Distant Errors,
Christmas Journal 2
My fax machine, which was made by the French state, always blames someone else when things go wrong. It is a Galéo 5000 model, and it is made by France Télécom and is therefore an official, or French government, product; even its name carries with it the nice implication that 4,999 other models were attempted before perfection was at last achieved by the French fax machine ministry.
You even have to go to a government telephone outlet to buy a new ribbon for it. It’s a plain paper fax (you have the same expression in French, papier ordinaire, ordinary paper) with all the usual features. It’s really very nicely designed—much better designed than its American equivalents, with that streamlined, intelligent Philippe Starck look that the French seem magically able to give to everything they make. It’s reasonably efficient too—perhaps a little overtricky in loading in the sheets and unduly inclined to bourrage de papier, paper jams—but still . . .
It has a little glowing window on its face where it affiches, or posts, the events and troubles of its day, its operating life. The window flashes, for instance, a shocked, offended Pas d’identité!—no identity!—when the fax machine at the other end doesn’t “identify itself,” which for some reason or another most American machines don’t seem to.
But the favorite, all-purpose affiche of my fax machine is erreur distante—distant error—which it affiches all the time, no matter where the error actually originates, far away or right in its own backyard. Whether the error comes from a fax machine in Lille or Los Angeles, it says that it is a distant error. When the machine itself has run out of paper, it is still a distant error. When I have forgotten to clean the ribbon heads, an error has nonetheless taken place, at a distance. Jams and overflows, missed connections, and faulty plugs: all are erreurs distantes. When it really is a distant error, it is still just another distant error. This is the French fax machine’s way of getting through life. The error is distant; the problem lies someplace else; there is always somebody else to blame for your malfunctions.
French intellectuals and public people, I have on certain occasions come to the mordant, exasperated, and gloomy conclusion, share the same belief, affiche the same accusatory message, banding together and flashing erreur distante, whenever they run out of paper or ink or arguments. This morning, for instance, I saw the economist Emmanuel Todd being interviewed about his book on the economic “stagnation” of industrialized economies. He blandly announced that the U.S. economy was just as stagnant as France’s, in fact was worse because its “cultural level” (by which he meant the level of education) was so much more depraved. Also, the United States manufactured less than it once had. Economic stagnation was the problem of all the industrialized economies, France was simply sharing in it, and the United States was really to blame. His debating opponent, an intelligent economist named Cohen—very poorly dressed in a brightly colored blazer and bad tortoiseshell glasses—tried to explain that this wasn’t so, that the fall in manufacturing was in fact a sign of the renovation of the American economy, and that whatever its flaws in equality, the growth in America was real, that the one thing you couldn’t call the American economy was stagnant. Todd, who looked terrific, hardly bothered to argue with him; he just made the same assertions again: The American economy is stagnant. He just affiched, like my fax machine erreur distante, and the host, terrified, nodded.
A while ago I was on a panel broadcast for France-Culture, the radio station, at the Sciences Po, the great political science school, along with Philippe Sollers and other French worthies, and we talked about the influence of American culture on France. Everyone took it for granted that the American dominance in culture was a distant error or, rather, a distant conspiracy organized by the CIA and the Disney corporation. (I was there, the sole American on the panel, to be condescended to as the representative of both Michael Eisner and William Colby, with mouse ears on my head and a listening device presumably implanted inside them.) The clichés get trotted out—that Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists got put over by the CIA, etc.—with a complacent certitude, and it was taken for granted that the relative decline of the prestige of French writing and painting has nothing to do with the actual decline of the quality of French writing and painting. (And yet when we got down to particulars, much of these preju-dices vanished: Sollers and I actually had a reasonable debate about Roth and Updike. No American Sollers would have been able to name two French novelists, much less debate their value.)
What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Astérix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to afficher erreur distante and wait for somebody else to change the paper.
