RETURNING TO the Montparnasse Cemetery, I found the polished black-granite sepulcher of Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, at the age of seventy-one, from a rare blood malignancy. “Cancer = death,” she wrote in her journal thirty years earlier, after being diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, which required a radical mastectomy. Though Sontag lived with cancer for many years, she never admitted that it was possible she might not survive, except in her private journal, where she was less victorious, writing, “People speak of illness as deepening, I don’t feel deepened. I feel flattened. I’ve become opaque to myself.”
Because death was not a subject she discussed with her son, the writer David Rieff, he was forced to improvise after she succumbed, so he shipped her body on the same Air France flight that she’d taken many times from New York to Paris, a city she found rapturous. A decade later, I am a literary tourist at Montparnasse. Cemeteries, after all, are for the living. The leaves were turning in the wind, and grit from the narrow walkways blew in my eyes as I searched for Sontag’s grave. Those buried near her are named Flamery (as in flamme, meaning flame, ardor, or passion) and Testu (perhaps pronounced like têtu, which means obstinate or stubborn). A stubborn passion or an obstinate flame is a good thing to accompany a writer for all eternity.
In the 1980s, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when I was a young man living in Manhattan, Sontag published her important story “The Way We Live Now,” which depicts the responses of a group of New Yorkers when they learn that their friend has AIDS. Like Sontag, the story’s protagonist believes that his will to live counts more than anything else, and if he really wants to live, and trusts life, he will live. But he is mistaken—all the determination in the world and a “utopia” of friends cannot suppress the terrible HIV. When one of the protagonist’s friends brings him a little Guatemalan wooden sculpture of Saint Sebastian, he explains that, where he comes from, Sebastian is venerated as a protector against pestilence,symbolized by the arrows lodged in his body. All we usually are told about the early Christian martyr is that he was handsome, with eyes searching upward, bound to a post, and shot with arrows—but there is more to his story. In fact, when Christian women came to bury him, they discovered he was still alive and nursed him back to health. For this reason, Saint Sebastian remains a protector against plagues.
At the Louvre, there is an excellent depiction of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), who lived during a time of incurable diseases. The saint is observed from an unusually low perspective, and two archers represent the profane pleasures, in contrast to the faithful Sebastian. A small fig tree grows at his feet, a sign of his sweetness and of the salvation to come.
At the end of Sontag’s short story, she observes that “the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or photo you can’t show ‘still.’” In a poem, too, you can say, He is still alive, or, I am living still.
Not far from Sontag’s pollen-coated grave are the remains of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who died at the age of forty-six of an unknown illness that was probably malaria. In a poem, Vallejo wrote, “Today I like life much less / but I’d like to live anyway . . . / I’d like to live always, even flat on my belly.” He shared Sontag’s desire to live no matter what, even if this meant being uncomfortable or unhappy. Fighting for life until the very end: this is their fraternity.
WALKING HOME LATE, I stopped to observe the stately buildings along the Seine. Everything had a pinkish glow, and as I stood admiring the view a tall, mannish woman approached holding a large bottle of beer and a cigarette. She spoke with a deep voice, while exhaling smoke, and there was a strange acknowledgment between us, as if we’d met before, though we hadn’t. Her face and hands were dirty, and she motioned for me to follow, so I accompanied her to a corner of the park, where we were joined by two of her friends, who rubbed their hands anxiously and looked at each other. I thought they might be the three Graces, the charities known in mythology—Charm, Beauty, and Joy—one of them giving, one of them receiving, and one patiently in wait. Alcohol and life on the street had made the two men softer than their female companion. When I realized that what they wanted was for me to open their beer bottle, I promptly unscrewed it and handed it back to the man with shaky hands, but he insisted I take the first swallow, so I did. A little later, when I left them, one of the Graces was already sleeping under a purple blanket.
MY FATHER was a farm boy from Rockingham, North Carolina. His parents were sharecroppers. They received a house and groceries in exchange for labor. They grew peaches and tobacco. Both of my parents had high-school educations and took classes at night school to improve themselves. The military enabled my father to see the world, including Paris. He received a Bronze Star for exemplary conduct in ground combat during the Rhineland Campaign. Many of my father’s ancestors were classified as “mulatto” by the American census and lived in the township of Wolf Pit, in the dusty sand hills of North Carolina, where Father is buried. The gravestones of his ancestors are made of poured concrete and have misspellings, but they are darkly beautiful.
A FEW DAYS AGO there was a large protest near the Hôtel des Invalides, built by Louis XIV for wounded and homeless veterans and as a monument to his own glory. At the center lies a wedding-cake-style gold dome, which took twenty-seven years to build and marks the final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte. Also housed in the galleries is one of the most comprehensive museums of military history in the world.
It was Sunday, and I was out for a walk when suddenly I was swept along by the protesters carrying pink and blue flags. (France is the flag nation of the world!)
Eventually I realized that the protesters were against same-sex marriage and adoptions by same-sex couples. In France, any surrogacy arrangement—whether commercial or altruistic—is illegal. So much pink and blue made me think of the French American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who used these same colors in her work, but these were not the friends of Bourgeois who were shouting, “Neither from a father nor from a mother!,” “One man and one woman!,” “A father is not a mother or like any other!” There were tens of thousands of protesters—angry men, women, and children—because a bill had been passed by the National Assembly and the Senate granting same-sex couples the right to marry and jointly adopt children, and this was supported by the French president.
A couple of days later, the first official same-sex marriage ceremony took place in Montpellier, a university town in the South of France, between two men, Bruno and Vincent, and there were two hundred policemen at their wedding to protect them. Again I thought of Bourgeois and her handsome I Do print, which she produced to benefit the Freedom to Marry campaign in the United States. It’s an abstract depiction, made of dyes on cloth with embroidery, of two flowers joined on a single stem.
When I was a young man during the seventies and eighties, gays and lesbians were not encouraged by society to love, marry, and reproduce. I think this is why, in part, I am so pessimistic about love, human relations, and the possibility of happiness. But this new law is an advancement for the human condition, and France is the fourteenth nation to permit same-sex marriage.
To celebrate, I went out and bought a bottle of champagne, Moët & Chandon, and stayed up drinking and reading Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia, a portrait of a pioneer woman in whose character the strengths and passions of America’s early settlers are rendered. On the horizon, the top of the Eiffel Tower kept me company with its sparkling lights that suggest freedom.
