Eleven

April

To write personal things in an impersonal mode, to try to attain the universal – it’s only this way that literature breaks through our separateness.

Annie Ernaux

I longed for spring. I had been waiting for it for too long; I didn’t have any way of measuring how long to be patient in a European winter. In the grey light I cultivated the idea that my residual aches and pains would disappear with the warmth, that the sun would somehow dissolve them. Warmth and bright light gained magical or omnipotent properties in my mind and when a few days of warm sunshine appeared in April, I sat out on the balcony on a small stool, lifted my face to the sun, and worshipped. The geraniums in my balcony boxes had new green leaves and buds were forming.

Early spring in Paris makes promises it doesn’t deliver. The ‘false spring’ Hemingway called it, but even in a false spring he said ‘there were no problems except where to be happiest’. That’s hard to believe, but I like that even Hemingway can be sentimental about Paris. The untruthful glow of nostalgia can blur anyone’s eyes.

I took a break from writing, mainly because there were friends coming to stay on and off through April, but I also needed distance from the manuscript. I had picked it up one morning and the rewrite, which had been going so well, suddenly seemed tangled and fragmented. It often happens and it’s hard to tell if there’s really something radically wrong, or if it’s just the mood I’m in. The day before it was clear, today it was confused and should be thrown away. It needed both detachment and deep concentration to sort it out and it was pointless trying to do that with other people around. I’ve always needed solitude to do that kind of work.

Phil came to visit from Australia and introduced us to the drawings of Sempé, a French cartoonist with a whimsical, tender spirit, like Leunig’s, the Australian chronicler of human frailty, and we introduced him to the grotesque faces under the Pont Neuf and the comic-book shops in the rue Dante. Hannah, my eternally travelling niece, came to stay again for a few days with three German friends and they all lay around in the tiny second bedroom talking, sorting out the world until halfway through the day. Peter and Libby arrived too and we walked up to Sacré-Coeur and, instead of music inside his head, Peter heard, by the purest chance, a beautiful young nun singing evening offices. He and Libby had been together since they were teenagers and now, finally, they were in Paris, as shining-eyed as sixteen-year-olds. Since then, Libby has died and Peter sang like an injured angel at her graveside.

I’d found two more conversation partners too – Sabine, a lawyer who loved oriental art, and Bibi, a French-Polish translator, so as well as my Sunday meeting with Sylvie, I was out two evenings and one morning every week. Bibi liked to arrange other outings, so we often went to an exhibition together. Vicky too asked me to go to films with her, and then to a concert, so even though Anthony was away, this time in Norway, I wasn’t often alone in the evenings.

Thursday evening choir was still a fixed rendezvous every week. I left my visitors for the evening and took the Metro to Ménilmontant and swung up the hill to the community centre in the rue des Amandiers. As I walked in each time I felt pleasure in being recognised, even though I didn’t know any of them, except Marie-Louise, outside rehearsals. When I’d gone to Istanbul in March, I’d had to miss choir and the following week Marie-Louise asked where I had been as she greeted me. Afterwards on the Metro, I realised that now there was a small space in Paris where I was expected to be.

We learned new songs and rehearsed ones we already knew with a particular date in mind; we had a booking, the Fête de la Musique, which is held every year in late June. The Fête happens on just one day, and many of the performances are held in the streets; quartets and choirs and ensembles perform in squares and on street corners so that people can wander all day listening to music wherever they go. Some of the musicians are professional, but there are also amateurs – which of course means ‘those who love’ – community choirs and solo performers. Our choir was singing in a square on the Canal St-Martin, at 5 pm on 20 June, just before my return flight to Australia, the end of my year. The timing seemed auspicious; I really was going to be singing in the streets of Paris.

One day Sylvie invited me to her apartment for an afternoon tea party to meet some of her friends. I had been told that the French rarely invited anyone outside the family and friends they had known since childhood to their homes, so it felt like an important invitation, a step into an inner circle.

