Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  Eight

  January

  I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know, to understand, to express itself: I was engaged in the great collective enterprise, which would release me forever from the bonds of loneliness.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Back in Paris it was cold and still, the light flat, the kind that robs everything, even Paris, of beauty. The sky was whitish-grey, without the drama of distinct clouds. Buildings looked grim, the chestnuts and plane trees in parks were leafless, people hurried by dressed in black or dark grey, rubbish overflowed from public bins as if the garbos thought it wasn’t worth picking anything up in this light. I remembered Degas, ‘Light is my consolation’, and thought, it’s more than consolation, it’s salvation. I tried not to long for a hot Australian summer day: soaring blue sky, bare arms, sweat, squinting eyes, dancing sunlight on waves.

  And then on the night before the year changed, it snowed. During the day clouds had started to form out of the white blur, clouds with the tell-tale brownish hue I recognised from winters in the Blue Mountains. I stood at the balcony doors with Patrick in the late evening – Matt and Anthony had gone to see a film – as the flakes started to fall. At first the snow was sparse, dotted over the buildings and the night sky, but it soon filled the air with soundless, moving whiteness. When we looked upwards, the snow seemed to be coming from a point of infinity, when we looked downwards, the tabac neon sign over the road gave the flakes a reddish glitter. We watched the Great Silence as it drifted like poetry or grace through the dark, and then we stepped outside onto the balcony in the sharp cold and saw the crossroads below become whiter and whiter until the roads were smooth, and parked cars, a fire hydrant and rubbish bins became simplified, essential shapes. We stood shoulder to shoulder on the cold balcony, neither of us speaking. The snow fell more thickly still, it was midnight and there was no traffic and the streets in either direction were perfectly white, flawless.

  ‘I’m going to make the first footprints,’ said Patrick. He went inside and grabbed his coat and ran down the five flights. I stayed shivering on the balcony and watched him walk across the crossroad, once and back again, making clean sharp footprints. They were distinct even from five floors up, human footprints in the snow, the brief trace of a journey, clear just for those moments until more snow or other traffic obliterated them.

  I don’t understand the mysteries of the human heart and why it reacts the way it does, but I can’t imagine the day I will forget my son’s footprints in the snow.

  *

  Something had shifted in La Livinière. The weight on my shoulder had a clear outline, which didn’t mean that it had gone, just that I could see it. Childhood had disappeared forever and I had been too immersed to grieve it when it happened and, in our culture, there are no rituals to acknowledge it. When I had watched, in Matt, and then seven or so years later in Patrick, the slow ending of childhood, I felt each time not just the loss of being able to hold them endlessly in my arms, the physical delights, but the loss of daily actions whose necessity I couldn’t question. It wasn’t until after they were gone that I realised there is a deep assurance in actions that don’t need to be questioned; I never had to ask myself if I needed to feed this child, or keep him warm, or stop him from running across the road. I understood then that initiation ceremonies – incisions, separation, secrets – were as much for the mother to let go of the assurance of necessary action as for the child to step through into his own world.

  Pagnol and de Sévigné are the only memoirists who had anything much to say about it. ‘I confess that the rest of my life is covered in shadow and gloom when I think that I shall spend so much of it far from you,’ de Sévigné writes to her daughter, Françoise. And, ‘Three years ago today I experienced one of the deepest sorrows of my life: you went away to Provence, and you are still there. My letter would be long if I wished to unfold all the bitterness I have since felt in consequence of the first one.’ I have to admit it starts feeling manipulative. She’s clingy, and truthfully, I have too strong a sense of my own separateness to hold on so tightly to someone else, even a child.

  Montaigne wrote at length on educating children but he had little to do with his own child because – it pains me to say it – she was a girl. We know Rousseau abandoned his. Stendhal didn’t have children and didn’t like them, even when he was a child himself, writing of his companions at school, ‘I hadn’t met with the gay, friendly, noble companions I had pictured to myself, but in their stead some very selfish young brats’. De Beauvoir didn’t have children either and, at least in her memoirs, had both an ideological and innate distaste for them.

