by Baxter, John
“Well, you’re stuck with him, it seems.”
“Not necessarily.” She gave me one of her pointed looks. “Anybody can be replaced.”
My sluggish perceptions finally delivered her message.
“You don’t mean me?”
“Why not?”
“I’m no guide,” I protested. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Oh, John!” she said in exasperation. “You live here, for goodness’ sake. Just tell them some of your stories.”
“Stories?” I said uncertainly.
“And didn’t you say you were looking for a way to get some exercise?”
“Yes . . .”
“Walking is excellent exercise.”
“Well . . . let me think about it.”
“Think quickly,” she said.
“Why? The next seminar isn’t for twelve months.”
Dorothy looked cross. “You don’t think I’m going to put people through that again? I told Andrew this morning that we wouldn’t need him for the other two walks.” She snapped her Filofax closed. “The next one’s tomorrow, at three.”
Chapter 17
The Opium Trail
At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk—and remember who you are!”
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland
Standing on boulevard du Montparnasse next afternoon with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, I watched my first tour group convene.
Just tell them some of your stories.
How easy she made it sound.
What stories?
About whom?
A musicologist friend, in a moment of weakness, once agreed to lecture an arts group on the history of Western music. Plunging in at Gregorian chant, he staggered out of Stockhausen and serialism two hours later to be met by an accusatory stare of a lady in the front row, who hissed “You forgot Scriabin!”
In ones and twos, the members of my group straggled out the front door—two pairs of middle-aged ladies in sensible shoes, a pretty but dazed girl who appeared to be suffering from terminal jet lag, and a short, bald man with a heavy red beard. Would it be politic to mention that he was a near-look-alike for Landru? Probably not.
“Is that everyone?”
“One other lady thought she might come,” said one woman, in a heavy Southern accent. She looked over her shoulder at the empty doorway. “But I guess she changed her mind.”
Six, out of a possible fifty. Word of Andrew’s soporific stroll had spread.
“Perhaps we’d better start . . .”
I introduced myself, then said, almost shouting over the traffic noise, “We’re standing on boulevard du Montparnasse . . .”
Within a minute, I started to feel some sympathy for Andrew. Street corners are no place to explain anything more complex than the way to the nearest métro stop. And unless you have a voice trained to project, anything you say barely travels two meters before fading into the general city din.
I had an additional problem, which had only dawned on me the previous evening as I went over my possible route. The eastern end of boulevard du Montparnasse, where the seminar held its courses, lacked even one site of literary interest. Nobody of artistic significance had lived, died, or slept here. It explained why Andrew started his tour in front of Deux Magots. At least there he had something to talk about.
Half a kilometer away lay the Luxembourg Gardens, Odéon, and a plethora of significant locations. It was just a question of going there. What would Hemingway do? I made a dangerous decision and pointed toward rue Vaugirard.
“Now we need to walk.”
“How far?” asked the girl with the weary look.
“Hardly any distance at all,” I lied. Buying time, I asked, “Where are you from?”
Telling me about Omaha kept her alert for two blocks, but as we began the third—and still only halfway to the Luxembourg—she faltered.
At this point, providence intervened and changed my life. By chance, we’d paused by an antique shop.
“Good grief!” I said, staring in the window. “Look at that!”
The slim metal tube, richly enameled, and prominently displayed on a stand, was obviously the star item of the shop.
“An opium pipe!” I said, mostly to myself. “Do you know how rare they are? You almost never see them on sale. I wonder what he wants for it . . .”
With the exception of alcohol, no narcotic exercised such a potent influence over European art and culture as opium. Alfred de Musset smoked it. Lord Byron drank it as laudanum, dissolved in spiced alcohol. Opium’s chemically refined forms of morphine and heroin provided a faster, more intense sensation, but artists and thinkers preferred the drug raw. It allowed them to spend an entire evening dreaming of a world transmuted into pure movement and form. To a culture that created the vine-like curlicues of art nouveau, Monet’s water lilies, and Debussy’s evocation in music of fountains, clouds, and the sea, it was the ideal narcotic—organic, transcendent, and ostensibly benign.
Every arcane pleasure creates a gadgetry that, for certain enthusiasts, is as satisfying as the thing itself. Like golfers with their matched Bobby Jones woods and membership of Pebble Beach or Saint Andrews, some opiomanes cared less about the effect of the drug than about owning the most richly decorated pipes, the correct lamp for heating the drug, the needles for holding it in the flame, and of course using only the best opium. Indochinese Yunnan was much preferred to the cruder Benares variety, English Mud, grown by the British in India and foisted on the Chinese.
“Opium had artistic significance, you know. Picasso smoked. He said the scent of opium was the least stupid smell in the world, except for that of the sea. Jean Cocteau was an addict. One of his best books is about a detox treatment at a clinic out in Saint Cloud . . .”
A silence from behind me made me turn. All six members of my group huddled, staring.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “We should get moving.”
“No, no,” one woman said. “It was interesting. Go on.”
“About . . . opium?”
“Yes.”
