September
While we are doing nothing the days pass, and our poor lives are made up of those days, and we grow old and die.
Madame de Sévigné
One day in September, needing to be amongst trees, I walked in the Luxembourg Gardens and again saw the bee-boxes, but not, this time, the beekeepers. I wasn’t puzzled anymore as I had since found out about the Rucher École, the beekeeping school. It was founded in 1856 and apparently the honey the school collects is richer and better than anywhere else in France because of the many different flowering plants in the city. The bees love the chestnut trees in the Champs Élysées and the linden trees of the Palais Royale and the lavender and geraniums in the window-boxes and gardens of Paris. What is beginning to puzzle me is why bees seem to be skimming into my mind as I turn over my memories of the year in Paris.
I don’t remember bees as being significant at the time. I can see they come from Montaigne and his metaphorical bees making ‘honey which is entirely theirs; it is no longer thyme nor marjoram honey’, but I don’t know why they have started multiplying. I do know that Napoleon had chosen them as his symbol. They had represented immortality for the Merovingians, the first line of French kings founded in the fifth century by Childeric and his son, Clovis. Engraved golden bees were found in Childeric’s tomb a thousand years after he died, although some sources say they were actually cicadas. Either way, Napoleon was connecting himself to the origins of France. He wove himself into the story of his country, stamped himself into the fabric, an indelible bee. Even without Childeric, bees are an image of devotion to the common good; they store riches for future need, they are armed with a ferocious sting to defend against intruders. I can only hope the bees flying into my head are intent on making honey rather than stinging.
*
It was the evening of my first meeting with the choeur, the choir. I liked that choeur was the word for heart, coeur, but with an ‘h’, like a breath, in it. I felt nervous, but not too jittery. I had been in a choir before, after all, and survived. And I knew Montaigne, whose good opinion I already wanted more than anyone else’s, would approve. He wrote that there was nothing more striking about Socrates than his taking up music and dancing in his older age, to make himself vulnerable by becoming a beginner again.
I arrived early at the hall in the Marais, up a flight of wooden stairs in one of the narrow streets running off the rue de Rivoli, the spine of central Paris. There were dozens of confident, well-dressed people milling about and chatting to each other, mostly in French, although I did hear a couple of English voices and a couple of Italians. They all knew each other already. The choirmaster arrived, a slender, grey-haired man in a linen shirt, well groomed, with a leather case under his arm. He put it down and looked around the group, nodded at me and said, ‘Bonjour.’
‘Bonjour.’ I nodded back, suddenly sure he knew I was from the backblocks without a note of music in me. He talked to the group for a few minutes about term dates and a performance, and then the warm-up began. The choirmaster stretched and wobbled his face, pursed his lips, rubbed his face and we all followed suit. I could do this, it was just like my choir in the Mountains.
Next were the vocalisations. ‘Ee ee ee oo oo oo ah ah ah.’ Up and down the scales he went. Powerful tenor and soprano and alto voices burst out around me, producing and projecting the notes in full bel canto mode. They had proper voices! This wasn’t a Blue Mountains community choir with a motley collection of people who liked singing. What on earth was I thinking? My squeaky little voice trembled in shock.
I looked around surreptitiously – perhaps I could slip out. But I was in the middle of a knot of people and couldn’t have walked out without excusing myself several times. A deep breath. I tried to follow the notes in a low voice. The woman next to me looked over. She already knew I was a pretender.
The choirmaster opened his leather case and sheets of music were handed out. There was excited conversation. Someone’s Requiem. I couldn’t read the music so I looked at the words, trying to make them save me. The group reshuffled into parts. I looked at one woman and raised my eyebrows. ‘Soprano,’ she said. I stood next to her. My voice had slightly more high notes than low.
The choirmaster tapped with his baton on a stand that had been produced from his case. I breathed out. He will sing the parts and I will copy him the way I did in my choir back home. Then he counted, un, deux, trois, quatre, flicked with his baton and without one note from him, the choir burst into powerful song. Voices soared out around the hall, rising, floating on notes and descending with enormous grace, sopranos as pure as bells, dark honey altos, rich tenors and basses. I tried for a couple of lines – I have to give myself some credit for pointless courage – my voice squeaking more and more with embarrassment until I gave up and simply mouthed the words. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more out of my depth in my life. I mouthed the words for the next two hours until I could safely slip back down the stairs and into the warm September evening.
