Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  ‘I’ve read that French people will come out and look at a wall if it was rumoured there was something happening on the other side of it,’ I said.

  Vicky shrugged. I thought of the desire for danger and for something different to happen, even the desire to see destruction. Madame de Sévigné had waited on Notre Dame bridge to see Madame de Brinvilliers, the poisoner, burned on a pyre after being executed: ‘Well, it’s all over, Brinvilliers is in the air: after the execution her poor little body was thrown into a very large fire and her ashes scattered to the winds; so we shall inhale her […] no-one has ever seen so many people, nor Paris so excited and engrossed in anything.’

  We shall inhale her! Present-day media vultures have nothing on Madame de Sévigné and the Paris crowds in the seventeenth century! I don’t know what the excited and endless need for catastrophe means – or what hunger it feeds – but there seems something like primitive witchcraft in it; if I eat enough of other people’s tragedies then I will be protected. I will be the child to run with the valuable news of a disaster, I’ll watch the planes fly into buildings for days on end. The crowd rocked the temporary fence, daring it to fall, daring the tigers to care and leap forward and tear someone – someone else – to pieces. It was the same crowd feasting at the guillotine in the place de la Concorde, or standing on Notre Dame bridge watching Madame de Brinvilliers burn. Breathing in the ashes of the poisoner’s body.

  As we walked back to the train Vicky apologised for the evening as if it had been her responsibility. I said it wasn’t her fault that the tigers had not rampaged, nor even stalked around the square.

  *

  In my zigzagging across Paris, in and out of streets and parks and galleries, gathering a strange mix of nectars, I found ‘L’Abeille’, ‘The Bee’, by the Symbolist poet Paul Valéry.

  ‘So deadly and delicate your sting,’ he begins. He longs for the sharp quick sting of the bee to wake him up. He says that without it, love will die or sleep, and, in my reader’s half of the words, he doesn’t mean romantic love, but the loving intensity of being awake to life; the bee is a bringer of awareness. I am no great believer in the necessity of pain, but mostly there is no choice in the matter. Since that year in Paris, friends have died – cancer, motor neurone disease, heart failure – and others are suffering ills or loneliness. None of us are old yet, but still, the harvesting has begun. I remember the yellow wheat paddocks of my childhood, the ripe ears, the grain bins filling, the bare spiky stalks left in the ground; I never thought the harvest was sad then.

  I dreamed my mother died a few days before her birthday in November. I was showing her around a house, but I knew she had already died. I had a severe pain in my chest and could hardly breathe. In the dream I thought: the pain of someone you love dying is a real physical pain. When I woke up I worried all day that the phone would ring with bad news from Australia. It didn’t come then nor for several years, but when it did, the pain I had dreamed was accurate.

  I don’t know why I’m thinking of death; it seems a long way off for me, although even when I was a teenager I thought about it often. It wasn’t with fear, and certainly not with longing – I wasn’t a dark teenager – but with a consciousness that it would happen. De Beauvoir said she was terrified of death, sometimes utterly panicked by the thought of it, but for me it was more of a puzzle. I stood in the heat of the day on the veranda of our farmhouse and tried to imagine not being. It would happen, but the texture of nothingness is impossible to imagine and so the day would ripple and resume.

  Montaigne thought about it a great deal when he was young too, but he thought the slow death of youth was more dreadful than actual death. He says, ‘Death is one of the attributes you were created with; death is part of you; [in running away from death] you are running away from yourself; this being which you enjoy is equally divided between life and death.’ I wonder if he did feel as calmly about it as he sounds. Non-existence, non-being, has to be a bit confounding whenever it is considered.

  Instead of non-existence, other elaborate worlds have been created to live in afterwards – Heaven, Paradise, Valhalla – populated not just by those who have died but also by gods and a hierarchy of heavenly beings. And then ways to communicate with those who lived there had to be developed. Dreams could bring messages from the dead, and so could angels, and certain creatures, birds and cats. In ancient Aegean cultures, bees were the sacred messengers from this world to the dead.

  Bees were also messengers from the gods to us. The messages were passed on in honey so that truth could be expressed in scholarship and poetry. Honey-voiced. Honey-tongued. The Oracle at Delphi, the one who had ‘Know Thyself’ carved above the temple door, was the Delphic Bee. The priestesses of Artemis and Demeter were known as bees and even Apollo was given his gift of prophecy by the Thriae, a trinity of pre-Hellenic bee goddesses.

  Bees were seen as truthful messengers because the ancients thought honey was incorruptible and pure, that nothing was added to the nectar for it to become honey. Pure and incorruptible Truth. Of course, science has discovered that the bees do add enzymes from their own mouths, chewing it for half an hour or so to break down the complex sugars into simple sugars and then, after they put it in the honeycombs, they fan it with their wings for hours to evaporate water from it. It takes quite a bit of work, really. Making honey.