How to explain the significance to the French of opium? The difference in sensibilities. How the English love sun, while the French seek shade. Opium offers no thrill, no high; rather, it’s a key to the space between sensations . . . a state that evokes that most French of all concepts, le zone. . .
“I don’t understand how you smoke it,” said the bearded man, peering into the window. “I mean, the pipe has no bowl.”
I explained how one took a little of the opium gum, rolled it into a pill the size of a pea, toasted it over a flame until it began to bubble, then fed it through the tiny hole in the spherical smoke chamber, where it vaporized into a few puffs of cool smoke—the stuff of dreams.
“And tell me,” said the most timid of the women, “Were there really . . .” Her voice dropped. “ . . . opium dens?”
“Of course. And still are. The French call them fumeries. Some are actually quite luxurious.”
A circle of faces leaned close.
“You see . . .” I went on.
Even though I was almost whispering now, they heard me perfectly. I was once again witness to a truth about public speaking. It wasn’t how loudly you spoke but what you had to say.
Girl in an opium fumerie
“ . . . opium numbs the sense of time. Cocteau said the effect was like stepping off the train of existence. But it takes three or four pipes to get the full effect. And for that, you need . . .”
“A place to lie down,” said the bearded man.
“Exactly!”
We nodded together, no longer guide and party.
Conspirators.
Two days later, as I crossed rue Vaugirard in front of the Sénat, the bookseller who has his shop opposite our apartment emerged from the post office, looked over my shoulder, and said in surprise, “But w
hat’s all this?”
Straggling across the road to join me were the people who’d signed up for my second tour—all twenty-seven of them.
I shrugged. “Mes admirateurs.”
“Merde alors,” he said respectfully.
As they gathered around, I said, “Now, if you look over at those railings next to the main entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, according to Philippe Soupault, sadomasochists in the 1930s used this as a pickup spot . . .”
Hemingway might not have approved, but I knew Henry Miller would.
Chapter 18
Postcards from Paris
Do not go with a so-called “Guide.” These “Guides” infest the Boulevards from the rue Royale to the Opera. They sneak up to you, want to sell you NAUGHTY postcards, take you to naughty cinemas, to “houses” and “exhibitions.” Walk away from them.
BRUCE REYNOLDS, Paris with the Lid Lifted, 1927
“Well, they loved you,” Dorothy told me triumphantly. She waved another sheaf of report sheets. “Just listen . . .”
“No, please!”
I shared with Hemingway an acute embarrassment at having people say nice things to me, particularly when I was present. When Hemingway first met Scott Fitzgerald in the Dingo Bar on rue Delambre, he recoiled from the other’s compliments. As he wrote in A Moveable Feast, “We still went under the system, then, that praise to the face was plain disgrace.”
“A couple even asked if you did this professionally,” Dorothy said. “You should think about it.”
To imagine myself as a tour guide meant battling an avalanche of stereotypes.
The least offensive was represented by those individuals, umbrella or flag raised, whom I saw every day leading bedraggled crocodiles of visitors up and down rue de l’Odéon. Nobody looked too pleased, least of all the guide.
Maybe it was perverse, but I felt more empathy with the less reputable but more adventurous guides—the first cousins to the caricature William Faulkner described when he lived around the corner in 1925: “a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards.” Other writers were even more scathing about guides. Basil Woon, writing in 1926 in The Paris That’s Not in the Guide Books, claimed “the worst way [to see Paris] is with one of the professional guides who infest the boulevards and offer you obscene postcards. Most of these guides are Russians or Turks; a few are German or American. Most of them are thieves, and all are potential blackmailers.” (And yes, he really was called Basil Woon. In the 1920s, Paris also harbored a journalist named Wambly Bald and the translator Bravig Imbs. It’s conceivable they hid out in Paris to escape the smirks their names earned back home.)
Naughty postcards gave Paris a bad reputation
Fictional guides possess a buccaneering quality, an element of seduction and threat absent in their real-life equivalents, who are dull sticks. Are there really professionals like Richard Gere in American Gigolo who hire out to lonely women visitors to Los Angeles? Initially he’s their chauffeur, but driving in from the airport, he asks if it’s all right to remove his cap—the male equivalent of a girl suggesting she “slip into something more comfortable.” After that, his duties take on a more intimate nature. Alain Delon, oddly cast as an Italian in The Yellow Rolls Royce, starts as a guide to gangster George C. Scott and ends up pleasuring his girlfriend Shirley MacLaine while bodyguard Art Carney turns a blind eye. And Robert Redford, picking up two American women looking for a dirty weekend in Havana, takes them to the porn show at the Shanghai Theatre, then back to his apartment for a giggling threesome in the dark. In each case, everyone has a wonderful time, which is surely what we hope for from a trip abroad.