If I had been with someone I would have burst out laughing. It was absurd, stupidly naive. Just the kind of thing a country bumpkin would do. We could have laughed immoderately and then had a glass of wine in the Café des Philosophes nearby and not care that we were talking loudly in English. But I was on my own, so I slunk home, my face still burning. I wasn’t Socrates enjoying being the fool at all, just a middle-aged woman hauling the burden of wanting to be good at everything.
‘How was it?’ asked Anthony. He has a good voice, not trained but he could sing anything in tune, even songs he last heard when he was a child.
‘Terrible,’ I said. ‘They can sing.’
‘Well, they are in a choir.’
I made myself a cup of tea and sat in the shadowy courtyard. The evening pooled around me, different from the deep darkness of the evenings in the Mountains, but still returning memories as evenings will. I thought of Dina singing to Theo, and performing in a country rock band, although that was before I met her. It was a long way from requiems, but then, maybe not. Her songs wailed of loss and longing, of grieving for people who are gone; times that have vanished. I glanced down and saw the beginnings of wrinkles on my arms, a faint terrain of cracks. It looked like a new geography on my body. I’d always found wrinkled arms disturbing, even as a child. I didn’t mind wrinkles on the face, that seemed natural, but on the arms they were frightening. Skin drying up, shrivelling, not fitting the body anymore. I wished I had a cardigan to pull over my arms even though it was still warm.
‘Guess who I think I’ve found?’ Anthony said. He had joined me in the courtyard, and squatted against the wall. ‘Jean-Jacques.’
‘Really? How? He’s here in Paris?’
‘No. He’s in Switzerland. I somehow remembered in the back of my brain that his father owned a driving school in Lausanne and I looked it up on the net. And there he was, Jean-Jacques.’
‘Are you going to contact him? Was there an email address?’
‘Yeah, I think I will.’
People always come and go from life and after a long enough time, it seems some people won’t come back ever again. Some die and others just disappear. Maybe it was best to leave them where they were. We both sat in silence for a while.
‘Why does anyone, me, want to be good at everything?’ I asked into the shadows.
Anthony shrugged. ‘So our mothers will love us the best?’
We sat for a while in the warm dark. In early September the evenings were still long enough to sort anything through, even making a fool of myself, long and quiet and just the right pace for reflection. I wondered what I did without a long twilight back home.
*
I lay in bed one night when I was seven and my mother counted the freckles on my nose. Forty-seven, she said, or fifty-two, I can’t remember, but I haven’t forgotten the delicious glow I felt at the attention showered on me, me alone. It is the sole memory I have from childhood of being the only one in my mother’s gaze. Every other time, I was one of many – four of us washed in the bath, eight of us fed, three of us told to get some ‘chips’ for the wood stove, five of us doing homework at the kitchen table, two of us yelled at for squabbling about who was supposed to do the washing-up, six of us ferried to Mass. I liked being one of many, proud our family was so much bigger than nearly everyone else’s, and even after the pleasure of the freckle-counting night, I didn’t realise that I longed to shine in my mother’s eyes. There was no conscious competition for her love and in my memory she treated all eight of her children equally, but I did have the feeling that I wasn’t really her sort of person. Writing that now all these decades later, I still feel my heart fall away. She was secretly rebellious, someone who didn’t like the rules, whereas I wanted to fit in, to look and act ‘right’. I suspect now that I got on her nerves – just enough for her not to acknowledge it to herself. It was only when I was older and found we shared a passion for ideas and reading that I felt I had some credit; I was almost conscious by then of giving her the novels I was reading at university to win her over, to make her see that, underneath, I was worthy of her love.
When my mother finished counting my freckles, in the midst of my warm glow, she told me I was going to have another baby brother or sister. I didn’t mind; I already had a younger brother and sister and three older brothers and another sister. It was just what happened.
When I look in any mirror, there’s always my mother standing in the background. I don’t think it can be any other way, although I suppose for some it’s the father. I wanted, still want, her gaze. Montaigne argued that the bond between mother and child is not so deep, that it can be broken by giving the child to a ‘wet-nurse or a nanny goat’. He explained that two of his manservants were suckled on nanny-goats, a common practice when the mother didn’t have enough milk, and it was well-known the nanny-goat would come running as soon as the baby cried. I don’t like to argue with Montaigne, but to me, that only shows that the bond is developed in the smell and sight and sound of nourishment – and that must begin when the baby is still in the womb. The knowledge is not remembered consciously, but it is there, shaping our longings and the desire to please. Couldn’t it be that many great achievements and many terrible ones were born of the desire to regain a mother’s gaze?
