June
Memory is stronger than reality.
Annie Ernaux
I went to see my first play in French. It was La Nuit des Rois, The Night of the Kings, or Twelfth Night, so I knew I’d be able to follow the story. Still, even after almost a year in Paris I didn’t think I was ready for Shakespeare in French – I was there because Bibi had organised it instead of our usual weekly French conversation, booking the tickets and arranging to meet me outside the theatre.
The actors were a travelling company from the south of France and the theatre was in the fourteenth arrondissement near Montparnasse cemetery. When Bibi and I found our seats there were already musicians playing on one corner of the stage. They were dressed as minstrels in gold and red with vests and trailing sleeves and caps, but somehow looking as if these were the clothes they wore every day rather than being costumes for a Renaissance play. They had an easy-going air; it didn’t matter what town or village or even what century they landed up in, they were ready for a jig or a song anytime.
‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Bibi in French. ‘I’ll explain if you don’t understand anything.’
A young woman waddled deliberately onto the stage. Her hips and backside were padded out and she exaggerated her side-to-side motion as if she were a wind-up toy. Everyone laughed as she indicated ‘mobile phones off’. It turned out she was the maid, Maria, and as the story unfolded, she nearly stole the show. She only had to appear on stage and the audience laughed.
I don’t really remember any of the tangled lovers in the play, what Olivia or Viola or Orsino looked like or wore, only Maria and the other comic characters, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and of course Malvolio with his yellow stockings – he had long, very thin legs – was another scene-stealer as he pranced about trying to win Olivia. ‘She did commend my yellow stockings of late, she did praise my leg being cross-gartered …’ The production was relaxed and the players were noisy and rough and funny as if they had all tumbled off the back of a caravan after travelling muddy roads from the last village. I couldn’t follow all the dialogue but the irreverent mood was infectious. The musicians threaded the story together with such energy that I had more fun than I’d ever had watching Shakespeare.
A great while ago the world began
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
Afterwards Bibi and I found a bar and had a glass of red wine. It was warm so we sat outside and talked about the play and watched passers-by. All the tables were crowded with theatre-goers, laughing and talking as if it were the beginning of the evening.
‘The play has made everyone happy,’ Bibi remarked. We were both excited to see Maria, slender now, and Sir Toby walk past, laughing and talking with Viola and Olivia. Of course I told Bibi about the day I arrived in Paris nearly a year earlier and about the actor hanging out the window across the courtyard in the rue des Trois Frères. It seemed like an age ago and just yesterday.
*
It was plummeting towards the end. Time had begun to concertina in that way it does, arrival and departure pressed up against each other. I thought of Annie Ernaux, ‘je ne suis que du temps qui a passé à travers moi’, I am just time that has passed through me. I am standing in a street and time is streaming through me, imprinting and colouring me like light on transparent film.
I started to think it would be as if the year in Paris had never happened by the time I returned home to my own wintry back yard in the Mountains. Time would close back over it and it would just be a shadowy shape in memory. I had not yet realised that ‘memory is stronger than reality’, and that even reality, if the present moment can be called that, is mainly made up of memory. It hasn’t really been until now, when I have been trying to write of the year with my book companions in Paris, that I’ve understood most of life is constructed in the mind. Paris was always an imagined place and living there was always going to feel imaginary. And then, writing about the year has, as writing about anything always does, refashioned my experience of it. As Montaigne remarked, ‘I have no more made my book than my book has made me’.
I wrote in my diary, ‘I don’t want to go back to my ordinary life. No! No!’, an isolated protest amongst the usual reminder notes. The handwriting was larger than usual and messier, with too many exclamation marks. It was the usual protest against endings, the futile pushing against time that occupies so much human energy.
*
A series of farewells: I visited Simone de Beauvoir’s grave in Montparnasse cemetery. She is buried with Sartre, under the same stone inscribed with both their names, a mingling of their bones for eternity, which I think would have pleased the romantic young de Beauvoir if not the older rationalist. The light on the stone was dappled, patterning the faded bunches of flowers – roses and carnations and a small silver bowl of daisies – and the Metro tickets that other people had left, a gesture of solidarity with Sartre’s support of the activists who stole Metro tickets to give to workers. It was a warm and gentle summer’s day, melancholic weather for a cemetery; graves are better to visit on cold, bleak days when there’s not such a strong reminder of how lovely the earth is.
