It’s a romantic view of the Noble Savage in many ways, but Montaigne uses the comparison to critique his own society. When he commends their punishment of prophets who get it wrong, it seems clear enough that he’s talking about the Church: ‘Those who come and cheat us with assurances of powers beyond the natural order and then fail to do what they promise, should they not be punished for it?’
In 1562, three indigenous men from Brazil were brought back to France and Montaigne met them in Rouen when they were presented to the king, Charles IX. They were asked, through an interpreter, what they had been most amazed by in France. Their answer as reported by Montaigne:
They had in their language an idiom which calls all men ‘halves’ of one another – and they had noticed here [in France] that there were men among us fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their ‘halves’ were begging at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty: they found it odd that those destitute ‘halves’ should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throats or set fire to their houses.
It stopped me in my tracks.
The idea that we are all ‘halves’ of each other.
It’s a powerful notion with the potential to overturn everything. It’s not just a basis for equality, but a radical concept of the self where our skin is not the end of us.
It took the destitute ‘halves’ in France another 200 years or so before they finally did tire of the injustice and took the bloated Others by the throat and set fire to their houses, but more intriguing is how and when Europeans lost the idea of ‘halves’. It was long gone in France by the time Montaigne was writing, but it must have been there in the beginning or communities could not have survived without a powerful reason to look after each other. Somewhere along the way, the idea that part of the self resided in others was lost. More important, the experience, the feeling of not being entirely separate within our own skin, the flow of self into others was lost, except perhaps to babies and some indigenous cultures and to mystics who learned how to melt the dark line between themselves and others.
I wonder at the energy I have used to keep that line distinct, the self behind it all of a piece. Words have something to do with it. Words break the world up into articulated bits, they put a line around the light and dark of being and let us know where we end and others begin.
A list of my halves in Paris: the man in the corner shop, Vicky, Trish, Anthony, Patrick, Matt, Theo, Marie-Louise, Camilla, Sylvie, the doctor at the American hospital, my choir teacher, Jean-Jacques and Ana, Tristan de Parcevaux, my niece, the elderly men and women at the physio clinic, the waiters at Café de la Place, the women in the boulangerie, the gypsy woman at Gare St Lazare who drugged her children, the checkout woman in the African shop, all the men in the rue St Denis.
*
As well as going to a concert every week, almost all of them free on Sundays, I visited museums every other week. Towards the end of March, I went to the Musée Guimet on place d’Iéna, which has one of the largest collections of Asian art anywhere in the world. The former colonies of Vietnam, Cambodia and the Lao Republic were a favourite destination for archaeologists, so the museum is a cornucopia of Southeast Asian sculpture.
It was a rainy day and I had to stand in the queue in the drizzle for half an hour. Everyone has the same idea on a rainy Sunday in Paris. Inside it was warm and, despite the crowds, almost immediately I felt calm – the Buddha effect. There were Buddhas sitting, standing, lying, in almost every room: Cambodian, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Burmese. They were mainly marble or other stone, some copper, silver, gold, some were elaborately dressed, most wearing only a draped cloth, some were slender, others were plump, but all of them were extraordinarily serene. I know next to nothing about Buddhist art, but as Stendhal said, ‘I don’t claim to be describing things in themselves, but only their effect on me.’ Looking at their quiet faces made me feel peaceful.
There was one statue in particular that had me circling back to it three or four times. It was from Cambodia, a seated stone Buddha with a broken snake carving behind his head. The identifying label said ‘Khmer Angkorien, fin de XII siècle’. I have the exact details because I bought a postcard of it, which I still have in my study, thumb-tacked onto a corkboard beside my desk along with postcards of Rodin’s Cathédrale, two entwined hands, and a Matisse of a cross-legged Arab girl. I look at the photograph of the calm, slightly smiling face, but it doesn’t have the same effect as the actual carved stone, the silent presence of it.