A wise man, an old émigré artist, when I told him, gaily, that we were going to move to Paris, said soberly, even darkly: “Ah. So you have at last decided not to forgo the essential Jewish experience of emigration and expatriation.” I thought it was a joke, a highly complicated, ironic joke, but still a joke, since what could be less traumatic, in the old-fashioned émigré’s sense, less Cioran and Benjamin and Celan, than moving to Paris with a baby? But of course, what he said was true, or contained a truth. The reality is that after a year here everything about moving to Paris has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult. An immigrant is an immigrant, poor fellow: Pity him! The errors arrive, and they tell me I brought them with me.
The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. Martha, the other day, spent the morning watching Luke open and shut the little gates that lead into the interior gardens at the Palais Royal. He would open the gate, she explained, walk through, watch it shut, and then walk back through again, with the rows of violet flowers in the background. She felt, she said, as if she had died and gone to heaven—but with the strange feeling that dying and going to heaven mean parting, leaving, and missing the people you left behind on earth. No wonder ghosts at séances are so blandly encouraging; they miss you, but they are busy watching someone else.
There is the feeling of being apart and the feeling of being a universe apart—the immigrant’s strange knowledge that the language and lore that carry on in your own living space are so unlike the ones right outside. (This is particularly true of our Canadian-American-Jewish–Sri Lankan–Franco-American ménage, with the two-year-old at its center.) There is also the odd knowledge, at once comforting and scary, that whatever is going on outside, you are without a predisposed opinion on it, that you have had a kind of operation, removing your instant reflexive sides-taking instinct. When French politicians debate, I think, well, everybody has a point. After a year the feeling that everything is amusing, though, bombs and strikes an act in the Winter Circus, does begin to fade, to seem less amusing in itself. When Le Canard Enchaîné, the satiric paper, comes out on Wednesday mornings, I buy it and generally enjoy, am even beginning to understand, most of the jokes and digs; what was largely incomprehensible to me at first is now self-evident, who is being mocked for what and why.
But I don’t actually care about who is being mocked. I am simply pleased to register that what I am reading is mockery. And the slightly amused, removed feeling always breaks down as you realize that you really don’t want to be so lofty and Olympian—or rather, that being lofty and Olympian carries within it, by tradition and precedent, the habit of wishing you could be down there in the plain, taking sides. Even the gods, actually looking down from Olympus in amusement, kept hurtling down to get laid or slug somebody.
After a first winter in Paris, when the lure of the chimney and cigar smell holds you in thrall, you become accustomed to them, and then all you notice is the dark. From November to April, hardly a single day when you see the sun. The light itself is beautiful, violet and gray, but it always looks as if it were planning to snow, and then it never does.
We had the seasonal pleasure of buying a (by Canadian standards, insanely overpriced) Christmas tree. We bought it from a Greek tree-and-plant dealer on the Île de la Cité. It’s a nice tree, a big fir, green and lush, but, at our insistence, without that crazy wooden cross that the French insist on nailing to the bottoms of their Christmas trees, so that you can’t give them water. Ours is open, with a fresh cut, and sits in its watery pedestal, a red-and-green tripod, which we brought all the way over from Farm and Garden nursery down on Franklin Street in TriBeCa.
The logic (or fantasy) of the wooden cross on the bottoms of the trunks of the French Christmas trees, as the bemused dealer explained it to me, is that it “seals” off the tree’s trunk and keeps the sap inside from drying out. The opposed American logic, our logic, of course (or is it our fantasy too?), is that an open cut will keep a dead and derooted tree “fresh” for as long as you need it, for as long as you give it water and the season lasts.
Or is the cut cross, after all, really a kind of covert, symbolic, half-hidden reminder on the part of a once entirely Catholic country of the cross-that-is-to-come, of the knowledge that even Christmas trees can’t be resurrected without a miracle? Americans persuade themselves that a dead tree is still fresh if you keep pouring water on it; here there is a small guilty stirring of Catholic conscience that says, “It’s dead, you know, the way everything will be. You can seal it up, but you can’t keep it going. Only a miracle will bring it back to life.”
