March
Our true self is not entirely within.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I finished a draft of the manuscript. It’s always a relief to finish but this time it felt like perfect timing. It was two weeks before Theo and Kit arrived. Theo’s mother had died more than ten years earlier, but I still didn’t want to be writing about her – and him – right in front of his eyes.
I was relieved to have the last piece, the closing scene of the story: Theo and I were walking up the street from our house; I was teaching him a song I’d learned at choir: ‘We are going/Heaven knows where we are go-o-ing’. It was rough, there was work to do, but I knew there was a sense of the moment between us that I had wanted to re-create.
Every now and then, the perception of a moment is impressed so sharply in waxy memory that words can be formed in the indents. In the moment of perception I feel the clear imprint calmly, although, in recall, there is urgency, the effort to see each aspect of the moment: Theo’s pale face and winning smile as he sings with me, the slope of the hill underfoot, the yellowish light filtering through snow clouds. Then I feel absorbed in the whole as if it is happening again, and in the end, there is relief – and pleasure – when the words are found. It feels as if the moment has not really been remade, but given form for the first time. Proust said that after he had written his first piece when he was a teenager – it was about glimpsing three steeples appearing ‘like three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight’ – he had such a sense of happiness that ‘as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice’. I burst out laughing when I first read that, the image of the boy-writer singing like a chook who has laid an egg – oh my, I have just made something new from my own body! I remembered our scraggy chooks and their eggs in dusty nests under the wheat harvester, or on the seat of the old truck or, once or twice, a pullet dropping her first egg in the yard without any care at all. I liked scooping them up when they were warm and clean and fresh, and feeling them nestle, perfect in the palm of my hand.
*
Before Theo and Kit arrived, Anthony and I made a trip to Istanbul so I could have my passport stamped from outside the European Union. Our long-stay visas hadn’t arrived in time before we’d left Australia, which meant we couldn’t legally stay in Europe more than six months. It was a bit risky – and if we’d been African, very risky – but a trip outside the European Union would re-establish our legal status. It sounds extravagant to dash off to Turkey, but it was easy to book cheap flights with a local airline – one, as it happened, that was later grounded after one of its planes crashed into the Red Sea – and to find a cheap, hot-pink hotel in Istanbul. It was only for four or five days, just enough to leave a bright impression in the still grey days of March.
There was the tiled dome of heaven in the Blue Mosque and frescoed layers of religion in Santa Sophia, the mini-skirts and blue and black hijabs in the street, the rows of carpets with geometric patterns, flowers, birds, vines, and the carpet-sellers offering sweet apple-mint tea. The hawkers in the streets spoke French – ‘Madame? Madame?’ and I answered, ‘Non, non.’ We took a boat on the Bosporus to a Crusaders’ castle and sat on the grass talking about the knights of France and England who had arrived here – was it to destroy Islam or simply for adventure?
At the ancient markets I saw baskets full of dates, nuts, grapes and figs and thought they must have looked the same when the knights strolled past, even when the first Christians before them wandered by wide-eyed. Afterwards we went to the sixteenth-century hammam with its crescent moons and stars, and we were steamed and scrubbed and rubbed and washed to pink newborn perfection. The air was cool on our baby-skin but the sky was high and blue and the light falling on stone walls was like the beginning of time.
One afternoon we visited the Topkapi Palace where the sultans of the Ottoman Empire lived and ruled. I traipsed through the rooms of the harem, the Courtyard of the Eunuchs, the Circumcision Room, the gilded bathroom of the Sultan’s mother, and the Treasury with its diamonds and emeralds and pearls. In the early morning I woke to the muezzin’s call rising and falling like a bird on unseen currents and felt as if I had fallen into a story.
By the time we got back to Paris, Istanbul felt like a kaleidoscope of colour and light, not quite something we had dreamed, but a tear in the fabric that had let another world in. The woman in the boulangerie across the road had noticed I hadn’t been in for a few days.
‘J’étais en vacances à Istanbul,’ I explained and felt like a local. I was on holiday in Istanbul.