  I don’t mind about Rousseau and Stendhal, but in Montaigne and de Beauvoir, because I love them both –Montaigne more than de Beauvoir – their lack of insight into what it means to love and to bring up a child bothers me. I don’t want to admit to limitation in either of them, and yet to not value through experience or imagination the poetry of a teenage son making footprints on a snowy crossroads at midnight seems a serious lack.

  *

  The following day was New Year’s day and Patrick was leaving for Amsterdam. His university course had not started yet, but he wanted to find his accommodation and his bearings in Amsterdam first. He had to go out to Port de Bagnolet on the edge of Paris to catch the bus, so Anthony decided to go with him on the Metro to the bus-station, just to make sure he found his way.

  Matt and I walked down the five flights of stairs with them. When we reached the street there was still snow on the edges of the road, slushy and dirty, and light snow was falling and dissolving as it landed on our heads and shoulders. Patrick carried the large Kathmandu backpack we had given him for his eighteenth birthday and was wearing an overcoat and scarf and woolly hat. He had the beginnings of a beard, a smudging down his cheeks and chin, and his eyes were alight with the beginning of an adventure. He looked like any traveller down through the ages, rugged up against the winter cold, carrying his possessions on his back. As I hugged him goodbye I felt the rough woollen fabric of his coat and his slight body underneath.

  He and Anthony walked away and then, at the corner, Patrick paused and turned, his backpack swaying. The snow was starting to fall more thickly.

  ‘The scholar trudges off through the snow to continue his studies in Amsterdam,’ he said, and grinned.

  He turned back and continued down the hill to the Metro with Anthony, and Matt and I ran back inside and up the stairs. By the time we had got to the French windows, they had both disappeared.

  Matt had a video camera with him in Paris and one day he shot Anthony and me as we sat on the couch talking. As soon as I realised the camera was on, I could feel my lips moving in strange shapes. I said I was frightened of cameras. He turned the camera on himself and said wryly, ‘Why is she afraid of cameras? I am not afraid of cameras.’

  When he played it back I saw how distorted I looked and how natural he was, his mouth and eyes smiling, his face open to anyone’s gaze. I wondered if I knew only how to look, not how to be looked at.

  Matt was the next to leave Paris. The film funding that he had been waiting on had come through and he had already shifted into production mode, sitting in front of his laptop for hours, sending emails and writing notes. I remembered when he was a child how he tried to organise Anthony and me, sitting with his arms out on the table; okay, so what time are we leaving? What do we need to take? Let’s make a list. He caught a flight back to Sydney and then there were only the two of us.

  In the quiet of no more boys, we lay on the couch in each other’s arms. I could see the buildings across the road over Anthony’s shoulder and I thought, there is a gap in each of us but we have started to grow around it, like gum trees carved for a bora ceremony grow back around their cuts. This new shape with its ridges and hollows is part of us now.

  Then Anthony left for a couple of weeks’ work back in
Australia. I was in Paris alone. I settled down to writing the first morning with a sense of limitless time, a rare experience. I have hardly ever been alone in my life, born into a family where there were already three brothers and one sister, and then another brother in twelve months, then a sister and finally another brother. Five boys and three girls, and we all knew our place in the order. A few years after living in Paris, when my mother died, after her night chant of our names, we all stood at the altar at her funeral, shuffling into the correct order with unspoken knowledge and we all laughed at our private coordinates.

  I’m fifth from the top. There are not a lot of roles left for the fifth. I wasn’t particularly good, meaning I wasn’t inclined to serve others, and I wasn’t pretty – freckles and red hair were both disadvantages – but I was considered ‘brainy’ as it was called then.