I’d already visited Rousseau’s burial place in the Panthéon, a monument in the style of a Greek temple where the Great Men of France are interred. It’s an unlikely resting place for a man who only wanted to lie down under an oak. And Stendhal in Montmartre cemetery, his verdigris profile seeming to smile wryly amongst the trees and moss. But not de Sévigné, who died visiting her daughter in Provence. Nor Montaigne, who was buried several times, firstly near his chateau, then at the church of St-Antoine in Bordeaux and, finally, at the University of Bordeaux, although his heart was removed and kept many kilometres away, preserved in the church of St- Michel de Montaigne.
I suspect Montaigne would have been delighted with the fact that there was no certainty or stability in his final resting place and that even his body did not remain whole! He always found it hard to be fixed: ‘I do not know whether I have found it harder to fix my mind in one place or my body.’ Now he doesn’t have to decide, he can be in many places at once.
Some years afterwards, I stood at my mother’s grave in the central west. She did stay alive to read the book I wrote in Paris, even though her peripheral vision was so poor she had to use a ruler to keep herself on the line of text, but in the end none of us could keep her alive forever. She died with my younger brother and me on either side of her bed after nearly two weeks of focused breathing, each breath seeming to take all her concentration. On the last day I stared at her wondering who, exactly, it was who was dying, and it came to me that my mother was a constellation of memories, of pre-memory, of feelings, of shared stories. I had stared and puzzled, knowing this shrunken, dying creature was not my mother, and now I saw it; my mother was a vast constellation inside me where she had always lived. She was a construction, a fiction, within me.
Annie Ernaux said that she wanted ‘to seize the woman who lived outside of me’, when she wrote about her mother, but that seems an impossible task. No-one exists ‘outside of me’. I construct every other person and every other person constructs me. Inside my sons, inside Anthony, Vicky, my choir, Tristan de Parcevaux, the Tahitian transvestite on the corner, everyone I pass on the streets, I exist as a fabrication, more or less detailed and probably not looking much like the one I carry of myself.
And places too: the landscape of my childhood, Wiradjuri land, lives in fierce detail inside me; Paris lives in a more impressionist mode. Even with the knowledge of my murderous rage towards a gypsy mother, and the feel of ropes and pulleys in a physiotherapy dungeon, and the smell of urine in alleyways, it is still in soft focus and aglow with warm light. The original imaginary image can never be fully dissolved; it colours everything else after it. Everything, apart from the present moment, this exact instant more fleeting than any clock can measure, is memory.
*
I wish I could convey the almost panicked delight I took in Paris in those last few weeks. The weather had the softness of early summer, the gentle skies that I’ve come to love as much as the high, wide, endless skies of home. People sat on benches in the parks, men played boules on any available patch of gravelly dirt, children dug in sandpits and sailed boats on the Tuileries ponds. I walked every day, trying to absorb the sight of chestnuts flowering, of houseboats on the Seine and their clotheslines with singlets and t-shirts pegged out, of accordionists endlessly playing ‘Those Were The Days’ on the Metro, of St Denis carrying his head in the park and Le Passe-Muraille walking out of the wall with boys playing soccer in front of him. Trying to absorb it all through my skin. When I was in the apartment I gazed at the window where the younger man still laid out the clothes of the older woman and brought her out each day in her wheelchair, and at the line of people who still queued outside the boulangerie, over the footpath and onto the street each day just before noon, and at the light falling on chimney pots across the street which still told me what the weather was like before I got out of bed.
I have some photographs: pink geraniums in white pots along a wall in the Tuileries, the stairwell in the rue Simart looking up five flights, the ‘Amélie’ shop at the end of the rue des Trois Frères, Colette’s grave in Père Lachaise, Anthony rowing on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, me walking down the stairs in Metro Abbesses, Sylvie smiling at Le Relais Odéon. They were mostly taken in the last couple of weeks.
There were too many goodbyes to say. When I arrived at my rendezvous with Sylvie, I saw she had brought another one of her friends to meet me. She was a soft plump woman with thick pre-Raphaelite hair and friendly, but I had wanted Sylvie to myself for our last meeting.
‘You’ve finished reading Montaigne?’ Sylvie asked.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever finish with Montaigne,’ I said. I tried to explain that he had become my friend and that it wasn’t just in my mind, that it was an emotion. I realised as I tried to find the words that it was love that I felt.
‘Je l’adore,’ I exclaimed and Sylvie and her friend laughed.
We talked as we always did, sitting under the rows of books in Café des Éditeurs. Her friend joined in now and then but mostly she watched us both. I marvelled again that we had met from a note stuck on a wall and we all laughed at the random ways the world can work, the paths that can cross.
Sylvie and I said au revoir at the entrance to Metro Odéon near the statue of Danton and as her friend kissed me on both cheeks, she said softly in English, ‘Sylvie really loves you, you know.’