Naturally none of the Christmas tree garlands I bought last year works this year. Though Martha packed them away neatly when we took the tree down, they have managed to work themselves into hideous tangles, the way Christmas lights always do. If the continued existence of the Christmas tree light garlands, even though they’re obviously impractical compared with strings, is proof of the strength of cultural difference, their ability to get themselves tangled is just as strong proof of cultural universality. The strands did it in New York, the garlands do it here, and there is no explaining how they do. The permanent cultural differences are language, the rituals of eating, and the habits of education; the permanent cultural universals are love of children and the capacity of Christmas lights left in a box in a closet to get themselves hopelessly tangled in knots.
The American Christmas came to Paris while I was away in New York; Halloween came this year for the first time, right while we were watching, right under our noses. Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin couldn’t have been more shocked, more pleased than we were to see Halloween rising before us like a specter. The shops were suddenly filled with pumpkins and rubber masks and witches and ghost costumes and bags of candy. Apparently the American Halloween has been sneaking up bit by bit for a little while, but everyone agrees that this year the whole thing has really happened, and for the most obvious of reasons: It is a way for small shopkeepers to sell stuff before Christmas comes. Le Monde, sensing this brisk commercial motive, published a piece about the coming of Halloween, predictably indignant.
The essentially creepy, necrophile nature of the holiday, invisible to Americans, was harder to hide from the French. Our friends Marie and Édouard, who live with their two children, Thomas and Alexandra, across the courtyard, were dubious: The children dress up as the dead and the horrific and then demand sweets at the price of vandalism? The pleasure is located where exactly? Our friend Cassie says that her French mother-in-law, seeing the grandchildren dressed up as skeletons, let out a genuine shriek of distaste.
Of course, it is incumbent on Americans to reassure, gently, that it is not really a holiday of the dead at all—that like all American holidays, it is a ritual of materialism, or, to put it another way, of greed, a rite designed to teach our children that everything, even death, ends with candy. It is just fun. Fun is the magic American word (Our motto “Let’s have fun!” is met by the French motto “Let’s be amused.”) Though Halloween arrived and caused parties and sales, the tradition of trick-or-treating has not really caught on here, and so Martha and several other mothers decided to have a Halloween party in Cassie’s apartment. The mothers hid behind doors, so that the children could knock and get their candy. It was trick-or-treating made into an indoor sport. The French children in the party, she tells me, just didn’t get it. What was the point, the French children, disconsolate as ghosts and skeletons and witches, seemed to wonder, waiting behind their doors, to be all dressed up, with nowhere to go?
Luke has mounted up onto the horses on the carousel this year, although he needs to be tied on, like a parcel. To my delight, though not really to my surprise, I discovered this year that the carousel has been turning in the same manner, offering the same game, and drawing the same bemused, fascinated attention of foreigners for at least seventy-five years. I found a passage in the travel writing of Joseph Roth, the Austrian novelist, who visited the Luxembourg Gardens in 1925 and wrote about the “manèges de chevaux de bois pour enfants.” He describes the rings and sticks, exactly as they are today: “The owner of the merry-go-round holds in his hand, at the end of a stick, little rings lightly hung and easy to detach. All the children on the horses and in the tiny cars are armed with wands. So that when they pass before the rings, they try to unhook them, which is to say slip them onto their wand. Whoever gets the most gets a prize. They learn quick action, the value of the instant, accelerated reflexes, and the trick of adjusting one’s eye.” “The value of the instant . . .” Doubtless Cartier-Bresson and the rest of the “decisive moment” photographers rode on such horses, caught their rings, learned there’s only one right moment in which to do it.
Roth admired the game endlessly, because it seemed so un-German, such a free and charming way to educate, without the military brutality of Teutonic schools. The funny thing is that there are now no more prizes—the same game, same carousel, but no more prizes. Nothing left to teach. You get the ring for the pleasure of having taken it. I wonder which child won the last prize and when.
