Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  None of this means that I experienced a renewal of faith in Paris. In fact the opposite happened. In the winter in Paris I finally admitted out loud for the first time that I no longer believed in any kind of God, not the Catholic one I was brought up with, nor the overarching Power, the Brahma, of eastern spirituality. At least not One who could or would intervene in any way. Perhaps Brahma had breathed out the universe and one day would breath it in again, but in the meantime there was just existence and I had to create my own meaning. I was sitting in the lounge-room in the rue Simart on the black couch when I ‘confessed’ it to Anthony. He grinned and said, ‘Me neither.’ We had reached the void at the end of clear thinking together, which was some kind of relief.

  *

  Being brought up Catholic is one of the few experiences I share with most of the French memoirists, all except Rousseau.

  Montaigne held to his faith and defended it, but his mind is more that of a sceptic and a freethinker, particularly when he says he has ‘a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth’.

  Madame de Sévigné is described as ‘pious’; she was brought up by an Abbé, her uncle, and often discussed sermons and theological questions in her letters. The loss of both her parents when she was young must have formed in her the idea that the world was fundamentally dangerous, she couldn’t afford not to believe in some kind of overarching protection. She was by temperament someone who longed for meaning, but she also seems not to have allowed herself to think outside the intellectual framework she had been given. Today she might be a Buddhist, a rigorous one, or an agnostic, questioning everything with wry humour.

  Stendhal and de Beauvoir were avowed non-believers, because faith, they both said, offended their intellects. With Stendhal though, I think it began with emotion. He heard a priest say that his adored mother’s death ‘came from God’. He was only seven years old and says he ‘began to speak ill of GOD’. It’s not difficult to see the proud, heartbroken boy raging against the God who had used His power to take all happiness from his life. It is perhaps not a long step from antagonism to disbelief.

  In her youth de Beauvoir was a passionate believer, not just because of convention, but because of her desire for expanded experience, and it was for the same reason that she stopped believing: ‘ “I no longer believe in God”, I told myself with no great surprise [she was thirteen years old] I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life […] As soon as I saw the light, I made a clean break.’

  I remember the same moment, at the same age – except I didn’t make a clean break. I was standing in the dim and dusty Infant de Prague hall, our school assembly hall, where Sister Julian, a short fat nun with a sensitive soul, was trying to teach choir. She was a plain woman and we thirteen-year-olds mocked her because she constantly fiddled with the fob-watch pinned under the folds of her habit, which made it look as if she were stroking her breasts. I had a soft spot for her because she had loaned me Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I loved the walled garden and the mysterious way it transformed everyone who went in there, but it didn’t stop me from joining in the mocking.

  It was a winter term and I was wearing an ill-fitting pleated uniform that made me look like a sack tied around the middle. Its hem was lumpy and it was always grubby no matter how many times I rubbed at stains with a washer. It is strange that the banal details of life sear themselves in memory when something life-changing is happening. In one moment, standing there in the hall, the thought appeared, ‘There’s nothing there. God doesn’t exist.’ On the outside, to anyone watching, nothing had happened; I was still an awkward pimply girl standing in a country hall, but continents had dissolved beneath me. I had caught a glimpse of the void and leapt back. It terrified me so much that I instantly changed the thought to ‘What if God doesn’t exist?’ and told myself that it was all right, it was just a doubt. Doubts were admissible. I lacked de Beauvoir’s courage, which meant it took me many decades to finally face what had happened that day.

  Afterwards I went to church with determination. I tried to listen to the priest’s words, to meditate on Christ’s suffering, to imagine that I was consuming Him in Holy Communion, to feel His loving spirit. It wasn’t a spiritual longing or that I had a devoted nature – I had neither – but a fear of nothingness.

  When I left school I never went to church again as a believer; faith had disappeared that day in the hall, the loss quickly disavowed but still it had gone, and by the time I had left school, there was no real thought about letting all the practices of religion go. But the inner structures were still there, most of all an urgent requirement for overarching meaning. I know I wouldn’t have lasted a moment with Sartre and de Beauvoir and their friends who, as de Beauvoir says, ‘laughed high-minded souls to scorn – in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the inner life […] fell under their lashing contempt’.

  *

  I went to the physiotherapy clinic the American Hospital had recommended. The clinic was underground with windows along the top of the wall at ground level giving a view of feet walking past in the outside world. As I walked down the stairs the first day, and every time after, it felt as if I were entering a dungeon with instruments of torture spread out below me. There were benches, ropes, pulleys, chains and various pushing, pulling and walking machines with cogs and wheels. Elderly women and men wearing long underclothes – spencers and tights – slowly pulled on the chains and ropes or bent over benches in a genteel version of an Hieronymus Bosch hell. I had the dizzying sensation of stepping into my own inevitable future where life had slowed down and would one day stop. I wasn’t even fifty years old yet. I wanted to turn and run.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ each of the elderly men and women said.