I haven’t seen Sylvie again since then.
We had a trip out of Paris in the last few weeks too, to the seaside. One Saturday morning Anthony said he felt like walking on a beach.
‘Are you trying to get ready for Australia?’ I asked.
‘Maybe. I just feel like sand and maybe a swim.’
I looked at my fold-out map of France and tried to work out which beach was closest to Paris.
We tossed a change of clothes into a bag and within an hour we were leaving Gare du Nord on a train to Deauville, a watering-hole for the rich in the nineteenth century. On the other side of the river was Trouville, where the working class had lived. We found the Hôtel des Artistes in Trouville and then we walked on the quay and on the beach and took photos of each other and Anthony took photos of fishing boats. There were rows of brightly painted bathing huts, red and yellow and blue, on the beach, but because there was hardly anyone else about they looked like a stage setting. The tide was a long way out, a shimmer of water lay on the flat sand reflecting a light blue sky. It looked as if I could walk out across the ocean and it would never get deep, as if I could walk all the way to England.
Afterwards we walked around the town and discovered, by reading plaques on the walls, that at different times both Gustave Flaubert and Marguerite Duras lived and wrote here by the sea. Madame Bovary and The Lover. It was a quiet and pretty town, flowers everywhere, intriguing houses scrambled up the steep streets, the sun shone, there was a market selling local saucissons and cheeses and it was summer and the sea-light illuminated everything, but I felt subdued. I knew I couldn’t keep pretending I lived in Paris anymore. Dashing away to the seaside for the weekend wasn’t going to fool anyone.
*
In one of Montaigne’s last essays he writes about his ordinary actions and habits; that he doesn’t like fruit except for melons, that he only likes to have sex before he goes to sleep, that he likes drinking wine out of a particular shaped glass and could not drink it out of a cup, that he likes a hard bed with too many blankets, that he feels ill at ease without his head covered, that he can’t stand not having a clean napkin at meals, that he doesn’t like to stay out in the evening dew, that he has trained his bowels to be regular, that he doesn’t dream much.
There was something about this recording of ordinary inclinations that moved me deeply, perhaps more deeply than anything else he wrote. It was as if he was giving me a glimpse of the things I would know about him if I lived with him, the daily ordinary habits that everyone, high or low, allows themselves. It felt like a celebration of being here in the world, of the endless wonderful banalities that occupy so much time. He claimed the unheroic, the unspectacular, the mundane, as part of who he was.
I see now that most of my daily life in Paris was the same as my life in the Mountains and is the same as my life now in Sydney; I dislike drinking tea out of thick-rimmed mugs, I much prefer to have sex in the afternoons (always have), I never go out without wearing kohl and feel undressed if I forget to put earrings on, I cannot bear my feet getting too hot in bed, I always compare my body to other women’s in the street, mostly unfavourably but sometimes favourably, I cut avocados neatly and find it disturbing when others dig into them with a spoon, I reverse toilet rolls in public toilets if the paper unrolls from the bottom instead of the top, I am happy to write at a messy desk for months and then take pleasure one day in tidying it up to perfection, I love the feel of early morning streets, the cool air and the unloading of boxes and produce and the early morning smells of bitumen and coffee.
*
Our choir was performing in the late afternoon in the Fête de la Musique. On the last Thursday before the performance Marc reminded us again that we needed to know all the words so that we could sing without looking at our song sheets.
‘Sauf Parti,’ he said with a smile. Except Patti.
When we had sung in the community hall for our families and friends and for the CD launch, the instructions to make sure we knew all the words were always ‘Sauf Parti.’ I nodded and smiled back. I didn’t mind at all; it didn’t matter if I had to hold the words in front of me. I did try to learn them, but even practising every day, only the choruses of ‘La Paysanne’ and ‘Petit Poucet’ stayed with me. I sang along to our taped rehearsals at home, hoping the neighbours wouldn’t mind my repeated attempts at ‘La Paysanne’, the rousing chorus of which – even now, if no-one is listening – I can belt out:
En route, allons les gâs!
Jetons nos vieux sabots
Marchons, marchons
En des sillons plus larges et plus beaux.
En route, let’s go boys
Throw away our old clogs
Let’s walk on, walk on
In wider and more beautiful furrows.
Posters had appeared around the streets and the Fête was listed in the Pariscope with performances in every quartier. There were soloists – opera, chanson, rap – choirs, quartets, chamber orchestras, guitarists, jazz drummers, on every street corner and square. Every performance was allocated a particular place, a square or street corner or hall, and a time, so that audiences could select particular musicians or simply wander around their quartier from Mozart to African chanting to the chanson of Jacques Brel.
