Montaigne, Stendhal, Rousseau, de Beauvoir all wrote about ‘the people’, Rousseau especially: ‘An inextinguishable hatred grew in my heart against the oppression to which the unhappy people are subject and against their oppressors.’ And Montaigne lived in a peasant household until he was weaned because his father wanted him to have sympathy for ‘the people’. Stendhal, in an age of revolutions, defended the people but was honest, more than once, about his distaste: ‘I loathe to have dealings with the hoi-polloi while at the same time under the name of the people, I long passionately for their happiness.’
Madame de Sévigné – I’m sorry to say because I did come to like her over coffee – wasn’t sympathetic even in theory; she describes the punishment of the leader of a people’s insurrection in Brittany where she came from:
The day before yesterday, a ruffian who had called the tune and begun the thieving of the official stamped paper, was broken on the wheel; when he was dead he was quartered and his four quarters put on view at the four corners of the town […] Sixty burghers have been arrested: tomorrow the hangings begin. This province is a fine example to the others, and particularly that they should respect their governors.
In case the details of seventeenth-century justice are not clear, ‘broken on the wheel’ means being tied to a large wagon wheel and then beaten with wooden or iron cudgels until your body is bashed through the spokes. ‘Quartered’ means the body is then cut into four. I am sure it did make them respect their governors.
It was several centuries later and I was from the other side of the world, standing on a balcony, God-like, watching. Like Annie Ernaux, I had come from ‘the people’, as much as that applies in Australia. Neither of my parents had any education past primary school; my father’s parents were a farmer and a housemaid, my mother’s, a house painter and a barmaid, all hard-working and quiet people. My father owned a farm but it was a small patch of dirt to support a family of ten – eleven counting my grandmother lying in her dark room with no windows to the outside. The house was shabby: boards rotted on the veranda, in one of the bedrooms white ants had destroyed the walls, and cement, which made do as plaster, was falling off the walls in the kitchen. We had no heaters, no indoor toilet – The Land newspaper for toilet paper in the cracked fibro lavvy outside – and no hot water unless it was heated in a kettle.
For most of my childhood I had no shower and no bath, ineffectually washing in a small tin dish. In my first few weeks of high school in town, I was drinking at the water-bubblers one lunch-time and realised the girl next to me was looking at my arms. I noticed for the first time that both my arms from wrist to past the elbows had several ‘high-tide’ layers of dirt on them, dirty, dirtier and dirtiest. I had not realised I was dirty until I saw myself through her astonished gaze. Stendhal was right, the people are dirty – ‘dirty, damp, blackish’ – but I think I spent the following decades hiding evidence of my grimy body. I succeeded well enough; I’m not ‘the people’ anymore. I’m one of those who can talk about them, watch them, from a balcony in Paris.
*
Annie Ernaux came from ‘the people’, which for her meant a small town in Normandy called Yvetot. Her mother and father moved up from being a farm labourer and factory worker to run a café. Her mother had ‘ideas’ – and so did Annie – so she was sent to a convent school where the other girls were middle-class. She tells a story in Retour à Yvetot which is almost a copy of my dirty arm experience, although in reverse. At home, her family used bleach to wash everything: sheets, curtains, even their hands. Annie didn’t think anything of this, didn’t even notice it, until, in the first French class, Jeanne, a girl whose parents were ‘chic’, exclaimed: ‘It stinks of bleach!’ and ‘Who smells of bleach? I can’t stand the smell of bleach.’
Ernaux writes that she wanted to sink into the earth. She hid her hands under her desk, filled with shame and terrified one of the girls sitting next to her would know it was her. In that moment she realised it was the smell of a ‘cleaning lady’, an inferior. She hated Jeanne but, even more, herself.
It was a secret humiliation, no-one outed her, and as far as I know, the girl next to me at the bubblers didn’t reveal my secret – although I don’t know why not because I would have been an easy target – but I felt the shame and the fear just as Ernaux described it. To be uncovered, not just as different but as inferior, was a terrifying thought. I already knew what happened to girls who were judged as different and inferior.
In that small town, apart from the Wiradjuri who lived on the edge of our lives, almost everyone was of English and Irish descent, fair-skinned and utterly certain there was no other way to be. Cathy Dantrinos, who sat near me in class and whose only crime was having a Greek father, had olive skin and black hair and was belittled and mocked every day. Her thick plait was mocked, her thick legs were mocked and her mother, who also, oh how embarrassing, wore a thick plait, was mocked. For the first few days when I arrived at the school I talked to Cathy, until a stream of girls came up to me, making it clear it would be the same for me if I continued along this dangerous path. I abandoned Cathy to her fate.
Annie Ernaux broke with her past, with her ancestors, saying at the end of the chapter, ‘I had just broken with generations of women who washed with bleach.’ Reading that sentence, I felt the sting. It was a small enough break in a world scarred by ruptures, but on opposite sides of the world the dirty girl and the bleached-clean girl had both submitted to the rule of their betters and made it their business to slip by unnoticed. I’ve just begun to think that my writing life may have been a journey back to that grubby girl before she knew what other people thought of her.
