Ransacking Paris Read online

  He busked as a shoeshine clown, Monsieur Polish, to earn a living, and when he and his girlfriend, Olive, came around to our place after busking, he always pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket to give to Matt. Jean-Jacques collected objects – kangaroo skulls he found on the roadside, a twisted branch, a carved elephant, cockatoo feathers – and made them into sculptures. He also painted disturbing pictures with thick paint and violent colours. In the evenings, he and Anthony smoked joints together on the back veranda and their talk ranged all around the world and I could see there was a matching discontent and a sweetness in them both.

  In a few years, Jean-Jacques’ story had become a saga of art and heroin addiction and flight, but, at least for now, it’s enough that he held the French thread for me for several years. He opened the door to a playful sensibility, ludique, and a child-like imagination, which has ever since seemed to me to be intrinsically French. But by the time we went to live in Paris, we hadn’t seen him for nearly fifteen years.

  *

  All those Mountain years I wanted to live in Paris, it was my dream, but everyone has unfulfilled dreams. C’est la vie. I began to turn to memoir, more and more interested in exploring the self in writing, ‘the self as a physics and metaphysics’ as Montaigne put it. Why on earth couldn’t the self be a respectable subject for literature? It was a territory as complex, as vast, as any other; a moment-by-moment hallucination of sense impressions, emotions and thoughts, continuously creating the experience of a shady chestnut tree, an itchy leg, a smiling face, a sense of belonging, of love and grief and delight. Wasn’t an ungraspable sense of being, in fact, the only thing that connects each one of us?

  I read La Batarde and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, looking out through their authors’ eyes at a world with a light and shade so much more dramatic than the light and shade in my mountain back yard that I wondered if it was their gaze or their world that differed so much.

  From the back veranda I could see a rough lawn sloping down to a trampoline and a clothesline slung between two gum trees. Orchids grew untended under one of the gums and, one year, a nearby waratah planted in memory of my father burst out with seventeen extravagant red blooms. Along a wooden fence hung with two of Jean-Jacques’ wooden masks, dark mauve lilacs and port wine magnolia scented the air. Beyond the clothesline were angophora gums, banksias, grevilleas, wattles, random and tangled, sloping all the way down to a creek. I couldn’t see the creek from where I sat but I had seen yabbies in the pool created by a stone dam the boys had built. Matt and Patrick were almost seven years apart, but they worked together hauling and balancing the stones, which stayed in place for years, even when the roar of brown flood waters tumbled over them.

  I was immersed in my days, I wrote, I enjoyed the feel of children’s arms holding me close and wasn’t discontent. I don’t want to give the wrong impression, or rather I don’t want to tempt the Fates who have given me more than my fair share of love and luck, but nothing lasts. I am at least old enough to know that. Even if it lies dormant for years, sleeping like a hibernating bear, restlessness always returns, no matter what.

  And then an aneurysm in Dina’s brain burst and she died and Theo’s eyes were bruised forever and I knew for certain that life and dreams and getting up in the morning could stop without warning. A blood vessel can split in the head and in an instant all is lost and nothing anyone can do or say, no clichés about holding on and having courage and living the dream, will make the slightest bit of difference. Plans for building an extension on the house are left mid-air, a child is left motherless and a clever and beautiful young woman is a handful of ashes.

  And even if catastrophe doesn’t arrive just yet, the body still changes, the monthly flow of blood starts drying up, the skin thickens, and then one day someone asks an innocent question: what have you been up to? It’s an everyday conversation, but suddenly the answer feels too heavy to say.

  I waded through muddy water against the current. Marianne Faithfull sang ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ on the CD player while I ironed. I was already older than Lucy; she was only thirty-seven. What had once seemed over the hill was already in the past. She would never ride in Paris in a sports car. The plaintive voice released vast territories of youthful longing. I put down the iron and cried. I hadn’t known that all dreams come back as forceful and demanding as babies. I had thought I had found my place here, but I was longing for elsewhere.

  I knew what would assuage the restlessness; it’s not that hard to recognise an old yearning when it resurfaces. I told Anthony my dream, and he, being always ready to jump sideways, dreamed with me. We began to plot and save. I made lists, researched apartments in Paris, taught extra classes, calculated endless sums and currency conversions, looked for someone to rent our small house in the Mountains. Our younger son, Patrick, left school and enrolled at university to study politics and watched with bewildered astonishment as Anthony and I shut the door behind us.

  *

  It was ten o’clock, still our first day in Paris and still twilight outside, but Anthony was asleep. I was too excited to sleep, unwilling to miss one moment. I had been annoyed with him for climbing the ladder and collapsing on the mattress with the daylight only just faded.

  ‘How boring you are!’

  He’d shrugged and closed his eyes and gone to sleep. He could always do that, even after a real argument. I wanted him to feel everything the way I did but he’d never had any need to dance to my tune. I was afraid of fading away. I wanted to stay awake every second, make the day last forever.

  I stood up and took more clothes out of the suitcases but I couldn’t think where to put them. There was no wardrobe or chest of drawers and I couldn’t see any hooks for hanging anything. I turned around in the dim room, swinging jeans and a coat on my arm, and the books on the floor slithered out of order, my companions jostling one another sideways. Montaigne – I was already beginning to fall in love with him – slid off sad-eyed Madame de Sévigné and Rousseau fell on her and bumped into Stendhal, de Beauvoir and Ernaux, making them lean but not fall.

  I had met them all before, my book companions, but I didn’t know them well, they were acquaintances really, and I wasn’t sure how I would get along with them every day for a year. Perhaps I would have little in common with them. After all, except for Ernaux, they grew up not just in a different landscape and culture, but in a different time.

  Montaigne was born 430 years before I was, de Beauvoir crossed over with me for a few decades – she died when I was thirty – and the others were all born in earlier centuries. They were envoys from another country and I wanted them to show me what they saw, what they heard, what they learned. I wanted more than companionship. I wanted to slip inside them; that’s what I should admit to from the beginning. Nestle unnoticed beneath their hearts and in their eyes, just under their opaque irises. I wanted to see the light and shade of their worlds and feel the press and weave of their minds over mine.

  I unpacked a few pages of manuscript and put them on the desk under the mezzanine and restacked the memoir writers – one for each century since Montaigne in the sixteenth century began the ‘daft undertaking’, as he called it, of writing the self. I sat on the chair in the shadows; it was claustrophobic and dark under there and the memoirists made a squat tower; looming or protecting, I couldn’t tell.

  I placed a photograph of each of my boys on the desk – Matt, a young man with honey-coloured curls, and Patrick, still a sensitive teenager – and one of Baron Rock, the lopsided rocky hill behind my childhood farm. There was a sudden painful contraction in my heart. It was all in the past. I didn’t know if I knew how to be a grown-up without them. I had been pregnant so soon after meeting Anthony I hadn’t even been alone with him, just him, no children, in twenty-five years. What was I doing trying to turn back time?

  The desk was old-fashioned with wooden compartments, made whe
n pen and paper were the only writing implements, and a bit narrow for my laptop. What if being here in this studio was my life, the one I’d imagined on the farm, and that I never had been living amongst eucalypts and banksias in the Blue Mountains for twenty years, being a good parent, helping with science projects, driving boys to soccer, chopping wood for the slow combustion fire, teaching classes, digging in the garden, busy as a bee? It was all a phantom, the past.

  I picked up my diary to make a list of what I wanted to do. I couldn’t stop making lists – it had taken me so many to get here. What did I want from this configuration of streets and buildings, limestone and plaster-of-Paris and cobblestones, doors wide enough for carriages, shadowy courtyards, theatres outside my window? Did I really imagine I could find something I couldn’t find back home?

  I would allow myself a few days’ wandering the streets to map my geography and then I had to open the manuscript. I was ready to start, or restart, but anxious. After working and saving like a madwoman for so long, I would soon need to face the words again.

  Two

  July

  I myself am the subject of my book.

