Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  He did say too that ‘we must learn to suffer what we cannot avoid’ and that ‘experience has taught me that we are ruined by impatience’. That struck home. Each time the pain eased I thought, now I’m better, but the next day when it returned, I was consumed with impatience.

  Rousseau was often sick as well, even as a child: he ‘was born almost dead and they had little hope of saving me’. As a young man he had long and mysterious illnesses, which he was certain each time were fatal. He knew he was a hypochondriac: ‘There was not an illness of which I read the description that I did not imagine to be mine […] I believed I had them all.’ He appears to have had depression when he was young and suffered later on from paranoia and from almost continual maladies including painful ‘urine retention’, which meant he had to use a catheter every day.

  None of these are romantic illnesses, just painful, and embarrassing to talk about, and they must have shaped his thinking, at least in that they meant he was sidelined and had to observe society from the edge. It meant he also observed himself from the edge; he may have been ‘maddish’ as Hume said, intense in his passions, fanatical, but he was also self-aware in some aspects: ‘I have a passionate temperament, and lively and headstrong emotions. Yet my thoughts arise slowly and confusedly, and are never ready until too late.’ Oh, mine neither, I need a day or two to think of the quick reply!

  I have been judging him too harshly, I realise. He was just another struggling human being. I had judged against his weaknesses too quickly, a flaw in my own character which has always been there. Even when I saw Proust’s cork room in the Musée Carnavalet, I wasn’t sympathetic. Marcel Proust was asthmatic, allergic to all kinds of dusts and pollens, and couldn’t bear noise; he spent much of his life shut away from the world, convinced that he would otherwise die. Instead of compassion, I felt impatience, even faint scorn. There was something in my then robust health that found his sickliness and oversensitivity irritating. I felt the same when I read the interminable – that word conveys my attitude already – pages in In Search of Lost Time where the narrator – I can’t help thinking it’s Proust himself – is waiting for his mother to say goodnight. Just get on with it, for heaven’s sake. I’d always been impatient with others’ illness, and now with my own obscure ailments.

  In the middle of one afternoon I was feeling more than sorry for myself. I was in pain, exhausted from lack of sleep, my mouth was entirely coated with ulcers, it was cold, and Anthony was away in China, in Shanghai. I had a sudden longing to have his comfort, a longing for the phone to ring and to hear his warm voice which was never impatient with illness. I even thought for a second of ringing him, but remembered it was 3 am in China and he always slept like the proverbial log and it was unreasonable to disturb him. And then, within a minute, the phone rang, and of course it was Anthony.

  ‘How did you know?’ I stood there, disbelieving, tears stinging.

  ‘I woke up suddenly with the thought that you needed to talk to me. So I rang.’

  In a way, I don’t want to say anything else about that phone call, but there is so little ever said about long marriages – apart from being a source of tedium and disillusionment – that, at the same time, I want to shout out from the rooftops. Communion might be quieter and nearly invisible – tempestuous affairs are given all the good lines – but it is as fine and rare and worth as much as stormy weather. Our connection had always been strongly physical – both of us wondering aloud at times how long we would stay together without sex – and strongly intellectual, dependent on decades of conversation about books. I sometimes wondered if there was anything else between us. Sex and books. And our sons too, of course. And wasn’t that more than enough anyway? But the yearning thoughts of a sceptic had travelled across high mountain ranges and cities and seas all the way to Shanghai to wake one man amongst millions from a sound sleep and caused him to make an international phone call to a self-pitying woman in Paris. When I put the phone down I couldn’t stop smiling.

  It was only a week to Christmas and both the boys were coming from Sydney. Matt in his impetuous way had decided to buy a ticket on his credit card and deal with it later. He would arrive first and then, a few days later, Patrick, on his way to his year at university in Amsterdam.

  The weather was cold and damp but Paris sparkled as each quartier tried to outdo the other with Christmas lights. There were garlands strung across market streets, moons and shooting stars and mandalas and nativity scenes dancing in the sky above the crowds of shoppers, glittering in the darkness.

