by W. E. Gutman
I met Colette, a future ambassador and member of the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) at one of the rare functions sponsored by the Brothers and Sisters of St. Joseph -- Jaffa campus -- during which boys and girls could mingle on school property. Like me, she’d been sent to a French Catholic school for a quality education. That did not prevent Colette, a brilliant student and teachers’ pet from spreading irreverent rumors. Our respective playgrounds were separated by a high wall breached by an ivied forged iron door through which, Colette insisted, priests and nuns met on dark moonless nights for bacchanalia of unholy communion. Apocryphal and told with sham solemnity, her story had made me laugh. I would in turn regale her with my own spurious fabrications of priestly buggering, all heavily inspired by the Marquis De Sade and French student songs dripping with anticlerical irreverence. We soon began dating. It wasn’t long before I tried to take her to bed. At home in her in parents’ Tel Aviv apartment, stripped down to her panties, she lay limp and lifeless like an alabaster statue on her satin sheets, her eyes wide open, amusement etched on her lips and showing not the slightest trace of arousal. I tried again on other occasions, each time with less enthusiasm. It would take another twenty years or so before I tried again -- she was by then Consul of Israel in Montreal, an attractive, ripened but sexless woman who found it opportune to tell me that Mammouth had blown his brains out as I retreated from her passionless embrace. I would try yet again several years later -- she’d by then served as first consul in Boston and been elevated to a higher post at Israel’s Embassy in Paris. Her meteoric ascent in the arcane and elitist world of diplomacy had done nothing to enliven a hopelessly torpid sexuality. A dozen years or so later, now Consul General in New York, she would offer me a job in the press office. The svelte, sprightly Colette of my youth had turned into a corpulent, cantankerous despot. She would make life so unpleasant that I quit after less than two years of employment.
In 2000, I received a note on Knesset stationery. It read: “I made it.” I replied on the back of my business card, saying: “Better watch out. If you’re not careful you run the risk of becoming Prime Minister.”
Buoyed by colossal chutzpah, Colette would have the effrontery (or loutishness) to run for the office of President of Israel. Predictably, she lost.
I would not hear from her again.
*
In 1954, armed with a letter of recommendation from Sister Louis and Frère Jean to the School of Journalism in Paris, I left Israel, my parents and a host of tattered memories. Five years had passed since I’d first glimpsed Haifa’s tawny shores. Gazing at the open sea, I was now headed on a one-way journey to early manhood. I never looked back.
ON MY OWN
There are no surprises in life, only latent events we subliminally nurture to fruition. Everything we do is undertaken in pursuit of a distant but manifest objective. As I stood at the window of my Montmartre garret, transfixed by the beautiful city that lay before me, I kept telling myself that being back in Paris was no happenstance but an epiphany willed from the depths of my subconscious. Fate had played no part in this latest transmigration. It was the culmination of an immeasurable hankering stubbornly chased and at last apprehended. These abstractions helped dispel the haunting suspicion, as I scanned my hometown with wonderment and elation, that the runaway train I’d been riding since birth, the tracks on which it thundered, the junctions, the country depots and drafty, smoke-filled terminals along the way, had all been pre-scripted and immutable. I needed to believe, at an age normally unclaimed by existential turmoil, that reason coincides with reality, that intent and force of will stimulate and whittle the future. I would have ample cause to revisit this thesis, to refute it in my darkest hours, only to embrace it again as a hedge against the tyranny of predestination. And as I surveyed familiar landmarks in the distance, each one evoking a special childhood memory, I knew that the same impelling force that had led me back to my roots would soon distance me from them yet again.
God created space; the devil created time.
*
Kismet or purpose attained, I was thrilled to be back in Paris. I was seventeen, free, on my own, ready to spread my wings, lusting for life, craving self-discovery in the newness of the moment.
Pallid like an anemic girl, Paris had weathered its share of storms and indignities. Nine years had passed since the end of the war, not enough to erase the stain of defeat, the agony of foreign occupation and the stigma of a lackluster victory against a hated enemy. But beneath the pallor of its sooty face, under its leaden skies and intermittent September rains, Paris sparkled and I was eager to bathe in its luminescence.
