Ransacking Paris

by Miller, Patti

  I’m not sure where to meet Annie Ernaux for coffee. Even though she lives outside Paris, she would know it better than I do. In the end I want to show her a place with an Australian atmosphere – and where I can have a good coffee – so I’m back at Café KB, the same place I met Montaigne. There’s a brocante, a second-hand fair, in the rue des Martyrs and the stall outside the café has old ironwork, kitchen appliances, embroidered tablecloths and lamps piled on tables. Annie Ernaux is waiting for me when I arrive, sitting inside at the window watching the crowd. She is elegant and still beautiful, high cheekbones, blue eyes, thick hair dyed a light copper. She looks refined, sensitive, well-groomed, middle-class, nothing about her appearance gives away her origins.

  I sit down and put my copy of Une Femme on the table.

  ‘It was the first book I read in French,’ I say, forgetting about Le Petit Prince. ‘I read it first before my mother died and found it …’ I stop to search for the right phrase, ‘so precise, so true. I like the way you name things without poetic effect, you restore their power to move the reader.’

  She listens intently and I can see she likes what I am saying. She says that she wants her words to be understood by the people she comes from.

  I tell her I loved her ‘washing with bleach’ story and recount my ‘dirty girl at the water-bubbler’ story. She smiles; we understand each other.

  I change topic, wanting to discuss de Beauvoir because I know she is an admirer. I say that I like de Beauvoir too but that I liked her better as a young woman, that she became too adamant when she was older. Annie, I think I can call her Annie, defends her, saying that de Beauvoir tried to live to the full extent of her being and that always has to be admired. We talk for a long time. Annie doesn’t like the way the rue des Martyrs had become so bobo and has pushed out all the workers, but she likes the relaxed atmosphere of Café Kooka Boora and the easygoing baristas. I invite her to come to Australia one day.

  *

  Kit and Theo arrived in Paris. It was Theo’s first overseas trip, except for when he was two months old and his mother took him to her family home in New Zealand for a week or two. Dina’s own mother had died before Theo was born, and then within a few years, she was dead herself. She was thirty-seven, Theo was three. It was a long time ago and he wasn’t a little boy anymore – he was tall with dark curls and beautiful eyes – but the loss was still, would probably always be, in him. I thought of Stendhal, whose mother died when he was seven: ‘It came about that all the joys of childhood ended with my mother.’ Years after the Paris trip, on his twenty-fourth birthday, Theo wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘I have been sad every day since you died.’

  But in Paris he had a reprieve. On the first morning, after he and his father left their bags in our apartment, Anthony and I took Kit and Theo on the Metro down to the Tuileries and stood on the rise above place de la Concorde so that they could see Paris all around them. We looked at the gold-tipped obelisk and in the distance the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe then turned and started walking down the Tuileries towards the first pond.

  ‘I love Paris! I’m going to come back and live here!’ Theo exclaimed. It was only halfway through his first morning. He looked at me and grinned and I grinned back. We walked around the pond and looked at the wooden boats bobbing on the water as a couple of boys poked at them with sticks. The sun wasn’t warm but it was bright enough to make the water glitter. I felt a proprietorial thrill, as if the beauty of Paris somehow had been my skilful doing.

  Over the next few days a flurry of sightseeing confirmed my skill. I revealed a golden Joan of Arc on her horse and the faces under the Pont Neuf, the Fontaine des Innocents at Châtelet and the mountains of seafood at the Bastille markets. In the backstreets of Montmartre I revealed the café where we played Scrabble and where the air smelled of hash, and the still wintry vineyard opposite the Lapin Agile, the cabaret frequented by Picasso, Utrillo, Modigliani and friends, the statue of Dalida, and the Roman temple column in St-Pierre, all of it magicked out of the air by me.