I left early, allowing plenty of time to find Sylvie’s place in the sixteenth arrondissement. To Parisians, the sixteenth arrondissement in the west of Paris, bounded by the southward-turning Seine and the Eiffel Tower on one side and the Bois de Boulogne on the other, means wealth and privilege, political and financial power, established families, a district that inhabitants of the working-class east declare they will never go to. Geographically it has no advantages over the east; in fact the south-east, north and north-east have all of the few hills in Paris, traditionally the terrain of the elevated rich, but in Paris, when Baron Haussmann knocked down the poverty-stricken inner city, the poor fled to the edges.

Sylvie’s street was on the other side of the périphérique, still in the sixteenth, but not in Paris proper delineated by the ring-road, and not in my map-book. I guessed where to get out, but it was the wrong Metro and I had to walk a long way. As I followed the wider, cleaner streets, I saw the brass plates of consulates, discreetly beautiful shops, grand Haussmannian apartment buildings, separate mansions and even large gardens with gold-tipped iron railings. Everyone was dressed quietly, elegantly – no flashes of colour to draw attention – and nearly everyone was white-skinned.

The sun was still weak but for the first time in five months I was outside in the streets without a coat and when I lifted my face I could feel a faint warmth. There were tight green buds on the chestnut trees, the faintest idea of renewal, and some blades of green – probably freesias – poking through in front gardens. I remembered the freesias beside the steps on the farm, one of the few shady, dark places that stayed moist and even mossy in all the heat and dryness, and I remembered how my mother loved their sweet, fresh smell. I could see her placing a cut-glass vase of freesias in the hall – although that was at the house in town, not out on the farm. And then I saw her sitting in her retirement unit; no freesias there and no shady places for them to grow, just sunny pansies in terracotta pots. How strange and strong memory is, with its own structures and its own translucent textures, more fine and enduring than reality.

Sylvie lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an ordinary 1970s block in the avenue Jean-Baptiste Clément. When I arrived her three friends were already there. I can’t remember all their names now and I didn’t listen carefully in the first place because I was nervous about speaking French all afternoon, but there was one woman, Emanuelle, whom I remember because of her story. Sylvie and her friends were good-looking, thirty-ish, two of them married and one, a sweet-faced woman, had a baby, although not with her that day. Sylvie was single and Emanuelle had an older fiancé she planned to marry soon. She was taller than the others and had short dark hair tossed around her head and her face was full of photographer’s angles, but more striking was her rebellious, defiant look. And some kind of pain.

We sat in the lounge-room around a low table piled with pâtisserie delicacies – charlottes, opéras, tarte aux framboises – and pots of tea and coffee. They asked me what I was doing in Paris and about Australia and about my family and I started relaxing into the familiar territory of getting to know other women. A few times I asked them to repeat or to speak more slowly but after half an hour or so I found my head shifting into a French mode, as if my brain had realised English was not going to be of any use so it may as well just move to the cache of French it had stored there. After a while the conversation drifted to relationships with men.

‘I’m not in love with Jean-Luc. But I don’t think it matters,’ Emanuelle said. There was a defiant look on her face. For a moment no-one knew what to say. Jean-Luc was her fiancé. Marrying someone you don’t love is not what most people will admit to. And then we each started to make our case. Everyone argued that loving the person you were going to marry did matter. We ranged our arguments – how could you get through the difficult times without love, wouldn’t children suffer sensing there was no love between their parents, wasn’t it a kind of deceit?

‘But he knows I don’t love him. I have told him. He loves me and accepts it this way. And I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to live alone and I want to have children.’

I looked at her, the rebellious tilt of her body, remembering I had heard the same words before. I had a friend in Australia who had once told me that she didn’t love the man she was with, but she was in her thirties and didn’t want to be alone. She liked and respected him, but wasn’t in love with him. I realised I had never known what it was like to be alone.

Perhaps Emanuelle was talking about the difference between loving someone and being in love with them. Perhaps she did love him but not in that heady, drugged, all-absorbing way of being ‘in love’. Just as I was trying to work out how to phrase the distinction in French, Sylvie asked it.

‘You mean you haven’t fallen in love with him or you don’t love him?’

‘Both,’ said Emanuelle.