*
Anthony and I were both robbed in the streets within a week of each other. I was getting into the train at Anvers Metro on the way to choir with my folder of songs tucked under my arm and shoulder bag slung on my back as usual. The crowd surged onto the train and there was jostling as the signal for closing the doors sounded, but people were smiling and good-humoured as we were pushed up against each other. I felt the push of the man who had leapt in behind me and turned around to see that he had got in safely, then turned away and reached in to hold the centre pole so as I wouldn’t fall. As the doors shut I looked out and was surprised to see the same dark-haired man walking away along the platform. I realised instantly what might have happened and slipped my bag off my shoulder to check. The wallet was missing. There were sympathetic noises from the other travellers and several pointed at the man we could still see walking away on the platform, but the train was pulling out. It had been well executed and we were all too late.
I told Marie-Louise and three or four others at choir about it and they were upset for me, taking it personally that one of their own had robbed a visitor. Strangely though, it made me feel less like a visitor and I felt pleased to have a story to tell them. Marie-Louise offered me money for my fare home, but I said it was okay, I had a weekly Metro ticket still in my pocket.
I thought about going to the police to report it, but it seemed pointless and there hadn’t been much money in the wallet anyway, no more than twenty euros. I cancelled my credit cards and wrote it off to experience. But within a couple of days Anthony was mugged down at place des Abbesses, pushed over and his wallet taken. He had gone down there one evening to see if he could buy some marijuana from the teenagers who were always kicking a soccer ball around the square – the same boys we had seen on our first day – but they had knocked him down and expertly slipped his wallet out of his pocket. He wasn’t hurt – and I wasn’t overly sympathetic – but we decided two robberies were worth the bother of reporting so we went to the police station in rue Clignancourt near our apartment.
We sat and waited for a few minutes, watching entranced as two groups of police officers greeted each other with three kisses each in the bare foyer.
‘We must be in Paris,’ Anthony said.
I nodded. The only oth
er time I’d been in a police station was the small police-cottage in my hometown when Matt’s bike had been stolen from my mother’s back yard. No-one had kissed anyone there.
We were allocated one of the policemen who transcribed the events as we explained them in simple French: voleur, thief, and portefeuille, wallet, but not marijuana. He didn’t ask many questions, just let us tell the two stories, although he did ask if my thief was an Arab. It seemed a leading question and I was surprised.
‘I’m not sure. He could have been. He had black hair.’
‘No. If you are not sure, I can’t write anything.’
It was an odd exchange, which I didn’t know how to read. I thought it was a racist question but then his refusal to write any details of the thief’s appearance on the grounds of my uncertainty suggested that it wasn’t.
I wanted to think that the French were not racists; they had welcomed black Americans, musicians and performers, most famously Josephine Baker, in the 1920s. It wasn’t until after I got to know Sylvie that I realised it was another romantic illusion.
There was a mix-up on my first rendezvous with Sylvie. She had told me the awnings of the café were white, but the awnings on the café named Le Relais Odéon were green so I was unsure whether I was in the right place. I was a few minutes late, so I rushed back into Metro Odéon and out again at St Michel to check another café near the Metro station there. I eventually and literally bumped into Sylvie coming out of the Metro. I was hot and bothered and Sylvie was embarrassed at having described the place incorrectly, but we both settled down inside the quiet elegance of Le Relais Odéon. It had wrought-iron railings and painted ceilings and perfect waiters. We sat in the window and Sylvie told me it had been her favourite place to watch people when she first came back to Paris.
‘I watched the women because I wanted to learn how to be a true French woman.’
She smiled a little self-consciously, aware of her naivety, but I wondered what she had looked at. Was it their clothes – dark, well-cut, with intriguing details – the way they walked, the tilt of their heads, the movement of their mouths as they talked to each other? It seemed to me that French women looked different in all those ways when I sat and watched, especially in this quartier, the sixth arrondissement. This was literary and intellectual Paris, near the Sorbonne and the Latin quartier and surrounded by publishing houses where words and ideas are still currency, where the student uprising of May ’68 raged, where my conception of Paris had been born and was nourished every day.
The sixth arrondissement stretches from the Seine to the other side of the Luxembourg Gardens, bordered on one side by boulevard St Michel and crossed by boulevard St Germain. In between, there are nests of narrow streets crammed with shops and galleries and crêperies where I always lost my sense of direction. Around the corner from where we sat, in the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, François Procope had opened the first coffee shop in Paris in 1689 – we could go in and bump into Voltaire and Rousseau, although they probably wouldn’t be speaking to each other. After Voltaire read Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract he sent a note to him saying, ‘I have received your new book against the human race and I thank you for it […] One longs, on reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.’ Ouch. It was a most civilised way of drawing blood. We might be safer in Le Relais Odéon, watching from behind glass.
I ordered a coffee and Sylvie had a hot chocolate and a croissant. We sat, both of us a little shy, and tried to tell our stories.