  ‘Bonjour, Mesdames et Messieurs,’ I said. We were all in this together.

  I stripped down to my tights and long-sleeved t-shirt and then was assigned one of the pulleys with chains and given a piece of stretchy yellow elastic and a chart with a series of exercises. I meekly pulled on the chains, unable to reach my arms more than a few centimetres from my body. My arm ached all over again. An old woman. I pulled on the elastic and tried to stretch my arms behind my back. I eased my neck sideways and back and forth, I rolled my hips from side to side. I thought afterwards that I never wanted to go back.

  The dungeon was near the Metro exit at Monceau, which meant I had to change at Gare St Lazare and then at Villiers. St Lazare is a vast station and it was being rebuilt, the renovations requiring a long walk through a temporary corrugated-iron corridor to catch the connecting train. It was above ground so it wasn’t warm like the underground corridors. It was, in fact, bitterly cold, colder even than outside in the weather.

  Each time as I climbed the flight of steps to the corridor, I could hear the plaintive, singsong of a gypsy woman: ‘S’il vous plai-aît, Monsieur. S’il vous plai-aît.’ Please, sir Plea-ease. Over and over, echoing down the tin walls. The sound alone twanged across my nerves. I could feel myself tensing, getting ready to do battle.

  And then I rounded the corner and saw her. She was there every time, kneeling on the floor at the other end of the corridor. She wore long skirts and thick stockings and her black hair was pulled back into a bun – she would have looked at home in any of the last few centuries. She had three grimy children with her, one of them a baby in her arms, and they all sat on the concrete in the bitter cold. Her head and shoulders were mostly bowed and if she did look up, her dark eyes were plaintive.

  The two older children, a boy and a girl, wore layers of gypsy clothes too, skirts and jumpers, but still they must have been freezing, sitting there on the concrete. They didn’t run around or play or even speak. They had no toys or books, they just sat, unnaturally still and quiet. They both had the same thick dark hair as the
ir mother and large dark eyes, although they rarely looked up.

  ‘S’il vous plai-aît, Mada-ame, S’il vous plai-aît, Monsieur. S’il vous plai-aît.’ Each vowel dragged out, the whining singsong grating on my pain-exposed nerves. She seemed to know, to be targeting me amongst all the hurrying travellers.

  I felt hot and cold with discomfort and judgment. And a violent rage. How dare she make her pretty, dull-eyed children sit with her on the concrete in the freezing cold for hours on end? How dare she, more than anything, teach them to kneel before others? It was the tone that wormed into me every time, a tone that pleaded that she was inferior, and we, striding by on our way to work or to physio appointments, were fine lords and ladies who might take pity on her inferiority.

  ‘Just shut the fuck up,’ I muttered under my breath.

  I looked at her children but I couldn’t look at her. They sometimes looked up at me, their large dull eyes and beautiful faces almost Biblical in their sorrow and poverty.

  I knew something of the culture and sociology of gypsies: none of the women were allowed to have any sort of education; practically none of the men could get any sort of work – who would give a gypsy a job? And I knew they were hunted from place to place – we don’t want them cluttering up the edge of town or the ring-road with their trucks and caravans and clotheslines – but in those moments rushing along the corridor, I didn’t care about any of that. I felt no compassion, no indignation at injustice, no rage against the powerful, only rage against her. I just wanted her to take her children home and teach them to stand up straight and look me in the eye.

  When I came back from the dungeon two hours later, each time they were still there in the cold corridor.

  *

  ‘They have Mercedes-Benz at home, you know.’ That’s what people tell each other, reassuringly, about the gypsies in Paris.

  *

  There is a vast amount of inequality, violence – and cruelty – in the history of Paris. It seems close and immediate; real blood was spilled on these cobbles right under my feet. There was the day, Friday 13 October 1307, when the members of the Knights Templar were arrested in their walled retreat in the rue du Temple and tortured, and their leader, Jacques Molay, burned at the stake on a barge in the Seine. And St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572 when Catholics massacred Huguenots in a bloodbath in the streets of Paris. And the months of the Terror from September 1793 to July 1794 when tens of thousands of heads were chopped off in the place de la Concorde and all over France. And the Prussian siege in 1870 when Parisians had to eat dogs, cats, rats and the zoo animals in the Jardin des Plantes to stay alive. And the rounding up and loading into cattle trains of Jews in the 1940s. And the day in 1961 when the police killed and threw into the Seine more than 200 Algerians who had been peacefully protesting against the war in Algeria.