There was a silence again. Her honesty seemed to break all the rules.

‘But what happens if you do fall in love with someone else? If you are not in love with him, then you could easily fall in love with someone else,’ Sylvie responded.

‘I have,’ she said. ‘It was a coup de foudre in the place St Sulpice.’

There was the same startled silence. For a few seconds I wasn’t sure what she meant and then I realised coup de foudre, lightning strike, also meant the shock of love at first sight. Sylvie and the sweet-faced woman argued that there was no such thing, but Emanuelle was adamant. She described it in detail; she was coming into the square walking near Café de la Mairie and he was walking towards her from the direction of the fountain; they looked at each other and they both fell in love in that moment.

‘How did you know he fell in love with you? Did you talk to him?’ asked the sweet-faced one.

‘Of course. Well, he spoke to me first. We sat at the café. I have had an affair with him.’

Another short silence.

‘Well, why don’t you marry him?’

‘He is already married.’

The pain in her face was finally clear. Stendhal said, ‘I have never been able to write of what I love, it would seem a blasphemy’, but for Emanuelle it was the opposite, she had to get it out in the open. Make it real for all of us. She could not have what she wanted, but at least she had connected it to her friends, to her world.

I understand Stendhal’s desire to hide his love, to protect it from a harsh gaze, but to keep things hidden in the end, I think, twists us as we contort ourselves to fit the mask. And yet, oddly for a writer, I’m a secretive person, at least about love. I don’t want to reveal that I too have wondered how much and how well I love. I don’t want to reveal how much my feelings change; that at times I am passionately in love with Anthony, shining-eyed and melting, at other times I admire and like him, at other times I am hard-hearted and judgmental. Nor do I want to reveal how much my love is self-centred, dependent on my well-being. Nor do I feel inclined to reveal how I cannot bear dependence and instead am drawn to what is withheld. Nor reveal how much my emotions are shaped by physical pleasure, that the intense mind-blowing high of love-making really does create love in me and that I have no idea how there could be ongoing romantic love without quite a lot of sex.

Is this the way it is with other people? The memoirists, or at least the male ones, write only of an all-absorbing romantic love, which, then as now, seems indistinguishable from a volatile mix of sexual passion and fantasy. Stendhal gives a list of eleven women he has loved:

Virginie (Kubly), Angela (Pietragrua), Adèle (Rebuffel), Mélanie (Guilbert), Mina (de Gresham), Alexandrine (Petit), Angeline, whom I never loved (Bereyter) [why does he include her then?], Angela (Pietragrua) [why twice?], Méthilde (Dembowski), Clementine (Guila) and then adds, ‘and lately for a month at most, Mme Azur whose Christian name I’ve forgotten’ [then a new line] and unwisely, yesterday, Amelia Bettini.

Stendhal is just too cool altogether! But he goes on to confess: ‘The majority of these charming creatures didn’t honour me with their favours, but they have literally occupied my whole life.’ Then I remember him as a boy losing his beloved mother and so I’m won over when he says, ‘With all of them, and several others, I was always the child; so I had very little success.’

Rousseau had ‘extremely violent’ feelings of both devotion and sexual passion, sometimes for different women at the same time. He fell in love with many women, starting when he was eleven, and passion and devotion dominated his whole life. Unlike Stendhal, he felt that ‘a love known to the person who inspires it becomes more bearable’. During the years he was with his mistress, Thérèse, he confessed – although not to her – to regularly being in love with other women. Madame d’Houdetot, the one he declares was the true love of his life, he ‘loved too well to possess’. For him, love was tumult: ‘I will not describe the agitation, the tremblings, the palpitations, the convulsive movements, or the faintings of the heart which I continually experienced’. He doubted his feeling for Madame de Warens, with whom he lived for several years, was love because it was accompanied by ‘peace of heart, calmness, serenity, security and confidence’.