  When Anthony got back from China we spent an evening going from quartier to quartier, holding each other’s gloved hand and admiring the transformation of the gloomy evening into sparkling fantasy. The strings of small windmills made of lights, gold and red and blue and green, in our old neighbourhood in the rue des Abbesses, were the most beautiful to our loyal eyes, but we didn’t go and see the most spectacular in the Champs Élysées that night because we wanted to see them with Matt and Patrick when they arrived. Sylvie had told me it was the custom for parents to take their children to see the Champs Élysées lights in the week before Christmas each year. Carollers wandered down the streets singing to people as they sat in cafés and parents and children drank hot chocolate and watched the lights.

  ‘Papa and Maman took us every year when we were back in Paris,’ she said.

  I thought of children too young to properly remember, but recalling glimpses of singing and cold and stars fallen to earth. One New Year’s night when we still lived in Sydney and Matt was a baby, about two years old, Anthony and I took him sleeping from his bed and carried him down to the harbour and climbed onto a ferry. It was nearly midnight. The New Year’s Eve fireworks began and Matt woke up to see the sky exploding with red and gold and silver and green stars. The water lapped on the side of the ferry and the cool dark wrapped around him and fountains and bees and dragon’s eggs and falling leaves sparkled in every colour. He would not remember the midnight journey from his bed, but underneath conscious memory he would always have the idea that extraordinary things might happen in the dark of night. It seemed to us that it was the beginning of his education. At that time I hadn’t read more than the two or three essays of Montaigne’s that Mrs Berman had given me in high school, but I know he would have agreed. Education was to enrich the inner being, and ought to be pleasurable, a delight. Waking to the sounds of a spinnet or the sight of golden stars filling the dark, ‘to educate the soul entirely through gentleness and freedom’.

  *

  I went to concerts every Sunday: sacred music in St-Louis on the Île St Louis, choir at the American church, a chamber concert in St-Jean de Montmartre at place des Abbesses, pianists playing Brahms at St-Merri near the Pompidou Centre. Sometimes my lack of musical background meant I couldn’t understand the blur of sound and I became restless and sat in my overcoat – the churches were always cold – wondering why I was still trying to join a club where my ignorance held me back at the door of grace and beauty, trying to see in.

  Then I met an opera singer, an Australian woman, Trish. I’d gone to an exhibition of paintings at the Australian Embassy and she had turned up, as I had, in the hope of meeting new people. I don’t remember any of the paintings at the exhibition or even who the artist was, but I have a photograph of myself there in a pink and green dress, which, in the narcissistic hierarchy of memory, I remember I bought at Porte de Clignancourt, the flea markets in the north of Paris. I talked to Trish about my manuscript, how I had taken singing lessons back home, and that I had joined a choir in the twentieth arrondissement. She told me she had come from Adelaide to study singing in Strasbourg in her twenties and had never gone home. She had married a Frenchman and had two sons, but she couldn’t sing while she was married and ended up leaving him. It wasn’t that her husband prevented her from singing, she just lost her voice.

  She was sexy-looking, with green eyes and long brown hair, and had
an earthy laugh, and I liked her right away. She said she was currently performing in a concert of songs from Mozart operas – she was a mezzo-soprano – and asked me to come and see it.

  ‘It’ll be fun,’ she said. ‘We don’t take ourselves too seriously.’

  The following week I turned up at the theatre, which was down a lane in the eleventh arrondissement. I climbed up narrow stairs leading to steep rows of seats that looked as if they might tip me over onto the stage if I tripped. The dusty red velvet stage-curtains appeared to have been there since the nineteenth century at least.

  A series of sketches unfolded: a man in a loud shirt sitting in a striped deckchair, a nurses and doctors surgery scene with everyone in clinical white, Roman soldiers, Trish as an Italian housewife wearing a headscarf and glasses – each with glorious songs from Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro. The singers fell about with slapstick humour, acting as if their soaring voices were effortless, accidental. The program explained that they wanted to explore Mozart’s gout de l’espièglerie, his taste for cheekiness and his childish spirit. I relaxed. It didn’t have to be solemn, reverential. Their voices were rich, powerful; they could do somersaults at the same time and still sing. Trish’s dark earthy mezzo reached effortlessly low and skimmed the high notes as she clowned around on the end of a telephone acting the gossipy fool.

