Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  Here in Paris, geraniums were simply pretty. Mine weren’t flowering yet, I had to wait until spring, and because my garden was so high up, I worried at first that the bees might not find them until I found out bees didn’t like geraniums anyway. I tended the plants with care, watering them once a week and turning the soil over with a kitchen fork. Because it was a garden on the fifth floor and with fresh-bought dirt, no weeds appeared. I wondered if the geraniums would survive the cold, but in January other balconies had pots out so I left mine out as well.

  I still missed the bush though, especially in the cold. I remembered the coastal bush in Sydney, foreign to me when I was a young student as everything is when you haven’t known it in childhood. There were ruffled paperbark and lilli pillis and Moreton Bay figs with dangling buttress roots clinging to sandstone. A country almost impossible to imagine in Paris. I thought of the child Stendhal saying to his aunt, ‘So there’s a country where orange-trees grow out in the open?’ He was talking about Provence, not Australia, of course, but it’s the same astonishment that there are places where nature does unimaginable things. Fig roots melting onto sandstone as they spread out to find enough nourishment on rock, wild fruits that I didn’t dare taste, seed pods shaped like devils.

  In rue Simart, I had the photograph of Baron Rock on my writing desk – it is always within sight when I write. Years ago I had written on the back, ‘This is a photograph of my heart.’ When French film-maker Agnès Varda said, ‘If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes’, I knew it was true. Inside me, even on the outside, it feels sometimes that there are the low hills and plains and dry creeks of the central western country, Wiradjuri country west of the Blue Mountains. It doesn’t feel as if it is located in my mind, but in my body, imprinted as if pressed on wet clay, and when I look at that country it is as if I am looking at myself. And yet I don’t, and probably couldn’t, live there. I found myself thinking of it often in the rue Simart and I had to wonder then, what am I doing here, so far away from my own landscape?

  *

  When I was a teenager I went for long walks across the countryside, sometimes with brothers and sisters, but more often alone. It was my only chance to be solitary, not talking or walking with anyone, with only paddocks and scrubby gum trees around me. I climbed over boundary fences, carefully lifting the barbed wire, and walked across foreign paddocks and up into the hills owned by a neighbouring farmer. Sometimes I found things: a buzzing swarm of bees hanging in a wattle tree, fossils embedded in stone in a creek bed, a goanna, but mostly I just walked. My mind roamed, I saw a kookaburra on a fence post, felt the wind in my hair, listened to the soft shirring of she-oaks, learning that most of life happens on the inside.

  Montaigne says we should have family and home and health if we can but ‘we should set aside a room for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establish there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum’. I think I was starting to make that room then as I walked across the paddocks, but before I was twenty I had met Anthony and lived with him and our babies and a dozen others in large share houses. Montaigne argued we don’t need to live alone to have a room for ourselves at the back of busy lives, but I think I didn’t have enough time to put up the framework for mine or find its shape. I lived for a long time out the front in the shop, which was full of delights. Here in Paris was the first time I was alone again since wandering across the paddocks in my childhood.

  The threads connecting me to others were still in place. The row of hand-made Christmas cards from friends hung on string across one wall in the rue Simart. There was the drawing from Phil, the cartoonist, and the note from Theo and his father, and the cards from Jean-Jacques and from Camilla, and the tiny plastic Christmas tree with a present for Vicky when she arrived back from seeing her family, and one for my niece when she came back through from Germany. Outside, the women in the boulangerie across the road knew me and we had a chat each time I went in there. I only had to say ‘comme d’habitude’, the usual, and they would carefully wrap my framboiserie in a paper pyramid each day. A vegetable-seller at one of the stalls in the markets knew me too, and the waiter at Café de la Place.

  At choir, Marc offered another English song, David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.

  ‘Pour Parti,’ he said again, and asked me to explain it to the choir.

  I had no hope of deconstructing Bowie lyrics in French so I told them it was surréaliste, that it didn’t really make sense at all. Marc smiled and everyone nodded thoughtfully. I had become the authority on English song lyrics.