The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don’t really encode things. They include things, and leave things out. There is, for instance, the exasperation of lunch. Lunch, as it exists in New York, doesn’t exist here. Either lunch is a three-course meal—i.e., dinner, complete with two bottles of wine—or else it is to be had only at a brasserie, where the same menu—croque monsieur, omelet, salade Niçoise—is presented almost without any variation at all, as though the menu had been decreed by the state. A tuna sandwich, a bran muffin, a bowl of black bean soup—black bean soup! Yankee bean! Chicken vegetable! It is soup, beautiful soup, that I miss more than anything, not French soup, all puréed and homogenized, but American soup, with bits and things, beans and corn and even letters, in it. This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch. So on Sundays I have developed the habit of making soup for the week, from the good things we buy in the marché biologique on the boulevard Raspail. Soup and custard on Sunday nights, our salute to the land of the free.
My favorite bit of evidence of the French habit of pervasive, permanent abstraction lies in the difficulties of telling people about fact checking. (I use the English word usually; there doesn’t seem to be a simple French equivalent.) “Thank you so much for your help,” I will say after interviewing a man of letters or politician. “I’m going to write this up, and you’ll probably be hearing from what we call une fact checker in a couple of weeks.” (I make it feminine since the fact checker usually is.)
“What do you mean, une fact checker?”
“Oh, it’s someone to make sure that I’ve got all the facts right, reported them correctly.”
Annoyed: “No, no, I’ve told you everything I know.”
I, soothing: “Oh, I know you have.”
Suspicious: “You mean your editor double-checks?”
“No, no, it’s just a way of making sure that we haven’t made a mistake in facts.”
More wary and curious: “This is a way of maintaining an ideological line?”
“No, no—well, in a sense I suppose . . .” (For positivism, of which New Yorker fact checking is the last redoubt, is an ideological line; I’ve lived long enough in France to see that move coming. . . .)
“But really,” I go on, “it’s just to make sure that your dates and what we have you quoted as saying are accurate. Just to be sure.”
Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. On occasion I even get a helpful, warning call from the subject after the fact checker has called. “You know, someone, another reporter, called me from the magazine. They were checking up on you.” (“No, no, really checking on you,” I want to say, offended, but don’t—and then think he’s right: They are checking up on me too; never thought of it that way, though.) There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, “fact checking,” is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naïve to think otherwise.
I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, post-interview, that a theory checker would be calling them. “It’s been a pleasure speaking to you,” you’d say to Al Gore or Mayor Giuliani. “And I’m going to write this up; probably in a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you.”
Alarmed, suspicious: “A what?”
“You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agree with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.”
“What do you mean?” the American would say, alarmed. “Of course they do. I don’t need to talk to a theory checker.”
“Oh, no, you don’t need to. It’s for your protection, really. They just want to make sure that the theory hangs together. . . .”
The American subject would be exactly as startled and annoyed at the idea of being investigated by a theory checker as the French are by being harassed by a fact checker, since this process would claim some special status, some “privileged” place for theory. A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it’s apparent (to us Americans) that people don’t speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is.
Well, replace fact (and factual) for theory in that last sentence, and you have the common French view of fact checking. People don’t speak in straight facts; the facts they employ to enforce their truths change, flexibly and with varying emphasis, as the conversation changes, and the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of pure factual consistency is an absurd denial of what conversation ought to be. Not, of course, that the French intellectual doesn’t use and respect facts, up to a useful point, any more than even the last remaining American positivist doesn’t use and respect theory, up to a point. It’s simply the fetishizing of one term in the game of conversation that strikes the French funny. Conversation is an organic, improvised web of fact and theory, and to pick out one bit of it for microscopic overexamination is typically American overearnest comedy.
“Does this bus go across the river?” the man from Chicago demands of the Parisian bus driver, who looks blank. “I said, this bus goes across the river, or doesn’t it?” I myself have been in this position, of course, more times than once, in Venice and in Tuscany, but (I choose to believe, at least) I try to make up for it with the necessary abasing looks of ignorance and sorrow and multitudes of thank-yous and head ducks, as the Japanese do here. The American in Paris just demands, querulously—“Now, you remember that pastry I showed you in the window? Now, I want that one”—in English, and expects the world to answer.
