by Baxter, John
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
A harpist, installed with his back to the city and well wrapped against the wind, played for a few dozen listeners seated on the steps. What was it Alice B. Toklas said? “I like a good view, but I prefer to sit with my back to it.” Any angel hoping for rippling softness would have been disappointed by his music. The squared-off wooden sound box and steel strings gave it a jangling clang, a taste of Asia, reminding us that middle Europe was overrun by the Mongols, who brought with them the ancestors of those plucked and hammered stringed instruments we associate with Austria and Hungary—the zither and the cimbalom. No other tone would have suited the Spanish folk song he played. In 1952, Narciso Yepes adapted it as the theme for the film Jeux Interdits—Forbidden Games—a story of two children in wartime France who create their own religion of death, burying dead animals and insects in a private cemetery. For a few minutes, we who listened were no longer in France or England or Spain—just in that least national of regions, the country of the senses and the mind.
Chapter 36
A Touch of Strange
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland
“So, tell us,” said the woman from the San Francisco Sentinel, “what’s been your strangest walk?”
“The strangest . . . ?” I said, stalling.
Strangeness has a problem; it’s impossible to define. No wonder particle physicists use “strange” and “charm” to categorize the most insubstantial objects in the universe, units of energy that barely exist—at least as we know existence.
I’d found that a touch of strange added something to my walks. Pausing in front of the old site of Shakespeare and Company, I’d point to the windows of the apartment above the shop.
“The American avant-garde composer George Antheil lived up there for a while,” I’d explain. (“Avant-garde” hardly did him justice. His Ballet Mécanique was scored for six player pianos, two airplane propellers, four xylophones, four bass drums, and an air-raid siren.)
“Even more bizarrely,” I’d continue, “Antheil and the movie star Hedy Lamarr patented a design for a remote-controlled torpedo!”
Normally nobody commented on this, except perhaps to laugh, but once it rebounded on me. The man of the couple said, unexpectedly, “Yes, it was a brilliant idea.”
“You know about it?”
“Sure. I’m in electronics. They teach it in school. Not very practical, but clever.”
The key, he explained, was Antheil’s knowledge of the player piano. Using a pierced roll of paper, it can repeat a piece of music note-perfect. In the same way, a radio frequency could be made to jump every few seconds according to a code punched into the equivalent of a piano roll. Unless the enemy possessed the same roll, they couldn’t jam the torpedo’s frequency or send it off course.
After that, I was more cautious in my use of strange. But I still wasn’t prepared for the man who knew Marlene Dietrich.
He tagged along on one of my seminar walks. Tall, about forty, with a mop of gray hair, a small, well-trimmed beard, and round steel-framed spectacles, he wore a long gray overcoat that swept to his ankles. He reminded me of Conrad Veidt in Above Suspicion, smiling as he demonstrated instruments of torture. His height gave him that lofty repose of men playing chess on the big outdoor boards one sees in some parks, with pieces the size of garbage cans. He seemed to look down on us, considering which to pick up between his long fingers and move to a different square.
He obviously wasn’t French. But not American either. Was he even with the seminar? I never asked. It would have been . . . impolite.
As we passed the big Fnac store on rue de Rennes, I noticed a window display of Marlene Dietrich records. It was a perfect opportunity to tell a few anecdotes about my favorite actress, who, though she was born in Berlin and made her name in Hollywood, had died in Paris. But I didn’t get the chance.
“I knew her, you know,” a soft accented voice murmured in my ear. It was the man in the gray coat.
His use of “you know” was disturbing in its conversational intimacy. It implied we were, if not old friends, then at least well acquainted. It was that complicity I’d noticed in talking about opium, the sense of shared confidences. Except I was no longer the one sharing. With two words, this stranger had turned me from performer into spectator.
“My father was a musician,” he went on. “First a pianist, then the accordion, and later a bandoleon player in a tango band. He played at La Coupole for a while. For years, they always kept a table there . . .”
The memory appeared to sadden him, since he stared for a few seconds at the enigmatic face of Marlene on the CDs, and then perked up.
“But before the war, he had his own band, the Moonlight Serenaders, at a hotel in Switzerland. In Basel. This is where I was born. Basel.”
My group had wandered on but, seeing me in conversation with this tall stranger, straggled back. He paid them no attention, except to turn slightly to include them.
“Marlene,” he continued, “would come to the hotel to meet her lover, Remarque.”
Instinctively I fell into the role of straight man to this hypnotic performer. “Erich Marie Remarque. A German author,” I said, for the benefit of the group. “He wrote the famous novel of the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Everyone, the man included, looked at me in mild surprise. Why was I stating the obvious? I was awed at his capacity to involve us in his story. We were no longer strangers but old friends, relaxing after dinner over coffee and a digestif. And of course we knew who Remarque was.
“Remarque. Yes,” he continued, picking up his thread. “He and Marlene were lovers. When she was in Europe, they would meet at the hotel. And you know, in such hotels, a guest could hire a musician, or the whole band, to play just for them. So my father and his Moonlight Serenaders were asked by Remarque to come to his suite and play while he and Marlene made love.”