I remembered my childhood longing for difference on the endless days of the farm, to see something new, for something else to happen. Every day there were paddocks, and a dry creek, and a few gum trees and cattle and sheep, and Baron Rock and the shabby farmhouse. The seasons changed and work changed with the seasons, harvesting, shearing, ploughing, hay-making, the same every year. Outside the farm, there was school and church and shopping in town. When we drove in through the hills to town I looked up the valleys and wished I could walk along them, wished my father would take a turn off the road, a detour.
People too were the same. Everyone had a mother who stayed at home and a father who owned a farm and everyone was white. And always the same neighbours; they never moved away and no-one moved in, except once, for a year, a family of share-farmers. Rarely, a stranger arrived at the farm; once a man came selling encyclopaedias, and my brothers and sisters and I were so unused to difference we hid behind the water tanks to watch. The only real difference happened in books.
Here, strangers from all over the world walked past my door, there were detours everywhere I looked; countries with palaces full of fairytale treasure were only an hour or two away. I wondered if having difference so easily available meant that people born here did not have to long helplessly for elsewhere.
But then Rousseau always longed for an imaginary place, ‘the castles in Spain’ in which he could easily take up residence, and 300 or so years later, Annie Ernaux in a small French town says, ‘When a child and teenager, I lived continually in dream and imagination.’ Perhaps the longing for another imagined world is a condition that afflicts some people. It’s as if reality can never yield quite enough. Perhaps it comes from endless desire, the hungry ghosts of Buddhist mythology who can never be filled. For Ernaux, by an ‘inverse movement’ as she called it, instead of imaginary life, the reality of her own life became the material of her writing. The same thing has happened to me.
*
In one way I have more in common with Annie Ernaux than any of the other memoirists, even de Beauvoir, because we are alive at the same time. We share the globalised world, the flood of information and communication pouring across us: television, mobile phones, satellites, the internet, Skype, Twitter, the mix of cultures, ideas, peoples. We also have in common an uneducated provincial background – and haven’t returned to it except in our writing.
What do I know about Ernaux?
She was born in 1940 in a working-class family in a small town in the Seine-Maritime department of Normandy. Just after the war, her parents moved twenty-five kilometres to Yvetot, a cold town on a windy plain, where they ran a café. She was an only child, her older sister dying of diphtheria two years before she was born. Her father, who had been a farmhand, and mother, who had worked in a factory, strove to give her every advantage, although her mother couldn’t help saying, ‘You cost us a lot.’ She studied at Rouen University, married, had two children, divorced. She lives in Cergy-Pontoise, a satellite town near Paris. Her books, La Place, about her father; Les Années, ‘a sociology of her self’; Une Femme, about her mother; and Retour à Yvetot, a return to her hometown, explore daily living and the tension between class and writing. Ernaux has spent her writing life reclaiming her past, her father and mother, her class background. She’s the only memoirist I’ve read entirely in French.
*
In La Place, Ernaux writes of her father: ‘He ferried me from home to school on his bike. From one bank to the other, come rain or shine. His greatest pride, indeed his mission in life: that I should belong to the world that had spurned him. All the while singing “round and round we row”.’
I thought of my father who did not even get to high school and who was dedicated to giving his eight children entry to a world that would spurn him. He had a short, stocky, peasant build and a harelip, which made him rather shy and unconfident. He had no pretensions, did not want fame or riches, his family and his faith were all that he required, but he believed the ability to think and write well were important because they could be used to persuade others of the value of living truthful lives under God. We had the smallest farm and the largest family in the district, but by going without comforts – no inside toilet, no toilet paper, no heating except for an open fire in one room, no running hot water – he was able to send us all to the convent high school in town.
One day he and I argued about some idea – I can’t remember what it was but it must have been a religious idea as that was the only kind of idea that really mattered to my father – and I used my superior education to demolish him. I was dismissive. I was in my twenties by then and had been to university. I don’t remember what I said; what I remember is the crushed look in his blue eyes as he replied in a hurt voice, ‘You don’t have to come the Queen of Sheba with me.’ Even though I was ashamed, I thought, what an odd, old-fashioned expression to use.