  *

  It was cold by mid-November and often grey. When I woke on the fifth floor I could see the orange chimney pots on top of the building across rue Eugène Sue. All the buildings in the street were Haussmannian, built after Baron Haussmann demolished most of medieval Paris in the nineteenth century, cream-coloured limestone, each six storeys with long balconies on the second and fifth floors, the only differences being the colour and design of the iron balcony railings. Ours were blue fern whorls, the building directly opposite, black ovals. As I opened my eyes I could tell what kind of day it was by the light on the chimney pots on the chambre de bonne, maid’s room, above the black-oval railing: if the orange of the pots was flat it was another grey day; if it was light and golden, then at least the day had started off sunny. I don’t normally mind grey weather; in the long drought of my childhood, cloudy, rainy days were longed for, welcomed, but here the low light was wearying.

  I had a rendezvous with Tristan de Parcevaux three times a week. I looked forward to the visits, not just because of the massage – which didn’t make much difference to my sore shoulder – but because we had begun to talk to each other. He practised his English and I practised my French. I learned that he was a musician in his life outside the physiotherapy rooms, and he learned that I was writing about my friend who had died. For practice, he gave his instructions to me in English and one day when I was lying on my stomach, he said in correct English, ‘Now put your feet to your arse.’ I laughed. He was embarrassed when I explained that ‘arse’ was not the word a health professional would use. He was more careful in the way he related to me for a while afterwards.

  I didn’t say much about the pain, even to Anthony. I think I inherited my mother’s impatience with whingeing, but it was more that being in pain undermined my sense of self – and self-respect. There was too much suffering in the world to even mention aches and pains. It wasn’t me; I didn’t have neurotic, undefined problems, and I didn’t get depressed. The firmer the ideas one has about oneself the harder it is to see the truth.

  Montaigne says, ‘We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each of them pulls its own way at every moment.’ But I was still trying to see myself made of one enthusiastic piece. And in fact some days I felt fine. The tiredness and pain came and went in a periodic fashion, three or so bad days, then one good day, just enough relief to create the cheering illusion that it would all be better soon. The days of pain were not so much the short sharp sting of a bee as the dull ache that comes afterwards, which sounds as if it would be easier to bear,
but it felt like a slow grinding down. The dull weather felt like an image of my inner flatness – if the light on the chimney pots was flat it took a lot more effort to get out of bed.

  One day I lay there thinking about my boys, about their childhood. As Ernaux said, ‘a palimpsest’ of memories floated through my brain: Matt looking for a lost lake called Paradise at the bottom of a cliff, Patrick swimming in the dark water of Gollum’s Pool and catching yabbies in a cold stream, a birthday party where boys played hide-and-seek behind blue gums and apple gums and grevilleas and banksias, ten-year-old Patrick instructing me when I was halfway up a cliff, frightened and unable to move, how to edge my foot to the next ledge. And images from my own childhood came: sitting in the wheat bin with wheat showering all around me, scraping my legs on the giant pepper tree in the back yard, riding Flicka bareback, reading all Sunday on my bed. I had a happy childhood – poor and loved, which sounds like a sugar-coated fairytale but it can be said truthfully – and so did my sons, but here in Paris I could feel something finally slipping out of my grasp. Leaving forever.

  I remembered a moment near the end of long-ago childhood, at the beginning of adolescence. I was standing in the scraggly front yard near the veranda – I can see the exact spot in my mind many decades later – when I was suddenly lifted – I don’t know how – out of immersion in the moments of my existence, and saw that there was a future stretching out for numberless days and that it wouldn’t fill up by itself, that it would be up to me to fill in the hours and days and years. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that one morning when she was a child, ‘Suddenly the future existed; it would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself.’

  I wondered whether all children have one moment when they are torn out of the eternal present, the moment when time and space no longer formed a closely woven cloak over the gaps and holes of existence.

  When I finally got up in the rue Simart and looked in the mirror in the bathroom, I was shocked to see the shape of my face had changed. I had always had an oval shape, which I quite liked, but now there were jowls on either side making it rectangular. When had that happened? I held the skin of the jowls back with my fingers and I immediately looked five years younger. So that’s why people have plastic surgery! I looked down at my arms, the faint geography of age appeared only when my arms were bent. My skin was dry, like my mother’s. Not yet loose and papery like hers, ready to bruise at every touch, but one day it would be.

  I made myself sit at the trestle desk but gazed sideways out the window. I saw a woman in a wheelchair in the apartment opposite, quite a bit older than I was, with soft, well-cut, grey hair. There was a younger man looking after her, not young enough to be her son, definitely a younger lover, laying her clothes out on the bed: a pink satiny slip, a bra, a red skirt. I stood up to see them come out of the door into the street below, he angling the wheelchair carefully through the door, and she dressed in the circular red gypsy skirt and a jacket and scarf. He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world and she took it as her due.

  I saw them nearly every day after that and thought about them a great deal. Had she always been in a wheelchair? Or did they meet when she could still walk and now he had to take care of her? Not that it was a burden; he was always so tender and so proud of her. Anthony had noticed them too, although coming and going as he did, they hadn’t become woven into his daily life. But he knew I was referring to them when I asked him, ‘Will you dress me in my favourite red skirt when I’m sixty-four?’