He looked around the group with an expression of such amiable amusement that nobody found the idea offensive, or even, it seemed, surprising. He might have been telling them that Herr Remarque liked his morning coffee black, with two lumps of sugar.
“There was a screen, you know. And my father and his musicians sat behind it, so they could see nothing. And what is really strange . . .”
He lowered his voice conspiratorially, as if the other details had not been odd enough.
“What is strange is this. Marlene explains to my father that Remarque is able to make love in only one way. She must whisper in his ear the words of a certain song, and keep whispering them until . . . well, you know. The song is from the operetta of Franz Lehar, Der Graf von Luxemburg—The Count of Luxembourg. It is called ‘Looking at the Stars.’ So each time Marlene and Remarque are at the hotel, they request my father and his men to come to the suite, and sit behind the screen, and play ‘Looking at the Stars.’ ”
For a moment, his attention drifted away. Was he listening to the lilt of that Lehar waltz? Then he recalled himself.
“But I am taking up your time.”
Pulling back the cuff of his coat, he revealed a square gray metal watch that belonged in a museum of art deco.
“And I am sorry; I must go. But this was been most interesting. Most interesting.”
He smiled around the group, then dived into the traffic, heading for the métro stop opposite.
Nobody commented at his departure, any more than they showed surpri
se at his arrival. It wasn’t unusual for us to run into other writers or artists in the street. Sometimes I invited them to pause and talk to the group. People accepted it as part of the show, proof that I really knew my city, and I didn’t discourage them.
Since the sixth arrondissement is, in that way, a small town, I knew that the man from Basel would turn up again sooner or later. A few weeks later, I came down one morning to see him outside the bookshop opposite. He was bent over the new arrivals in the boxes along the pavement.
Coming up behind him, I said, “Anything interesting?”
He didn’t look surprised. Innocently pleased, in fact.
“It is good to see you.” He looked over my shoulder. “Nobody else today?”
“Not today. Occasionally I take a day off. It gives me time to do research. On Der Graf von Luxemburg, for example.”
“Ah, really?”
“Yes. I looked it up. There’s no song in it called ‘Looking at the Stars.’ ”
“Well you know, the translators often wrote new lyrics.”
“And I couldn’t find the Moonlight Serenaders.”
“Oh, it was a very small orchestra. And so long ago.”
“But I did notice that the plot of Der Graf von Luxemburg does include a screen.”
Such stories only exist in operetta. A penniless count agrees to marry a stranger, and to divorce her shortly after, leaving her with the title of countess so she can marry a grand duke. At the wedding, a screen separates bride and groom, to keep the ceremony completely dispassionate, so neither sees the other. Later, of course, they meet by accident and fall in love—hopelessly, as they think, not realizing they are already married.
If he noticed my implied suggestion that he’d made up the story of Dietrich and Remarque and dropped in the detail of the screen from Der Graf von Luxemburg to add authenticity, he didn’t pick up on it.
“I’d forgotten that,” he said. “But you know, such things were common around Marlene.”
He turned toward me, confidingly.
“How we met is most unusual. This was when she was very old, and almost blind, and never left her apartment. Someone told me she was lonely, so I decided to make her a gift . . .”
It was a good story. Even better than the one about Remarque.
A few weeks later, a postcard arrived in the mail. The Swiss Cultural Centre invited me to a presentation by the distinguished Swiss performance artist and playwright Hans-Peter Litscher of his newest creation. I turned the card over. On the picture side was the man from Basel, surrounded by enigmatic bric-a-brac and wearing what appeared to be a furry animal suit.
His piece was called In Search of Eleanora Duse and Her Red-Haired Kangaroo. You didn’t know that Italy’s most famous actress at the turn of the nineteenth century owned a boxing kangaroo?
Oh, it’s a very interesting story.
Chapter 37
The Most Beautiful Walk in the World
Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized—
that was the dream of his life.
PHILIP ROTH, When She Was Good
And at last we come to my own most beautiful walk. There could only be one—down the street on which I live, rue de l’Odéon.
I first came to it twenty years ago, when I’d just arrived in Paris and Marie-Do was pregnant with Louise. Our daughter grew up here. I have vivid memories of her as a toddler, briefly separated from us in a crowd, turning to the nearest adult, a stranger, and inquiring “Ou est Maman?”—not plaintively but with the casual confidence one employed to request directions or the time; that sureness that comes with a sense of belonging and of place.
For a book person, this was hallowed ground. I never crossed the tiled floor of our building’s lobby without thinking of those who’d passed over it before me, heading up the serpentine staircase to the fourth floor.
