Ransacking Paris (12 page)

Montaigne says, ‘We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each of them pulls its own way at every moment.' But I was still trying to see myself made of one enthusiastic piece. And in fact some days I felt fine. The tiredness and pain came and went in a periodic fashion, three or so bad days, then one good day, just enough relief to create the cheering illusion that it would all be better soon. The days of pain were not so much the short sharp sting of a bee as the dull ache that comes afterwards, which sounds as if it would be easier to bear, but it felt like a slow grinding down. The dull weather felt like an image of my inner flatness – if the light on the chimney pots was flat it took a lot more effort to get out of bed.

One day I lay there thinking about my boys, about their childhood. As Ernaux said, ‘a palimpsest' of memories floated through my brain: Matt looking for a lost lake called Paradise at the bottom of a cliff, Patrick swimming in the dark water of Gollum's Pool and catching yabbies in a cold stream, a birthday party where boys played hide-and-seek behind blue gums and apple gums and grevilleas and banksias, ten-year-old Patrick instructing me when I was halfway up a cliff, frightened and unable to move, how to edge my foot to the next ledge. And images from my own childhood came: sitting in the wheat bin with wheat showering all around me, scraping my legs on the giant pepper tree in the back yard, riding Flicka bareback, reading all Sunday on my bed. I had a happy childhood – poor and loved, which sounds like a sugar-coated fairytale but it can be said truthfully – and so did my sons, but here in Paris I could feel something finally slipping out of my grasp. Leaving forever.

I remembered a moment near the end of long-ago childhood, at the beginning of adolescence. I was standing in the scraggly front yard near the veranda – I can see the exact spot in my mind many decades later – when I was suddenly lifted – I don't know how – out of immersion in the moments of my existence, and saw that there was a future stretching out for numberless days and that it wouldn't fill up by itself, that it would be up to me to fill in the hours and days and years. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that one morning when she was a child, ‘Suddenly the future existed; it would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself.'

I wondered whether all children have one moment when they are torn out of the eternal present, the moment when time and space no longer formed a closely woven cloak over the gaps and holes of existence.

When I finally got up in the rue Simart and looked in the mirror in the bathroom, I was shocked to see the shape of my face had changed. I had always had an oval shape, which I quite liked, but now there were jowls on either side making it rectangular. When had that happened? I held the skin of the jowls back with my fingers and I immediately looked five years younger. So that's why people have plastic surgery! I looked down at my arms, the faint geography of age appeared only when my arms were bent. My skin was dry, like my mother's. Not yet loose and papery like hers, ready to bruise at every touch, but one day it would be.

I made myself sit at the trestle desk but gazed sideways out the window. I saw a woman in a wheelchair in the apartment opposite, quite a bit older than I was, with soft, well-cut, grey hair. There was a younger man looking after her, not young enough to be her son, definitely a younger lover, laying her clothes out on the bed: a pink satiny slip, a bra, a red skirt. I stood up to see them come out of the door into the street below, he angling the wheelchair carefully through the door, and she dressed in the circular red gypsy skirt and a jacket and scarf. He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world and she took it as her due.

I saw them nearly every day after that and thought about them a great deal. Had she always been in a wheelchair? Or did they meet when she could still walk and now he had to take care of her? Not that it was a burden; he was always so tender and so proud of her. Anthony had noticed them too, although coming and going as he did, they hadn't become woven into his daily life. But he knew I was referring to them when I asked him, ‘Will you dress me in my favourite red skirt when I'm sixty-four?'

He stood behind me putting his arms around my waist. We were standing at the French doors in the bedroom, both looking down towards the street.

‘And will you still love me when I'm sixty-four?' I asked. Pushing my luck.

‘Will you still love me?' he said. He turned me to face him in front of the glass doors and we kissed and then made love, the half-drawn Venetian blinds letting in slices of light on our bodies.

Peering into other people's apartments became one of my main pleasures in the rue Simart. In the apartment on the opposite corner there was an Algerian family – a mother with dyed red hair, a grandmother and two girls, one about nine and the other a baby, a toddler. I wondered where the father was, whether he had found work in another city and only came home every few months. They sat on a brocade sofa and watched television in the evening, the blue glow flickering in the room. Once, I saw the girl hold the baby over their balcony, not to frighten her, but to show her their flame-haired mother approaching in the street below. I wondered if the baby would ever remember the moment, high in the air, seeing her mother from above.

Most of the time the window of the only bathroom I could see into was shut. On the occasions when it was open I sometimes saw a woman about my age washing her son's hands. An older mother. She had a beautiful face, brown-skinned and dark-eyed. She looked as if she may have been Tahitian and because I never saw a man through the window, I thought she was a
fille-mère
, a ‘girl-mother', as the French call unmarried mothers, although she was in her forties. On Saturday mornings she washed her woollens at the hand basin with the window open and hung them on the railings. The boy's two pullovers hung there every Saturday, their tiny arms dangling in the sunlight, and I realised I missed not just my boys, but I missed that they were no longer little boys. I could neither hold them in my arms nor gaze at them for as long as I wanted, but only for brief seconds.