  He stood behind me putting his arms around my waist. We were standing at the French doors in the bedroom, both looking down towards the street.

  ‘And will you still love me when I’m sixty-four?’ I asked. Pushing my luck.

  ‘Will you still love me?’ he said. He turned me to face him in front of the glass doors and we kissed and then made love, the half-drawn Venetian blinds letting in slices of light on our bodies.

  Peering into other people’s apartments became one of my main pleasures in the rue Simart. In the apartment on the opposite corner there was an Algerian family – a mother with dyed red hair, a grandmother and two girls, one about nine and the other a baby, a toddler. I wondered where the father was, whether he had found work in another city and only came home every few months. They sat on a brocade sofa and watched television in the evening, the blue glow flickering in the room. Once, I saw the girl hold the baby over their balcony, not to frighten her, but to show her their flame-haired mother approaching in the street below. I wondered if the baby would ever remember the moment, high in the air, seeing her mother from above.

  Most of the time the window of the only bathroom I could see into was shut. On the occasions when it was open I sometimes saw a woman about my age washing her son’s hands. An older mother. She had a beautiful face, brown-skinned and dark-eyed. She looked as if she may have been Tahitian and because I never saw a man through the window, I thought she was a fille-mère, a ‘girl-mother’, as the French call unmarried mothers, although she was in her forties. On Saturday mornings she washed her woollens at the hand basin with the window open and hung them on the railings. The boy’s two pullovers hung there every Saturday, their tiny arms dangling in the sunlight, and I realised I missed not just my boys, but I missed that they were no longer little boys. I could neither hold them in my arms nor gaze at them for as long as I wanted, but only for brief seconds.

  It gave, still gives, me such pleasure to watch people unseen that I wonder if I’m a kind of voyeur. I meant no harm though, and it arouses tenderness to see a hand reached out, a neck stretched, when there is no consciousness of being seen.

  *

  Simone de Beauvoir liked looking into apartments, even when she was a child: ‘I would be deeply moved to see my own life displayed, as it were, on a lighted stage. A woman would be setting a table, a couple would be talking […] I didn’t feel shut out; I had the feeling that a single theme was being interpreted […] repeated to infinity from building to building, from city to city, my existence had a part in all its innumerable representation.’

  She also liked watching people in the street from her balcony in the boulevard Raspail: ‘Their faces, their appearances and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to a fifth floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: “But I won’t be able to see the people in the street any more.” I was being cut off from life, condemned to exile.’

  Oh, the watching of people’s lives from above! One day I watched two ancient, wrinkled women, both white-haired, one with a cane, walking slowly arm-in-arm, helping each other along. One woman was black and the other one was white. Another day I saw a boy with a first beard, walking with neat straight steps, his arms folded above his waist like a young girl unsure of her blossoming breasts.

  And another day an accordion player walked down the middle of rue Eugène Sue, playing and collecting coins as people threw them down from their balconies. Some of the coins rolled under cars and he had to get down on his hands and knees to retrieve them. I thought it must be a hard way to make a living when most people were out at work and apartments were empty during the day. My choir had started to learn a new song, ‘L’accordéon’ by Serge Gainsbourg – we sang about how cruel life was for the street musician, how his only friend was his accordion, but this accordionist was cheerful. When I threw him down some euros from the fifth floor, he stopped and played a whole song for me. I didn’t recognise the song, but it made me feel like I was in a French film from fifty years ago.

  Then one day there was a teenager in army fatigues fighting his own private war, knocking over bins and ripping down posters as he loped along the street. Drawn out by the noise I stood on the balcony looking at him from above. He scooped up the real estate magazines from the stand outside the boulangerie
and threw them in the first bin he came to. He had a roving gaze, as if he were not going to miss anything that needed his attention. He was about the same age as Patrick, perhaps two or three years older. He kicked the rolled-up carpet used by the African street-sweepers to direct water along the gutters, he punched cars, he yelled obscenities. Then he looked up, a raging, crazy, unloved boy, and saw me watching him. I looked away quickly, ashamed.

  ‘Salope,’ he yelled. ‘Va te faire foutre.’ Fuck off, bitch.

  The rue Simart was a kind of littoral, I suppose, a shore between privilege and disadvantage, often delineated by race instead of class. The raging boy was white, and so were most of the clochards, the down-and-outs, but all the sans-papiers, refugees without legal status, and many of the poor were Africans or Arabs from former French colonies: Mali, Senegal, Algeria, the Sudan. Algerians have been in Paris longer, most of them coming to escape the civil war in the 1960s, and are more likely to have jobs and small businesses – allez au Arab means ‘go to the corner shop’. When shonky apartment buildings burn down and lives are lost, most of the names of the dead are African. Most live in wretched state housing towers, called HLM, in the banlieue, outer suburbs, but there is a large African quartier on the other side of boulevard Barbès. They are ‘the people’ now, the disadvantaged and the oppressed.