  De Beauvoir too thought her future lay in her love of knowledge rather than in being good or pretty, both of us influenced by Jo in Little Women whom de Beauvoir considered ‘superior to her sisters, who were either more virtuous or more beautiful than herself, because of her passion for knowledge’. I didn’t think I was superior, and both my sisters were also brainy – and pretty – and it didn’t make me want to be a scholar. Even as a child I knew I wanted to write books. I remember thinking one day out on the farm, I want to do for readers what writers do for me; make a world in their heads.

  The patterns of family, or lack of it, formed all the memoirists as much as time and place. Neither Madame de Sévigné nor Rousseau had brothers or sisters and both lost their mothers as children; Stendhal had a younger sister but he too lost his mother as a child; de Beauvoir had a younger sister, and Montaigne, I’ve just discovered, was one of eight! He doesn’t mention them, except to say he has four brothers, but I can see now that he understands the difficulty of knowing who you are when there are so many other opinions about that. And the difficulty of knowing what makes you part of the family and what makes you distinctive amongst so many.

  There is such a strong desire to be like other people – I listen to teenagers walking past my building from their school at the end of the street saying ‘Same, same’ eagerly as they listen to each other’s lives – but equally, a need for difference. Sometimes I wonder if writing, especially memoir, isn’t just a way of doing that: noting similarity and finding distinction. I’m thrilled to find Montaigne one of eight; I’m relieved to have Stendhal share my prissy reaction to crudeness; I recognise I don’t have the quick wit and sharp tongue of de Sévigné; I recoil from sharing Rousseau’s self-deceit; and with de Beauvoir, it’s ‘same, same’ all the way through as I read her childhood.

  As children and teenagers, Simone and I both liked embroidery but not sewing, couldn’t sing in tune, loved reading above all else, suspected the existence of another parallel reality, were ‘no good at jobs requiring finicky precision’, were thrilled to join a library and were overcome by the endlessness of books to choose from, wanted briefly to be a nun, had an existential experience of ‘Here I Am’, dreaded Hell and often imagined how terrible it would be, identified with Jo as clever but not good or pretty, had detailed sexual-religious imaginings based on public humiliation and degradation – hers involved being a half-naked royal slave stepped on by a tyrant, mine being a half-naked martyr tied up in a square and taunted – experienced a sense of pride in having our first monthly bleed, wanted to be a writer, had ‘a happy disposition’, disliked loud voices and coarse language, liked to make public everything that happened to us, were transported by beauty, especially the beauty of Nature, lost God at thirteen, fantasised long romantic stories with fictional lovers, felt sorry for adults because they led ‘a monotonous existence’, had an insight that the future was for our own making.

  Nothing in this list is remarkable, only that two women born at different times in different cultures and classes shared the same collection of traits. I imagine that millions of others do too.

  *

  What else needs to be said about de Beauvoir? In my twenties, I thought of her as part of my generation, a contemporary, but she was much nearer to my grandmother’s age. She was born in 1908 and yet when she died in 1986 it felt as if one of us had died. She was brought up in a bourgeois family in Paris, a family with money at first, but they came down in the world. She had a sister, Hélène, known as Poupette, and they attended a Catholic school. She was devoted to her faith until she was thirteen, when she stopped believing in God. In June 1929 she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom her name would be forever linked. She loved other men – and women – but he was always central. She wrote in The Second Sex, ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one’, and in the 1970s her star rose as a heroine of feminism and Sartre’s faded – at least with women – but she always put him above her. She wrote her most famous novel, The Mandarins, the year I was born.

  Although I was raised in an uneducated family on a poor farm in Australia and she grew up in a bourgeois apartment in boulevard Raspail and then rue de Rennes in Paris, when I read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, it felt as if I were reading my own story. It could sound absurdly vain to say that, but I only mean my inner life was so similar to hers as a girl that it makes me think there must be ‘types’ who resemble each other closely despite vast differences in background, education and class.