I looked up Marcel, the boy I’d befriended before moving to Israel, but it was Françoise, his sister, I’d really come to see. I’d thought about her often and fantasized about the day when we would consummate what had so fleetingly, so innocently been assayed five years earlier. I found Marcel at home. He was having lunch in the kitchen. He recognized me.
“You’ve grown taller but your face hasn’t changed,” he exclaimed.
I wish I could have said the same about him. The once spindly Marcel was now a strapping young man, apprenticed to the neighborhood butcher shop. Barrel-chested, he wore a thick turtleneck sweater, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A blood-splattered white apron encircled his corpulent girth. His shoes were caked with scraps of viscera and organ meat. His cheeks were ruddy; his fingers red and bloated like sausages. He smelled of freshly slaughtered venison. Peering through thick lenses, his gentle, myopic eyes hardened when I asked about Françoise.
“Elle est à la campagne.” She’s in the country, he said evasively.
“Where?”
“A la campagne!” he repeated, a hint of impatience hardening his voice. I didn’t insist. I paid Marcel a couple of visits after that; we went to the cinema once or twice, then I stopped calling on him. His sister had not come back from the country and he’d reacted to my ceaseless inquiries with petulance.
“Enough!” he exploded, grabbing me by the lapels and shoving his face against mine. “How many times have I told you? Enough about Françoise, you hear me!”
Carnivores have lousy dispositions.
Startled, left to ponder the fleeting essence of friendship, I concluded that Marcel and I had little in common save one year or so of trivial puerile pursuits when we were twelve. Five years had passed. We’d evolved in mutually exclusive ways. There was no camaraderie in our relationship, no enduring intimacy that might help bridge or attenuate the differences in our temperaments. I was nauseated by his occupation, repelled by the rawness of his temperament. He did not share my love of books, music and theater; my informality and bohemian ways vexed him; culture wearied him, erudition made him feel uncomfortable. I was reading Bazin, Camus and de Montherlant; he’d never heard of them. He obsessed on food; I ate sparingly. I still hated liver; he was pawing it, selling it all day long, devouring it fried in lard and onions.
Many years later, while visiting Paris, I learned that Marcel had married an English girl and moved to London. Had it not been for a fortuitous encounter with his sister shortly after Marcel and I parted company, I would have never known the dark, painful secret he had so valiantly tried to conceal.
*
When I was not in school or toiling as a low-level clerk at the U. S. Embassy three days a week, I spent endless hours exploring and getting re-acquainted with my hometown. These serpentine perambulations always began on Rue du Pont Neuf, the epicenter of Paris’s 2,000-year history and the focal point of my own origins. Driven by instinct or nostalgia, I invariably turned my gaze upward and beheld with indescribable melancholy the building in which I’d spent the first three or four years of my life. There was little I remembered about the apartment, its configuration, the furnishings that adorned it. What drew me there time after time was an intuitive connection to a tangible beginning, to an anchor that had once secured me in time and space. Replaying my father’s arrest by the Gestapo and our subsequent fli
ght from Paris, I always wondered who might be living there now. Did new generations of tenants have any inkling of the drama that unfolded in the apartment they now occupied? Once or twice, I felt the urge to take the elevator, knock at the massive carved wooden door with the polished brass knob and inform whoever might open it, “You know, I used to live here when I was four.” The urge remained just that, a whim wisely held in check.
Senseless nostalgia set aside for now, I crossed the Seine over the Pont d’Arcole, lingering a while to watch the river’s slate-colored waters flow beneath, then surveying the splendor that stretched before me. To my left stood Notre Dame Cathedral, the jewel, the very soul of Paris. Overtaken with awe, electrified by the purity of its form, conscious of its antiquity, daunted by its timelessness, I just stood there, gawking at the sublime edifice. Sometimes I closed my eyes, eclipsing the throngs of tourists and idlers, and I embarked on the wings of fantasy, weaving implausible but engaging scenarios. From the depths of an overactive imagination and vague evocations of Hugo’s masterpiece, I conjured the fiery Esmeralda and asked her to dance for me. She offered me a rose, lifted her skirts and, flaunting golden legs, pirouetted on the age-worn esplanade to the accompaniment of flutes, lutes and drums. Lurking high above the gargoyles, clambering about in the bell tower’s tangle of crossbeams and alcoves, Quasimodo strained against the weight of the ropes as the seraphic Angelus chimed in the noonday tumult.