I went back to the Marais one afternoon to the Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris and, in the seventeenth century, home of Madame de Sévigné. Long ago the area had been a marsh, marais means marsh, but by the seventeenth century there were Italianate mansions, convents and grand gardens stretching between the elegant place des Vosges at one end and the Cimetière des Innocents at the other.
In those days the Marais was where the aristocracy lived and where the idea of Paris as a literary city was born. Women like Madame de Sévigné and her friend Mademoiselle de Scudéry, who wrote La Princesse de Clèves, a popular novel in the seventeenth century, held the first salons to talk about books and ideas with friends. Now it’s a quartier dedicated to fashion boutiques and cafés with tourists and locals bumping into each other on the narrow footpaths.
I criss-crossed the streets, passing an office for the French Association of Beekeepers, a small gallery selling globes of the world and skulls, a synagogue and, in the rue des Rosiers, shops selling Jewish food and religious objects. Then I saw a sign on the wall of a school: ‘165 enfants juifs de cette école déportés en Allemagne durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale furent exterminés dans les camps nazis. N’oubliez pas!’; 165 Jewish children from this school were deported to Germany during the Second World War and exterminated in Nazi camps. Do not forget! A chill crept over my skin at the exact number. 165. I couldn’t imagine millions being exterminated in camps, but I could imagine that many children. Their arms as they were grabbed, their terrified cries. The skin on my skull tightened. History was not something far away and a long time ago; it was right here in front of me in living memory. I felt bereft and then, disturbingly, a pang of envy. I walked away trying to shake my reaction.
I backtracked through the narrow streets of the Marais until I came to the wrought-iron gates of the Carnavalet on the rue des Francs Bourgeois. I sat for a while in the garden with its gravelled paths and low box-hedges clipped into the shape of fleurs-de-lys. I didn’t think I’d like its severe control, but, sitting there for a while, I felt myself quieten. I remembered Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Sarah Kofman’s brief memoir of being a Jewish girl in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Because she was blonde she was able to live with a Gentile woman as her child while her mother lived separately and sometimes, carefully, visited. In one of the many smaller stinging tragedies of war, Sarah grew to love the woman who looked after her more than her own difficult and emotional mother.
It was no longer hot, but a warm and still September noon. It was calm in the garden with few visitors, that lull as people leave to find somewhere to eat. Even the bees were quiet, ferrying their nectar back to the hives, perhaps the ones on the top of Opéra, where the props man kept his bee-boxes. Twenty-five years ago, he had been waiting to move into his house in the country and put his boxes on the roof of the Second Empire glory of the Palais Garnier opera house as a temporary measure – he got the idea from his friend who also worked at Opéra and bred fish in a pond under the building. The bees were happy in Paris and the props man’s honey became famous, the honey from the roof of Opéra.
There were cone-shaped trees on the other side of the Carnavalet garden and low roses between the clipped hedges, all perfectly ordered. In the quietness I started to recognise my reaction to the terrible events recorded on the wall. I had felt it before; it wasn’t a desire for pain or suffering, it was story-envy, a hungry desire to be in a story, no matter how dreadful. Growing up on the raw and sunny side of the world, I had no such stories of my own. It was almost as if I felt having such stories could compensate for such loss. I was outside these horrible tales, watching where they had flooded by, the bodies of ghostly children tumbling past me.
Sarah Kofman wrote: ‘9th February 1943, eight in the evening. We are in the kitchen having some vegetable broth. There is a knock. A man enters: Go into hiding immediately with your six children. You are on the list for tonight. And he hurried away.’
What can be done with the pain of other people’s stories? And why do I seek it?
I had creeks to play in, German soldiers in comics, straggling eucalypts to swing from, wheat fields, our horses Flicka and Beetlebomb, a well with a corrugated- iron cover, almond trees to climb, long droughts to dream of rain, arguing brothers and sisters, flies and bees and ants to watch, Baron Rock, a rocking chair for reading books. My mother and father never had their children snatched from them at school one day, never yearned until their last breath to see us again. The sun shone, my father came home when the sun went down, we ate lamb and potatoes and peas with tomato sauce at tea-time, and we slept through the night. In the morning we heard magpies and kookaburras and the sun was shining again.
By the time I got up to go inside through the museum entry in the rue de Sévigné I felt the slow drift of calm. Perhaps I was condemned to be the powerless witness of other people’s stories. Had I travelled from the other side of the world to accept that I could only say, ‘Yes, I see what has happened here to you’? It wasn’t resolution, and it could have been only the result of warm sun and an ordered garden; in these ways it becomes possible to continue.
Inside the museum there were hundreds of rooms and corridors with displays of street signs, maps of sixteenth-century Paris, gilt furniture and paintings, historical documents. I looked longest at the paintings of Montmartre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was where I lived! A steep wooded hill, windmills, orchards, vines, a fountain, a crooked village street, a stone fence. I read gallery notes, slowly. The people who lived there were uncouth, rural, dirty. Later, criminals and revolutionaries hid out on Montmartre and gangs known as the Apaches roamed about kicking in a head or two. I wondered how many years had to pass before violence and horrors became dramatic and romantic tales.
I stood in front of the original Declaration of the Rights of Man, and to my surprise, tears of admiration welled. People sticking up for their rights, however dodgy it becomes in practice, has to be a good thing. The museum guard noticed my tears and talked to me about the Declaration with pride. He showed me the rope ladder used to scale the Bastille on that fateful 14 July in a nearby glass case and I gladly believed it was the very rope.
I saw the cork room of Marcel Proust, cork to keep out annoying sounds and smells – he was a sensitive type – and the desk of Madame de Sévigné. It was a dainty black and gold Chinese lacquered writing desk in a light and airy room with a parquetry floor. I imagined she sat with a quill pen and creamy paper, writing in her clear but not excessively neat hand to her beloved daughter and friends.
In the painting above her desk she is a pretty woman with full lips, large dark blue eyes and an aristocratic nose. She looks sweet-natured, but judging from her Letters, I don’t know if I’d trust her after I’d left the room at one of her salons. She had a sharpish eye on everyone around her. After one evening at a friend’s gathering she wrote, ‘A pyramid [of pastries] wished to come in – the sort of pyramid that makes people have to write to one another from one side of the table to the other (not that one grieves that over here, on the contrary one is only too glad not to see what they hide) – that pyramid, with a score of china dishes, was so completely knocked over in the doorway that the noise silenced the violins, hautboys and trumpets.’
I was drawn to her though. I liked her humour and directness and her admissions about herself, especially her intense love for her children. She seemed obsessive about them, but then, I wonder if she was only trying to be honest about a love that most women know is too terrifyingly deep to reveal. Don’t let the Fates know how much my boys mean to me.
*
What do I know about her? Madame de Sévigné was born Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, at 1b place des Vosges in Paris in 1626 and died seventy years later. She arrived in the world after Montaigne, whom she read, and before Rousseau, whom I suspect she would have given the sharp edge of her tongue. Her father died when she was a baby and her mother when she was seven. She married at eighteen, had a son and daughter, and was widowed at twenty-four when her husband was killed in a duel over another woman. Her husband and, years later, her son both took the same woman, Ninon de L’Enclos, as a lover. She was friends with many writers, such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Rochefoucauld, and political figures like Nicolas Foucquet, Louis XIV’s finance minister, and Madame de Maintenon, the king’s mistress. She became famous for the thousands of letters she wrote to her daughter about cultural and political life in Paris. And infamous for her ‘excessive’ devotion to that daughter, who had married and moved to Provence, which, in those days, meant de Sévigné only saw her every several years. She was religious but had a sharp and witty eye for the absurd and for foolishness, and had a streak of melancholia. She went to see the plays of Molière, Corneille and Racine – she didn’t think Racine would last – and loved to talk about books. She had many admirers but, apparently, she never took a lover after her husband died.
I was in de Sévigné’s house several centuries later but it didn’t feel like a house. It was too vast and too grand and I found it hard, even with her portrait in front of me, to see her as a thinking, feeling person. The elaborate silk gowns and jewellery and even more elaborate hairstyles of the time made women seem like ornate objects. It was only in her words that I could see who she really was. Or at least, see her version of herself.
