Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  De Beauvoir wrote of her feelings for her friend Zaza when she was a teenager: ‘I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a pounding cataract, as naked and beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.’

  To my Anglo-Celtic soul, it sounds extreme – violent, naked, pounding cataract, cliff – and I want to shrug it away as excess. But just as I do, I suddenly remember the long-forgotten years as a teenager when every night I unfolded an imaginary love affair in fine detail in my mind. It’s curious that I didn’t think of it when I read of Stendhal’s and Rousseau’s imaginary lovers. Each evening I could hardly wait for the solitude of my bed to imagine the next intricate instalment of love and passion. There were jealous scenes, passionate reconciliations, slow kisses, piercing glances from dark eyes. Cliffs and pounding cataracts; I’ve had a few in the endless landscapes of the mind.

  Still, still, I want to insist, what of the subtle and transitory? A boy’s smile as he plays ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on his violin, a wordless conversation in a physiotherapy clinic, two elderly women helping each other in the street below, the accordionist and his song, beekeepers inspecting hives in a park.

  *

  I told Sylvie that my sons were coming to Paris. She smiled and said I always glowed when I talked about them.

  ‘Do I?’ I blushed as if she had found me out in some sentimental nonsense. I hadn’t thought I was a woman who centred her life around her children; like Simone de Beauvoir, as an adolescent I had wanted to write, not beget children. She famously said that to have children was to keep playing the same old tune, ‘but the scholar, the artist, the writer and the thinker created other worlds, all sweetness and light, in which everything had a purpose’.

  I can remember saying something similar as a teenager: why be born simply to give birth in turn? But somewhere along the years I had realised that nothing mattered more. Writing mattered, of course it would always matter, but if I couldn’t write again it wouldn’t annihilate me. Probably.

  ‘Sorry, I guess I’m like Madame de Sévigné.’

  ‘Ah my dear,’ she had written to her daughter, ‘how I would love to see a bit of you, hear you, embrace you, watch you go by …’ A familiar longing. But I thought of de Beauvoir and how she never found out that feelings as fundamental as disinterest, and even distaste, could be transformed into an adoration filling every cell of the body. I had not been interested in babies either when I was a teenager – I couldn’t imagine what it was people saw when they exclaimed ‘what a beautiful baby’. To me they looked red-faced, squashed, bald, and they smelled of milk and poo. I scorned women in my country town who didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything except have babies. My mother had observed my lack of interest. After I told her, when I wasn’t quite twenty-one, that I was pregnant, she dreamed that I got off the train in my hometown alone, blithely saying I’d left the baby behind in another city.

  ‘Non, non,’ Sylvie smiled. ‘But anyway, it’s the most important thing for children that their parents believe in them, don’t you think?’ she said.

  I knew she wasn’t talking about believing in their brilliance or beauty and I felt reassured. I had looked at them and recognised them and that was worth something.

  Years later I lay on a small camp-bed alongside my dying mother. We, all her many sons and daughters, had been taking turns to stay with her in her last days and that night it was my turn. It was the middle of the night in winter and because the winters are cold in my hometown I had the blankets up to my chin. Her hospital bed was higher than mine so I couldn’t see her face but I still lay with my face towards hers. It was quiet, not even the rubber-soled pad of nurses’ feet checking other patients could be heard. My mother had not spoken for several days and I thought I would probably never hear her speak again.

  Suddenly in the dark I heard her voice, low but quite clear. ‘Kathy,’ she said, ‘Peter, Barney, Tim.’ I held my breath. ‘Patti, Kevin, Mary, Terry.’ They were the names of all her children. All my brothers and sisters. She started again. ‘Kathy, Peter, Barney …’ All the way through to the last. And then again. And again.

  She told me once that she used to chant our names to herself every night and if she stopped on someone’s name she knew something was wrong with that one. One last safekeeping chant of the name of each child before she died.