Amid the din and boisterous cadence that was medieval Paris, I became François Villon, the morose 15th century poet whose impudence, drunken brawls and petty thievery earned him several stints in prison and banishment -- and nearly cost him his head. There, where once stood the very gallows he had narrowly managed to escape, I caught myself reciting a quatrain from a ballad I’d learned by heart. Drawn from his Testament, a collection of satirical poems in which he ponders the brevity and absurdity of life, his verses, chiseled in the archaic French of the time, warned potentate and bard alike:
Princes à mort sont destinez
Et tous autres qui sont vivans;
S’ils en sont courciez n’ataynez,
Autant en emporte le vens.
Princes are destined to die
As are all those who live;
If this vexes them by the bye,
That too shall be gone with the wind.
Enfant terrible, minstrel, scholar and agitator, Villon epitomizes the vitality and charm of eccentricity and iconoclasm in an age of anxiety, intolerance, religiosity and superstition. A master of the allegorical and moralistic literature of the “Dark Ages,” he nimbly decomposes real persons and reconstructs from their parts semi-fictitious characters who are free to expose the emotions, instincts, fears and contradictions that haunt the human soul. An early champion of free speech, he remains one of my favorite poets.
Alighting from these flights of fancy, I then strolled on Quai de Montebello and Quai de Tournelle, leafing through old books, foraging for comics and 3-D erotic postcards in the bouquinistes’ stalls. Rue Lemoine took me past Lycée Henri IV, one of the prestigious schools that had denied me a seat five years earlier. Skirting the Panthéon, where the mortal remains of Voltaire, Hugo and Dumas, among others, are laid to rest, I went up boulevard St. Michel, past the Sorbonne and the Faculty of Medicine, my father’s alma mater, and I ambled on into the heart of the Latin Quarter. The School of Journalism, where I was enrolled, stood across the Eglise Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the 11th century Romanesque basilica in whose cool shadows I often retreated on warm days. The school has long since been relocated and the ornate, fin de siècle building in which it was housed was taken over by a welfare agency.
It was at that juncture in my perambulations that I took time out to sip a fragrant cup of espresso at the terrace of the Café Les Deux Magots. I was not interested in clever conversation, nor did I seek inspiration, as Hemingway, Becket, Fitzgerald, Baldwin, and Sartre are said to have done long before me. It was not to be seen by an endless parade of faces that I immersed myself in a sea of humanity, but to watch the faces drift past me in a lulling cadence of form, color and motion.
Rue Bonaparte is a narrow street lined with quaint boutiques, antique shops and art galleries; it leads to the banks of the Seine. It is there that I re-crossed the river, taking Pont Royal and making a beeline for the Tuileries Gardens. Walking its entire length, from the Louvre to Place de la Concorde, I remember ogling young lovers as they exchanged tender kisses, oblivious to the world around. Further on, a new generation of young sea captains navigated their galleons in the same boat basins where I’d played as a toddler. Soon, I reached the final leg of my marathon excursion -- the ascent up the Champs Elysées to the Arch of Triumph. Exhausted yet strangely energized, I then took the Metro to Place Pigalle and walked the rest of the way up to the network of narrow streets and flowered escarpments of Montmartre which I called home.
Later undertaken to appease what would become a lifetime longing for Paris, future pilgrimages, however brief, held the promise of a hike that rarely veered from its inaugural course. I have since added other tributaries, other neighborhoods to these ritual outings. They always begin on Rue du Pont Neuf.