I’m not sure where to meet Annie Ernaux for coffee. Even though she lives outside Paris, she would know it better than I do. In the end I want to show her a place with an Australian atmosphere – and where I can have a good coffee – so I’m back at Café KB, the same place I met Montaigne. There’s a brocante, a second-hand fair, in the rue des Martyrs and the stall outside the café has old ironwork, kitchen appliances, embroidered tablecloths and lamps piled on tables. Annie Ernaux is waiting for me when I arrive, sitting inside at the window watching the crowd. She is elegant and still beautiful, high cheekbones, blue eyes, thick hair dyed a light copper. She looks refined, sensitive, well-groomed, middle-class, nothing about her appearance gives away her origins.
I sit down and put my copy of Une Femme on the table.
‘It was the first book I read in French,’ I say, forgetting about Le Petit Prince. ‘I read it first before my mother died and found it …’ I stop to search for the right phrase, ‘so precise, so true. I like the way you name things without poetic effect, you restore their power to move the reader.’
She listens intently and I can see she likes what I am saying. She says that she wants her words to be understood by the people she comes from.
I tell her I loved her ‘washing with bleach’ story and recount my ‘dirty girl at the water-bubbler’ story. She smiles; we understand each other.
I change topic, wanting to discuss de Beauvoir because I know she is an admirer. I say that I like de Beauvoir too but that I liked her better as a young woman, that she became too adamant when she was older. Annie, I think I can call her Annie, defends her, saying that de Beauvoir tried to live to the full extent of her being and that always has to be admired. We talk for a long time. Annie doesn’t like the way the rue des Martyrs had become so bobo and has pushed out all the workers, but she likes the relaxed atmosphere of Café Kooka Boora and the easygoing baristas. I invite her to come to Australia one day.
*
Kit and Theo arrived in Paris. It was Theo’s first overseas trip, except for when he was two months old and his mother took him to her family home in New Zealand for a week or two. Dina’s own mother had died before Theo was born, and then within a few years, she was dead herself. She was thirty-seven, Theo was three. It was a long time ago and he wasn’t a little boy anymore – he was tall with dark curls and beautiful eyes – but the loss was still, would probably always be, in him. I thought of Stendhal, whose mother died when he was seven: ‘It came about that all the joys of childhood ended with my mother.’ Years after the Paris trip, on his twenty-fourth birthday, Theo wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘I have been sad every day since you died.’
But in Paris he had a reprieve. On the first morning, after he and his father left their bags in our apartment, Anthony and I took Kit and Theo on the Metro down to the Tuileries and stood on the rise above place de la Concorde so that they could see Paris all around them. We looked at the gold-tipped obelisk and in the distance the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe then turned and started walking down the Tuileries towards the first pond.
‘I love Paris! I’m going to come back and live here!’ Theo exclaimed. It was only halfway through his first morning. He looked at me and grinned and I grinned back. We walked around the pond and looked at the wooden boats bobbing on the water as a couple of boys poked at them with sticks. The sun wasn’t warm but it was bright enough to make the water glitter. I felt a proprietorial thrill, as if the beauty of Paris somehow had been my skilful doing.
Over the next few days a flurry of sightseeing confirmed my skill. I revealed a golden Joan of Arc on her horse and the faces under the Pont Neuf, the Fontaine des Innocents at Châtelet and the mountains of seafood at the Bastille markets. In the backstreets of Montmartre I revealed the café where we played Scrabble and where the air smelled of hash, and the still wintry vineyard opposite the Lapin Agile, the cabaret frequented by Picasso, Utrillo, Modigliani and friends, the statue of Dalida, and the Roman temple column in St-Pierre, all of it magicked out of the air by me.