She admits to occasional depression in her Letters: ‘When one goes to bed one’s thoughts are only dark grey … and in the night they become quite black: I know how true it is.’ I was startled by her honesty, especially in a time when wit and style were all that mattered. Depression and anxiety run through my family; my solid peasant-farmer father suffered from it. His way of life out on our few dry acres in the bush was as far from the mannered rituals of the Sun King’s court and the literary salons of seventeenth-century Paris as possible, but he would have known exactly what de Sévigné meant if he had ever read her. Inheritance is a chancy thing, it dances like a bee, bestowing or skipping over at will; depression stung some of my brothers and sisters and flew past others. I was one of the ones who escaped its grey miasma; I’m more inclined to blind optimism and I’m drawn to sunny dispositions, but I’ve always both feared and been attracted to the shade and angles of depression.
Montaigne suffered from depression after his dear friend, Étienne de la Boétie, died, but he was essentially at ease, enjoying the pleasures and delights of life without anxiety; Rousseau worried about everything, was disturbed by everything, including his own passions; de Sévigné was, I think, simply sad.
When I looked again at the portrait of de Sévigné, a woman of beauty and intelligence, wealth and influence, I could see some hooded wound in her eyes. She once confessed to wishing she had died in her nurse’s arms so as to have avoided the many sorrows of her life. Perhaps the wound was because, like Rousseau, she lost her mother when she was only a child. And like Theo too, whose mother died when he was three years old. It felt as if I was being given pieces of the mosaic I was making about him and his mother at home in my studio. A beautiful, gifted boy with panicked eyes trying to hide infinite loss.
The last time I saw Dina she was lying exhausted in the Blue Mountains hospital, only her eyes able to move as her gaze followed Theo’s chubby body around the room. Then Theo came over and climbed on my knee and fitted his body comfortably into mine. Dina’s eyes filled with tears and Theo patted her stiff hand lying on the bed cover.
Outside in the streets of the Marais, people lingered over a late lunch with a final cup of coffee, their purchases in shopping bags on the chairs beside them. I wondered if they knew about the 165 children taken from the school around the corner. Or about Madame de Sévigné missing her daughter so much she felt she would jump from the window of her grand house nearby. Perhaps they felt no absence in not knowing the stories surrounding them; perhaps they were fully immersed in their own rich weave and had no need to knot and tie themselves into other people’s tapestries.
*
I arrange to meet Madame de Sévigné for a coffee in the Marais so she can see how much it has changed. ‘The Café des Philosophes,’ I text, ‘on the corner of the rue Vieille du Temple – you can walk through place Royale where you were born, but it’s called place des Vosges now.’
‘Let’s sit outside so we can watch everyone walk past,’ she texts back.
She orders a long black with Narbonne honey and then, seeing mine, wishes she’d ordered a café au lait. As far as I know she was the first French writer to mention coffee with milk. She is striking with her creamy skin and dark hair – everyone looks at her – but she takes no notice. She talks about members of parliament including government ministers, she knows them all, and various actors and artists. These days she writes well-informed and entertaining analyses of politics and social mores; she’s always being asked to be a guest on various television programs. No-one feels safe from her clever and amused eye. She unsettles me at first – her beauty gives her an unnerving power – but she has a genuine warmth and also a sadness and I begin to feel that we are women together. She makes me laugh with her observations about people walking past and she listens to my stories with attention. I can tell she wants to win me over, that she does that with everyone, and I am won over.
*
In the Marais there are the ghosts of the Knights Templar tortured in the fourteenth century, wandering medieval streets past art nouveau synagogues. There is the shadow of Evelyn Waugh drinking at Au Père Tranquille, Balzac as a child in the rue Vieille du Temple, Victor Hugo magnificent in the place des Vosges, Rousseau and Madame Rousseau living simply in the rue Plâtrière. Here are the smells of silvery fish, oysters, runny cheeses, cabbages and the noisy yelling and arguing of Les Halles market echoing under a suburban shopping mall, and here is the dusty late-Gothic splendour of St-Eustache towering over the quartier; and there the coloured pipes of the Pompidou Centre shining like a giant plumbing works.
Over there, bikes bump on the cobbles along narrow streets, lines form for the best falafels in the world in the rue des Rosiers, pretty place du Marché St-Catherine looks like a village square, bees buzz in the hidden gardens of the Hôtel de Sully and Jardin des Rosiers, and a few metres of the twelfth-century wall of Paris protect kids playing basketball. The homeless camp with their eiderdowns under the arches in the place des Vosges, the hooded monks chant in St-Gervais, and in the rue des Mauvais Garçons, the Street of Naughty Boys, the name makes everyone smile.