It’s evident that this statue, and most of the others, must have been ransacked from ancient temples. The label for a large carving of temple gates noted they ‘had made their way across the world to Paris’, as if they had upped and wriggled across the world on their own. I know that the Khmer Buddha was stolen, or at least obtained, by people who felt they had a greater right to it than the people who had made it and meditated before it, and that it ought to be returned to where it came from, but I was glad it was there in Paris for me to see and feel its imperturbable grace.
Eleven
April
To write personal things in an impersonal mode, to try to attain the universal – it’s only this way that literature breaks through our separateness.
Annie Ernaux
I longed for spring. I had been waiting for it for too long; I didn’t have any way of measuring how long to be patient in a European winter. In the grey light I cultivated the idea that my residual aches and pains would disappear with the warmth, that the sun would somehow dissolve them. Warmth and bright light gained magical or omnipotent properties in my mind and when a few days of warm sunshine appeared in April, I sat out on the balcony on a small stool, lifted my face to the sun, and worshipped. The geraniums in my balcony boxes had new green leaves and buds were forming.
Early spring in Paris makes promises it doesn’t deliver. The ‘false spring’ Hemingway called it, but even in a false spring he said ‘there were no problems except where to be happiest’. That’s hard to believe, but I like that even Hemingway can be sentimental about Paris. The untruthful glow of nostalgia can blur anyone’s eyes.
I took a break from writing, mainly because there were friends coming to stay on and off through April, but I also needed distance from the manuscript. I had picked it up one morning and the rewrite, which had been going so well, suddenly seemed tangled and fragmented. It often happens and it’s hard to tell if there’s really something radically wrong, or if it’s just the mood I’m in. The day before it was clear, today it was confused and should be thrown away. It needed both detachment and deep concentration to sort it out and it was pointless trying to do that with other people around. I’ve always needed solitude to do that kind of work.
Phil came to visit from Australia and introduced us to the drawings of Sempé, a French cartoonist with a whimsical, tender spirit, like Leunig’s, the Australian chronicler of human frailty, and we introduced him to the grotesque faces under the Pont Neuf and the comic-book shops in the rue Dante. Hannah, my eternally travelling niece, came to stay again for a few days with three German friends and they all lay around in the tiny second bedroom talking, sorting out the world until halfway through the day. Peter and Libby arrived too and we walked up to Sacré-Coeur and, instead of music inside his head, Peter heard, by the purest chance, a beautiful young nun singing evening offices. He and Libby had been together since they were teenagers and now, finally, they were in Paris, as shining-eyed as sixteen-year-olds. Since then, Libby has died and Peter sang like an injured angel at her graveside.
I’d found two more conversation partners too – Sabine, a lawyer who loved oriental art, and Bibi, a French-Polish translator, so as well as my Sunday meeting with Sylvie, I was out two evenings and one morning every week. Bibi liked to arrange other outings, so we often went to an exhibition together. Vicky too asked me to go to films with her, and then to a concert, so even though Anthony was away, t
his time in Norway, I wasn’t often alone in the evenings.
Thursday evening choir was still a fixed rendezvous every week. I left my visitors for the evening and took the Metro to Ménilmontant and swung up the hill to the community centre in the rue des Amandiers. As I walked in each time I felt pleasure in being recognised, even though I didn’t know any of them, except Marie-Louise, outside rehearsals. When I’d gone to Istanbul in March, I’d had to miss choir and the following week Marie-Louise asked where I had been as she greeted me. Afterwards on the Metro, I realised that now there was a small space in Paris where I was expected to be.
We learned new songs and rehearsed ones we already knew with a particular date in mind; we had a booking, the Fête de la Musique, which is held every year in late June. The Fête happens on just one day, and many of the performances are held in the streets; quartets and choirs and ensembles perform in squares and on street corners so that people can wander all day listening to music wherever they go. Some of the musicians are professional, but there are also amateurs – which of course means ‘those who love’ – community choirs and solo performers. Our choir was singing in a square on the Canal St-Martin, at 5 pm on 20 June, just before my return flight to Australia, the end of my year. The timing seemed auspicious; I really was going to be singing in the streets of Paris.
