Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  I crept out of bed and started writing later and later each day until, like a proper Parisian, it was 10.30 or 11 am by the time I sat at the trestle desk. I had almost finished what I’d been hoping would be a final draft, but I had thrown so much out that most of what I was writing was new and raw and would have to be rewritten. And there was the added pressure of Kit and Theo arriving the following month. I wanted to have it finished before they came and to let it compost for a few weeks, but the last section still wasn’t coming. It was the part after Theo had left the Mountains to live in Melbourne with his father, seven years after his mother’s death, and there were years to write about, dozens of visits. It seemed complicated; there were too many comings and goings. I needed to put aside the record, combine some visits, construct the reality of Theo arriving each time, our awkwardness with each other at first, the way he fitted back into our lives.

  One afternoon, tired of sitting inside, I persuaded Anthony to come out to the Bois de Boulogne with me. The Bois is a 2000-acre park with lakes and woods and some cultivated gardens and pathways – not quite untamed nature, but large and wild enough for a wander. Sometimes the constructed world is enough to sustain, for months it can be enough, but then I need real air, dirt, trees and creeks. We had been out there a few times to row on the Grand Lac when it was still warm, Anthony doing most of the work, pulling strongly around the islands. This time we rented bikes and rode along the bitumen roads and then off along dirt lanes and paths through the bare oaks and chestnuts. There were muddy tracks, tangled undergrowth, briars, grasses, fallen branches, wild herbs – mint and yarrow. Because it was winter, there weren’t many people about, not even the prostitutes who worked from vans along the roads leading into the Bois. The air was cold on our faces but it was exhilarating and I could feel my spirits lift.

  We stopped at the Bagatelle, an English garden within the Bois, and had to leave our bikes to walk in. In France, an ‘English garden’ is one that is a natural messy garden; that is, without the clipped order, the fleurs-de-lys hedges and square trees of a traditional French garden. Its beauty depends on the colour and textures of leaves and flowers, more than on shape.

  We came to a rose garden, which wasn’t in flower except for the few odd blooms that always seem to come out of season, somehow given the wrong information about the weather and opening out anyway. The garden was in a basin, and we sat down on one of the benches so that we could look down on it from above. Each bed had a low hedge around it delineating the shapes and spaces. I wasn’t thinking anything in particular, just looking at the distinct shapes of the gardens and the pattern they made, the way the squares and rectangles and crescents fitted together and how the spaces between them created their own shapes. As I sat there gazing, pieces of writing started to fall into place in my head. It was as if the shapes of the garden had given my brain an idea that I wasn’t conscious of and set it to work sorting and shifting and arranging.

  Anthony relaxed with his face up to the weak sun, his hands deep in his jacket pockets. We both sat there, an ordinary couple looking at a bare rose garden, neither of us speaking, while the last section of my manuscript came together in my head like bits of an airy jigsaw puzzle.

  I don’t want to say that writing is always like that, that nature just comes and writes things for me, that I am some sort of vessel, but every now and then, rarely enough, instructions appear that some part of me must be able to read, and I am grateful for that. That’s all. I have been back to see the garden in the heat of summer – the scents of red roses and drunken bees stumbling about and every rose colour under the sun, apricot, burgundy, pink-tipped cream, striped, sunset orange – and it’s just a pretty garden with intoxicating fragrance filling the air.

  Back in the eighteenth arrondissement that night I had a glass of wine with Vicky at Café de la Place. I told her about riding in the woods and about the rose garden and how it had given me what I needed for my writing. She said that if I wanted more nature, why didn’t I go to stay at her place at Lacapelle-Biron in the Lot-et-Garonne where she’d raised her two children. I said I might just take her up on that. It was the first time I’d heard the name of the village which has since become part of my life and part of my family’s life.

  Later I told her about the gypsy woman at Gare St Lazare, about the hunched shoulders, the bowed head, her children, her voice. S’il vous plai-ai-aît, Madame, S’il vous plai-aît. Such long plaintive vowels. I needed to confess how enraged the sound of her voice made me.