*
I wonder why it matters that Theo, or anyone else, should love what I love. There is always a pleasure when others love as I do, always a slight kind of rupture when they don’t. I don’t think it’s that I want to colonise others, make them all horrifyingly like me, but the feeling of being in tune, in harmony with someone else, is one of the deepest pleasures. Most often it is fleeting; once, years ago, I was standing at a pedestrian crossing in Sydney and I caught the eye of a man in a car stopped at the traffic lights – and we suddenly recognised each other as fellow human beings in the world. We both smiled widely. That was more than thirty years ago, but I can still remember exactly where it was – the corner of George and Liverpool streets in the centre of Sydney – and the joy of being one with a stranger. I wonder if that’s what Rousseau meant when he wrote, ‘Our true self is not entirely within.’
*
Theo went to the Dali museum near the place du Tertre and to the Pompidou Centre and the Musée d’Orsay, spending hours looking at paintings every day. He was only fourteen but he was already creating himself as an artist, filling a notebook with drawings and dressing each day with a kind of romantic flair – a long flowing overcoat, waistcoat, felt hat. A few years later he would be at art school just as his mother had been. Dina had had the same eye for beauty and style and seeing him here in Paris made me wonder how he had inherited her gifts along with her eyes and curls and easy laugh. He wasn’t shaped or influenced by her, but he was as much a mirror of her as could be possible.
Some days he hung around the apartment and read or looked up places to see on the internet. He was a long, rangy teenager, but not loud or argumentative, easy to be around. One day I was cleaning the apartment, putting the sheets on to wash and afterwards draping them over the doors to dry, scrubbing the bath, vacuuming around Theo’s long legs. He looked up from his book.
‘Listen to this,’ he said, preparing to read aloud. He’d always done that, read pages out loud and quoted large chunks of films or The Simpsons to me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m busy.’ I’d always been a bit impatient with whatever hilarious extract from Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde he wanted to subject me to.
‘It won’t take long,’ he persisted. ‘You’ll like it.’
‘Thanks, but I have to get this done now. We’re going out later and I still have to clean the toilet.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You keep going and I will trot around after you and read to you like a literate puppy.’
I stopped and laughed. ‘Okay, you win. You’re much too good for me.’
Afterwards we went out to Versailles together. I had been a few times, as anyone who has visitors in Paris must, and was tired of its weary glory, but I had to take Theo. We both read our guide books as the train sped through the south-western suburbs of Paris, occasionally glancing at the bare, cold gardens and state housing towers. There was a brief patch of fields and forest and then we were at Versailles, walking up the hill to the gilded gates of the palace. We trailed around the state rooms with the waves of other sightseers and took photographs in the Hall of Mirrors of infinitely reflecting crowds and cameras. Afterwards we stood on the steps above the Apollo Fountain with its rearing horses and chariots at the beginning of a vista that continued all the way to the horizon. We admired the symmetrical sweep of pools, clipped gardens, lawns, woods; from our feet to the sky an utterly controlled world. Theo remarked that it was ‘sort of calming’.
I nodded, wondering if the random chaos of losing a mother when he was so young had made order more necessary. I found it impossible enough years later to comprehend a world without my mother in it; a child without a mother has lost almost all his context, his surroundings almost erased; how does he find a shape against the blankness? Theo draped his arm over my shoulder as we stood there. He often did that, mostly to show how much taller than me he was, and we stared at the panorama in silence.
Later, back in Paris, I asked him if it was okay to use his name in the book I was writing about his mother. The plundering of others’ lives can’t be hidden. Better to admit it up front. Bees can buzz as shrilly as they like, and sting the unprotected, but without honey they will starve.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I don’t care. No-one I know will read it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I’d been in Paris for nine months, long enough for everyday life to blur into a kaleidoscope of scenes. A few events are anchored in time, but most float, sometimes attaching themselves to weather or another scene. I do know Theo and Kit were there when my choir sang at the launch of a CD – I have a memory of them finding their seats in a row near the front. Anthony came too and Patrick was over from Amsterdam for a short visit.