  Each week we tried the Bach cantata, which I still loved and which everyone else still grumbled about. Its yearning richness stirred some longing in me and I could feel my voice giving in to the notes. One evening as I sang happily, I suddenly realised everyone was leaning in and following my voice. I was the one keeping the tune! In my chest and throat the rich notes rose and held, reached down again, held. For the first time in my life I felt the notes and their unfolding inside me like soft round fruit, plums or peaches, in my mouth. For this one glorious song, ‘Nun lieget alles unter dir’, I was necessary. I looked up the words: ‘Now everything is subject to you.’

  I still met with Sylvie every Sunday morning, always sitting in the same place in the window at Le Relais Odéon and we smiled with delight when we saw each other. Sometimes we talked politics and one day I told her of the shameful refugee camps in the desert in Australia. Then she told me that when she’d had a job interview at a finance firm, the employer, seeing her dark skin, said the criteria had changed and she was no longer suitable. She explained that because her name was French, they hadn’t realised until they saw her that she was not white. Other applicants with African or Arabic or Indian names would have been screened out already.

  I said I had thought that Paris was not racist, that it had welcomed the African-Americans right back in the 1920s and 1930s and later, when they were still segregated in their home country – what about Josephine Baker and James Baldwin and Nina Simone?

  ‘It’s different if you are a singer or dancer or musician or painter. Or writer. All the rules are put aside in Paris if you are an artist,’ she said, ‘but for everyone else it’s the same as anywhere. There are more racist places than Paris, but we are not immune here.’

  Other times we talked about our families. I told her my father did not even get to high school and missed half of primary school helping out on his father’s farm, but he always believed I could do anything I wanted. Sylvie told me her father, the diplomat, had directed her to have a sensible job so she had become a financial consultant, although this was not her dream.

  There was a rhythm to our rendezvous, we were part of the scenery of Le Relais Odéon, and the young waiter knew us. I wondered what he made of it, the way I stumbled along in French one week, then chatted away in English the next. At times Sylvie would get carried away and speed up her French and I’d grasp maybe three or four words per sentence. Leap as I might, I’d fall flat in the gaps between. Sometimes I had to wait until the English Sunday to check what it was exactly we had been talking about on the French Sunday.

  One afternoon I arrived first at Le Relais Odéon and was startled to see that it was closed and the interior looked sooty and disordered. There was a handwritten note on the door which said there had been an ‘incendie’. I waited until Sylvie arrived and we both exclaimed over the misfortune. We stood in the cold street at a loss, wondering where else we could meet. I suggested Les Éditeurs, a café nearby on the Carrefour de l’Odéon that I had visited with Anthony a few weeks before. We had both been drawn in by the name – ‘The Publishers’ – and inside the walls were lined with books, which customers could take out and read if they wanted. Sylvie liked it straight away and we settled in under the bookshelves and ordered our coffees.

  It was French Sunday so Sylvie started. She talked about her brother who wrote poetr
y and how she admired his sensitivity. He too had been influenced by their father to choose a sensible career, but poetry was his love. Then we discussed writing songs as poetry and then singing and I talked about my choir. I said that this week I realised I was carrying the Bach song. That somehow I had slipped inside the song and let it come out of my heart and soul instead of standing outside it fearfully. It seemed like a kind of magic to me, not just my singing, but that human beings sang at all, that we had an instrument inside our bodies.

  Singing and music were still something I knew so little about and were so powerful that they seemed like the activities of the gods. I had been to a musical exhibition at the Cité de la Musique during the week, where, as I walked around the museum, performers played musical instruments from different cultures and periods. I heard the harpsichord as Montaigne might have heard it, the instrument beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the thrumming of African drums and tambours, and two violins singing Mozart. I’d thought as I had many times before that music was the highest gift. To me there was no doubt.

  ‘Music is the highest art,’ I said to Sylvie, ‘the greatest gift.’

  ‘But no, it’s literature, of course. You remember when I first met you, I said it’s the most important thing,’ said Sylvie.

  ‘No, you know I love books but I can accept music is the best. Music is the most mysterious – the effect, I mean – and it crosses all languages,’ I replied.