Marc gave us a handwritten sheet with our running order, location and time, and added instructions to meet beforehand for a last-minute rehearsal and voice warm-up. Our allocated spot was on a small square on the Quai de Valmy along one side of Canal St-Martin which runs through eastern Paris, joining the Seine to the Canal d’Ourcq in the north. From Bastille, the canal runs underground for a while and when it emerges it’s crossed by high curved footbridges and has locks for the tourist barges that make their slow way up and down. It’s mostly in the tenth arrondissement, which also contains the vast Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est, so it’s a crossroads quartier for people from all over Europe and Africa. In the years since living in Paris, as I return each year, I’ve become familiar with the canal and the quays; I ride my velib, free city bike, up the canal and back each day for exercise when I’m visiting, but back then I didn’t know the area at all.
I caught the Metro to Colonel Fabien, the nearest station according to Marc’s instructions: 179 Quai de Valmy (10ème). Metro Colonel Fabien. Anthony was coming later, and Camilla too, to hear me sing. I kept looking at the paper, checking and rechecking the address. I was rushed and felt hot – I had wanted to leave plenty of time, but a quick meeting with Vicky had turned into a conversation and now I might be late.
I found the quay easily and I could see some people gathering in the distance but realised that must have been another performance as the street numbers were going in the wrong direction. I turned and headed up the other way. As I drew near I started to feel unsure. There didn’t seem to be anyone about. There was no square, just the canal on one side and the street and footpath on the other. Not even people shopping. Where was my choir? Where was our audience? Perhaps I’d got the date wrong. I looked at Marc’s scrawl headed Programme du 20 Juin. That was today. And the time. Rendezvous à 16h30. It was already nearly 5 o’clock, I was late. I looked again at the street number on the paper and the number on the wall. 179 Quai de Valmy. Nothing and nobody here. Had they all arranged to meet somewhere else and hadn’t told me? My heart began to thump and although it was only a mild day I was sweating. Even in that moment I knew my feelings were out of proportion to what was happening, but it didn’t stop the knotting in my stomach.
I looked down at the paper again, willing it to be different. 179. Suddenly my brain leapt sideways into a different channel. A French channel. The 7 didn’t have a line through it; it was a 1. The street number was 119. It was in the other direction, where I had seen the milling group of people several blocks away in the distance.
I ran about half a kilometre down the quay and arrived at the square just as my choir was arranging itself into sopranos, altos, tenors and basses. They all looked up and exclaimed as I ran up to them, hot, sweaty and breathless. They are pleased to see me, I realised, and felt a rush of delight.
‘Patti, you’re late. You’ve missed the rehearsal.’ Marc scolded. He had a stand in front of him and was holding his guitar.
‘I’m really sorry, I thought the one was a seven.’
He shrugged, puzzled, but let it go. He turned and arranged our song sheets on his stand. There was already a crowd of people waiting. I looked around and saw Anthony and Camilla, who must have arrived before me. How had they got the number right? Anthony raised his eyebrows at my sudden late arrival.
‘We thought you had decided not to come,’ Marie-Louise whispered. Marc frowned at us. He was ready to start.
He slipped his guitar strap over his shoulder, tapped on the stand, and we began. The first song, ‘La Pluie’, ‘The Rain’, opened with a faint chorus of plinking sounds like rain falling on a roof, the sopranos and tenors and altos alternating, the sound of raindrops rising until it was a clattering storm and then diminishing as the verse began. My breath returned and I could hear each voice and my voice, light and nervous at first. We didn’t sound as strong as usual, all of us holding our voices in. We made it through, holding the last note uncertainly, and Marc nodded. He’s nervous too, I thought.
The audience applauded, clapping and whooping, and we looked at each other, relieved, smiling. They were our friends and families, there was nothing to worry about. We headed off into ‘La Paysanne’ and then the rest of our repertoire with gusto, twelve songs altogether – French, Spanish, English, African. We swayed and clapped. Marc kept one hand on the music, and conducted us with the other. On a few songs, he played along with us on his guitar. My voice rose and fell, disappeared in all the other voices, the notes true and strong, sweet and straggling.
I couldn’t stop smiling. I was singing in the streets of Paris. I could feel Marie-Louise’s shoulder next to mine. My heart had calmed down after beating too hard from running and now my voice felt strong and round in my throat. I kept my gaze on Marc, letting his eyes hold me, hold us all as one. Marchons, Marchons. We all belted out the fighting words. The sun was shining in a milky blue sky, that soft pearly colour that I haven’t seen anywhere else, the chestnut trees had new leaves, everyone was smiling. Ma fren orll drive Porchez.
