*
Wild grasses growing on the stony roof of the St Avit chapel; an oak growing out of a lintel – these sights please me. Things that are well ordered reassure for a while – a neat row of trees in a winter park – then I want to rebel. It could be just that I’m not good at order, I’ve never achieved a ‘look’ that goes together perfectly, a room where everything is in the same style. Perhaps it’s disruption that attracts me, the point between order and chaos where neither dominates. Montaigne aimed for that kind of disorderly order in his writing style, a kind of roughness and disruption: ‘I like to imitate the unruly negligence shown by French youth in the way they are seen to wear their clothes …’
I laughed when I read it, thinking of suit jackets worn with t-shirts, and then he went on to say: ‘With their mantles bundled over their necks, their capes tossed over one shoulder or with a stocking pulled awry: it manifests a pride contemptuous of the mere externals of dress and indifferent to artifice.’
Montaigne said too: ‘Those clever chaps [he meant other writers, not the French youth] […] are always adding glosses […] they never show you anything pure, they bend it and disguise it to fit with their own views.’
Is that what I’ve done? I have wanted to be honest, but it’s easy to add gloss, to make things shine when in life they have an ordinary colour, a plain finish. It’s the nature of writing to complete things, to give form, perhaps some bending and disguising can’t be helped.
Many centuries later, Annie Ernaux aimed for a style without disguise, for directness and simplicity, although it seems to me for a different reason. For her it was a way of giving allegiance to her country working-class origins, ‘to accord the same importance to the words, to the gestures, of the people’.
It makes me curious that an aristocratic man from the sixteenth century and a working-class woman from the twenty-first century had the same desire to disrupt the smooth and stylish surface of language. Was it because they were both from the country, or even just that they were not from Paris and they found its elegant rule overbearing? Like the farmers who come to Paris every now and then: when they are unhappy with the government they shovel cow manure, or sometimes horse manure, onto their trucks and hold their anger and drive up the motorway to Paris and stop in front of the Assemblée Nationale, and as they unload the steamy pile in front of the Parliament it breaks the spell of the word-spinners.
I like plain and simple, rough and ready, but I also love fine and precise. I’m not single-minded, I’ll be led anywhere. Montaigne said his mind ‘bolts like a runaway horse’, heads in any and all directions. He leaps from the body’s ills to sexual inclinations to dislike of morose temperaments – and back again, quoting Horace here and Cicero there, interrupting his own thought or jumping sideways. ‘I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune and take the first she presents to me, they are all the same to me.’ It sounds lazy but I want to defend it because I suspect it’s what I do as well. He says he gives himself to ‘doubt and uncertainty, and to my governing method, ignorance’.
Stendhal said he wanted to use language that the workers at Les Halles, the city market in Paris, used, concrete and direct. He also drew sketches all the way through his memoir – interrupting the flow of words. They are rough and odd, sometimes incomprehensible, messy or spidery corners of his memory, a contrast to his elegant and sharp thinking. And at the end he attached an appendix, which he wrote a couple of years before he died. It’s a list of twenty-three articles of privilege he would like to be granted.
Article 3
A hundred times a year he will know for twenty-four hours whatever language he wishes.
Article 7
Four times a year he will be able to turn himself into the animal he wishes and then turn himself back again into a man.
Article 18
Ten times a year, on demand, the privilege-holder will be able to reduce by three-quarters the pain of someone whom he sees …
Article 21
Twenty times a year the privilege-holder will be able to divine the thoughts of all persons around him, at a distance of twenty paces.
It’s a peculiar way to end a memoir, and it’s scrappy like the drawings, but in this odd list, tacked on the end, the bits and pieces of the boy and the man come to life and someone breathing steps out of the book. Not everything is continuous, part of a whole, makes perfect sense.
I thought of an article of privilege for myself.
Article 1
Twelve times a year the privilege-holder can become anyone who has ever existed for half an hour and then be themselves again without harm or advantage, but keeping the memories, if they so wish, of the other.
Back in Paris after two weeks away, the air was noticeably warmer; summer was coming at last. Bees had returned to the Jardin du Luxembourg and the gardens in Montmartre, collecting nectar for the beekeepers who kept hives in the Gardens and on the roof of the old Palais Garnier opera building and the roof of Temple de l’Étoile near the Arc de Triomphe.
In yet another of those odd patterns in an apparently random world, I’ve discovered that in Greek mythology a bee settling on the lips signified a truth-teller in scholarship and in poetry. In some African cultures too, honey was put on the lips of newborns so that they would be truth-tellers. In India, the bowstring of the Goddess of love, Kamadeva, is made of honey-bees. And then, in Hebrew, ‘honey-bee’ has the same root as ‘word’, both coming from the letters DBR. The letters can be interpreted as ‘to pick a direction’. Bees don’t so much pick as reveal a direction in the steps of the dance they perform in front of their hives. They show where and how far away the clematis or linden or eucalypt flowers bloom. I thought of words taking me this way and that, perhaps not even revealing a direction for me, but at least uncovering where I have been.