Sometimes the French response is muttered and comic. “Hey, does this bus go across the river?” the woman from California says, mounting onto the steps of the 63. “I wouldn’t come to your country and not speak in your language,” the driver says, in French. A sensitive listener would detect some frost in the manner, but the American woman doesn’t: “No—I asked you, does this bus go across the river?” Or, worse, Americans ordering in English from French menus, specifying precisely, exigently, what they want in a language the waiters don’t speak.
For it turns out that there is a Regulon in the Semiosphere stronger even than the plug, more agile than the fish. It’s language. Language really does prevent signs or cultures from going universal. For all the endless articles in the papers and magazines about the force of globalization and international standardization, language divides and confuses people as effectively now as it ever has. It stops the fatal “exponentiality” of culture in the real world as surely as starvation stops it in the jungle. It divides absolutely, and what is really international, truly global, is, in this way, very small.
The real “crisis” in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they’re really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is likely to feel at home in the other bits. You can join this global community by speaking English yourself, but that’s about all. The space between the average Frenchman (or Italian or German) and the average American is just as great as it’s ever been, because language remains in place, and it remains hard. Even after two years of speaking French all the time, I feel it. We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
Yet there is a kind of authority associated with the American presence right now that is both awe-inspiring and absurd. At the Bastille Day fireworks, for instance, over on the champ-de-Mars, there is always a nice big picnic feeling, but no one pays minimal respect to the notion that people ought not to stand up in front of other people when other people are trying to watch fireworks. As happens so often in France, it is a designated bacchanal, like the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens. At the Bastille Day on the champ-de-Mars this July, in the midst of the anarchy—over on the fringes, of course, there were flics, gendarmes, busy arresting the vendors of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces; now, there was a real crime—a single American woman rose to bring order to the multitudes. She was the kind of big-boned East Coast woman you see running a progressive day camp, or working as the phys ed instructor at Dalton or Brearley, high-flown but (as she would be the first to tell you) down-to-earth. She just started ordering people around: Sit down, you down there (all this in English, of course), now make room so the little kids can see, etc. And people, at least the few hundred in earshot, actually did it. They obeyed, for a little while anyway.
The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else’s fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.
It is, still, amazing to see how vast a screen the differences of language can be—not an opaque but a kind of translucent one. You sort of see through it, but not quite. There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who’s called Hal—like Falstaff’s prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so throughout the film the absent lover is referred to in the subtitles as Al—Al like a stagehand, Al like my grandfather. If you have the habit of print addiction, so that you are listening and reading at the same time, this guy Al keeps forcing his way into the movie. “But what shall I say to Hal—that I have never loved him?” Patricia says to Fred. Down below it says, “Et Al—qu’est-ce que je vais lui dire?”
My other favorite subtitle was in some contemporary comedy that we went to see—we see about a movie every six months, where once I saw three a day—in which there was a reference to American talk shows. “And what do you want me to do: go on Oprah, Geraldo, or Sally Jessy?” the character asked. The translator did fine with Oprah and Geraldo but could make nothing of the last, so Sally with her glasses became a non–non sequitur question. “Oprah, Geraldo—et sale est Jesse?” the subtitle read—“Oprah, Geraldo—and Jesse is dirty?” This network of distant errors obviously occludes itself in front of us all the time, every day, and mostly we don’t know it.
There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Télécom who won’t give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can’t find them on the computer inventory; the chair restorer who looks at your beautiful Thonet rocker and then announces, sniffily, that it isn’t worth his time; the woman who sells you a poster and then announces that she has no idea where you might go to frame it; the bus driver who won’t let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you’re supposed to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. It affects Martha much less than me, leading me to suspect that it is essentially a masculine problem. My trouble is that I think like a Frenchman: I transform every encounter into a competition in status and get enraged when I lose it. As Cioran said, it’s hard for me to live in a country where everyone is as irascible as I am.