One day Sylvie invited me to her apartment for an afternoon tea party to meet some of her friends. I had been told that the French rarely invited anyone outside the family and friends they had known since childhood to their homes, so it felt like an important invitation, a step into an inner circle.
I left early, allowing plenty of time to find Sylvie’s place in the sixteenth arrondissement. To Parisians, the sixteenth arrondissement in the west of Paris, bounded by the southward-turning Seine and the Eiffel Tower on one side and the Bois de Boulogne on the other, means wealth and privilege, political and financial power, established families, a district that inhabitants of the working-class east declare they will never go to. Geographically it has no advantages over the east; in fact the south-east, north and north-east have all of the few hills in Paris, traditionally the terrain of the elevated rich, but in Paris, when Baron Haussmann knocked down the poverty-stricken inner city, the poor fled to the edges.
Sylvie’s street was on the other side of the périphérique, still in the sixteenth, but not in Paris proper delineated by the ring-road, and not in my map-book. I guessed where to get out, but it was the wrong Metro and I had to walk a long way. As I followed the wider, cleaner streets, I saw the brass plates of consulates, discreetly beautiful shops, grand Haussmannian apartment buildings, separate mansions and even large gardens with gold-tipped iron railings. Everyone was dressed quietly, elegantly – no flashes of colour to draw attention – and nearly everyone was white-skinned.
The sun was still weak but for the first time in five months I was outside in the streets without a coat and when I lifted my face I could feel a faint warmth. There were tight green buds on the chestnut trees, the faintest idea of renewal, and some blades of green – probably freesias – poking through in front gardens. I remembered the freesias beside the steps on the farm, one of the few shady, dark places that stayed moist and even mossy in all the heat and dryness, and I remembered how my mother loved their sweet, fresh smell. I could see her placing a cut-glass vase of freesias in the hall – although that was at the house in town, not out on the farm. And then I saw her sitting in her retirement unit; no freesias there and no shady places for them to grow, just sunny pansies in terracotta pots. How strange and strong memory is, with its own structures and its own translucent textures, more fine and enduring than reality.
Sylvie lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an ordinary 1970s block in the avenue Jean-Baptiste Clément. When I arrived her three friends were already there. I can’t remember all their names now and I didn’t listen carefully in the first place because I was nervous about speaking French all afternoon, but there was one woman, Emanuelle, whom I remember because of her story. Sylvie and her friends were good-looking, thirty-ish, two of them married and one, a sweet-faced woman, had a baby, although not with her that day. Sylvie was single and Emanuelle had an older fiancé she planned to marry soon. She was taller than the others and had short dark hair tossed around her head and her face was full of photographer’s angles, but more striking was her rebellious, defiant look. And some kind of pain.
We sat in the lounge-room around a low table piled with pâtisserie delicacies – charlottes, opéras, tarte aux framboises – and pots of tea and coffee. They asked me what I was doing in Paris and about Australia and about my family and I started relaxing into the familiar territory of getting to know other women. A few times I asked them to repeat or to speak more slowly but after half an hour or so I found my head shifting into a French mode, as if my brain had realised English was not going to be of any use so it may as well just move to the cache of French it had stored there. After a while the conversation drifted to relationships with men.
‘I’m not in love with Jean-Luc. But I don’t think it matters,’ Emanuelle said. There was a defiant look on her face. For a moment no-one knew what to say. Jean-Luc was her fiancé. Marrying someone you don’t love is not what most people will admit to. And then we each started to make our case. Everyone argued that loving the person you were going to marry did matter. We ranged our arguments – how could you get through the difficult times without love, wouldn’t children suffer sensing there was no love between their parents, wasn’t it a kind of deceit?