Sylvie was born in Paris, but her mother and father were of Indian ‘origine’ as the French so exactly put it; she was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired. But she had not come from a disadvantaged background. Because her father was a diplomat, she and her brother had grown up in Brazil, Senegal and the French Congo with visits back to France until she moved permanently to Paris in senior high school. I felt the envy of the exotic that only someone relentlessly Anglo-Celtic who had lived on the same few acres all her childhood could feel. How dull, unchanging, homogenous my life was. This, I thought, was exactly why I had come to Paris. To see and touch difference.
‘I grew up on a farm in Australia and never knew anything else every day of my childhood,’ I admitted. It was a dreary story with not even a change of scenery to hold attention.
‘How lucky you are to have a home, a landscape that knows you,’ she exclaimed. I felt a jolt of surprise when she said that. How did she know that secret truth when I had hardly articulated it to myself?
She tried to explain how living in so many countries had created an uncertain identity, which was further complicated by the fact of her dark skin. When she was in South America or Africa, she said to those who asked, ‘Of course, I am a French girl,’ and as she repeated it to me, her voice was indignant. How dare she be questioned about her right to be called French. She felt completely French even though she recognised that she physically resembled the people in Senegal and Brazil more than she did the other diplomatic families.
‘But when I came back to Paris, I didn’t know who I was. I felt like I didn’t know how to be French. I was confused and felt like an outsider.’
I know it sounds improbable that with my limited French we could have articulated such things, but we did. We were strangers but there was something happening between us. A few times in my life I have had an instant intimate connection with a stranger, as I did with Vicky, but never before in another language. For the first time, I threw a few words of French into the air with the feeling they would be caught and put together. There was something brilliant about the way Sylvie leapt towards meaning from my fragments.
‘À dimanche,’ we said as we parted. See you on Sunday. We were friends already.
*
Jean-Jacques and Ana couldn’t come in November. It would be more like March or April the following year. But plans for visitors from Australia were falling into place, the Paris magnet exerting its endless pull: a new friend, Camilla, had already arrived – she was an actress and director who had worked with Matt when he was younger; Theo and his father, Kit, were coming in March; our friend Phil who had drawn the cartoon of us in Paris was arranging to visit early in the New Year; Peter, who heard music in his head, and his wife, Libby, were calling in; my niece Hannah, travelling in Europe, was staying for a day or two as she passed through to somewhere else. And Patrick had been accepted into the University of Amsterdam, starting in the New Year. He was coming to stay for a few weeks in late December and would be with us for Christmas before going on to Amsterdam. I emailed Matt, hoping he would find a way to join us. He was waiting on funding to make a film and lived hand-to-mouth, although he always seemed to get by. I had no income and everything extra in my savings had gone on Patrick’s studies, but Matt had always been one of those people whom the world likes and looks after.
I waited on the fifth floor in the rue Simart. Each visitor must climb the narrow staircase and, out of breath, knock on my door. I would bring them along the hall and stun them with the glimpse of the cupola of Sacré-Coeur and the sound of the accordionist playing ‘Les Temps des Cerises’ in the rue Simart below and then serve them camembert and vin de pays from the Arabs on the corner. Other people must see my dream, otherwise it might be said that it did not exist at all.
Seven
December
Nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well.
Michel de Montaigne
The pain in my right arm and shoulder was constant now, and had spread to my back and between my ribs. When I breathed, in and out, it hurt between every rib.
‘Go and see the physio,’ Anthony said.
‘I already go three times a week.’
Most of the time the ache was dull, but if I moved my arm suddenly a sharp pain shot through it. Because the autumn leaves on the f
ootpaths were wet and slimy, I often skidded on them and instinctively shot my arm out for balance. There was an instant of calm, and then the searing pain hit and doubled me over, breath held. People looked at me in astonishment. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’ What the matter? What’s she carrying on about? There was nothing to see.
One day when Hannah was staying for a week on her travels around Europe, she stood with me at traffic lights and I went to step out onto the pedestrian crossing. She saw a car run the red light and grabbed my arm – the pain shot through me as I bent double in front of her startled face.
Sleeping had become difficult; there was no position that didn’t make the pain worse after a few minutes so I lay this way and that for hours. Worst of all, self-pity was creeping damply in to match the cold, grey weather.
I went to another doctor who gave me stronger codeine and an anti-inflammatory. I swallowed as many of both as I was allowed a day; the codeine made me sluggish and the anti-inflammatory gave me ulcers all over my tongue and gums so that I couldn’t smile or eat or kiss without it hurting. I knew there was nothing seriously wrong with me, none of it was life-threatening, not even enough to justify calling it suffering. I thought about illness and pain being good for the character and wondered why it was dissolving mine.
Montaigne suffered a variety of illnesses: ‘rheums, fluxions of gout, diarrhoeas, coronary palpitations and migraines’, and ‘the stone’ or ‘gravel’, which sounds like either kidney stones or gallstones, both extremely painful, which is perhaps why he said ‘nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well’.
But he was not one to seek pain as a way of learning; in fact he thought pleasure was both a guide for what we should choose – ‘I have never been bothered by anything I have done in which I found great pleasure’ – and our aim – ‘we ought to have given virtue the more favourable, noble and natural name of pleasure’. For him, the only use of pain was the pleasure that came when pain was lifted; the contrast heightened the experience of pleasure.
Ransacking Paris Page 12