At the same time, I find myself often reduced to an immigrant helplessness. We went to BHV, for instance, earlier this year to frame our “From Paris to the Moon” engraving. I have had it up in my study, an icon to write under. There’s a nice do-it-yourself framing shop up there, and lacking a framer to go to, we thought we just ought to, well, do it ourselves. Back in New York we knew a framer who did our frames, and I prided myself, within limits, on having learned a thing or two about what made the right edge for the right picture. We began to sort around with simple white mats and black wooden frames. As we were doing it, a lady came up to us: a Frenchwoman in her seventies, with pearls and a strong jaw and silver hair. She had a couple of handsome flower prints that she was framing for herself. “No, no, children,” she said. “You are doing that quite incorrectly. This, you see,” she said, “is a nineteenth-century print. It needs a nineteenth-century mat, a nineteenth-century frame.” She took the white-and-black frame away from us—put them right back—and chose a cream mat and a fake, “antiqued” gold frame. “There,” she said, “that is the French nineteenth century,” and took the frame and the print and the mat all up to the counter for us. We looked at each other sheepishly and went ahead and bought them. I used to know something about art, or thought I did, I muttered to myself, all the way home. The print actually looks pretty nice in its gold frame. When I remember the moment now, I remember my utter helplessness and how she smelled of a wonderful tea-rose perfume.
The other side of French official arrogance is French improvised and elaborate courtesy. The delivery men from the department store Bon Marché called last night, to deliver the wicker kitchen organizer. “We have to be there early, because it’s a small street. Six-thirty.”
“It’s a little too early for us,” I said. “Let’s make it later.”
“Ah, no. It’s impossible. Six-thirty or nothing.”
“All right,” and I hung up the phone, silently cursing French arrogance and the lack of any kind of service ethic.
Then, the next morning, at six forty-six, I was just awakened by the sound of the gentlest possible knocking on the front door—so butterfly quiet that at first I imagined that it must have been Luke Auden stirring in bed. But then there it was again, quiet but insistent. I got up, put on my robe, got to the front door, and stared out the spyglass. There were two workmen in the hallway, leaning over gently, knocking with their knuckles, as lightly as ghosts. I slipped the door open and got not a smile, but a look of acknowledgment, and they brought the kitchen organizer in with balletlike light-footedness. “Thank you,” I said, “the baby is sleeping.” They nodded. We know. I signed the invoice, and they were gone, and I went back to sleep.
And then there is the chair. It started by accident one rainy Monday, after we had been to the Musée d’Orsay, and I had failed to get Luke much interested in my old favorites, Monets and Manets. I still find going to the Musée d’Orsay an infuriating, maddening experience. (Apparently, despite my superficial essays at amused blandness, I realize, reading this, that I’m a real pepperpot, a hothead, Billy Martin in France.) That vast, handsome railroad station so horribly done over in Wiener Werkstätte fashion by Gae Aulenti; the stupid, unquestioned dominance of the worst pompier art of the nineteenth century in the main hall as though saying, here are our real treasures. And the greater pain that only the pompier official art could look any good in such a vast and frigid space. I no longer find the taste for nineteenth-century French academic art, which can be amusing if seen small on a slide screen, the least bit likable. It is horrible, depressing beyond words, the revenge of official culture on life and youth, on reality itself. I swear to God I would take a razor to The Romans of the Decadence without a moment’s hesitation.
And then having to take the escalator up all the way to the far upper floors—a garret, in museum terms, in order to see the great pictures, every one of which looked incomparably better in the old Jeu de Paume. It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration against everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation—and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.
Paris is marked by a permanent battle between French civilization, which is the accumulated intelligence and wit of French life, and French official culture, which is the expression of the functionary system in all its pomposity and abstraction. By French civilization I mean the small shops; by French official culture I mean the big buildings. There is hardly a day when you are not wild with gratitude for something that happens in the small shops: the way that Mme. Glardon, at the pastry shop on the rue Bonaparte, carefully wraps Luke Auden’s chocolate éclair in a little paper pyramid, a ribbon at its apex, knowing perfectly well, all the while, that the paper pyramid and ribbon will endure just long enough for the small boy to rip it open to get to the éclair. And hardly a day when you are not wild with dismay at something that has been begun in the big buildings, some abstraction launched on the world in smug and empty confidence.