To step onto the sidewalk of rue de l’Odéon (the first street in Paris ever to have a sidewalk, as it happens) was to wade into literary history. It was as if words poured in a torrent from the colonnade of the Odéon Theatre at the head of the street to boulevard Saint-Germain at its foot. In the 1700s, a few doors down the hill, printer Nicholas Bonneville lent a room to his friend, the American political writer Thomas Paine. Bonneville (and France) sheltered him while he poured out his anti-imperialist tirades, urging sedition in the American colonies with such passion that, as one hears the words, ink appears to spatter from the point of his quill like blood from a gash. “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Next door, during the 1920s and 1930s, lived the American publisher and writer Robert McAlmon—christened “Robert McAlimony” after he agreed to marry a shipping magnate’s Sapphic daughter, releasing her to lead a lesbian existence in Paris. With her money, he produced his modest Contact Editions. In 1923, he published three hundred copies of Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems. The stories included “Up in Michigan,” that small tragedy of a country girl’s love crushed by the male world of sex, booze, and blood. “She felt Jim right through the back of the chair and she couldn’t stand it and then something clicked inside of her and the feeling was warmer and softer. Jim held her tight hard against the chair and she wanted it now and Jim whispered ‘Come on for a walk.’ ”
The book sold poorly. People found the author crude and his work worse. “The Dumb Ox,” jeered snooty British modernist Percy Wyndham Lewis. Reading his review in Shakespeare and Company, Hemingway took a ruler and savagely slashed the heads off the tulips on Sylvia Beach’s desk. Passing the door of the shop, now a boutique selling women’s clothes, I often see those petals showering to the floor, just as I hear the querulous Dublin whine of James Joyce, half-blind and drunk on words, ranting the glorious diapason of Ulysses. “Bronze by gold, Miss Douce’s head by Miss Kennedy’s head, over the cross-blind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel.” And in the tiny apartment above the shop, Samuel Beckett and his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, hid from the Gestapo as they formed plans to flee south to safety. “I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.”
To find your place, to share it with those you love, and to be happy—who could want more than that?
In Jacques Prévert’s screenplay for Les Enfants du Paradis, made in the depths of the wartime occupation, the young actor Dubureau, played by Jean-Louis Barrault, stammers his admiration and desire for the lovely courtesan Garance, the greatest role of the unforgettable Arletty.
“You speak like a child,” she says gently. “It’s only in books that people love like that. In books and dreams.”
“Dreams and life, it’s the same for me,” he says. “I don’t care about life. I care about you.”
Moved by his innocence, she says, “You’re the nicest young man I’ve ever met.” Then, “Vous me plaisez”—literally “You please me” but implying much more. Affection is there, anticipation, but also memory, and a knowledge that nothing lasts.
Papa and Louise—
the most beautiful walk in the world
“C’est tellement simple, l’amour,” she says.
It’s so simple, love.
Appendix
Paris, Mode d’Emploi (Paris, A User’s Guide)
“Strewth!” said a friend from Australia, contemplating his serving of noisettes d’agneau sautées aux petits légumes at one of Paris’s more modest restaurants. “Fifty dollars for a lamb chop and veggies. Back home, you could have a whole sheep for less.”
I couldn’t argue with him. Paris is expensive—and more so every day as the pound and the dollar, U.S. and Australian,
slip ever lower against the euro. On the face of it, a cheap Paris holiday seems a contradiction in terms.
Well, don’t give up yet. Like most people with rural roots, the French know the value of a euro. When out-of-towners visit Paris, they don’t waste a centime. Learn from them. With sensible spending and some judicious cost-cutting, you can enjoy Paris and not still be paying for it to the end of the decade.
• Rule 1 •
Spend your money where it does you the most good.
Is your idea of a Paris holiday lounging in a canopied bed while relays of servants deliver room-service snacks? No shame in that (if you can afford it), so by all means check into a centrally located five-star hotel, for example, the Crillon, overlooking Place de la Concorde, right next to the Champs-Elysées and the U.S. embassy—a mere $1,500 a night for a double room.
But if you’re in Paris for the art, music, food, shopping, or romance, choose a three-star or even two-star establishment. They’ll be off the tourist track and won’t have much in the way of staff or even, in some cases, an elevator. Forget room service, too (though most offer a coffee-and-croissant breakfast). Rooms, though small, will be modern and clean, and three-star establishments will have en suite bathroom and toilet, telephone and TV. And you’ll pay, on average, $200.
• Rule 2 •
Eat as the French eat.
Parisian cuisine is still the best in the world—and among the most expensive. Dinner for two at the Tour d’Argent with that thrilling view of the Seine by night, or at Arpège, Paris’s second-highest-rated restaurant (and one which, incredibly, uses no meat), costs, with wine, at least $1,000.
So think about breakfast and lunch.
A true French café breakfast remains one of the great pleasures of life in Paris. The coffee is fresh, the croissants, brioches, and baguettes still warm from the oven. You can eat in comfort, plan the day, and be first in line at the Musée d’Orsay or the Louvre.
Lunch is even more of a bargain. This is the “working meal” for the French, who traditionally close business deals “between the pear and the cheese.” Prices average 50 percent lower than for dinner, even at the most fashionable restaurants. At Arpège, chef Alain Passard tests new creations on his lunch crowd with a set menu for less than $100. You still need to book weeks ahead, but it’s worth it for his legendary tomate aux douze saveurs—a tomato poached in a syrup of twelve spices, served with anise ice cream.