  *

  On the day Matt was due we arranged to meet him at Gare du Nord. It’s a vast station on the RER, the Île-de-France lines, and the national train lines as well as the Metro, and was being renovated at the time. We tried to give instructions by text.

  ‘Outside ticket barrier, near Lafayette poster.’

  ‘Which barrier? There’s lots.’

  ‘On stairs leading up to main concourse then.’

  ‘?’

  ‘Stay there, at top of stairs – can see u.’

  And there he was, with his open face and warm energy, bounding towards us. His reddish gold hair had darkened as he’d gotten older and it was shorter, no more luxuriant curls, a grown-up man. He was taller than both of us, and more outgoing, more confident and at ease. He had been the sort of child who made friends in a moment and kept them for life, never doubting that he wouldn’t be received with the same openness. He had always been ready for adventure, jumping off cliffs into mountain pools and riding his bike along fire trails and doing well at school, delighting teachers with his enthusiasm. I often thought, he likes the world and the world likes him. He put his arm over my shoulder as we walked.

  That evening he went out after dinner and found Café Oz, an Australian-style café with corrugated-iron walls near the Moulin Rouge. Each evening afterwards he went out to chat to the Australian dancers who met there after performing at the Moulin Rouge and came home in the early hours of the morning.

  Patrick arrived a few days later, slipping in from the airport and making his own way to rue Simart. He came in smiling shyly, trying to hide his delight as he had when he was a child and first realised how vulnerable it made him. It was a smile from a better world, I’d often thought, and it made me realise there was such a thing as a pure heart. He had been a child who loved knowledge, the kind that explained medieval trebuchets and how the pyramids were made and the history of architecture. He wandered the student quartier in the fifth arrondissement on the first day and went to the Museum of the Middle Ages on the boulevard St Michel. In the evening he drank wine with us. His narrow face and dark hair and his dark-coloured, understated clothes made him look typically French. I wasn’t surprised when, a few years later, he went back to Paris by himself and came home with a French girlfriend.

  The first night we were all together we played Scrabble in Camille’s, but there were letters missing – someone had taken most of the ‘e’s – and we didn’t get far. In the next few days both boys explored all over Paris, walking from Montmartre down to the Seine and all the way up to the Eiffel Tower, but when they were back at rue Simart, they took up all the available space with their bodies and backpacks and clothes and youth. I bought a coat-stand to shift the small mountains of hats, gloves, scarves and coats off the lounge chairs. It fell over with the lopsided weight nearly every time either of the boys hung their coats up.

  I announced we were going to take them both to see the lights in the Champs Élysées.

  ‘Okay, but I’ll just go myself,’ Patrick said.

  ‘No, I want you to come with us.’

  ‘Why? I can work out how to get there.’

  ‘It’s traditional. Parents take their kids to see the Chrissie lights in the Champs Élysées.’ I knew how I sounded before I’d finished the sentence.

  ‘You want us to be like little kids. Swinging hands.’ Matt grinned. They were ganging up on me.

  ‘Yep. That’s it. Indulge me.’

  We did go, rugged up in gloves and hats and scarves, and there
were children everywhere, bundled up in woollen coats or parkas, their faces shiny in the cold. We walked up from Concorde towards the Arc de Triomphe with thousands of others, a stream of sightseers enchanted by pretty lights. The roundabout near Concorde had a halo of lights in the middle like a vast swarm of bees, and the gardens – where Proust’s narrator played and chased his friend Gilberte – were festooned with golden shapes and patterns, and the chestnut trees all the way up the avenue glittered, a glorious silvery-gold blaze. Near the top we sat in a café on the terrace and had extraordinarily expensive hot chocolate. Up close in the chestnut tree in front of us we could see the lights strung along each branch.

  ‘Is this what you imagined, us all together in Paris at Christmas?’ Matt looked at me quizzically. ‘It’s not bad, is it?’