  Afterwards we had a drink in a nearby bar. The waiter hovered around Trish and asked if she was free later. A couple of men at the next table started flirting with her.

  ‘Like bees to a honey-pot,’ I said.

  She laughed. It was an everyday dance for her, the stepping forward and back of attraction. She smiled at them and returned to our conversation.

  ‘I’m trying to compose a set of songs about Australia,’ she said.

  ‘Even though you’ve been living here for twenty years?’

  ‘Proabably because I have. I’m working on a series, the whole piece will be called Terre Rouge, Red Earth. But I need to listen to Aboriginal music, didgeridoo and sticks and chanting.’

  ‘But what kind of songs are you writing?’

  ‘I’m writing them to perform myself, so I guess you would call them arias. It’s not folk or rock’n’roll or jazz anyway.’

  ‘And you want to combine that with didgeridoo?’

  We continued talking, both of us offering bits of our work. I envied Trish her voice, her capacity to make music, her entry into a world of sound that seemed to me beyond words. Like Stendhal I had come from ‘an essentially unmusical family’. Like him I was trying to sing, but as he said, there was little that could be done about it. I could only respond with more words. I told Trish that Dina in the book I was writing had sung in a rock’n’roll band for a while and that when I wrote about her tragedy, a beautiful young mother leaving a little boy forever, I had thought someone should write a sad love song about it.

  Because stories keep going, a couple of years later when I gave Trish a copy of the book about Dina, she did write a song for her, a sad love song, and sang it when I did a reading of my book at The Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris. That was in the future, but I like the way stories thread back and forth over time, connecting things that might otherwise have been lost or left flapping in the wind. It makes time past and time present seem to be, not a line, but arcs of a spiral. Trish finished writing Terre Rouge after I left Paris and performed it for a season on a nightclub barge on the Canal St-Martin. I didn’t see it, but Camilla, who had also become a friend of Trish’s, directed it. I heard the Paris audiences loved it.

  *

  Days and weeks had found a rhythm. I wrote each morning, immersed in life after Dina had died, the long slow connection with Theo, trying to stitch it together. I had begun to think of it as a kind of song and that I was trying to find the pattern of notes. I wrote pieces and arranged them as if they were notes: four or five short pieces, a run of quarter beats, and longer pieces, whole beats, or longer still, a note held as long as a breath would allow.

  While I was writing, I listened to bellbirds and magpies in the Blue Mountains, to the sound of Theo’s near-silent crying, to Dina’s breath gargling in her throat as her weak lungs struggled to draw air. As I tried to re-create those sounds, those days, I felt as if they inhabited me, that my body and heart were living there and not in Paris. My body felt warm while I wrote, but afterwards, I was cold. I finished about two o’clock each day and when I lifted my head the sound of police sirens and cries from the street rose to my room on the fifth floor.

  In the afternoon I returned to the present where there were ordinary tasks: I had my new trousers taken up at the Nigerian sewing shop across the street, I bought bath cleaner at the supermarket and ginger and honey at the African shop, I had massages with Tristan de Parcevaux, and studied French verbs on the internet. In the evenings I had a drink with Camilla or a conversation with Sylvie, and went to choir every Thursday night.

  At choir I had learned that ‘Qui a tué Grand-maman?’ was an environmental protest song and I was getting the hang of muttering through the wordy lines of a chanson. We had added a few more to our repertoire, ‘J’en ai marre’, ‘I’ve Had Enough’, which I understood was a general angry complaint about poverty and hard work and lack of love, and a folk song, ‘J’ai vu le Loup, le Renard et la Belette’, ‘I Saw the Wolf, the Fox and the Weasel’. They were fun but the Bach cantata, No 11, Choral 6, I loved and was now brave enough to say so. I didn’t understand any of the German words, but the slow rich sound and rhythm reminded me of the swing of the incense crucible in the Friday night Benediction service of my childhood, the comforting weight of a belief I no longer had. The priest chanted and the faithful responded, incense filled the air. Here in the room in the rue Amandiers each note felt like a solid step underfoot, and each one inevitably led to the next one.