*
And then I discovered night. And night bared a reverse image that transmutes the City of Light into a city of shadows, of wan, angular glows that bathe half a building while the other half is swallowed in Stygian blackness, of stealthy denizens who come out and prowl its darkened streets as the gentry sleeps. I was drawn by the cold phosphorescence of neon lights shimmering on rain-slick sidewalks, the bluish halos encircling streetlights when fog rolled in, the sound of my own footsteps echoing in the distance.
It was inevitable that among the picturesque bestiary that Paris becomes by night I would seek out its filles de joie, the “joy maidens” I’d often noticed from afar as a boy, the tawdry women who loitered aimlessly and drew condescending glances from the squeamish and the hypocrites.
“Papa,” I remember asking as a tot, “the ladies seem to be waiting for someone.”
“Yes, son, they’re waiting for someone. Don’t worry. Someone will show up real soon.”
It took an amateurish solicitation on my part -- and a curt and disdainful send off -- to learn that the girls who cruised around the Opéra, the Champs Elysées and other patrician neighborhoods were well beyond my means. I settled instead for the plebeian and incomparably more libertarian bordellos of Pigalle, Clichy, the Châtelet district, Rue St. Denis and Rue Blondel. Staged as a prelude to wholesale copulation, these nocturnal romps also took on an aesthetic dimension, one that helped define and shape my taste in women. I chose them carefully, discarding the corpulent, the raw-boned, the wilted, the overly made-up, the frumpish. My putes, were I to enjoy their services, had to be graced with charm, not classic beauty, with that indefinable something -- the piquancy of spice, not sweetness, tang not Grecian profiles. This may explain an early and lingering penchant for African and Asian women. Above all, they had to be pleasing to look at, especially when I climaxed. Looking into their eyes as I crested then came, heightened the rapture. It also added an element of intimacy to an otherwise hasty and perfunctory act. I would seek a sign of pleasure withheld, a hint of impeding surrender to the forces that kept us fused in carnal embrace. But there would be none. I’d startled several of the girls, asking that they look straight into my eyes as I felt myself coming. I would try to kiss them on the mouth, an indiscretion they gently but firmly rebuked. Their bodies were for sale; their lips, which they deftly used to invigorate a sluggish erection, were off limits. Instead, they stared at the ceiling or sideways, anticipating the premonitory spasms, bracing themselves against the paroxysm that ensued with nary a sign of vicarious emotion. Most of them, no doubt exhausted by the tedium of their profession, were cold and lifeless as dead fish.
I would eventually learn to shut my eyes when fantasy and anticipation exceeded reality, as it often does.
It was near Place Blanche that, to my great astonishme
nt, I spotted Françoise one night. Spring had sprung and the air was filled with the scent of lilac. She’d been pacing the pavement back and forth with one of her “colleagues” in front of a small, drab hotel that rents rooms by the hour, “a fresh towel included.” I walked up to her and stood in mute amazement, checking her out from head to toe. She wore a tight, short Kelly green skirt, a black bolero from which beamed a luscious cleavage. Stiletto-heeled open-toe shoes enhanced the curvature of her long supple legs. She did not recognize me at first. Or she pretended not to.
“Françoise? It’s me. We used to be neighbors. Marcel, you and I…. The pool…,” I ventured.
She blushed and let out a nervous laugh. She turned to the other girl.
“I’ll catch up with you in a minute. It’s a friend. I’ll fill you in later.” She then spun around and looked at me, not with the starry-eyed fondness she’d shown when she was a little girl, but with the studied poise, listlessness and self-possession of a seasoned streetwalker.
“So, what brings you to Paris?”
“School.”
She nodded and looked elsewhere.
“That’s good,” she replied without a shred of conviction in her voice.
I gazed at Françoise. The precocious little girl who’d made my heart flutter was now a shapely young woman. I was about to ask what calamity had landed her on the Paris sidewalks but I remembered my father’s counsel:
“Don’t ask a whore for her ‘story.’ You’ll never get a straight answer.”
Prostitutes have a “story,” a tale, a yarn that varies from place to place, a recurring leitmotif concocted to hide the truth or help endure it in Paris and Paramaribo, Cayenne and Calcutta, Marseille and Montevideo, Amsterdam and Ankara: