Arriving
This great world of ours is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant.
Michel de Montaigne
The studio in the rue des Trois Frères on the slopes of Montmartre looked out onto a shadowy courtyard, just a couple of strides across. On the other side of the courtyard was a small theatre, Théâtre du Tremplin, which my dictionary revealed meant ‘springboard’ or ‘stepping stone’ theatre. In the foyer there was a poster for the next production – La Grenouille mode d’emploi, Frogs, How to Use – with a photograph of two frogs, one right side up, one upside down. One of the actors, young, dark-haired, hung out the back window overlooking the studio, smoking and talking to someone behind him.
The sky wasn’t visible from where I was sitting – the studio was on the ground floor and the courtyard was too narrow – but there was enough light to see a scraggly locust tree in a pot under the actor’s window. I’d noticed it as we dragged our suitcases in; it looked as if it needed more space and light with its spindly branches and some of its oval leaves yellowing. I stood up and stretched, arms over my head, feeling the kinks of twenty-four hours in flight straighten out. My joints clicked after being locked into place for too long. I sat down again and looked around the studio.
Our bags were half unpacked on the lounge. Dresses and jeans were thrown over chairs, and books – Montaigne, de Sévigné and Rousseau – were stacked on the floor. Stendhal and de Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux too, all writers looking out at ‘this great world’ as Montaigne called it, trying to set down what they saw. They had come with me to Paris and I was hoping they might keep me company throughout the year. I had placed them in chronological order, but they made an unsettled, uneasy tower, threatening to slip into a heap at any moment.
‘Ça va?’ Anthony asked. How are you? He was sitting on a kitchen chair near the French windows, holding his cigarette outside with one hand and a glass of wine with the other. His dark hair was greying but his eyes and smile were youthful, fully engaged and observant. He shifted his stocky body on the chair and leaned back to catch my distracted gaze. Beside him on a stool were the leftovers of a baguette and corner shop camembert we’d eaten as our jetlagged dinner. It looked like a tableau ready for a romantic painter: bread and cheese and wine in front of a window in midsummer twilight, the long soft embers of an evening that didn’t want to end.
A kaleidoscope turned in my head, disjointed scenes, confusing and exciting at once; the green iron and glass fan of the Guimard-designed Metro entrance at Abbesses Metro, a busker’s voice echoing Joni Mitchell’s ‘Free Man in Paris’ up the long spiral staircase from the platform, light glittering on the gold-tipped obelisk at place de la Concorde where a guillotine once stood, a gypsy woman in layered skirts in front of the Tuileries gate offering me a fake gold ring. We had walked around the gardens trying to stay awake. Children sailed boats in the pond, chestnut trees clipped into cube shapes grew in neat rows, the heavy-headed blossoms of asters and anemones and cosmos leaned in the summer heat, bees staggered from flower to flower. ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I; in a cowslip’s bell I lie,’ Ariel sang in my spaced-out brain. After lunch, Anthony and I sat in a café in the Tuileries, drinking Stella Artois, legs stretched out, shoes dusty from the white crushed gravel paths. Even then, our arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport that morning seemed a century ago.
My diary sat on the kitchen bench alongside the laptop, and pages of the manuscript I’d begun back in Australia were still lying in the suitcase. The manuscript was the story of a friend who had died from a brain haemorrhage and of her baby son who has become part of my life ever since. In Paris, away from ordinary life, I thought I might be able to piece together their stories, Dina’s and the child Theo’s, and mine. Our paths had crossed and become tangled and then she had died. A young mother dying and leaving a child bereft is an old story, a story from the beginning of stories, but it was the first time it had arrived in my life.
It was still the evening of the day we arrived and time had acquired a stretching quality, as if the day had lasted several lifetimes, as if time, in fact, didn’t pass but circled forever. Perhaps it was days since Anthony asked me how I was. His cigarette smoke went straight up in the still twilight.
I looked around my new home. The one-metre-square kitchen was delineated from the rest of the studio by a bench; the remaining space contained a lounge, a desk and another chair, and the bedroom was a futon on a mezzanine up a steep ladder and so close to the ceiling we would have to be careful sitting up in bed. The only separate space was the bathroom with a toilet and shower, both of them, we soon found out, as temperamental as cheap camping equipment. The only picture on the wall was a poster advertising an exhibition of Aboriginal art at a gallery in an outer suburb of Paris.
‘Ça va,’ I answered. All going well. I loved every little thing about our studio. It was just as I had imagined it all these years. Even the small cement courtyard and the dodgy loo and the bed platform I couldn’t stand up on were perfect. I could hardly believe that it had somehow happened. We were together, our two boys had grown up and we were young again. Maybe you could set time back to start again. To gain a dream long after it seemed possible made the world glow as if the light that comes after the sun has set had spilled gold on everything.
*
Thinking about that year it seems as if it were outside time, or a dream. It’s not an unusual dream; it’s so common that if I say it aloud I have to use an ironic tone or an American accent: who doesn’t wanna be a writer in Paris? Part of me shifts uneasily – not another writer in a garret living in illusion in Paris – but another part feels tender. It must mean something, a dream that can propel you to the other side of the world. Couldn’t it be the heart wanting something it needs, this longing for elsewhere? After all, we are all strangers wandering around this planet, apparently lost most of the time, looking for something or someone – or some place. And then, when we arrive there, we await revelation, or we impatiently turn things over, demanding answers.
Montaigne wrote, ‘Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there, but then they make a honey which is entirely theirs; it is no longer thyme nor marjoram honey.’ I ransacked all year; I’m not sure if I was the hard-working bee or the beekeeper who simply bided her time until the honey was ready, but it doesn’t matter as both bee and beekeeper are thieves. I feel a bit twitchy admitting that, a propensity to theft, and it’s not something I can defend except to say that I’ve always been that way.
In childhood I had a great uncle who kept bees. In memory he’s an unshaven, wrinkled bloke in shabby clothes who turned up at my grandmother’s house in town once a year with a battered drum of honey. I thought he lived in a hut in the hills behind the town although I’m not sure about that now. When we drove home after visiting Gran, through the hills along Bushrangers Creek Road to our farm, sometimes we would see his bee-boxes up under the gum trees, so that may have led me to imagine he lived there as well. Thinking back on it he was probably shy, perhaps a recluse, and the honey was his offering to his sister, his connection with the world. When we were visiting, I sneaked into the washhouse where Gran left the drum and put my finger in to steal a scoop of eucalypt honey.
*
I glanced at the poster for the ‘Exposition d’Art Aborigène d’Australie’. It was reassuring and unsettling: a dot painting in ochre and brown and black painted in the Western Desert, thousands of kilometres from where I lived on the other side of the island continent. It described country, the sacred sites of the desert places, where the rainbow serpent had slept and where waterholes could be found. I was born on Wiradjuri country in eastern Australia and walked on it every day of my childhood; I had no painting of it, but the shape of every fold of land, every rocky outcrop, was printed, is still printed, in my memory. I can see the anthill by the dry creek, the slope of the fallow paddock behind the house-yard, the muddy hoof prints of sheep and cattle around the shrinking dam. If that landscape was erased from me I am certain I would no longer exist. Why had I left it behind? What else did I think I would find here? It was something to do with an imaginary life, that much was obvious, one that had begun when I was still a child and that bore small resemblance to my actual life.
*
At the end of January during the long 1960s drought of bare brown earth, blue skies and bony animals, the new French teacher, Mrs Berman, walked into my classroom at St Mary’s high school in a country town 300 kilometres west of Sydney. It was a parish convent school, run by Irish nuns who taught the sons and daughters of the poor – cocky farmers and struggling shopkeepers – and a few Aboriginal kids from the Mission. We were a ragtag lot, some of us dressed in hand-me-downs, but not wild. Religion had a strong hold, keeping us mostly obedient and believing the rest of the world was on the road to hell.
‘Bonjour mes enfants,’ Mrs Berman said. She smiled as we sat in puzzled silence, none of us daring even a ‘bonjour’. There were only six in the French class; the rest had sensibly enrolled in Commerce. I gazed at her critically; she wasn’t French. She was just a nice, plump Australian woman about the same age as our mothers; she dressed in the same quiet skirts and neat cardigans, had the same short tidy cap of hair and spoke with the same Australian accent.
I was thirteen years old and young for my age. I still read Enid Blyton schoolgirl stories and had met Mam’zelle, excitable Mam’zelle, her dark hair in a bun with wisps that kept escaping. She stamped her foot with un-English temper and had a great sense of humour and was afraid of mice and beetles. The girls played merry pranks on her and she scolded ‘ze girls like ziz’. That’s how a French teacher was supposed to be.
‘Comment allez-vous?’ asked Mrs Berman and then she smiled and began handing out a French textbook with a red cover. ‘You can find the question in here – and the answer,’ she said. I was hooked already.
Although she was calm and correct and Anglo-Saxon, nothing like Mam’zelle, Mrs Berman did love French and, most impressively, had been to Paris. We learned the conjugations of avoir and être and aller in the first few weeks and a new vocabulary list every week until, by the end of the year, we could all ask Comment allez-vous and answer Je vais très bien merci or J’ai mal à la tête with only the usual amount of stumbling.
I complained with the others about the never-ending lists of ‘vocab’, but I loved being able to say le chien and le chat and mon frère and ma soeur at home on the farm. It was like having a secret language, one that set me apart. Having some small distinction was at times necessary amongst eight brothers and sisters, but it also hinted at the possibility of another kind of world, the faint beginning of awareness that there was a connection between language and perception. Other words for things created the idea that there was another way of seeing, of thinking, of knowing, that things didn’t have to be what everyone agreed they were. Not that anyone in my family was impressed.