In any case, I couldn’t, as it happened, get Luke much stirred by Manet or Monet (not that he was stirred by the Couture either, I’m glad to say), but searching for something that would stir him, I came across the handsome side chapel devoted to Daumier’s portrait busts. They are caricatures of the political men of the mid-nineteenth century. Luke loved them. I held him up, and he stared at their faces behind the Plexiglas boxes and imitated each one. We guessed at the character of each one: who’s mean, who’s nice, who’s conceited. The scary thing is that the faces are exactly the faces of French politicians today: Philippe Séguin, with his raccoon-circled eyes; Le Pen, with his obscene, smiling jowliness; Bruno Megret with his ratlike ordinariness. You could find the men of the left; too: Jospin’s fatuous cheerfulness—they’re all there.
After the success of the Daumiers, I thought of going to the park, as a release, or back to Deyrolle, for the umpteenth time, but it was raining hard, and we needed something new. “Do you want a soda?” I said, and we went over to the Courier de Lyons, the nearest thing our haut neighborhood has to a workingman’s café. After he had a grenadine, and I a grand crème, and we had shared a tarte Normande, I noticed that there was a pinball machine—a flipper, as it is called in French. So I dragged a chair over, so that he could stand up on it and work the left flipper, and took control of the right flipper myself. It was an “NBA all-star” pinball machine, a true old-fashioned, pre-Atari, steel ball pinball, but with extra ramps and lights that let you shoot the ball up into hoops, get extra points, make model players jump up and down. (Luke, of course, had never seen a basketball game.) We started playing, and he loved it: the ping of the hard metal balls, the compressed springiness of the release, the fat thwack of the bumpers, above all the bounce of the flipper, hitting the ball back up, keeping it in play, making it go. We played three times, rushed home, and he told his momma about it. “It goes . . .” he said, and at a loss for words, he just raced his eyes, back and forth, rolled them back and forth crazily—that’s how it goes.
Since then we go once a week to play pinball, always prefaced by a trip first to the Musée d’Orsay to look at the funny faces (while Daddy seethes at the nineteenth-century academicians and the small boy counts the minutes to the Courier de Lyons.) The funny thing is that the café changes the pinball machine every month or so, and it is always, always, an American machine with an American theme. Each machine has an automated bonus, something weird that happens if you get enough points, and there is something rapt and lovely, in this day of virtual everything, about the clockwork nightingale mechanicalness of the pinball machines, about the persistence of their metallic gears and simple slot-and-track devices. So far we have been through major-league baseball, Star Wars (Han Solo gets blasted into that carbon sheet), Jurassic Park (an egg glows and opens, and a baby dinosaur appears), Gopher Golf (a kind of parody golf, with little chipmunks that jump up, bucktoothed), and, our favorite, Monster Bash (Dracula comes out of his coffin, on a little metal track; Frankenstein, to the accompaniment of suitably stormy music—the lights on the machine actually first go off, a lovely touch—sits up). All the instructions on the machines are in English, of course, as are all the details. (“I love these machines, compared to video games,” another aficionado at the café said to me once, sincerely, as we scored big and watched Dracula creaking out on his mechanical track. “They are, well, so real.”)
We go once a week, always get the same grenadine-coffee-pie combo, leave a ten-franc tip; I am sure that it is illegal for a three-year-old to play pinball, and I am paying protection. After a month or so, though, I noticed something odd. When we began to play, I would always discreetly drag a café chair over from the table and put it alongside the machine for Luke to stand on. But after we had done this five or six times, over five or six weeks, I noticed that someone had quietly tucked that small café chair under the left flipper. The chair, the little bistro chair, was permanently pushed under the pinball machine, on the left, or Lukeish, side. There was no talk, no explanation; no one mentioned it, or pointed it out. No, it was a quiet, almost a grudging courtesy, offered to a short client who came regularly to take his pleasure there. Nothing has changed in our relation to that café: No one shakes our hands or offers us a false genial smile; we pay for our coffee and grenadine as we always have; we leave the tip we have always left. But that chair is always there.