Sinister guides appear seldom in movies, and even then, their menace is ambivalent—more silly than sinister. My model would be Conrad Veidt in an obscure 1943 film called Above Suspicion. Most people remember him as Major Strasser in Casablanca, asking Humphrey Bogart, “Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?” In Above Suspicion, he wears a soft felt hat, tweeds, and a monocle, but he appears just as menacing. Accosting Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray in a torture museum, he displays a pair of pincers. “This elaborate piece was a fascinating device for removing fingernails,” he explains. “It is still in good working order.” Pointing to a metal effigy that, when hinged open, reveals a spiked interior, he explains, “Here is the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg—sometimes known as the German Statue of Liberty.” When Crawford, says, a little shakily, “You don’t look very much like a guide,” he observes with his shark-like smile, “And perhaps you don’t look much like tourists.” Disappointingly, he’s a good guy in disguise. I wish he’d stayed in character at least long enough to offer Joan and Fred some postcards. Undoubtedly they’d have shown something nastier than fornication.
“You’re thinking about this the wrong way,” said Terrance Gelenter as we sat on the terrace of Deux Magots.
All European capitals have their Gelenter, the go-to guy of the expat culture. A transplanted Brooklynite, he’d retained the style and manner of his onetime profession, selling schmutter in the garment district. Where his love of Paris came from nobody knew, but it was as passionate as it was unexpected. His website, Paris-Expat.com, generated just enough income to support him in a tiny fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the far side of Père Lachaise cemetery. Not that he spent much time there. When not installed on the terrace of Deux Magots, chatting up pretty tourists and exchanging Jewish jokes with the waiters, he could be found hosting a book launch, participating in a TV or radio documentary, or officiating at a restaurant opening where, after working the room, dealing out business cards by the deck and blatantly propositioning every woman under eighty, he would, if not subdued, climb onto a table and favor the crowd with an a cappella performance of “Fly Me to the Moon.”
“Is there a right way to think about it?”
But I’d left the question too late. His attention, always focused on the sidewalk, and the women on their way to work, had been caught by a girl crossing rue Bonaparte. His bearded face took on the look of a satyr in heat. Another five seconds and he would be bolting outside, accosting her in his inexact but rapid-fire French, offering his card, suggesting that she might care to meet him in the bar of the Hotel Lutetia that evening for un coctel, and after that . . . well, who knew? Because, this was, after all, Paris.
I poked his ribs, hard.
“What?”
“Concentrate, will you? What’s the ‘right way’ to be a tour guide?”
He waved toward the departing young woman. “Did you see that tuchus?”
“Yes. But explain what you mean about ‘the wrong way.’ ”
Reluctantly, he switched back to my problem.
“Look at it this way. You’re not a guide—you’re a writer.”
“Yes . . .”
“But a writer who, if the money’s right, finds time in his busy schedule to show you around Paris as only he knows it.”
“That’s just playing with words. If I offer a guiding service, I’m a guide.”
“You remember that scene in Ninotchka where Garbo arrives in Paris and the porter takes her bag?”
Of course I remembered it. She asks him, “Why do you want to carry my bags?” The porter replies, “That is my business.” And she says, “That’s no business. That’s social injustice.” And he replies, “That depends on the tip.”
(I missed Billy Wilder. That he’d left behind so many wonderful films only made it worse. And he deserves credit for one of the funnier telegrams ever sent to the United States from Paris. As he left Hollywood in 1962 to cross the Atlantic for the making of Irma La Douce, his secretary said, “All I want from Paris is some cravats from Charvet for my husband and, for me, a real French bidet.” Billy agreed and promptly forgot. He even ignored her increasingly hectoring messages. Of the many demands on his time, shopping for plumbing fixtures didn’t rank high. Finally he cabled: CRAVATS SHIPPED BIDET UNAVAILABLE SUGGEST HANDSTAND IN SHOWER.)
“So it’s all about the money?”
“It’s always about the money, bubeleh. What do most guides charge for a walk around Paris?”
“About ten euros a head.”
“Then you should charge a hundred. No, better—two hundred.”
“For what?”
“For a walk around Paris.”
“Who’d pay that?”
“For a morning with a real Paris writer? Who lives in the building where Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce used to hang out? You’d be surprised.” Warming to the idea, he said, “I’ll promote it on Paris-Expat. It’ll be a sensation. You watch.”
I was just about to thank him when he went on. “And I’ll only take fifty percent.”
Chapter 19
The Ground Beneath Our Feet
In Bangkok
At twelve o’clock,
They foam at the mouth and run,
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
NOËL COWARD, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”
Escaping from Gelenter and the goldfish bowl of Deux Magots, I retreated to the Chai de l’Abbaye, my favorite quiet café in rue Buci. It gave me a chance to think.
There was something crazy about the idea of taking people for a walk in Paris. Parisians grow up with the promenade, or stroll, as a natural part of their lives. There are no French-language guides to walking in Paris. Why give swimming lessons to fish?
But tourists are not Parisians. Very often, like survivors of an accident, they hardly know who they are, or where, or what they are doing there. On the most fundamental of levels, the cellular, crossing the Atlantic is an ordeal from which it takes the tourist a few days to recover. Watching their moony slow-motion progress, one thinks of patients under treatment and looks for the rolling metal drip stand with its bottle and tube. The French language, which incorporates the most precise vocabulary for sensual enjoyment—connoisseur, gourmet, bouquet—has also contributed the best terms for non-feeling—ennui, cafard, longueurs.