  I decided to meet Simone de Beauvoir for coffee at Les Éditeurs in the Carrefour de l’Odéon, because it’s lined with books. She wouldn’t like her old haunts, Les Deux Magots or Café de Flore, these days as they are more likely to be the haunts of tourists than intellectuals, and anyway, I want to be somewhere I feel at home. I’m nervous enough as it is. She walks in wearing a stylish grey suit, self-possessed and unsmiling. I feel as if I have to establish my credentials, that she will have no patience with me if I try to connect with her emotionally. She orders a short black and asks me about the book I have on the table.

  ‘It’s Annie Ernaux’s Une Femme – about her mother’s death. I liked your book A Very Easy Death about your mother as well – and of course, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. You might think it strange – I’m from a different class, totally different family patterns – but I recognised so much of myself in you as a girl.’ I blurt out as much as I dare, not wanting to annoy her.

  But she’s interested in the fact that so much of my inner life as a young woman was the same as hers and points out there were similar cultural influences of Catholicism and, of course, being women. I want to say that our ways parted when we became adults, that I had babies and continued to study and write more slowly, but that I didn’t feel disempowered bringing up children. But she is the woman who said, ‘Women should not have the choice [to stay at home and care for their babies] precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.’ If I admit anything I will be relegated to the ranks of the misguided.

  ‘May I ask about Sartre – how much did admiration underpin your love for him?’ I ask instead.

  ‘He was my double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence,’ she responds. It’s what I thought she might say but it still sounds unexpectedly intense. Although I admire him deeply, I can’t imagine speaking of Anthony in that way, not aloud at least. I show her a photograph I’d found of the two of them, Simone and Jean-Paul, working together in Café de Flore. She picks it up and smiles with real delight. I’m bowled over by the way her face changes, all the severity is gone, her eyes crease and she looks girlish. There’s a certain closeness between us, but still a sense that de Beauvoir is in control. She is more friendly now, but I will not be one of her chosen ones, I suspect because I have nothing to offer her that she doesn’t already have. We say we must meet again, but no date or time is set.

  *

  I made a balcony garden when I first arrived at the rue Simart. A tiny plot of earth. I had never lived in an apartment before I came to Paris so I wasn’t sure how it was done, how to just liv
e indoors. I recalled that de Beauvoir as a small child had loved creating a world under the table in her family’s apartment, but I wasn’t used to enclosure. The childhood farm, even though it was the smallest in the district, still stretched out in every direction, so that every time I looked out, stepped out, there was earth and sky.

  My mother tried to make a garden on the farm, to make the world smaller, prettier. The yard was bare dirt during droughts and overgrown with marshmallow grass when it rained, but over the years my brothers dug flower plots for her. She planted stocks, pansies, poppies, sweet-peas and geraniums and we all helped bucket water to them in the long summer. We knew the flowers were some kind of talisman against harshness, we could see it on her face as she gazed at the sweet-peas in the evenings and exclaimed about their scent and their delicate colours, mauve and pink and white.

  The yard in the Blue Mountains was mostly native bush, gum trees and grevilleas, bottlebrush, banksias, ti-tree, and there was a creek at the bottom, but near the house there was a rough lawn and garden beds. In breaks from writing, I wandered around with a cup of coffee in one hand, pulling out weeds, and after a while realised I found it soothing. I planted the same old-fashioned flowers as my mother, and raked endless gum leaves and pinched laterals in the tomatoes and, in the spring, picked pansies and stocks, but the weed-pulling was more satisfying than anything else.

  Voltaire said at the end of Candide, after all trials and foolishness, the only useful thing to do was ‘to cultivate a garden’. In Paris I bought window-boxes and hooks and dirt and geraniums and hung my garden on the balcony railing. I felt as if I were planting myself as I put the soft-leaved cuttings in the dirt. I like geraniums – they were the only flowers in my mother’s garden that lived through droughts when everything else had died. When I read the bleak Henry Lawson story ‘Water Them Geraniums’, telling of a woman living in hardship in the country, I knew what it meant. Keep one thing alive at least, resist the forces of desolation.