang it. Vicky, who was born in England but had lived in France most of her life, invited me around for ‘supper’ the next night. I had never been invited for supper before – it sounded like a nursery meal from Enid Blyton – and Vicky had a posh voice, but as soon as she opened the door I felt at home; the walls of her entrance hall were covered with books, right up to the ceiling.

  She smiled a welcome and greeted me in English. She was about the same height as me, slightly older, and was wearing jeans and long-sleeved t-shirt and a silver and amber necklace. She invited me into her lounge-room where there were more books on tables and on the mantelpiece, and, on a low Afghani coffee table, a tray with cheeses, gherkins, saucissons and wine. After it was vacated by an indignant cat, I sat down in an old leather armchair – in the sort of disrepair only the English gentry would have in their living rooms – and we began talking about books.

  A couple of hours later we were still talking about books and we kept on talking. I stayed much longer than the acceptable time for an evening with a new acquaintance, but words and ideas were firing between us as we exchanged our stories. Vicky told me that when she was a child at birthday parties a nanny stood behind every child’s chair – but she had come to France to escape all that and had brought up her children as a single mother in a village in the south-west of France. She had done all sorts of work: packing cold and smelly crates on a fish farm, sorting tourists’ complaints about their showers in rented village houses, and had eventually set up her own
holiday accommodation business. And she loved books. She read as easily in French as in English, but seemed to have more English books scattered around. We had read all the same women writers in our youth: Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc, Anaïs Nin, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys, Alice Walker. I walked back home late that night with the airy feeling and glow on the skin that comes after a passionate exchange about books and ideas. As de Beauvoir said, ‘As long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.’

  Before I left that night, Vicky invited me to another rendezvous, a performance at the place des Vosges in the Marais. It was billed as an ‘Evening of Poets and Tigers’ – I had already seen a poster for it and thought I’d go. At the end of the same week, we met at her place and walked down to the Metro Marcadet-Poissonniers together. Between us there was the slight uneasiness of a second meeting after an intense first connection. Was the passion really shared? Or were we too open too soon? Like Montaigne, ‘I am able to make and keep exceptional and considered friendships, especially since I seize hungrily upon any acquaintanceship which corresponds to my tastes,’ and I was sensitive to the rhythms of making a new friendship. We talked about ordinary things, what we had been doing, the weather.

  The ‘Evening of Poets and Tigers’ didn’t live up to its exotic title. The gates of the square in the place des Vosges had been shut and temporary fencing installed, presumably to keep the tigers in, and by the time we arrived, there were crowds at least four or five deep all around the fencing. I am short and so is Vicky, which meant neither of us could see much. We managed to wriggle forward and spotted a couple of bored-looking tigers lying on a gravelled pathway in the distance. Nothing happened for quite some time. Some French was read aloud but I couldn’t tell if it was poetry or an announcement and I didn’t want to ask. After another long while, white horses did a display of precision stepping, crossing their hooves this way and that, trying to make up for the poets and tigers not living up to their dangerous names. The crowds stayed although there was little to see except shadowy shapes in the square.