  *

  I wonder why it matters that Theo, or anyone else, should love what I love. There is always a pleasure when others love as I do, always a slight kind of rupture when they don’t. I don’t think it’s that I want to colonise others, make them all horrifyingly like me, but the feeling of being in tune, in harmony with someone else, is one of the deepest pleasures. Most often it is fleeting; once, years ago, I was standing at a pedestrian crossing in Sydney and I caught the eye of a man in a car stopped at the traffic lights – and we suddenly recognised each other as fellow human beings in the world. We both smiled widely. That was more than thirty years ago, but I can still remember exactly where it was – the corner of George and Liverpool streets in the centre of Sydney – and the joy of being one with a stranger. I wonder if that’s what Rousseau meant when he wrote, ‘Our true self is not entirely within.’

  *

  Theo went to the Dali museum near the place du Tertre and to the Pompidou Centre and the Musée d’Orsay, spending hours looking at paintings every day. He was only fourteen but he was already creating himself as an artist, filling a notebook with drawings and dressing each day with a kind of romantic flair – a long flowing overcoat, waistcoat, felt hat. A few years later he would be at art school just as his mother had been. Dina had had the same eye for beauty and style and seeing him here in Paris made me wonder how he had inherited her gifts along with her eyes and curls and easy laugh. He wasn’t shaped or influenced by her, but he was as much a mirror of her as could be possible.

  Some days he hung around the apartment and read or looked up places to see on the internet. He was a long, rangy teenager, but not loud or argumentative, easy to be around. One day I was cleaning the apartment, putting the sheets on to wash and afterwards draping them over the doors to dry, scrubbing the bath, vacuuming around Theo’s long legs. He looked up from his book.

  ‘Listen to this,’ he said, preparing to read aloud. He’d always done that, read pages out loud and quoted large chunks of films or The Simpsons to me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m busy.’ I’d always been a bit impatient with whatever hilarious extract from Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde he wanted to subject me to.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ he persisted. ‘You’ll like it.’

  ‘Thanks, but I have to get this done now. We’re going out later and I still have to clean the toilet.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You keep going and I will trot around after you and read to you like a literate puppy.’

  I stopped and laughed. ‘Okay, you win. You’re much too good for me.’

  Afterwards we went out to Versailles together. I had been a few times, as anyone who has visitors in Paris must, and was tired of its weary glory, but I had to take Theo. We both read our guide books as the train sped through the south-western suburbs of Paris, occasionally glancing at the bare, cold gardens and state housing towers. There was a brief patch of fields and forest and then we were at Versailles, walking up the hill to the gilded gates of the palace. We trailed around the state rooms with the waves of other sightseers and took photographs in the Hall of Mirrors of infinitely reflecting crowds and cameras. Afterwards we stood on the steps above the Apollo Fountain with its rearing horses and chariots at the beginning of a vista that continued all the way to the horizon. We admired the symmetrical sweep of pools, clipped gardens, lawns, woods; from our feet to the sky an utterly controlled world. Theo remarked that it was ‘sort of calming’.

  I nodded, wondering if the random chaos of losing a mother when he was so young had made order more necessary. I found it impossible enough years later to comprehend a world without my mother in it; a child without a mother has lost almost all his context, his surroundings almost erased; how does he find a shape against the blankness? Theo draped his arm over my shoulder as we stood there. He often did that, mostly to show how much taller than
me he was, and we stared at the panorama in silence.

  Later, back in Paris, I asked him if it was okay to use his name in the book I was writing about his mother. The plundering of others’ lives can’t be hidden. Better to admit it up front. Bees can buzz as shrilly as they like, and sting the unprotected, but without honey they will starve.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I don’t care. No-one I know will read it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  I’d been in Paris for nine months, long enough for everyday life to blur into a kaleidoscope of scenes. A few events are anchored in time, but most float, sometimes attaching themselves to weather or another scene. I do know Theo and Kit were there when my choir sang at the launch of a CD – I have a memory of them finding their seats in a row near the front. Anthony came too and Patrick was over from Amsterdam for a short visit.