  Michel de Montaigne

  I still have the diary I kept that year. It’s just notes, handwritten in a French exercise book, the kind with graph-paper, papier scolaire, which I bought on the first jetlagged day at WH Smith’s bookshop over the road from the Tuileries. It was too big to carry around with me, not useful for jotting observations, but now as I try to recall what happened that year it has the heft of a convincing record.

  On the front page I taped a black-and-white postcard of a girl standing on the pont d’Arcole, one of the bridges spanning from the Right Bank to the Île de la Cité, the larger of the two islands in the Seine. The girl has her back to the camera looking eastward down the river towards the Île St Louis and is wearing plain clothes – a cardigan, narrow skirt and sneakers – but her arms are uplifted in a joyful salute. Even though you can’t see her face, she looks like a naive, happy girl, probably a country girl, just arrived in the city of her dreams. It’s a well-known image – you see it in racks outside all the postcard shops in Paris – but I don’t care that it’s commonplace. It’s exactly how I felt at the beginning of my sojourn.

  At first I wrote excitable descriptions of streets and cafés and people in the diary, a series of postcards, clear edges against bright blue skies, but it soon enough became patchy, often just instructions like ‘Ring Mum today’ or ‘Choir 19.00’. While it allows some checking of dates, much of that year is a sequence of memories overlaid since then with other sojourns, not a history but a kind of layered honeycomb of stored memory.

  *

  Despite scrambling up the ladder to bed so late the night before, the first morning I woke early, still on an Australian clock, tired but wide awake. Anthony was up already and had been down to the boulangerie in the rue des Abbesses. The croissants and pain au chocolat he had bought were still warm in their paper bag.

  ‘We can’t do this every day,’ I said. ‘Pastry and chocolate for breakfast.’

  ‘This is not every day. This is today. First-morning party.’

  I sat on the stool over by the window with my cup of tea and gazed with an unfocused stare out at the courtyard. I was in Paris at last but a ritual as deep as tea was not going to change. I took a bite of the pain au chocolat. The warm runny chocolate dribbled down my chin and I wiped it off with my fingers. Anthony leaned over and licked my chocolate fingertips, not sexily but as if he were licking the back of a spoon.

  ‘Sorry for saying you were boring last night,’ I said. The small and ordinary failings had come with me.

  ‘Let’s explore,’ he said.

  Out in the rue des Trois Frères it was already warm although still fresh on the shady side of the narrow street. Anthony turned right and I followed but within seconds we stopped at Bonjour l’Artiste. There was a painted jester on the door in front of a cascade of gold streamers and the windows were scattered with blinking lights and crammed with masks and magic tricks and a stuffed white rabbit. It looked like a shop out of a children’s book where elves and gnomes might work, where you might find yourself transformed into a bird or a dormouse. A fall right through the looking-glass; Alice quivering in anticipation. It was closed at this early hour, 11 am.

  Near the end of my childhood the muttering white rabbit and the raging Queen of Hearts still frightened me, but I wanted to be Alice nonetheless. To grow tall, or small, to fit through looking-glasses and tiny doors and rabbit holes into other worlds; how lucky she was. She could have half a cup of tea with the Mad Hatter and see a smiling cat and answer riddles and play croquet with hedgehogs and flamingoes. Heads might be cut off and babies might change into pigs too, which was worrying, but the possibilities of entering another world were too enticing to turn away.

  Anthony pointed out a bird mask that reminded him of Jean-Jacques. We still had a couple of masks of his at home. He had left all his possessions with us – animal skulls, masks, photographs of malformed creatures, a hash pipe, Balinese puppets, pots and pans and sheets and a wardrobe – when he fled Australia. We kept a lot of it, put our clothes in the wardrobe, hung the puppets up in the hallway, and the disturbing papier-mâché bird-man mask sat on the mantelpiece for fifteen years.

  He had sent a couple of postcards from Paris soon after he left fifteen or so years ago, and a photograph of himself sitting in a window. Last we had heard, he had a new Spanish girlfriend, Ana, and he was thinking of working with his parents in Switzerland.