‘Bonjour Maman,’ I said.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ my mother said and handed me a tea-towel.
Mrs Berman brought in madeleines and éclairs, which she made at home and let us eat in class, and told us about the cafés in France where everyone sat outside at round tables and drank wine with their meals. We sketched maps of the ‘hexagon of France’ with the Dordogne, the Rhône and the Seine rivers marked, the Alps and the Pyrénées cross-hatched, and Provence, Languedoc and all the other provinces outlined; we learned that Napoleon crowned himself emperor in an ermine-lined purple cloak decorated with gold bees, and that Marie Curie was a woman scientist who won the Nobel prize. It was a pure, old-fashioned version of France.
Mrs Berman also told us about the novels of Balzac and Zola and we read Guy de Maupassant’s stories and the short essays by the exquisitely truthful Michel de Montaigne, for whom I was not yet ready. I started to dream that one day I would go to Paris, but apart from Mrs Berman, I didn’t know anyone who had made such a miraculous journey. There didn’t seem to be any way for a girl from a scrabbling farming family to get to Paris.
When I sat on the broken veranda at home, I could see patchy grass, the pepper tree, a sagging chicken-wire fence. Outside the fence was the dry creek, windmill, dams and paddocks, and to the west, the farm sheds and, in the distance, Baron Rock, the monolith behind my childhood. To the east was the lane out to the road which went past the tin church we prayed in on Sunday mornings and then past the one-teacher school where I spent seven years, then twenty kilometres through the bush-covered hills to town where there were shops, a wheat silo, a high school and another, bigger, brick church. I had been to Sydney once that I could remember. That was the size of the world, except in books.
The only other French writer I remember reading in high school was Camus. The Plague was set for English; I’m impressed now that the nuns were willing to set existentialism loose on bush teenagers in the 1960s. I sat on the back veranda on my great aunt’s old rocking chair, which we eventually rocked to pieces, and ploughed my way through the tumult in Algeria, a country I’d barely heard of. It’s hard to recall now the effect of existentialism and the absurd on a fourteen-year-old girl, but I do recall a feeling both of pride in reading something which I knew to be ‘literature’ and a worrying sense that the world was much stranger and more frightening than I had been told.
Perhaps it was then that the paddocks and sheds finally lost solidity, or at least, became unconvincing. Ever since I could read, the three-dimensional world inside books had taken up more and more space, become more detailed, had come to be the world I wanted to live in. In my mind there were apartments with balconies, stairways and attics, narrow streets and shops and parks with iron railings, and beyond the cities, stone villages and meadows and running streams and oak forests, all made of words, and all the spaces, the air in the streets and rooms and over the meadows, that too was made of words.
I left the farm and moved to Sydney and then to New Zealand and back. Within a few months of meeting him when I was only twenty years old, I was pregnant to Anthony and gave birth to a boy with reddish gold hair. He was one of those babies who smiled at strangers and strangers smiled back. I waited until he was walking and talking and then I enrolled at university to study literature and writing.
The French thread was picked up by a mismatching collection of writers – Voltaire, Balzac and Duras, Artaud, Robbe-Grillet, Colette, Françoise Sagan, de Beauvoir (but not Sartre at that stage as we were a feminist faculty), fragments of Rousseau, and reams of French theorists, Barthes and Foucault and Irigaray. Like de Beauvoir, ‘literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion, it absorbed me entirely and transfigured my life’.
At home in a shambolic share house, I read Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Hemingway, James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald. I tried Proust, just because I thought I should, and certain lines – ‘as a rule it is with our beings reduced to a minimum that we live’ – appealed, but mostly I was in too much of a hurry for his precise world. At the time the whole household was passionately devoted to the film Les Enfants du Paradis, seeing it several times and falling in love with both Baptiste and Garance. I wasn’t the only one with romantic French symptoms.
After I finished my degree, the household broke up and I moved with Anthony and our son and two friends to a house in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. Matt started school, sturdy and independent, and my body started to long for another small body to nestle under my chin and to fit around the curve of my breasts and stomach. Another boy arrived on a cold blue day. Matt, who was seven years old by now, stroked the baby’s arms and said, ‘So this is the person we have been loving all this time.’ The baby lay on my belly and gazed at me and in that instant I saw the sweetness of his nature.
Afterwards, I changed Patrick’s nappies, was often exhausted, stole time to write, dug in our garden and dreamed about the world outside the Mountains. Anthony drove taxis in Sydney and we got by.
One day in the Mountains we met Jean-Jacques, a French-Swiss who gave us French lessons around the fire and became our friend. He spoke a fantastical half-French version of English with no care for tense or grammar, but once a week turned up with French books and red wine and sat with us reading Le Ballon Rouge and laughing at our accents. He gave our boys, Matt and Patrick, a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, the first whole book I read in French. I still can’t look at the drawing of the elephant in a python in Le Petit Prince without thinking of Jean-Jacques.
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 when 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.