  I thought I had won the argument but Sylvie launched into a passionate defence of writing as the highest art. She said all writing could be translated, so it too crossed all boundaries of language and then she talked about her teenage years in Brazil and how she was always a stranger, how confused she felt, how her sense of self had been dissolved. The characters in books were her friends, their experiences, their conversations, were hers. Her thoughts, her awareness of her emotions, her sense of being in the world, were all detailed and shaped by reading. She spoke intensely, her dark eyes holding mine.

  ‘Je me connais quand je lis,’ she said.

  I know who I am when I read.

  Stendhal said ‘a novel is like a violin-bow and the soul of the reader is the violin-belly which gives off the sounds’. It means that the words of a writer are only given their sound, their richness and fullness, in the soul of a reader. The vibration enters the chamber and amplifies and diffracts and reverberates according to the shape and size and texture of the violin-belly soul so that every reader, reading the same book, reads a different book. I would have liked to say that to Sylvie, but it was too complicated for me to say in French.

  *

  I wrote more of the story of Dina and Theo, setting up my laptop on the trestle table, I spoke French, I sang at choir and I went to concerts, but I had to do something about the shoulder, back, rib and neck pain. It had not abated at all despite revelation, or despite knowing that it wasn’t fatal. The internet self-diagnosis sites informed me the pain would abate but that it would take up to two years.

  I was still going to Tristan de Parcevaux and swallowing painkillers to get through each day and, in the evenings, stronger ones to get through the night. Most days it was difficult to think, difficult to write and doing ordinary things like putting the washing-up away was slow work. One day I stubbed my toe on the wet, rolled-up carpet the street-sweepers used on the corners of streets to direct water along the gutters and whimpered. I was ‘shamelessly grovelling at the feet of pain’ as Montaigne said. My happy disposition was taking a beating.

  I decided to go to the American Hospital on the edge of Paris where the doctors all spoke English. I trudged along the streets, lost for a while, but eventually arrived at my appointment where I was diagnosed with ‘adhesive capsulitis’, or frozen shoulder. I could put up with it and it would go away in time, or I could have a series of cortisone injections to stop the pain and then exercises to restore movement.

  I made an appointment for the first injection. Suffering with patience might be a good thing, but I’d reached the end of my small allotment. I couldn’t help agreeing with Montaigne that ‘without health all pleasure, scholarship and virtue lose their lustre and fade away’ and that ‘no road leading to health was too rough or expensive’.

  A week later I was back out at the hospital where a rheumatologist gave me the first injection. By the next day, the pain had reduced dramatically, not gone altogether, but enough to make the days seem bearable. Under the rheumatologist’s direction I booked into a physiotherapy clinic in the sixteenth arrondissement for twice-weekly sessions, to start after my second injection if all went well.

  I did feel as if I had failed some test, that I ought to have been able to put up with what, in the scheme of suffering, was minor, but I’ve long been suspicious of the doctrine that suffering was good for the soul. I’d been afraid to say it out loud, having a superstitious fear of the Fates who like to knock down anyone who defies them, and then I found brave Montaigne saying, ‘I disclaim those incidental reformations based on pain.’ He suffered a great deal of pain through illness and there was much less relief from pain in his day and yet he still didn’t take refuge in it supposedly improving his soul.

  Anthony had been in Australia for three weeks for work meetings and arrived back tanned and carrying tales of bright heat and bushfires and days at the beach. While he was still jetlagged, we rugged up in our overcoats and went walking in the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden near the Seine in the fifth arrondissement. I put my gloved hand through Anthony’s elbow and felt the comfort of his body even though layers of wool separated us. Up on the hill we saw stylish bee-boxes labelled ‘L’Hôtel des Abeilles’, Bee Hotel, but no bees. It was too cold for gathering nectar. We wandered along a wintry path and on either side hardy marguerites and pansies gave splashes of colour. The pansies reminded me of my mother’s garden, their dark red and violet and yellow faces so common and everyday, but if you looked closely, each one individual and beautiful. The branches of bare chestnut trees, twisted and knobbly from being pruned so often into neat cube shapes, reached over our heads in a long avenue. They looked like they were grasping for something, or ready to receive something from the sky with their deformed limbs.