  Patrick didn’t say anything. They were both used to my attempts to make life fit a perfect imaginary version. A couple with three children walked past, one of them crying to be picked up. The father carried a large parcel and the mother was carrying the baby but they both looked down and made encouraging noises. A white terrier hopped around the child, trying to be of use.

  ‘To our boys,’ said Anthony, and lifted his cup of hot chocolate with one hand and, under the table, held my gloved hand with the other.

  ‘It’s cold,’ said Patrick after a while. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘I’ve booked a proper house for Christmas,’ I said. ‘It’s in Languedoc in the south-east. La Livinière.’

  ‘Are we going to have a Christmas tree and presents?’ asked Matt.

  ‘If you are good children. A Christmas tree and a turkey and an open fire,’ Anthony said.

  *

  Christmas on the farm was always hot. A branch was lopped from one of the tired pines in the top paddock and put in a bucket full of rocks to hold it up. There was anticipation and sticky-taped presents and Mass in the town church and a hot Christmas dinner in the hot middle of the day. Sweat on the vinyl kitchen chairs, roast chicken and roast potatoes and pumpkin and tomato sauce, wrapping paper and cards still lying about, the old plaster nativity scene with the paint chipped off Mary and Joseph, Christmas stockings from Coles. And then the long, slow afternoon. One year someone was given a plastic slide viewer of Switzerland and at first I thought it was magical. Snowy peaks and grassy meadows and chalets. But there were only eight pictures and once I’d clicked through them a few times, that was it. It wasn’t enough to transform a flat Christmas afternoon.

  *

  Even though it was in the south, it would be cold in Languedoc, which meant I needed a book for days around a fire. Perhaps a novel – I could leave the memoirists to themselves for Christmas. In WH Smith’s bookshop I pulled out novels I had always wanted to read but not got around to and ones I thought I ought to read one day. None seemed what I needed. As I stood there in front of tens of thousands of books, there was a sense of looking for exactly the right tincture for some wound. I felt stiff, heavy. A sense of grief had been with me the whole time in Paris and I couldn’t quite see what it was. The painful shoulder seemed an obvious metaphor; I was carrying something heavy that I needed to put down. I had to be quiet and still, let the right book come to me.

  I moved over to the memoir section but still didn’t see anything. Then just as I was about to give up I pulled out My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle by the film-maker Marcel Pagnol. I turned it over – the back cover said it was about his boyhood exploring the wild hills in the south-east of France. Before I even opened it, I knew this was the book, that there was some revelation waiting for me. I started reading it as soon as I got back to the apartment.

  We set off for Languedoc four days before Christmas, the boys’ backpacks and our bags and presents stuffed in the boot. It was sleety when we headed off and there were two snowstorms on the way. Snowflakes blew towards the windscreen from a single, ever-disappearing point and snow powdered my head and shoulders as I ran with Anthony and Matt and Patrick into auto-stops for hot coffees and toilet breaks. I remembered photographs of us standing in the snow in the Blue Mountains, Matt in a cardboard box sled, Patrick not quite born yet. Snow on gums and bottlebrush and banksias.

  It was evening by the time we reached the medieval steel crucifix marking the turn-off to the village. It wasn’t snowing anymore and I could see La Livinière ahead along a winding road through the vineyards, its milk-coffee stone buildings and orange slate roofs looking like a perfected French village. It was lit by the golden light that comes sometimes after the sun has gone down, ‘entre le chien et le loup’ – between the dog and the wolf – the light between two worlds. We bumped over a walled bridge and suddenly dropped back at least two centuries into cobbled lanes between stone houses, each with brightly painted shutters.

  The house on the corner of the rue de la Républic and the rue Vieux Pressoir had three whole bedrooms to spread out into, a huge fireplace, and a kitchen with everything you could want including Scrabble and a pile of books. It was cold though, and the air had a faint stony shut-in smell of past human lives, sweet and sour traces of other meals, other habits. I pushed newspaper into the cracks around the windows and pulled the shutters tight. Anthony tacked a blanket over the door, and Matt lit the fire with pine-cones and roots he found in a basket next to the grate.