*
It was a decade ago, the singing. And everything else that happened that year. I really don’t know if I have any better idea of what it all meant. It was a year in Paris. I finished a manuscript, I had coffee with Montaigne and all the other memoirists. I discovered many looking-glasses in other centuries, other minds. I found the imaginary world did not disappear when I stepped into it. I grew in different soil, the red-brown earth of Wiradjuri country, and would always belong to it, but I could see my reflection in mirrors in Paris too.
I have been going back there every year to work since then; I stay no more than a couple of months and I teach memoir classes and write and ride around the streets on the squat grey velib bikes, dodging buses and taxis. Several times I have gone back up to the rue Simart and I look up at our apartment on the fifth floor and I’m reassured to see the red geraniums are still growing there.
Every time I return I think, this will be the time that I see Paris for what it really is, just another crowded European city with an overweening pride in its beauty and bloody history.
An elegantly arranged pile of limestone.
A criss-cross of urine-smelling alleys and cold windy boulevards.
A glossy tourist copy of its original self.
And every time, usually on a chilly autumn morning, often rainy, or at least grey, a few days after I arrive, my heart lifts with a piercing joy.
Last time I arrived, just a few months ago, it was mid-September and, in the morning, chilly enough to wear a scarf. I took the train into Paris from the airport and dragged my luggage through Châtelet station and up along the streets of the third arrondissement to the rue des Gravilliers where I’d booked a tiny studio. I was going to spend several weeks trying to finish this book. I knew the street, Trish used to live there, an ordinary working street, and I had often visited her, so it felt familiar.
I saw myself reflected in the window of the boulangerie opposite the front door. This great world of ours is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant.
The door was open and I could see the boulanger sliding baguettes onto wire racks so I went in to buy an almond croissant for breakfast. The first day.
‘Bonjour,’ I said, cheerfully.
‘Bonjour,’ he said with vast indifference. He looked sensitive and life wasn’t the way he had wanted it to be.
The studio was up five flights without a lift, again. I felt defeated for a moment, feeling the weight of my bag, but the landlord came downstairs and carried my bag up the narrow sloping flights. He told me that he was a linguist and also wrote novels – there were three of his books on the shelves beside the bed. The room was just big enough for the bookcase, bed and a table at a window looking onto an inner courtyard and, above it, an expanse of sky.
After the landlord-novelist left and I’d unpacked my laptop and manuscript and clothes I went out walking to stay awake. I always walk all the first day, trying to shake off the jetlagged desolation that always visits me. More than ‘where in the world am I?’, it’s ‘why in the world am I?’ I know joy will come when it wants to, maybe not today, but that’s fine, I still have to walk.
I had a few small tasks to do as well, buy a weekly Metro pass, and a puce, the word for both a flea and a SIM card, for my mobile phone. I decided to head back to Châtelet first, then to the phone shop in the rue de Rivoli, and then I’d walk along the Seine all the way up to the Port de l’Arsenal near Bastille.
Not far from the rue des Gravilliers a young Iraqi man – a doctor, he said – asked me for directions. People often ask me for directions in Paris, more often than the likely average for any one person could be. Some days it seems that my job is just to wander about helping passers-by find their way. I occasionally know the direction but most often I have to look at my blue map-book, Paris Pratique. That particular day, five people asked me which way to go: the Iraqi doctor, an American couple in Châtelet, an elderly French man who must have been from the provinces, a boy on his mobile phone who called out, ‘Quel direction est Gare de l’Est?’ as I passed by him in the rue St Martin and then, later in the afternoon in the same street, a young African-French woman with a baby tied on her chest asked for directions to the Beaubourg, Pompidou Centre.
‘Just along there,’ I said in French, ready to hurry past. ‘You’ll be there in a second.’
‘Une seconde?’ she repeated, puzzled. I looked at her unfocused eyes and suddenly realised that she was blind. She needed me to be more precise. I hesitated for a moment.
‘I could walk with you if you like?’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That would be good.’
‘You cannot see at all?’
‘I can see colour and general form.’
‘Your baby can see?’
‘He sees,’ she said smiling.
We walked along chatting. Her baby looked sideways at me and I stroked his arm. When the green and blue and red pipes of the Beaubourg appeared, I said ‘Voila’ and we parted ways.
I smiled as I walked on, absurdly pleased to have been of use. Sometimes it seems that that is enough anywhere in the world.