‘But he knows I don’t love him. I have told him. He loves me and accepts it this way. And I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to live alone and I want to have children.’
I looked at her, the rebellious tilt of her body, remembering I had heard the same words before. I had a friend in Australia who had once told me that she didn’t love the man she was with, but she was in her thirties and didn’t want to be alone. She liked and respected him, but wasn’t in love with him. I realised I had never known what it was like to be alone.
Perhaps Emanuelle was talking about the difference between loving someone and being in love with them. Perhaps she did love him but not in that heady, drugged, all-absorbing way of being ‘in love’. Just as I was trying to work out how to phrase the distinction in French, Sylvie asked it.
‘You mean you haven’t fallen in love with him or you don’t love him?’
‘Both,’ said Emanuelle.
There was a silence again. Her honesty seemed to break all the rules.
‘But what happens if you do fall in love with someone else? If you are not in love with him, then you could easily fall in love with someone else,’ Sylvie responded.
‘I have,’ she said. ‘It was a coup de foudre in the place St Sulpice.’
There was the same startled silence. For a few seconds I wasn’t sure what she meant and then I realised coup de foudre, lightning strike, also meant the shock of love at first sight. Sylvie and the sweet-faced woman argued that there was no such thing, but Emanuelle was adamant. She described it in detail; she was coming into the square walking near Café de la Mairie and he was walking towards her from the direction of the fountain; they looked at each other and they both fell in love in that moment.
‘How did you know he fell in love with you? Did you talk to him?’ asked the sweet-faced one.
‘Of course. Well, he spoke to me first. We sat at the café. I have had an affair with him.’
Another short silence.
‘Well, why don’t you marry him?’
‘He is already married.’
The pain in her face was finally clear. Stendhal said, ‘I have never been able to write of what I love, it would seem a blasphemy’, but for Emanuelle it was the opposite, she had to get it out in the open. Make it real for all of us. She could not have what she wanted, but at least she had connected it to her friends, to her world.
/> I understand Stendhal’s desire to hide his love, to protect it from a harsh gaze, but to keep things hidden in the end, I think, twists us as we contort ourselves to fit the mask. And yet, oddly for a writer, I’m a secretive person, at least about love. I don’t want to reveal that I too have wondered how much and how well I love. I don’t want to reveal how much my feelings change; that at times I am passionately in love with Anthony, shining-eyed and melting, at other times I admire and like him, at other times I am hard-hearted and judgmental. Nor do I want to reveal how much my love is self-centred, dependent on my well-being. Nor do I feel inclined to reveal how I cannot bear dependence and instead am drawn to what is withheld. Nor reveal how much my emotions are shaped by physical pleasure, that the intense mind-blowing high of love-making really does create love in me and that I have no idea how there could be ongoing romantic love without quite a lot of sex.
Is this the way it is with other people? The memoirists, or at least the male ones, write only of an all-absorbing romantic love, which, then as now, seems indistinguishable from a volatile mix of sexual passion and fantasy. Stendhal gives a list of eleven women he has loved:
Virginie (Kubly), Angela (Pietragrua), Adèle (Rebuffel), Mélanie (Guilbert), Mina (de Gresham), Alexandrine (Petit), Angeline, whom I never loved (Bereyter) [why does he include her then?], Angela (Pietragrua) [why twice?], Méthilde (Dembowski), Clementine (Guila) and then adds, ‘and lately for a month at most, Mme Azur whose Christian name I’ve forgotten’ [then a new line] and unwisely, yesterday, Amelia Bettini.
Stendhal is just too cool altogether! But he goes on to confess: ‘The majority of these charming creatures didn’t honour me with their favours, but they have literally occupied my whole life.’ Then I remember him as a boy losing his beloved mother and so I’m won over when he says, ‘With all of them, and several others, I was always the child; so I had very little success.’
Ransacking Paris Page 20