  Next morning we ventured out, rugged up like bears. It took minutes to layer on the coats, hats, gloves and scarves, all tucked in tightly with no chinks to allow the cold air entry. Just up the hill behind our house was a Romanesque church, twelfth century, with arched buttresses joining it to the surrounding buildings. Nearby was a square with a medieval covered market and fountain and on the edge, a cemetery with its gravestones sinking into the earth. Back in the house I read that La Livinière had supplied wine to the Romans and the name had originally been Cella Vinaria, Latin for ‘wine cellar’.

  Although there were bare vineyards all around the village, with no resemblance to the wheat paddocks of my childhood, I kept thinking of the farm. The girl I was on the farm. Proust says the ‘better part of our memories exist outside us, in the blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first cracking brushwood fire in a cold grate’. At the edges of rows of vines, bushes clung to the dry soil and the crumbly texture of the dirt brought the memory of walking barefoot in a wheat paddock, the wheat as high as my chest. The smell of wood smoke gave me my father chopping wood. The cold air on my face in the morning when I woke in the whitewashed bedroom brought back a winter’s morning walking up the lane to school, frost on the grass. The sharp sweet eddies of lost childhood washed through me in a foreign place.

  In front of the pine-cone fire we drank local red wine and played Scrabble. And read. Pagnol kept pulling me into the garrigue, the stony hills he roamed as a boy and, strangely, I was that boy as well. I breathed in rosemary and lavender and chalky earth and scraped my legs on a thorny bush, but it wasn’t until I was almost finished that I came upon the sentences I had been waiting for. I went upstairs and sat on the bed and cried. Later that night, after I had gone to bed, I recalled the sentences and again cried. Anthony started reading Pagnol as soon as I finished – not because I cried, he didn’t see my tears, but because I’d said it was the right book to read in this part of the country.

  I went out the next afternoon and bought some holly and arranged it along the mantelpiece. I understood for the first time what it was really for. The fierce green leaves and red berries had only ever been Christmas kitsch before seeing them here in the bare coldness.

  Anthony finished reading the book the day after he started. He has always been a passionate reader and will sit and read until he is finished whereas I like to take my time.

  ‘Did you cry?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why should I cry?’

  ‘Because of these sentences,’ I said. I opened the book and read them out: ‘Such is the life of a man. The long childhood of joy is obli
terated by unforgettable grief and sorrow. But there is no need to tell the children so.’

  To my surprise I started crying again. I had thought before it was the cumulative effect of the story, but even on their own the sentences pierced the pleasant surface of things. Patrick and Matt sat by the fire, reading, taking sips of wine, pretending they didn’t notice.

  Somehow Pagnol’s words untied the amorphous sadness. Nothing can ever be turned back; childhood was long ago, and now my children’s childhood was long ago. Sun, wind, the smell of harvested wheat, the caw of crows, bees in the almond blossoms, the peppery smell of rosemary – a child’s heart knows and sees everything. In every life, the kingdom is lost again and again, it must be lost, and nothing will ever bring it back. But there is no need to tell the children so.

  The next day was Christmas Eve. Anthony and I tried to make a traditional French Christmas dinner according to the instructions Sylvie had given me before we left Paris. We drove across the bare countryside to the markets in Narbonne, an ancient seat of Roman government, and found dindes, turkeys, staring balefully at us from dead eyes. They were too big for four people to eat so we selected a chicken instead and watched the woman hack its legs and head off and stuff them inside the body cavity. Then we found marrons, chestnuts; moules, mussels; and an extravagantly iced and decorated Bûche Noel.

  I cooked the mussels in wine, Anthony prepared the chicken and roast potatoes and green beans, then we sat around the table on Christmas Eve and ate our Christmas dinner in a village in the south of France. Afterwards, at midnight, we toasted each other with champagne and then, in the middle of the night, I rang my mother in Australia. It was already a hot Christmas morning there.