I don’t believe anymore in a cosmology where the world is speaking to me, speaking to us all, but I keep wondering about the stinging restlessness that pulled me to Paris in the first place. Was I longing for direction, the ordinary longing of those who have lost their origins? I thought I knew where I’d come from, that I had already ‘picked my direction’. The Wiradjuri country of my childhood is my heart and soul and all the sense memories of my body too, which are no small things, but truthfully, my mind has come from elsewhere. The stories that I read, that filled my days, had the weather and geography and animals, snowstorms and wolves and castles, oaks and meadows, of a world that I had not seen. Even language, the English I’ve always thought of as mine, so deep in my cells, didn’t come out of the soil I grew up on, didn’t match the landscape or the weather. Here I was finding out what words meant for the first time. I found myself at home on the other side of the world and I found too that I didn’t belong. Paradox shifts the lens, brings who I am in and out of focus. There was always, perhaps will always be, a fine split, a self which is never quite whole. And neither does it matter. Nothing on earth is pure and unmixed, even honey, and there will always be flaws and cracks and things that cannot be one. It’s the nature of being here in the world and I wonder if I even desire wholeness anymore.
*
It was already late May; we had to leave Paris in mid-June to return to Australia. I remember making lists again, what I had done, what I wanted to do, but when I look in my diary I find most pages just contain a time next to a name, ‘Camilla’, ‘see Trish in Semele’, or an instruction, ‘Ring Mum’, or brief information, ‘Felix born today’ – my youngest brother and his wife had a baby in the middle of May. I kept tickets for various exhibitions and plays which fill in some of the gaps, and although evidence doesn’t really matter because I have not wanted to write a history, I take them out and as mementoes they faithfully give me back to the day and the place and the people.
One Sunday I heard a Congolese choir sing in a church on the other side of Paris. The choir stood in front of the altar, mostly big women in loose dres
ses, and gave the songs their whole breath and heart and body, and I felt as if I were being shot through with an electric charge. They swayed their hips and arms and stepped back and forth, utterly fluid. At the end they asked people from the audience to join them singing ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and some of us stood up and sang. Comin’ for to take me away.
Another day I went to hear Trish singing in the chorus in Semele at the Théâtre des Élysées in the rue Montaigne, the glorious sound of endless desire, endless love, filling the theatre. The story of Semele, who desired immortality, and who, of course, was destroyed by her desire, unfolded in a flood of sound and light. There were thunderbolts and gods and hymns – and a huge round bed with satin sheets. I had a balcony seat and felt like one of the gods looking down on the action. Afterwards I had a drink with Trish and a few of the Greek gods and nymphs in the café across the road from the theatre.
Another Sunday I went to a Miró retrospective at the Pompidou Centre and found myself drowning in blue. It looked as if the struggle to find what was essential almost made his art disappear only to be reborn in vast blue canvases. Another day I saw ‘Orientalism’ at the Institut du Monde Arabe and it was the opposite: souks, bazaars, gold and scarlet robes, sand, azure sky, Matisse’s La petite mulâtresse (Mulatto Girl), painted Persian carpets, colour and detail on every centimetre of canvas.
I could only try to see every image, hear every note, be attentive to each part of the world. I sang and listened to my voice merging with the rest of the choir, I walked and felt my stride easing the world forward. Montaigne wrote, ‘When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time I walk.’
I dug in the balcony garden with a kitchen fork and watered my geraniums. I wrote each morning except market mornings when I went with Anthony to the rue Ordener and bought parsley, broccoli and carrots – I knew the best stall and the stall-holder knew me – and still avoided the dark red meat labelled cheval. We bought comté cheese in the rue Poteau, after discussing it with the fromager, and on the way home we bought tulips from the corner flower shop. I went clothes shopping with Bibi in the Marais and I taped the songs at choir so I could practise them at home for the Fête de la Musique. I rang my mother and talked about my new manuscript as a way of making a spell so that she would stay alive to read it. I met Sylvie every week in Les Éditeurs and, while I was with her, spoke French with a messy ease, my mantle and cape and stockings awry.
Thirteen
June
Memory is stronger than reality.
Annie Ernaux
I went to see my first play in French. It was La Nuit des Rois, The Night of the Kings, or Twelfth Night, so I knew I’d be able to follow the story. Still, even after almost a year in Paris I didn’t think I was ready for Shakespeare in French – I was there because Bibi had organised it instead of our usual weekly French conversation, booking the tickets and arranging to meet me outside the theatre.
The actors were a travelling company from the south of France and the theatre was in the fourteenth arrondissement near Montparnasse cemetery. When Bibi and I found our seats there were already musicians playing on one corner of the stage. They were dressed as minstrels in gold and red with vests and trailing sleeves and caps, but somehow looking as if these were the clothes they wore every day rather than being costumes for a Renaissance play. They had an easy-going air; it didn’t matter what town or village or even what century they landed up in, they were ready for a jig or a song anytime.
‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Bibi in French. ‘I’ll explain if you don’t understand anything.’
A young woman waddled deliberately onto the stage. Her hips and backside were padded out and she exaggerated her side-to-side motion as if she were a wind-up toy. Everyone laughed as she indicated ‘mobile phones off’. It turned out she was the maid, Maria, and as the story unfolded, she nearly stole the show. She only had to appear on stage and the audience laughed.