*
It was mid-September. I had been in Paris for three months and it had to be faced: immersion as a way of learning French was not working. If it was supposed to soak in like dye into cloth, then I was an impermeable substance. The final evidence came when I was still in the backstreets of the Marais and a young woman said, ‘Excusez moi.’
I stopped. ‘Oui?’ I said. I noticed she was staring straight ahead.
‘Blah, blah rue, blahenblah?’ She was looking over my shoulder.
I suddenly realised she was blind – and I had no idea what she’d said. What should I do? She was blind and I was deaf and dumb. She said ‘rue’ somewhere in there, maybe she was lost, but even if she was, I couldn’t tell her where she was. I didn’t know where I was myself and the words would not come and arrange themselves in the right order to explain any of this. I reddened and felt hot.
‘I’m sorry,’ I burst out in English. She looked puzzled and worried. I think the sound of my voice was harsh. She was young, no more than twenty, and looked vulnerable. I turned and rushed away. I glanced back before I turned the corner and the young woman was still standing there, bewildered.
I told Anthony when I got home that I’d abandoned a blind girl in the street and that was it. No more wandering about thinking the words would soak in to me. I was going to go and enrol in French classes.
The following day I went to Alliance Française in the boulevard Raspail to ask about class times. The efficient girl, who seemed annoyed with people who couldn’t speak fluent French, told me to sit down and do a written test to see what level to enrol in. It was late in the afternoon, I was tired, but I sat down as instructed. There were multiple-choice questions with a confusion of verb conjugations, but I recalled as much of Mrs Berman’s French as I could and then waited while it was marked. After half an hour I was given a slip of paper saying I could enrol in an intermediate class, which started on the following Monday.
I knew Simone de Beauvoir had lived in the boulevard Raspail when she was ‘a happy and somewhat opinionated child’ and a ‘dutiful daughter’. It was not difficult to imagine her pressing the porte button to unlock her apartment building door and walking along the street to school, immersed in her own sense of self, her sense of being a separate individual. I was a student in Paris too, carrying my books and the desire to know alongside Simone in the cool morning air, smiling happily at no-one.
I swung through the gates of the language school and into a building of corridors and classrooms. In one of those doublings of time, the chalky hot smell of my high school classroom and the glaring summer light and the feeling of being caught forever in a desolate town trembled under the cool Paris morning. All those years ago Mrs Berman came and took our small class to the library and we had our French lessons there, surrounded by books before present-time existed.
I found the classroom and sat down. All the other students were at least twenty years younger than I was.
‘Je m’appelle Didier,’ said the teacher. My name is Didier. That was easy. I could do this.
It didn’t take long after that to realise my written French had betrayed me into a class higher than I had a hope of understanding. I couldn’t answer any of the questions, I had no clue as to what I should be doing. The young Indian next to me chatted and asked Didier questions. Teacher’s pet, I thought. I was the clever student; I was the one who could answer all the questions.
The two pretty Japanese girls in the next row stumbled through their answers and Didier smiled at them. I kept my head down and tried not to catch his eye.
The two hours were up. I waited until most of the students had left and approached Didier, who was packing up his books and papers.
‘Cette classe est trop difficile pour moi,’ I said. ‘J’ai besoin d’une autre classe.’ This class is too difficult for me. I need another class.
‘It’s only your first day,’ he said in accented English. ‘Take some more time.’
‘No, it’s too hard,’ I said, relieved to understand something again. ‘I need an easier class.’
‘Okay, I have another class that is more easy. You come to that. I speak a little English there. Tomorrow.’
I turned up the next day, a little less jauntily this time, but relieved when Didier greeted me with a smile and a clear, ‘Comment allez-vous?’
I sat down with another mix of travellers and migrants from Poland, Japan, India, the USA and the Middle East. As promised, Didier used some English and two- or three-word French instructions, which I could follow. He handed out a sheet of paper with conversation topics and lists of vocabulary and asked us to practise a short conversation with the person next to us.