  Vicky smiled in the way people do when you have given yourself away but didn’t say anything so I had to keep going.

  ‘She’s … she makes herself inferior. In front of her children,’ I accused.

  ‘I know. I think I’ve seen her, the same one,’ Vicky said. She was still smiling, but I realised it was because she too was going to confess. ‘At the entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s probably the same woman. With her drugged children?’

  ‘That’s what I wondered. They didn’t play or even stand up; they just sat there. It was her kids sitting there in the cold and her tone of voice that got to me.’

  ‘Yes, the whining sound. And the glazed eyes.’

  We were silent for a moment, taking a sip of wine, looking at passers-by on their way back from the evening shopping with bags and children in tow. A perfect little girl in a blue coat carried a baguette over her shoulder like a rifle and her mother smiled down at her.

  ‘You know, it made me feel violent.’ I lowered my voice. ‘I wanted to punch her.’

  Vicky glanced at me, startled.

  ‘So did I. I wanted to … to hit her, hard,’ she said. ‘Make her stop.’

  We looked at each other in shame-faced relief, remembering the leap to violence in our chests. I felt as if I had been unmasked; it was a kind of freedom. And then we talked, back and forth, hardly stopping for breath.

  ‘The gypsies are marginalised. It’s not her fault.’

  ‘Often they can’t speak much French – they’re from Romania. And mostly they have never been to school.’

  ‘And probably no work papers.’

  ‘The women have to support the whole family, or more, and they have learned only to beg.’

  ‘How can the children learn dignity? Who is responsible?’

  We both took sips of wine. I could feel the shame spreading in my body, a kind of stain starting in my heart. We were silent a bit longer than was comfortable.

  ‘But why does it make us angry?’ I asked finally.

  ‘It’s not the begging, it’s her manner. There’s something about being servile …’ Vicky said.

  ‘Servile! That’s the word. That’s it.’ For a moment I was grateful to have an exact name.

  We continued, often not looking each other in the eye, dodging around our judgment and the disturbing desire for violence, then tiptoeing towards it, trying to see why servility enraged instead of engendering compassion. If we two reacted like that, two well-behaved women from opposite sides of the world and different backgrounds, then we were, most likely, not the only ones.

  ‘It’s why I like defiant children,’ I said. ‘I get irritated with kids who won’t argue back. They make me feel like a tyrant.’

  That was getting somewhere near it, the unwelcome sense of being seen to have crushing power. It was a lump in the soul that neither of us wanted to have, and the gypsy woman had made us feel its cartilaginous shape. I thought of the bishop of Nanterre galloping over people in the streets of Paris. Trit trot, trit trot.

  ‘Madame, vous finissez?’ The waiter was picking up my glass. I nodded.

  ‘I’d like another one, please.’

  ‘And the same with animals,’ said Vicky. ‘It’s why I like cats. They are never servile, but dogs can be.’

  We both spoke with a mixture of shame and pride. Side-stepping towards it, shuffling back. We kept our voices low. E
ven though we were speaking in English I didn’t want anyone at the next table to overhear us. It was there, whatever it was, in us both and it was not something for the general light of day, but it had marked us. I don’t think I got very far with understanding it; it still feels like something of a knot, not large, but dark. Afterwards, when I returned to my reading, I couldn’t find anything, even in Montaigne, to help me see it any more clearly.

  Ten

  March

  Our true self is not entirely within.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  I finished a draft of the manuscript. It’s always a relief to finish but this time it felt like perfect timing. It was two weeks before Theo and Kit arrived. Theo’s mother had died more than ten years earlier, but I still didn’t want to be writing about her – and him – right in front of his eyes.