The obsessive, overpowering intensity of feelings, his devoted limpet-like tenderness, seem, to me, crowding, exclusive. I remember lying with Anthony once in an unpainted wooden house high above a deep valley and, after love-making, we rolled and tumbled together through the dark night above the valley, our still moist bodies and mingled breath indistinct from air and space. Decades later, I can still feel the night air on my skin although we did not leave the loft room where we lay. Surely love has to be spacious, part of everything around it. I barely recognise the claustrophobia he describes as love at all.

Montaigne writes of the ‘loving-friendship’ of a good marriage, but then spoils it by saying the ‘boiling rapture’ of intense sexual passion is not a good thing in marriage: ‘There is a kind of lewdness in deploying the rapturous strivings of Love’s licentiousness within such a relationship, which is sacred and to be revered’, and that ‘women’s reason can be unhinged by arousing them too lasciviously’. Oh Montaigne, how could you! There is nothing wrong with love’s licentiousness, or with being, at times, unhinged!

I’m forced to admit Montaigne is not at his best when it comes to women. This is the one topic where he is of his time, seeing women as a necessary and pleasing adjunct to men’s lives: ‘What more do they want than to be loved and honoured?’ and ‘reasoning powers, wisdom and the offices of loving-friendship are rather to be found in men: that is why they are in charge of world affairs’. It’s also the one area where he is less than ruthlessly open and honest; he becomes theoretical and tells us nothing personal about his thoughts or feelings towards his wife, or any other woman. In his defence, I wonder if women were so highly constructed as fascinating objects by their roles at that time and in that place – and for the next several centuries in Western Europe – that they were near impossible to know as fellow human beings? And then Montaigne does wriggle out of it right at the end of the wonderfully sexy essay ‘On Some Lines of Virgil’ when he writes, ‘I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom, the difference between them is not great.’

But it’s not until Simone de Beauvoir that things change much. She still wants to be ‘in love’ but she didn’t think of herself as ‘a man’s female companion; we would be two comrades’. I wouldn’t use the word ‘comrade’, but I like the idea. I could never be one of those women who subsume themselves in serving a great man – I don’t want to look up or down, I want to walk side by side.

In a contradictory fashion, in the same paragraph de Beauvoir says, ‘I should be in love the day a man came along whose intelligence, culture and authority could bring me into subjection.’ And then again ‘from the very start, he would be a model of all I wished to become; he would, therefore, be superior to me’.

I wonder if she was poking fun at her youthful perfectionism, but it does appear to describe how she felt about Sartre. She says she required him to be ahead of her in ability because ‘I was grasping rather than generous; if I had had to drag someone along behind me, I should have been consumed with impatience.’ I admit, with some shame, to understanding that impatience, but I cannot accept being either dominant or dominated in the power battle of love; it has to be equal, or at least constantly shifting.

*

I saw a quote on a poster in the Luxembourg Gardens: In nature, the bee and the flower desire one another and indulge one another with a true act of love. I like the phrase, ‘indulge one another’; it suggests both equality and pleasure. Bees and honey have long been part of the imagery of love and sex, the penetration of the flower and the sweet liquid on the tongue. Renaissance artists often painted bees with Cupid as a symbol of the delights and dangers of love, the sting of deflowering and the richness of fertilisation and fecundity.

I suppose my conception of love was formed by the sight of my mother, Connie, and father, Don, walking together on the farm in the evening arm-in-arm, talking. And of my mother seated at my father’s feet in front of the open fire while he ‘rubbed’ her head – they never used the word ‘massage’. And the pair of them on the old sofa on the back veranda after they moved to the house in town, Dad with his arm over Mum’s shoulder, Mum coquettishly holding his finger. There was a feeling of enjoyment of each other’s company and of equal exchange of feeling and thought – except my mother was probably the more powerful of the two – which must have sunk into my heart. I didn’t observe or think about sexual passion between them, although by the time I was a teenager I had become suspicious of them spending every single Sunday afternoon in their bedroom where we were utterly forbidden to disturb them. And the troubling salty smell their room often had. Then, later on in life, ten years after my father had died, my mother, quiet and not given to exclamation, one day exclaimed: ‘Sometimes I ache to have Don’s arms around me again.’ The word ‘ache’ carried more weight than any word I’d ever heard her use.