The CD was a collection of French chansons by a friend of Marc’s and we were told to ask our family and friends to come to make a good crowd. We arrived at the hall in the twentieth arrondissement and as soon as I saw my choir gathered near the back, I realised I hadn’t understood the instructions about what to wear. I thought I’d heard ‘toutes couleurs’ so I was wearing a multicoloured patterned top. Everyone else was wearing one plain colour and black trousers. I asked Marie-Louise what we had been told and she said, ‘Any colour, but it has to be one colour, not patterned. And black pants.’
I stood on stage and sang, ‘La Paysanne’ and ‘L’accordéon’, confident at least in the chorus each time. We only had two songs to sing and we had rehearsed the night before but I still needed the song sheets to remember all the words. I could see Anthony, Patrick, Kit and Theo watching me and clapping when we finished. I hadn’t quite got it right in my multicoloured top but I was singing in a choir in Paris and my family and friends were witnesses to it.
A few weeks later I was on a stage, of sorts, again, this time doing a reading at Café de la Mairie near St-Sulpice, a church visited for its Delacroix and for the brass meridian line in the floor. The café across from the church was shabby, ordinary-looking, but renowned for its long history of literary events in the upstairs room.
Elaine, whom I’d met a few months earlier and who had owned the Australian Bookshop in Paris, often organised readings for visiting Australian writers. She was one of that fast disappearing breed who devote themselves to literature for love. She even looked like someone from another era, a glamorous 1950s woman in a Max Dupain photograph perhaps, with softly waved hair and soft skin. She offered to arrange a reading at Café de la Mairie for me. Once she had booked it, I worried that I would be speaking to an empty room. I knew practically no-one in Paris; no-one would come.
By the evening of the reading I imagined empty chairs and tables and wanted to call it off. Who can bear to call out ‘Regarde’ and no-one turns a head? Not even my mother looks up. As it happened, Elaine had arranged an email-out from the Australian Embassy and a few expats arrived, and my friends came, Vicky, Trish, Camilla and Sylvie – and Anthony, of course. I wondered if the desire to map where I begin and end in the world is also the desire to understand where others begin and end. The mapping of the self is not really about the past, even though the details are all of the past. As Annie Ernaux remarked, it’s not about searching for lost time, but ‘to show how we always carry time with us’. When I read her words I could see time past cradled inside each one of us like a nest made of bleached smooth twigs, string, ribbons, wiry grasses. Sometimes all I can do is marvel at its intricacy. Afterwards we went to a café near Mabillon Metro and had more wine and moules frites, mussels and chips, and talked about books.
After Kit and Theo left there was a lull. I had looked at everything in Paris, twice, three times. What else was there to look at? And what was the point of endlessly looking? I stayed at home for a while, read through my manuscript, made notes, wrote postcards to my mother, started translating Une Femme into English to improve my French grammar. I enjoyed the familiarity of my quartier, the greetings from the woman in the boulangerie, the nod from the Nigerian man in the sewing shop over the road, but there was still the knowledge that I could not see this place from the inside. I had to keep searching, keep looking. Look at everything.
One afternoon I took the Metro down to Strasbourg–St-Denis to explore the quartier around rue St Martin and rue St Denis, two parallel streets which run from near Les Halles all the way up to Gare de l’Est. Both streets had triumphal arches halfway along, marking the old tollgates of Paris where people had streamed through, paying their taxes as they entered the city. The kings and emperors of France, Napoleon’s troops too, had entered Paris through the St Denis gate, returning from wars, or from Basilica of St Denis to the north, in extravagant parades of power and domination.
I’d been to the quartier only once before with Anthony to try an Indian restaurant in passage Brady one night and thought it had the feel of another country altogether – the smell of curries, the strings of fairy lights decorating the passage, the un-Parisian cries and urgings to go into this or that restaurant. Now, in the late Paris winter, the streets were crowded with market stalls heaped with red, green and yellow peppers, bunches of green bananas, unrecognisable salad leaves, piles of garlic and other roots. The clothes shops had saris and robes in scarlet and royal blue and emerald green, patterned and edged with gold. And, I quickly realised, the streets were streets of men.