  I was relieved to have the last piece, the closing scene of the story: Theo and I were walking up the street from our house; I was teaching him a song I’d learned at choir: ‘We are going/Heaven knows where we are go-o-ing’. It was rough, there was work to do, but I knew there was a sense of the moment between us that I had wanted to re-create.

  Every now and then, the perception of a moment is impressed so sharply in waxy memory that words can be formed in the indents. In the moment of perception I feel the clear imprint calmly, although, in recall, there is urgency, the effort to see each aspect of the moment: Theo’s pale face and winning smile as he sings with me, the slope of the hill underfoot, the yellowish light filtering through snow clouds. Then I feel absorbed in the whole as if it is happening again, and in the end, there is relief – and pleasure – when the words are found. It feels as if the moment has not really been remade, but given form for the first time. Proust said that after he had written his first piece when he was a teenager – it was about glimpsing three steeples appearing ‘like three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight’ – he had such a sense of happiness that ‘as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice’. I burst out laughing when I first read that, the image of the boy-writer singing like a chook who has laid an egg – oh my, I have just made something new from my own body! I remembered our scraggy chooks and their eggs in dusty nests under the wheat harvester, or on the seat of the old truck or, once or twice, a pullet dropping her first egg in the yard without any care at all. I liked scooping them up when they were warm and clean and fresh, and feeling them nestle, perfect in the palm of my hand.

  *

  Before Theo and Kit arrived, Anthony and I made a trip to Istanbul so I could have my passport stamped from outside the European Union. Our long-stay visas hadn’t arrived in time before we’d left Australia, which meant we couldn’t legally stay in Europe more than six months. It was a bit risky – and if we’d been African, very risky – but a trip outside the European Union would re-establish our legal status. It sounds extravagant to dash off to Turkey, but it was easy to book cheap flights with a local airline – one, as it happened, that was later grounded after one of its planes crashed into the Red Sea – and to find a cheap, hot-pink hotel in Istanbul. It was only for four or five days, just enough to leave a bright impression in the still grey days of March.

  There was the tiled dome of heaven in the Blue Mosque and frescoed layers of religion in Santa Sophia, the mini-skirts and blue and black hijabs in the street, the rows of carpets with geometric patterns, flowers, birds, vines, and the carpet-sellers offering sweet apple-mint tea. The hawkers in the streets spoke French – ‘Madame? Madame?’ and I answered, ‘Non, non.’ We took a boat on the Bosporus to a Crusaders’ castle and sat on the grass talking about the knights of France and England who had arrived here – was it to destroy Islam or simply for adventure?

  At the ancient markets I saw baskets full of dates, nuts, grapes and figs and thought they must have looked the same when the knights strolled past, even when the first Christians before them wandered by wide-eyed. Afterwards we went to the sixteenth-century hammam with its crescent moons and stars, and we were steamed and scrubbed and rubbed and washed to pink newborn perfection. The air was cool on our baby-skin but the sky was high and blue and the light falling on stone walls was like the beginning of time.

  One afternoon we visited the Topkapi Palace where the sultans of the Ottoman Empire lived and ruled. I traipsed through the rooms of the harem, the Courtyard of the Eunuchs, the Circumcision Room, the gilded bathroom of the Sultan’s mother, and the Treasury with its diamonds and emeralds and pearls. In the early morning I woke to the muezzin’s call rising and falling like a bird on unseen currents and felt as if I had fallen into a story.

  By the time we got back to Paris, Istanbul felt like a kaleidoscope of colour and light, not quite something we had dreamed, but a tear in the fabric that had let another world in. The woman in the boulangerie across the road had noticed I hadn’t been in for a few days.

  ‘J’étais en vacances à Istanbul,’ I explained and felt like a local. I was on holiday in Istanbul.