We began halting, laughing exchanges, helping each other out with words and guessing what might be being said. Didier walked around the class, listening to each conversation, correcting grammar and pronunciation and providing the right French word when we looked at him helplessly. The woman I was speaking to was a doctor from Istanbul, nearer my age than any of the others. We laughed together, recognising each other’s embarrassment at failing to be good at everything. Then we changed partners and I talked to a Japanese teenager who worked in IT and who was serious about his sentences. I felt pressure again, the desire to say everything perfectly. I wanted to have all the words in the right order, the tenses correct, before I even began the sentence. I told him the same things that I had told the Turkish doctor.
I went to class each day for a few weeks. As we relaxed with each other we spoke more and more in a Franglais in a variety of accents – Japanese, American, Hindi. Didier tried to correct us, but the urge to communicate was starting to overcome the desire to speak correctly. If I kept coming, in a few months I would be able to talk to all the people in the class easily, but not to anyone speaking actual French.
On the last day I gave Didier a card I had found in a shop which sold Australian postcards off the boulevard Raspail. I’d bought an elegant black-and-white image of the Sydney Opera House and wrote on the back, chez moi, my house, and merci. Didier smiled when he saw it. I had made a little joke in French.
On the way home from classes I sometimes got out of the Metro at Pigalle and walked up the steps to rue des Abbesses. There was often a transvestite street-worker in a mini-skirt and fishnet stockings on the corner of the rue André Antoine, the narrow alley below the steps. She was stockily built and looked Tahitian, with a broad nose and thick black hair. Every time I passed her she said, ‘Bonjour Madame,’ and I answered, ‘Bonjour Madame.’ The first time I was startled as I hadn’t been greeted by a prostitute in the street before, but after that, it was the same as any polite exchange with people you see regularly but don’t really know, acknowledging each other sharing the same space. It made me feel at home for that moment. In fact, I began getting out at Pigalle, just to greet her. To her I was part of this place, just like the two little boys who often played in the alley and the beggar with the smelly overcoat and swollen legs who sometimes rested there. One day I saw her talking to a young mother who had a baby in her arms and a boy standing in the folds of her skirt. I looked at the boy, bored and swinging the skirt, and felt envious of all of them. There was nothing any of them needed of me.
With the aid of my Larousse, the French bible of verb conjugations, I constructed a note asking for a conversation partner and put it on the wall of our building, outside on the street.
That afternoon the telephone rang, a young woman named Cosette. ‘Have you read Victor Hugo? Like that,’ she said. Meaning, I guessed, like Cosette in Les Misérables. She lived in the same apartment block and suggested we go to the piscine, swimming pool, together the next morning. Apparently she had some children whom she had promised to take to the pool.
The next day I turned up at her apartment, hiding my towel and cossie in my bag in case that wasn’t the arrangement we had made. A woman in her early twenties came to the door, curly blonde hair, short and slim. Inside was a teenage girl sitting at a table and a younger teenage boy half-lying amongst the sheets of a sofa bed watching television. I was confused. There was no way Cosette was old enough to be the mother of either of them and, besides, they were both African looking. I was introduced to Ornella and Augustin, who greeted me politely. In a garbled way I gathered that Cosette looked after them, but it appeared they lived there as they were still in their pyjamas.
The kids dressed and we all piled into Cosette’s car and headed south right across Paris to Portes de Sèvres pool. I smiled a lot and pretended I knew what Cosette was chatting about. I learned that she was a mathematics professeur, which at that stage I thought meant professor. So young to be a professor! Finally at the pool, we changed into our cossies then walked out into the brilliant sunshine. The blue sky and water, the concrete, looked and felt like summer in my hometown in Australia. Cosette stripped off her bikini top, revealing sturdy shoulders and tanned breasts, and dived into the pool. I looked down at the loose skin on my arms and decided not to undress.
Ornella and I chatted laboriously and I understood that she was waiting to go to university where she wanted to study English literature. ‘J’adore l’Anglais,’ she said. Whew! Now there was something I could talk about. We spoke for several minutes before the effort embarrassed and tired us both. Cosette, out of the pool, chatted to a couple of young men. She was so at ease, so French, in her nakedness that I wanted to be her.
I had several more conversations with Cosette. I found out she was from Normandy, that she was doing a PhD in mathematics, and that she had a dream to live in Cairns in tropical Australia because she wanted to be warm all year round. I wondered aloud if everyone longed for elsewhere, and Cosette smiled. Most of the time I left with a headache from the strain of trying to listen. The two teenagers were with her each time, which meant it was mostly noisy, and there were just too many voices to follow. I needed quiet conversation with one person if I was to get anywhere at all.