There were hundreds of men of Middle Eastern and Indian origin and some Africans. I couldn’t see any women at all. My heartbeat sped up, thumped hard enough for me to be conscious of it as I walked. The men were in clusters, walking, standing about, sitting outside cafés, smoking, drinking tea. No women. The men were not threatening in their manner, but my skin prickled. Only men were allowed out here. I was relieved that it was winter and I was well covered from head to toe. I walked quickly, trying not to catch anyone’s eyes, keeping my eyes slightly down. Each time I glanced up the crowds of men seemed more dense, more Other. Should I keep going? My heart banged louder.
Then two plump African women in long floral dresses came around the corner of the next street and walked towards me. They were talking to each other and one of them laughed. As they passed a surge of identification and relief washed through me. Without a moment’s thought, I turned around and walked back down the street, staying near them, until I reached the Metro.
I thought about it a great deal afterwards, the feelings of alienation and then of identification. There are so many lines around being human – culture, gender, class, status, colour, age – that much of the time it seems almost impossible to recognise one another. For a while on that day, men were no longer fellow humans sharing a street in Paris, but another dangerous species. I kept thinking I should go back there again and walk calmly along the street and see them as human beings, but I never did.
One day I was in the shop in rue Ordener that sold African produce. Ginger wasn’t available in the market or supermarket or greengrocer’s – and I used it every morning in my breakfast juice – so I always bought it and sometimes honey there. They stocked all sorts of foods that I didn’t recognise, cartons and tinned food as well as fresh vegetables and fruits I’d never seen before. There was often a crate of what looked like mown grass right near the checkout. That day, I asked the checkout woman what the grass was – how was it eaten, was it cooked? She was white-skinned but all the others in her shop, all the women doing their evening shopping, were black-skinned. She looked at my white face, held my gaze and said, ‘Je ne sais pas. Les Africains la mangent!’ I don’t know. The Africans eat it! Her voice, loud enough for everyone in the shop to hear, seared the air with scorn and disdain. I felt dozens of eyes on my pale skin. I looked away from the woman, grabbed my ginger and change and left the shop.
I rarely know what to say when the words should be said aloud in a firm voice. Even in English. The next day at my rendezvous with Sylvie I wanted to tell her about the checkout woman, but whenever I thought of it, the words stuck.
My memoirist companions don’t have much to say about people from other countries – except Montaigne. In the 1500s, European exploration of the Americas and Africa and Asia was just beginning and during that time Montaigne had a visitor who had been with the French explorer Villegaignon, when he made the original French settlement in Brazil. Montaigne listened to his first-hand tales of the boundless new territories and peoples who lived differently. Even then, in the sixteenth century, he was doubtful about the morality and value of exploring and seizing of new lands: ‘I fear our eyes are bigger than our belly. Our curiosity more than we can stomach.’
He couldn’t have known the effects of colonisation then, the exploitation of lands and people, the oppression and destruction of culture, nor the later twentieth-century return of colonised people to the ‘motherland’, disturbing the towns and suburbs with their dark presence, giving rise to fearful political parties, but he seems to have understood that greedy impulse could only lead one way. He was writing in the 1580s, more than 200 years before Australia was seized by Europeans, who, as educated sons of the Enlightenment, one might think had read and learned from Montaigne.
He says that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to […] indeed we have no other criterion or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country’.
He launches into a description, no doubt gained from his explorer-visitor, of the country and customs of the people of Brazil: ‘They inhabit a land with the most delightful countryside and a temperate climate, so that, from what I have been told by my sources, it is rare to find anyone ill there.’ On their way of life and ethics he reports glowingly: ‘Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love for their wives.’
It’s a romantic view of the Noble Savage in many ways, but Montaigne uses the comparison to critique his own society. When he commends their punishment of prophets who get it wrong, it seems clear enough that he’s talking about the Church: ‘Those who come and cheat us with assurances of powers beyond the natural order and then fail to do what they promise, should they not be punished for it?’