  The CD was a collection of French chansons by a friend of Marc’s and we were told to ask our family and friends to come to make a good crowd. We arrived at the hall in the twentieth arrondissement and as soon as I saw my choir gathered near the back, I realised I hadn’t understood the instructions about what to wear. I thought I’d heard ‘toutes couleurs’ so I was wearing a multicoloured patterned top. Everyone else was wearing one plain colour and black trousers. I asked Marie-Louise what we had been told and she said, ‘Any colour, but it has to be one colour, not patterned. And black pants.’

  I stood on stage and sang, ‘La Paysanne’ and ‘L’accordéon’, confident at least in the chorus each time. We only had two songs to sing and we had rehearsed the night before but I still needed the song sheets to remember all the words. I could see Anthony, Patrick, Kit and Theo watching me and clapping when we finished. I hadn’t quite got it right in my multicoloured top but I was singing in a choir in Paris and my family and friends were witnesses to it.

  A few weeks later I was on a stage, of sorts, again, this time doing a reading at Café de la Mairie near St-Sulpice, a church visited for its Delacroix and for the brass meridian line in the floor. The café across from the church was shabby, ordinary-looking, but renowned for its long history of literary events in the upstairs room.

  Elaine, whom I’d met a few months earlier and who had owned the Australian Bookshop in Paris, often organised readings for visiting Australian writers. She was one of that fast disappearing breed who devote themselves to literature for love. She even looked like someone from another era, a glamorous 1950s woman in a Max Dupain photograph perhaps, with softly waved hair and soft skin. She offered to arrange a reading at Café de la Mairie for me. Once she had booked it, I worried that I would be speaking to an empty room. I knew practically no-one in Paris; no-one would come.

  By the evening of the reading I imagined empty chairs and tables and wanted to call it off. Who can bear to call out ‘Regarde’ and no-one turns a head? Not even my mother looks up. As it happened, Elaine had arranged an email-out from the Australian Embassy and a few expats arrived, and my friends came, Vicky, Trish, Camilla and Sylvie – and Anthony, of course. I wondered if the desire to map where I begin and end in the world is also the desire to understand where others begin and end. The mapping of the self is not really about the past, even though the details are all of the past. As Annie Ernaux remarked, it’s not about searching for lost time, but ‘to show how we always carry time with us’. When I read her words I could see time past cradled inside each one of us like a nest made of bleached smooth twigs, string, ribbons, wiry grasses. Sometimes all I can do is marvel at its intricacy. Afterwards we went to a café near Mabillon Metro and had more wine and moules frites, mussels and chips, and talked about books.

  After Kit and Theo left there was a lull. I had looked at everything in Paris, twice, three times. What else was there to look at? And what was the point of endlessly looking? I stayed at home for a while, read through my manuscript, made notes, wrote postcards to my mother, started translating Une Femme into English to improve my French grammar. I enjoyed the familiarity of my quartier, the greetings from the woman in the boulangerie, the nod from the Nigerian man in the sewing shop over the road, but there was still the knowledge that I could not see this place from the inside. I had to keep searching, keep looking. Look at everything.

  One afternoon I took the Metro down to Strasbourg–St-Denis to explore the quartier around rue St Martin and rue St Denis, two parallel streets which run from near Les Halles all the way up to Gare de l’Est. Both streets had triumphal arches halfway along, marking the old tollgates of Paris where people had streamed through, paying their taxes as they entered the city. The kings and emperors of France, Napoleon’s troops too, had entered Paris through the St Denis gate, returning from wars, or from Basilica of St Denis to the north, in extravagant parades of power and domination.

  I’d been to the quartier only once before with Anthony to try an Indian restaurant in passage Brady one night and thought it had the feel of another country altogether – the smell of curries, the strings of fairy lights decorating the passage, the un-Parisian cries and urgings to go into this or that restaurant. Now, in the late Paris winter, the streets were crowded with market stalls heaped with red, green and yellow peppers, bunches of green bananas, unrecognisable salad leaves, piles of garlic and other roots. The clothes shops had saris and robes in scarlet and royal blue and emerald green, patterned and edged with gold. And, I quickly realised, the streets were streets of men.