Although Cosette lived in the same building as I did, in one of those random mismatchings, I didn’t even bump into her in the hall or courtyard or street after that. I sometimes wonder if she ever got to Cairns.
By the end of September it was noticeably cooler. The days were still warm but in the mornings and evenings the air was fresh. I’d never been much of an early riser, but I enjoyed getting up in the mornings and walking down to the boulangerie with the morning city smells of coffee and hot bread and old motor oil on the cobbles. The twinges of pain in my shoulder and arm had become an occasional dull ache, especially at night – I thought it must be the hard futon – and a walk in the morning helped ease it out.
Anthony arrived back from a week in Jordan talking to students and it was the weekend. We headed for the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the north-east of Paris, not far, as the crow flies, from Montmartre. It’s a hilly park with grassy slopes where, we noticed, people were allowed to lie about. There were oak-filled glades and paths lined with chestnuts and clusters of cedars and pines and beeches. There was also a lake with a sheer cliff rising from it, on the summit of which was a temple, the Temple de la Sibylle, and further around, a torrent falling over an abyss into a cave. It didn’t take long to realise that everything, the lake and cliff, the torrent and even the cave, was fake, the artfully arranged rocks and waterfalls puzzling the eye for a moment before the artifice was revealed.
The park was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century on a bare hill near the gibbets of Montfaucon where the corpses of criminals were left hanging until they rotted. The area was notorious for the smell and the carrion birds and the sheer terror of dozens of human bodies decomposing in the midday sun. The Age of Romanticism reclaimed the hill for a version of natural beauty, the park designer trying to imitate Rousseau’s drama-filled version of wild nature: ‘Never does a plain, however beautiful it may be, seem so to me. I need torrents, rocks, firs, dark woods, mountains, steep roads to climb or descend, abysses beside me to make me afraid.’
I thought of the Blue Mountains where our boys had grown up, the sandstone cliffs and rocky streams and waterfalls, so different from the plains and undulating hills where I was raised. I was used to subtle changes in form and colour, long stretches of grey-green eucalypts, yellowing wheat paddocks, gradual inclines. I wondered how much landscape shapes longings and even stories, whether my boys needed wilder country than I did, more dramatic tales?
‘A good place for kids to play,’ said Anthony.
‘I was just thinking of our boys,’ I said. We were stretched out on the grass by the lake looking up at the cliff, me propped on my elbows, Anthony leaning with his back against my knees. ‘Not kids anymore.’
Anthony nodded, his eyes shut. He reached his arm backward and I took his hand.
‘I wonder if Patrick has heard about his application for Amsterdam?’ I said.
‘He would have told us. If he does get in Matt will be the only one left back home.’
We were going to talk about our boys. It was a recurring conversation, a reweaving of the pattern of our lives with them. It wasn’t woven every day, not even every week, but once we started there was a deep pleasure that both of us extended as long as we could. It was not done in front of other people, it was a private weaving, not fit for others to see. At the same time, there was fear that the gods might hear us. Don’t let the wanton gods know, speak in low voices. Don’t let them know of the older boy who made a sculpture of string and Christmas baubles in the back yard, don’t let them hear of the younger who whistled ‘Ode to Joy’ on the veranda, don’t let them see both boys sitting around a campfire watching sparks disappear into the night, don’t let them smell their soapy after-bath-in-pyjamas bodies.
None of the memoirists except Madame de Sévigné writes of the visceral absorption in one’s children. Montaigne says he doesn’t like babies and de Beauvoir’s disdain is famous: to have more children ‘was to go on playing the same old tune, ad infinitum’. I thought of Madame de Sévigné, criticised over the centuries for her outpouring about her daughter: ‘Do you think I don’t kiss with all my heart your lovely cheeks and bosom? Do you think I can embrace you without infinite affection? Do you think affection can ever go further than mine?’
It’s not how I would ever talk to or write to my children; it’s too dramatic for me, like the fake Rousseau landscape, and yet, I know it speaks to the unsayable depth of my feeling. And Anthony’s. Today, when the boys are on the other side of the world, love and some nostalgia well up and there is a tone in our voices that no-one else ever hears. It’s over now, the daily care of small bodies and tender minds, and although they no longer orbit around us, we can’t yet let go being the centre of their lives.