  Further down, the cobbled street turned a sharpish corner and then lost itself in a five-ways. One corner was occupied by a boulangerie, which became our local for the next few months. We crossed over into the rue Tardieu where the shops sold Eiffel towers of all sizes, Sacré-Coeur in snow-domes, Mona Lisa mugs and tea-towels. We came to an open square with a large nineteenth-century carousel, and there, high on Montmartre above us, were the symmetrical white domes and cupolas of Sacré-Coeur cut out against the blue sky. I want to say it perfectly reproduced its thousands of photographic images, but of course, it’s the other way around.

  I read aloud from my pocket Paris history that it was built as a penance for the excesses of the socialist Communards who seized power in Paris in the brief revolution of 1871 just after the Franco-Prussian war. The Communards had hidden several hundred cannons they had somehow dragged up to Montmartre and after fierce battles with the army had established the Commune and ruled Paris for a few months.

  ‘Penance?’ Anthony scoffed. ‘You mean it was the Catholic Church reasserting its power!’

  I bridled a little. My childhood days were immersed in ritual and incense and Benediction and confession and making lists of sins and coveting a lacy white communion dress. My brother and sister and I constructed an altar rail out of boxes in the laundry and made communion hosts by pressing round Vegemite lids into bread and played at being priest and congregation. Every evening I knelt on the lino in my bedroom and prayed for the Fall of Communism, even though I was from a poor family and even though I didn’t know what communism was. I might be on the side of the Paris Commune now, but my history was against me.

  ‘Let’s walk right up,’ Anthony said. ‘You can show me how to genuflect.’

  I ignored him and set off up the hill past the young French-Africans approaching tourists with braided wrist bracelets. They smiled and held out the bracelets and deftly tied them to wrists before tourists had time to protest. I had only just arrived but I’d read my guide book; I wasn’t going to be caught.

  From the terrace at the top, the basilica wasn’t nearly as white and had a blocky squat air. The travertine stone was like concrete close up and had lost its drama.

  ‘One of the many things in life that look better from a distance,’ said Anthony. I looked away. I hadn’t wanted it to be said.

  There were hundreds of tourists on the
terrace gazing out over Paris. The steps below were crowded with young travellers; a boy played his guitar and sang ‘Brown-eyed Girl’, a couple were setting up a puppet show, more young men held out bracelets and Eiffel tower earrings.

  We surveyed the city for a few minutes, not able to name anything except Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, but it all felt recognisable; it could not have been any other city in the world. The overarching whiteness of it gave it the appearance of an imagined town, a place that had constructed itself to be looked at. This wasn’t the real-life red roofs and green-grey gums of Sydney or the washed-out honey colours of country towns, it was a fantasy city where all the buildings were the same whitish-cream and the same dimensions. It created a sense of order and calm – and unreality. Around the edges, outside the périphérique, the ring-road, there was a rash of skyscrapers, threatening the perfection, but they were not enough to disturb the dreamy sense of looking at a mythical city.

  We walked down the side of Sacré-Coeur. There would be plenty of time to go inside another day; today we just wanted to see the lie of the land in our quartier, the eighteenth. For local government, Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements and Parisians name where they live, not by suburb, but by the number of their arrondissement, the sixth, the eleventh, the eighteenth. Each number carries a connotation: the sixth connotes ‘bobo’, bohemian-bourgeois or intello, the eleventh suggests young and cool, the eighteenth is the artistic world of early last century.

  Around the corner was place du Tertre, with its cafés and checked tablecloths and geraniums in boxes and shops selling Toulouse-Lautrec, Dali and Picasso prints and artists sketching pencil portraits – a marketed version of its own past. ‘A picture of Madame,’ the artists called out in English, holding their pads and pencils and pretending to start sketching. People streamed all around us, picking up posters of Aristide Bruant, the cabaret performer in his black cape and red scarf, and key-rings with melting Dali clocks and music boxes playing ‘La Vie en Rose’.