  There were hundreds of men of Middle Eastern and Indian origin and some Africans. I couldn’t see any women at all. My heartbeat sped up, thumped hard enough for me to be conscious of it as I walked. The men were in clusters, walking, standing about, sitting outside cafés, smoking, drinking tea. No women. The men were not threatening in their manner, but my skin prickled. Only men were allowed out here. I was relieved that it was winter and I was well covered from head to toe. I walked quickly, trying not to catch anyone’s eyes, keeping my eyes slightly down. Each time I glanced up the crowds of men seemed more dense, more Other. Should I keep going? My heart banged louder.

  Then two plump African women in long floral dresses came around the corner of the next street and walked towards me. They were talking to each other and one of them laughed. As they passed a surge of identification and relief washed through me. Without a moment’s thought, I turned around and walked back down the street, staying near them, until I reached the Metro.

  I thought about it a great deal afterwards, the feelings of alienation and then of identification. There are so many lines around being human – culture, gender, class, status, colour, age – that much of the time it seems almost impossible to recognise one another. For a while on that day, men were no longer fellow humans sharing a street in Paris, but another dangerous species. I kept thinking I should go back there again and walk calmly along the street and see them as human beings, but I never did.

  One day I was in the shop in rue Ordener that sold African produce. Ginger wasn’t available in the market or supermarket or greengrocer’s – and I used it every morning in my breakfast juice – so I always bought it and sometimes honey there. They stocked all sorts of foods that I didn’t recognise, cartons and tinned food as well as fresh vegetables and fruits I’d never seen before. There was often a crate of what looked like mown grass right near the checkout. That day, I asked the checkout woman what the grass was – how was it eaten, was it cooked? She was white-skinned but all the others in her shop, all the women doing their evening shopping, were black-skinned. She looked at my white face, held my gaze and said, ‘Je ne sais pas. Les Africains la mangent!’ I don’t know. The Africans eat it! Her voice, loud enough for everyone in the shop to hear, seared the air with scorn and disdain. I felt dozens of eyes on my pale skin. I looked away from the woman, grabbed my ginger and change and left the shop.

  I rarely know what to say when the words should be said aloud in a firm voice. Even in English. The next day at my rendezvous with Sylvie I wanted to tell
her about the checkout woman, but whenever I thought of it, the words stuck.

  My memoirist companions don’t have much to say about people from other countries – except Montaigne. In the 1500s, European exploration of the Americas and Africa and Asia was just beginning and during that time Montaigne had a visitor who had been with the French explorer Villegaignon, when he made the original French settlement in Brazil. Montaigne listened to his first-hand tales of the boundless new territories and peoples who lived differently. Even then, in the sixteenth century, he was doubtful about the morality and value of exploring and seizing of new lands: ‘I fear our eyes are bigger than our belly. Our curiosity more than we can stomach.’

  He couldn’t have known the effects of colonisation then, the exploitation of lands and people, the oppression and destruction of culture, nor the later twentieth-century return of colonised people to the ‘motherland’, disturbing the towns and suburbs with their dark presence, giving rise to fearful political parties, but he seems to have understood that greedy impulse could only lead one way. He was writing in the 1580s, more than 200 years before Australia was seized by Europeans, who, as educated sons of the Enlightenment, one might think had read and learned from Montaigne.

  He says that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to […] indeed we have no other criterion or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country’.

  He launches into a description, no doubt gained from his explorer-visitor, of the country and customs of the people of Brazil: ‘They inhabit a land with the most delightful countryside and a temperate climate, so that, from what I have been told by my sources, it is rare to find anyone ill there.’ On their way of life and ethics he reports glowingly: ‘Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love for their wives.’