*

After Norway, Anthony went to several cities in Germany for work and then Amsterdam to see Patrick. I pictured the two of them walking along the canals, discussing politics as they both liked to do, Anthony with his hands in his overcoat pockets, holding forth, Patrick biding his time. It would be clear to anyone watching they were father and son.

Anthony was gone for nearly two weeks and came back just before Ana and Jean-Jacques were due to arrive. I told him about Emanuelle’s confession and about my companions’ thoughts on love, especially de Beauvoir’s need to gaze upwards.

‘She was a Catholic too, wasn’t she? Looking up to the Father?’ he said.

‘Yes, but I don’t have that need. I mean, I need to admire you, but that’s kind of a sideways gaze.’

‘Is that right?’ he said wryly. We were lying on the leather couch, a favourite spot where the light flooded in from three directions. Above us on the wall was the small Matisse print, a girl sitting cross-legged against a glorious blue background. Outside, through all three French doors, I could see only sky from where I lay. Anthony leaned over me and opened his laptop on the low table beside the lounge and selected a song to play. For you, he said. It was a romantic love song, ‘Come Away With Me’.

‘Sometimes you can think about it too much,’ he said. ‘But, you know, it’s mutual. It’s a kind of communion. I guess it’s what we all want. To join with others – and that’s the thing to think about. Why do we want that? And I don’t think there’s only one person for everyone; that would be mad. It’s a matter of opening your heart and mind to the ones who come your way.’

It probably isn’t exactly what he said but that was the gist of it. I thought about how both love and precise words are able to briser les solitudes, break through separateness. I felt my cheek on Anthony’s chest, my stomach along his side, my leg over his legs, the length of two bodies and all the intimate places they touched. I went to reply, and then thought of Stendhal; perhaps it is too risky to let the Fates know what you love.

*

The wait to see Jean-Jacques made us both uncertain. In our minds he was still young and beautiful – and dangerous. He had lived the shadow side for us all those years ago; neither of us was sure how we would relate to a nice middle-aged man who ran his father’s driving school. We had laughed by the fire, played at learning French, drunk red wine. It was only a moment ago, on the other side of the world.

And Ana, I remembered a photograph of a pretty brown-eyed young woman. What would we say to each other?

They flew from Lausanne in the evening and booked into their hotel. They had arranged to meet us at our place the next morning.

‘I want to see your Paris apartment,’ Jean-Jacques said, and I could hear amusement in his voice.

Next morning I waited as Anthony opened the door and then Jean-Jacques stood there smiling, still handsome, but more solid. I saw in his eyes – he could never hide anything – that he too was nervous at meeting us, a middle-aged couple who purported to be the friends of his youth from Australia.

Anthony and Jean-Jacques embraced. Ana and I caught each other’s eye and smiled. I think we knew straight away that it was going to be fine.

Jean-Jacques spoke his mixed French and English and Ana spoke careful French for me. How long have you been here? How do you like Paris? We are staying in the Hôtel des Artistes. Where do you want to go? The readjustments of people from each other’s past standing in front of each other in different bodies with different faces. Hiding the sadness.

Jean-Jacques wanted to see all the touristique sites, he said, as if this were his first time. He had in fact lived in Paris for a year or so after he fled Australia. He had tried to quit heroin before returning home to Lausanne, before his parents saw him, but it hadn’t worked. He ended up going into a detox clinic back in Switzerland and then he’d worked there for a couple of years afterwards, helping other people break the addiction.

‘This is what we do in Paris, non? See the monuments, be a tourist. I want to do everything. You are nice bourgeois in a nice apartment and you can show us Paris.’ His eyes were alight with mischief. ‘And, Tony, you can give me a joint.’

Anthony did have a joint for him. He had bought some marijuana in Amsterdam on his way back to Paris. He still did have the occasional smoke himself, but I knew he’d bought it this time because he hadn’t wanted to be caught without any by Jean-Jacques. We’d argued about it – it was risky and stupid to carry drugs through an airport. It seemed clear enough it was to stake a claim against middle-aged safety.