  Nine

  February

  Perhaps the one link possible between two souls was compassion.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  One chilly day in February I discovered St-Gervais, just behind the Hôtel de Ville in the fourth arrondissement. It was built in the mid-seventeenth century, a French baroque church with Greek columns, a cupola and painted wooden statues. Madame de Sévigné attended St-Gervais – it was only about ten minutes’ walk from her house – and commented on the sermons in her letters, but I had only gone in because I was tired from wandering and wanted to sit for a while. At a side altar there was a continual ‘Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament’, a white host, or flat circle of bread, visible in the centre of an elaborate golden spiked monstrance with people praying in front of it. I sat there, musing, looking at the people kneeling, their hands clasped, their heads bent. What was happening in their minds? What stories were they telling themselves? In my childhood and teenage years I had tried to believe that the white round of bread was Christ and whenever I swallowed it in Holy Communion I tried to believe I was being filled with His spirit. Truthfully, nothing ever happened. Nothing at all.

  I often went into churches in Paris. At first it was a tourist impulse not to miss any grand sight: Notre Dame and its rose windows, St-Sulpice and its Delacroix, the extraordinary looming dark splendour of St-Eustache, and then there were the free concerts in churches every Sunday, but there was also childhood comfort.

  Every Sunday my parents took my brothers and sisters and me, dressed in our best dresses and shirts and hats, to Mass, first in the tin church up the road with its five pews on either side – we filled up two rows at the back – and then in the solid brick church in town. Mass, the
ritual of sitting and kneeling and standing and listening, was tedious, but in the town church, St Patrick’s, there was light coming through stained-glass windows, the smell of incense from Benediction and cold smells of concrete, white marble altars, the warm feel of wood under my legs, sweaty in summer, badly sung hymns, babies crying, other people’s hats and lacy mantillas, Pauline Frogley in a wheelchair, short Mr Kelly with his tall blonde wife, paintings of soldiers hammering nails into Jesus’ hands, prayer books with guardian-angel holy cards tucked in them, the sound of the priest’s Irish accent.

  Sitting quietly in church looking around was something I knew how to do.

  That day in St-Gervais, I sat looking around, feeling critical and tired. There were a few elderly women praying and an anxious-looking man with his hands clasped; what good did they think it would do, talking to themselves in this old building? I kept sitting, resting. The monstrance was polished gold, the altar white marble. Candles flickered on the gold. I could feel the soaring space above and around me, the dim light from the stained-glass windows high above. And then I became aware of a peaceful calm beginning to ease into me. It came first to my breath, slowing it down, and then my ribs expanded, making more room for my heart, and then my body felt warm and my muscles eased. I became still, without thought, centred.

  It’s a state that arrives sometimes, which many people think of as spiritual. For me, it has never come when it’s bidden by prayer or meditation even though I tried for years. In my experience it comes most often in the bush, although, like joy, it arrives when it will. It was the ‘peace that passeth understanding’ as sacred texts refer to it, deep and warm and calm.

  I went back to St-Gervais a few weeks later in the early evening. I didn’t want to admit it, but I realise that I must have been trying to find the switch to turn it on again. This time, as I sat on a woven chair in the church gazing at the ornate paintings and stone scrolls, I was startled to hear the sound of chanting. I turned around and saw double rows of robed and hooded monks walking up the centre aisle. For a split second I thought I had fallen back several centuries or was hallucinating, but they were contemporary and real. Their faces were somehow modern – I think it was their shaved chins and the glimpses of ordinary haircuts under their cowls. The rhythmic chanting was powerful, hypnotic, impossible to walk away from, male voices seeming to bind the earth together. Later I found a leaflet in the church, which explained they were an order of city monks founded in the 1970s. They didn’t have an abbey but rented apartments because they believed they should not be attached to property and they worked at part-time jobs in offices and shops. But each morning, and at lunchtime, and in the evening, they came together and chanted in St-Gervais. On the leaflet, they had written, ‘If you want to know what we believe, come and listen to us sing.’