I don’t really remember any of the tangled lovers in the play, what Olivia or Viola or Orsino looked like or wore, only Maria and the other comic characters, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and of course Malvolio with his yellow stockings – he had long, very thin legs – was another scene-stealer as he pranced about trying to win Olivia. ‘She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered …’ The production was relaxed and the players were noisy and rough and funny as if they had all tumbled off the back of a caravan after travelling muddy roads from the last village. I couldn’t follow all the dialogue but the irreverent mood was infectious. The musicians threaded the story together with such energy that I had more fun than I’d ever had watching Shakespeare.
A great while ago the world began
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
Afterwards Bibi and I found a bar and had a glass of red wine. It was warm so we sat outside and talked about the play and watched passers-by. All the tables were crowded with theatre-goers, laughing and talking as if it were the beginning of the evening.
‘The play has made everyone happy,’ Bibi remarked. We were both excited to see Maria, slender now, and Sir Toby walk past, laughing and talking with Viola and Olivia. Of course I told Bibi about the day I arrived in Paris nearly a year earlier and about the actor hanging out the window across the courtyard in the rue des Trois Frères. It seemed like an age ago and just yesterday.
*
It was plummeting towards the end. Time had begun to concertina in that way it does, arrival and departure pressed up against each other. I thought of Annie Ernaux, ‘je ne suis que du temps qui a passé à travers moi’, I am just time that has passed through me. I am standing in a street and time is streaming through me, imprinting and colouring me like light on transparent film.
I started to think it would be as if the year in Paris had never happened by the time I returned home to my own wintry back yard in the Mountains. Time would close back over it and it would just be a shadowy shape in memory. I had not yet realised that ‘memory is stronger than reality’, and that even reality, if the present moment can be called that, is mainly made up of memory. It hasn’t really been until now, when I have been trying to write of the year with my book companions in Paris, that I’ve understood most of life is constructed in the mind. Paris was always an imagined place and living there was always going to feel imaginary. And then, writing about the year has, as writing about anything always does, refashioned my experience of it. As Montaigne remarked, ‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me’.
I wrote in my diary, ‘I don’t want to go back to my ordinary life. No! No!’, an isolated protest amongst the usual reminder notes. The handwriting was larger than usual and messier, with too many exclamation marks. It was the usual protest against endings, the futile pushing against time that occupies so much human energy.
*
A series of farewells: I visited Simone de Beauvoir’s grave in Montparnasse cemetery. She is buried with Sartre, under the same stone inscribed with both their names, a mingling of their bones for eternity, which I think would have pleased the romantic young de Beauvoir if not the older rationalist. The light on the stone was dappled, patterning the faded bunches of flowers – roses and carnations and a small silver bowl of daisies – and the Metro tickets that other people had left, a gesture of solidarity with Sartre’s support of the activists who stole Metro tickets to give to workers. It was a warm and gentle summer’s day, melancholic weather for a cemetery; graves are better to visit on cold, bleak days when there’s not such a strong reminder of how lovely the earth is.
I’d already visited Rousseau’s burial place in the Panthéon, a monument in the style of a Greek templ
e where the Great Men of France are interred. It’s an unlikely resting place for a man who only wanted to lie down under an oak. And Stendhal in Montmartre cemetery, his verdigris profile seeming to smile wryly amongst the trees and moss. But not de Sévigné, who died visiting her daughter in Provence. Nor Montaigne, who was buried several times, firstly near his chateau, then at the church of St-Antoine in Bordeaux and, finally, at the University of Bordeaux, although his heart was removed and kept many kilometres away, preserved in the church of St- Michel de Montaigne.
I suspect Montaigne would have been delighted with the fact that there was no certainty or stability in his final resting place and that even his body did not remain whole! He always found it hard to be fixed: ‘I do not know whether I have found it harder to fix my mind in one place or my body.’ Now he doesn’t have to decide, he can be in many places at once.
Some years afterwards, I stood at my mother’s grave in the central west. She did stay alive to read the book I wrote in Paris, even though her peripheral vision was so poor she had to use a ruler to keep herself on the line of text, but in the end none of us could keep her alive forever. She died with my younger brother and me on either side of her bed after nearly two weeks of focused breathing, each breath seeming to take all her concentration. On the last day I stared at her wondering who, exactly, it was who was dying, and it came to me that my mother was a constellation of memories, of pre-memory, of feelings, of shared stories. I had stared and puzzled, knowing this shrunken, dying creature was not my mother, and now I saw it; my mother was a vast constellation inside me where she had always lived. She was a construction, a fiction, within me.
Annie Ernaux said that she wanted ‘to seize the woman who lived outside of me’, when she wrote about her mother, but that seems an impossible task. No-one exists ‘outside of me’. I construct every other person and every other person constructs me. Inside my sons, inside Anthony, Vicky, my choir, Tristan de Parcevaux, the Tahitian transvestite on the corner, everyone I pass on the streets, I exist as a fabrication, more or less detailed and probably not looking much like the one I carry of myself.
Ransacking Paris Page 23