They had a few puffs – Ana and I didn’t bother – and then we walked out into the rue Simart and zigzagged up the backstreets towards Montmartre. We came out behind Sacré-Coeur, near the park in the rue de Bonne where I had watched the little boy call out ‘Regarde’ to his mother on our first day. I had been there many times since then; it had become a place to sit and contemplate. It was away from the rush of tourists but still high enough up on the slope to give a feeling of detachment. Jean-Jacques wanted to go to place du Tertre and to have lunch there, so we kept walking.

We wandered around the crowded square packed as always with stalls selling bright paintings of Paris streets and artists offering caricature sketches. Tourists bumped into each other, talked loudly, took photographs. We sat down on the terrace of Mère Catherine: red-checked tablecloths, woven chairs, a ringside view. I felt uncomfortable. I had not so much as stopped in place du Tertre, even though I lived less than ten minutes away, avoiding it or scurrying through if I had to go that way.

‘You are not ze tourist?’ Jean-Jacques asked, gleefully observing my discomfort.

‘Not really.’

‘Pourquoi pas?’ Why not?

‘I don’t know. I live here.’

‘But it is good to be ze tourist. You can enjoy this très belle ville like an innocente.’

He was right of course, but I wasn’t ready to let go my fragile sense of being at home. I turned to Ana and we started talking about our kids. She and Jean-Jacques had two sons and one daughter, the oldest about twelve, I think. Her youngest son, she said, had a developmental disability, which meant he needed and might always need careful attention. She said his need did not oppress her, that it had opened her heart and only made her love more. I knew it was true – in some people there is a largeness of heart, a loving compassion, which only expands more with hardship. I thought how fortunately things turn out sometimes, that Jean-Jacques had found someone who could love so well.

I told Ana that Jean-Jacques had known both our boys in the Mountains; that even when he was an addict he was like a sweet older brother, that he did the same things as our kids, collecting odd things, bones, shells, cicadas, and he liked to play and to dress up in costumes. And like a child, he couldn’t hide his feelings. Delight, anger, wonder, pleasure were always right there on his face with no mask.

‘He is still like that.’ She smiled. ‘He’s still a little boy.’

Jean-Jacques heard her comment and the sweet-boy smile flashed. ‘Un mauvais garçon,’ he said. A naughty boy. He put his arm around Ana’s shoulder and I was reminded of my parents.

‘He’s a good father, very protective,’ Ana said. He worked long hours, she said, and she knew she could always depend on him. ‘But,’ she said, ‘he is a child too. He plays games for hours on his computer.’

Afterwards Anthony and I went back to the apartment to do some work. Jean-Jacques begged us to go to the Louvre with them, but neither of us felt like traipsing past endless dark canvases and made excuses. We met up again in the early evening at the Tuileries because Jean-Jacques wanted us all to go on the ferris wheel on place de la Concorde. I hadn’t been on a carnival ride since the octopus and the ferris wheel at Wellington showground when I was fourteen or fifteen. Every year the show brought rides and sideshows, Jimmy Sharman’s boxing tent and the mysterious half-man–half-woman and the open-mouthed clowns, transforming the dusty paddock into alleys full of strangeness. Seeing it from above in a whirling ride had made it seem all the more fantastical, like a phantom town appearing briefly in our ordinary place.

It was early evening in Paris. The lights came on as we soared up and around, above the rooftops and monuments, high up with the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe and all the way to the horizon one minute, and then down with the traffic and cobbles of place de la Concorde the next, and then up with the lights and distance again. The perspective shifted over and over, but slowly enough not to make me feel giddy. The air was cool on my face and the lift and sway of the ferris wheel gondola felt dangerous. Jean-Jacques looked happy.

‘C’est la vie,’ he said.

Jean-Jacques and Ana stayed in Paris four days, which was as long as they felt they could be away from their children. It was probably long enough for all of us; even when hearts reconnect, daily life has to go on. It was time for me to see what had happened in my draft while it had been out from under my anxious gaze. Sometimes things sort themselves out when I’m not working on them. We said goodbye to each other, insisting, as people do, that the next time we meet up must be in Australia.