  I remembered my childhood longing for difference on the endless days of the farm, to see something new, for something else to happen. Every day there were paddocks, and a dry creek, and a few gum trees and cattle and sheep, and Baron Rock and the shabby farmhouse. The seasons changed and work changed with the seasons, harvesting, shearing, ploughing, hay-making, the same every year. Outside the farm, there was school and church and shopping in town. When we drove in through the hills to town I looked up the valleys and wished I could walk along them, wished my father would take a turn off the road, a detour.

  People too were the same. Everyone had a mother who stayed at home and a father who owned a farm and everyone was white. And always the same neighbours; they never moved away and no-one moved in, except once, for a year, a family of share-farmers. Rarely, a stranger arrived at the farm; once a man came selling encyclopaedias, and my brothers and sisters and I were so unused to difference we hid behind the water tanks to watch. The only real difference happened in books.

  Here, strangers from all over the world walked past my door, there were detours everywhere I looked; countries with palaces full of fairytale treasure were only an hour or two away. I wondered if having difference so easily available meant that people born here did not have to long helplessly for elsewhere.

  But then Rousseau always longed for an imaginary place, ‘the castles in Spain’ in which he could easily take up residence, and 300 or so years later, Annie Ernaux in a small French town says, ‘When a child and teenager, I lived continually in dream and imagination.’ Perhaps the longing for another imagined world is a condition that afflicts some people. It’s as if reality can never yield quite enough. Perhaps it comes from endless desire, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist mythology who can never be filled. For Ernaux, by an ‘inverse movement’ as she called it, instead of imaginary life, the reality of her own life became the material of her writing. The same thing has happened to me.

  *

  In one way I have more in common with Annie Ernaux than any of the other memoirists, even de Beauvoir, because we are alive at the same time. We share the globalised world, the flood of information and communication pouring across us: television, mobile phones, satellites, the internet, Skype, Twitter, the mix of cultures, ideas, peoples. We also have in common an uneducated provincial background – and haven’t returned to it except in our writing.

  What do I know about Ernaux?

  She was born in 1940 in a working-class family in a small town in the Seine-Maritime department of Normandy. Just after the war, her parents moved twenty-five kilometres to Yvetot, a cold town on a windy plain, where they ran a café. She was an only child, her older sister dying of diphtheria two years before she was born. Her father, who had been a farmhand, and mother, who had worked in a factory, strove to give her every advantage, although her mother couldn’t help saying, ‘You cost us a lot.’ She studie
d at Rouen University, married, had two children, divorced. She lives in Cergy-Pontoise, a satellite town near Paris. Her books, La Place, about her father; Les Années, ‘a sociology of her self’; Une Femme, about her mother; and Retour à Yvetot, a return to her hometown, explore daily living and the tension between class and writing. Ernaux has spent her writing life reclaiming her past, her father and mother, her class background. She’s the only memoirist I’ve read entirely in French.

  *

  In La Place, Ernaux writes of her father: ‘He ferried me from home to school on his bike. From one bank to the other, come rain or shine. His greatest pride, indeed his mission in life: that I should belong to the world that had spurned him. All the while singing “round and round we row”.’

  I thought of my father who did not even get to high school and who was dedicated to giving his eight children entry to a world that would spurn him. He had a short, stocky, peasant build and a harelip, which made him rather shy and unconfident. He had no pretensions, did not want fame or riches, his family and his faith were all that he required, but he believed the ability to think and write well were important because they could be used to persuade others of the value of living truthful lives under God. We had the smallest farm and the largest family in the district, but by going without comforts – no inside toilet, no toilet paper, no heating except for an open fire in one room, no running hot water – he was able to send us all to the convent high school in town.

  One day he and I argued about some idea – I can’t remember what it was but it must have been a religious idea as that was the only kind of idea that really mattered to my father – and I used my superior education to demolish him. I was dismissive. I was in my twenties by then and had been to university. I don’t remember what I said; what I remember is the crushed look in his blue eyes as he replied in a hurt voice, ‘You don’t have to come the Queen of Sheba with me.’ Even though I was ashamed, I thought, what an odd, old-fashioned expression to use.