  It’s a 2000-year litany of bloody battles, sieges, starvations, massacres, murders, tortures, beheadings, burnings at the stake, dismemberments – and every other means of causing extreme and detailed suffering. That’s not to even mention the casual everyday violence of obscene wealth and vicious poverty; workers poisoned by the fumes in tanneries, babies being left in their tens of thousands on doorsteps, the rich galloping their carriages through the narrow streets, trampling underfoot any man, woman or child who couldn’t get away fast enough. Madame de Sévigné describes it as if it were entertaining:

  Yesterday the Archbishop of Rheims was coming back from Saint-Germain in a great haste, like a whirlwind […] They were passing through Nanterre, trit trot trit trot; they met a fellow on horseback […] the coach and six horses knocked the poor fellow and his horse head over heels and passed over them so clean that the coach was tipped up and overturned. Meanwhile, the man and his horse, instead of amusing themselves by being broken on the wheel and maimed, got up again by some miracle and remounted, one on the other, and fled, while the lackeys and coachman and the Archbishop himself started to shout: ‘Stop him! Stop the knave! Give him a good beating!’ When telling this story the Archbishop said: ‘If I had got hold of that rascal, I would have broken his arms and cut off his ears.’

  Her flippancy is hard to interpret. I still can’t decide if she was mocking the Archbishop, a supposed representative of Christ-like love and compassion, or is just amused that the man got away.

  Montaigne is not ambiguous; in fact, cruelty is the one topic he is adamant about. His revulsion began when he was fifteen and saw an angry mob skin and ‘joint’ a man like a piece of beef and stuff his orifices with salt. And then came the Wars of Religion, a time of extreme violence that began after a massacre of Huguenots in the north-east in 1562 and spread all over France, reaching a horrific degree of violence in the Perigord where he lived:

  I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil war; you can find nothing in ancient history more extreme than what we witness every day […] If I had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man’s limbs and lop them off and cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures, not from hatred or gain, but for the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitchings of a man dying in agony.

  Unusual in his time, from his own nature and judgment he saw cruelty as the worst vice of all. ‘I am so soft I cannot even see anyone lop off the head of a chicken without displeasure, and I cannot bear to hear a hare squealing when my hounds get their teeth into it.’ And he makes a ready link between those who would be cruel to animals and cruelty to fellow humans: ‘In Rome, once they had broken themselves in by murdering animals they went on to men and to gladiators.’

  Even more, and sounding more contemporary than ever, he says: ‘There is a respect and duty in man as a genus which links us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men: and to other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness. Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation.’

  As a young child on the farm I could witness violence, or at least its aftermath, without drawing back. Although it wasn’t cruelty, which requires the desire to cause pain, farming practices meant the infliction of pain; sheep’s throats were cut, chooks’ heads were chopped off, cattle were branded with a burning iron, puppies were drowned, lambs and calves were desexed with a sharp knife. My father, who performed all these acts, was in fact a gentle man. It was part of what he had to do as a farmer, so he made sure that axes and knives were razor-sharp so that the act could be done quickly and cleanly. I can see him with the butcher’s knife, scraping it this way and that on the whetstone, making sure it was surgically sharp.

  I don’t think I lacked fellow-feeling for creatures or, if I did, so did my brothers and sisters. We lined up, miniature Madame Defarges – four of us under six years old – watching my father cut the sheep’s throat, disembowel it, hang it up on a hook like a large coathanger under the gum tree and skin it. The intestines were given to the dogs, who, in that moment, became unknowable wild animals, snarling as if they had never let us pat and cuddle them. And then one day, I couldn’t bear to watch the throat-cutting – the bright blood darkening on the dirt.

  It must have been about the same time that I stopped helping out with desexing. It was done with a quick cut of the lambs’ testicles, the gonads were drawn out with claws on the other end of the knife, and then the tails were cut off both male and female lambs and tossed into a bucket. It was one of our childhood jobs to catch the lambs in the yard, bring them to the table nailed onto the fence and hold them with both legs forced upwards while my father did the cutting. In memory I can feel the lambs, the woolly back against my chest, my hands grasping the legs tightly. As I grabbed each lamb, I had a quick look to check they were females – the tail-cutting was slightly more bearable
than testicle-cutting. And then, by the time I was eleven, I couldn’t stand it at all. It was a task my father never insisted on once we said we didn’t want to do it.

  He was compassionate by temperament, and so was my mother. No creature, man or beast, ought to be hurt if you could help it. For my mother, religion and politics were founded on compassion. She was fiercely sympathetic towards anyone who was ill-treated in any way – Aborigines, refugees – and leapt to the defence of those without power, but it was also a thought-out moral position which she taught all of her children. It makes my rage against the gypsy woman all the more unforgivable.

  *

  It’s probably not so strange that my thoughts were darker in the depths of winter. The cold and grey had seeped into my spirit. Even in the Blue Mountains, wintry for months on end, I hadn’t experienced such long and dimly lit cold. I found waking in the dark especially dispiriting and even though it was past time to get out of bed, I often rolled over back into foggy sleep. When I woke again and saw the flat light on the chimney pots across the road, I took refuge in imagining sunlight and warmth in the back yard in the Mountains. Sun on the waratah leaves, on the eucalypts, on my face.