  ‘J’en ai assez de Bach,’ the young woman next to me grumbled. I’ve had enough of Bach.

  ‘Non, j’adore Bach,’ I defended. Marc nodded approvingly.

  We started learning an English song too, Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’, one of my all-time favourites. I had sung it when I was sixteen walking up the middle of the road one night on a weekend away from boarding school, my first time in Sydney without my parents, the first time I’d had a beer or two. I was with a school friend who had introduced me to Janis Joplin’s torn soul, and we sang loudly in the quiet street. ‘Oh Lord,’ we yelled into the night.

  ‘For Parti,’ Marc said, and asked me to read it out loud with the correct English pronunciation. I read it, delighted to be the one who was the authority on a song for the first time, but when we sang it, I couldn’t help but blend in with the French accents: ‘Ma fren orll drive Porchez, Ay muz make amen.’

  Marie-Louise had taken me under her wing and invited me home to practise French with her. She told me she loved French with all her heart and wanted to protect it – I understood – from my murdering ways. There was a kind of intensity in her that made me nervous though, and made me fear doing violence to her language. I had started to see that the passion to communicate mattered more to me than sounding perfect; I improved more with Sylvie because we wanted to understand each other more than we wanted to be correct.

  I still practised French every day, listening to the news with a dictionary open on my knee. The words I learned weren’t ones I could often use in daily conversation – naufrage, shipwreck; sinstré, disaster victim; ravisseur, kidnapper – but I could understand what was going on in the world. I liked listening to President Chirac in particular, not because I agreed with any of his politics, but because he enunciated so clearly. ‘Français et Françaises,’ he would always start solemnly. French men and French women. I wanted to sit to attention, be one of the patriotic French women he was addressing.

  I learned more useful words from Tristan de Parcevaux as he massaged my sore body. Allongez-vous, lie down; l�
��hanche, the hip; la boite, slang for nightclub – he sometimes told me about his weekends. It was an odd way to have French lessons, a young man and a half-naked older woman. I suspected there was more warmth and gaiety in the way we corrected each other’s pronunciation than might have been the case if we were both sitting at a desk in a classroom. And then, on my second-last appointment, a ‘thing’ happened between us. It was unspoken and, if anyone had been watching, unseeable, but it was something. We were talking, I think it was about his desire to be a musician, and then there was a silence, but not because we had run out of things to say. It’s strange that I can’t remember our words but I can remember the quality of the silence. It was warm and there was a current of understanding or acknowledgment exchanged, a kind of energy. It wasn’t sexual, not on my part and most likely not on his, but there was a tenderness, a knowledge that we had, for some brief moments, connected. There was something exposed in it, a vulnerability. We both hastily resumed our professional selves and pretended it had not happened, but I think of it sometimes. The way human beings can touch each other isn’t something to forget.

  *

  Rousseau and Stendhal often wrote about their passionate feelings, but not about the delicate and transitory. They both seem to have lived most of their relationships entirely in their own heads – or is that what we all do? Perhaps every relationship is imaginary in that we construct a version of the person in our heads to fall in love with. Proust said that the loved person is ‘a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves’, but Stendhal and Rousseau both went as far as falling in love with women who were entirely imaginary, Stendhal with a fictional character – ‘I went absolutely berserk, the possession of a real life mistress, then the object of all my desires, wouldn’t have plunged me into such a torrent of voluptuousness’ – and Rousseau with women he imagined himself: ‘I created for myself societies of perfect creatures, celestial in their virtue and beauty […] I spent countless hours and days, losing all memory of anything else.’