In 1562, three indigenous men from Brazil were brought back to France and Montaigne met them in Rouen when they were presented to the king, Charles IX. They were asked, through an interpreter, what they had been most amazed by in France. Their answer as reported by Montaigne:
They had in their language an idiom which calls all men ‘halves’ of one another – and they had noticed here [in France] that there were men among us fully bloated with all sorts of comforts while their ‘halves’ were begging at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty: they found it odd that those destitute ‘halves’ should put up with such injustice and did not take the others by the throats or set fire to their houses.
It stopped me in my tracks.
The idea that we are all ‘halves’ of each other.
It’s a powerful notion with the potential to overturn everything. It’s not just a basis for equality, but a radical concept of the self where our skin is not the end of us.
It took the destitute ‘halves’ in France another 200 years or so before they finally did tire of the injustice and took the bloated Others by the throat and set fire to their houses, but more intriguing is how and when Europeans lost the idea of ‘halves’. It was long gone in France by the time Montaigne was writing, but it must have been there in the beginning or communities could not have survived without a powerful reason to look after each other. Somewhere along the way, the idea that part of the self resided in others was lost. More important, the experience, the feeling of not being entirely separate within our own skin, the flow of self into others was lost, except perhaps to babies and some indigenous cultures and to mystics who learned how to melt the dark line between themselves and others.
I wonder at the energy I have used to keep that line distinct, the self behind it all of a piece. Words have something to do with it. Words break the world up into articulated bits, they put a line around the light and dark of being and let us know where we end and others begin.
A list of my halves in Paris: the man in the corner shop, Vicky, Trish, Anthony, Patrick, Matt, Theo, Marie-Louise, Camilla, Sylvie, the doctor at the American hospital, my choir teacher, Jean-Jacques and Ana, Tristan de Parcevaux, my niece, the elderly men and women at the physio clinic, the waiters at Café de la Place, the women in the boulangerie, the gypsy woman at Gare St Lazare who drugged her children, the checkout woman in the African shop, all the men in the rue St Denis.
*
As well as going to a concert every week, almost all of them free on Sundays, I visited museums every other week. Towards the end of March, I went to the Musée Guimet on place d’Iéna, which has one of the largest collections of Asian art anywhere in the world. The former colonies of Vietnam, Cambodia and the Lao Republic were a favourite destination for archaeologists, so the museum is a cornucopia of Southeast Asian sculpture.
It was a rainy day and I had to stand in the queue in the drizzle for half an hour. Everyone has the same idea on a rainy Sunday in Paris. Inside it was warm and, despite the crowds, almost immediately I felt calm – the Buddha effect. There were Buddhas sitting, standing, lying, in almost every room: Cambodian, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Burmese. They were mainly marble or other stone, some copper, silver, gold, some were elaborately dressed, most wearing only a draped cloth, some were slender, others were plump, but all of them were extraordinarily serene. I know next to nothing about Buddhist art, but as Stendhal said, ‘I don’t claim to be describing things in themselves, but only their effect on me.’ Looking at their quiet faces made me feel peaceful.
There was one statue in particular that had me circling back to it three or four times. It was from Cambodia, a seated stone Buddha with a broken snake carving behind his head. The identifying label said ‘Khmer Angkorien, fin de XII siècle’. I have the exact details because I bought a postcard of it, which I still have in my study, thumb-tacked onto a corkboard beside my desk along with postcards of Rodin’s Cathédrale, two entwined hands, and a Matisse of a cross-legged Arab girl. I look at the photograph of the calm, slightly smiling face, but it doesn’t have the same effect as the actual carved stone, the silent presence of it.
It’s evident that this statue, and most of the others, must have been ransacked from ancient temples. The label for a large carving of temple gates noted they ‘had made their way across the world to Paris’, as if they had upped and wriggled across the world on their own. I know that the Khmer Buddha was stolen, or at least obtained, by people who felt they had a greater right to it than the people who had made it and meditated before it, and that it ought to be returned to where it came from, but I was glad it was there in Paris for me to see and feel its imperturbable grace.