It gave, still gives, me such pleasure to watch people unseen that I wonder if I'm a kind of voyeur. I meant no harm though, and it arouses tenderness to see a hand reached out, a neck stretched, when there is no consciousness of being seen.

*

Simone de Beauvoir liked looking into apartments, even when she was a child: ‘I would be deeply moved to see my own life displayed, as it were, on a lighted stage. A woman would be setting a table, a couple would be talking […] I didn't feel shut out; I had the feeling that a single theme was being interpreted […] repeated to infinity from building to building, from city to city, my existence had a part in all its innumerable representation.'

She also liked watching people in the street from her balcony in the boulevard Raspail: ‘Their faces, their appearances and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to a fifth floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: “But I won't be able to see the people in the street any more.” I was being cut off from life, condemned to exile.'

Oh, the watching of people's lives from above! One day I watched two ancient, wrinkled women, both white-haired, one with a cane, walking slowly arm-in-arm, helping each other along. One woman was black and the other one was white. Another day I saw a boy with a first beard, walking with neat straight steps, his arms folded above his waist like a young girl unsure of her blossoming breasts.

And another day an accordion player walked down the middle of rue Eugène Sue, playing and collecting coins as people threw them down from their balconies. Some of the coins rolled under cars and he had to get down on his hands and knees to retrieve them. I thought it must be a hard way to make a living when most people were out at work and apartments were empty during the day. My choir had started to learn a new song, ‘
L'accord
é
on
' by Serge Gainsbourg – we sang about how cruel life was for the street musician, how his only friend was his accordion, but this accordionist was cheerful. When I threw him down some euros from the fifth floor, he stopped and played a whole song for me. I didn't recognise the song, but it made me feel like I was in a French film from fifty years ago.

Then one day there was a teenager in army fatigues fighting his own private war, knocking over bins and ripping down posters as he loped along the street. Drawn out by the noise I stood on the balcony looking at him from above. He scooped up the real estate magazines from the stand outside the
boulangerie
and threw them in the first bin he came to. He had a roving gaze, as if he were not going to miss anything that needed his attention. He was about the same age as Patrick, perhaps two or three years older. He kicked the rolled-up carpet used by the African street-sweepers to direct water along the gutters, he punched cars, he yelled obscenities. Then he looked up, a raging, crazy, unloved boy, and saw me watching him. I looked away quickly, ashamed.

‘
Salope
,' he yelled. ‘
Va te faire foutre.
' Fuck off, bitch.

The rue Simart was a kind of littoral, I suppose, a shore between privilege and disadvantage, often delineated by race instead of class. The raging boy was white, and so were most of the
clochards
, the down-and-outs, but all the
sans-papiers
, refugees without legal status, and many of the poor were Africans or Arabs from former French colonies: Mali, Senegal, Algeria, the Sudan. Algerians have been in Paris longer, most of them coming to escape the civil war in the 1960s, and are more likely to have jobs and small businesses –
allez au Arab
means ‘go to the corner shop'. When shonky apartment buildings burn down and lives are lost, most of the names of the dead are African. Most live in wretched state housing towers, called HLM, in the
banlieue
, outer suburbs, but there is a large African
quartier
on the other side of boulevard Barbès. They are ‘the people' now, the disadvantaged and the oppressed.

Montaigne, Stendhal, Rousseau, de Beauvoir all wrote about ‘the people', Rousseau especially: ‘An inextinguishable hatred grew in my heart against the oppression to which the unhappy people are subject and against their oppressors.' And Montaigne lived in a peasant household until he was weaned because his father wanted him to have sympathy for ‘the people'. Stendhal, in an age of revolutions, defended the people but was honest, more than once, about his distaste: ‘I loathe to have dealings with the hoi-polloi while at the same time under the name of
the people
, I long passionately for their happiness.'

Madame de Sévigné – I'm sorry to say because I did come to like her over coffee – wasn't sympathetic even in theory; she describes the punishment of the leader of a people's insurrection in Brittany where she came from:

The day before yesterday, a ruffian who had called the tune and begun the thieving of the official stamped paper, was broken on the wheel; when he was dead he was quartered and his four quarters put on view at the four corners of the town […] Sixty burghers have been arrested: tomorrow the hangings begin. This province is a fine example to the others, and particularly that they should respect their governors.

In case the details of seventeenth-century justice are not clear, ‘broken on the wheel' means being tied to a large wagon wheel and then beaten with wooden or iron cudgels until your body is bashed through the spokes. ‘Quartered' means the body is then cut into four. I am sure it did make them respect their governors.

It was several centuries later and I was from the other side of the world, standing on a balcony, God-like, watching. Like Annie Ernaux, I had come from ‘the people', as much as that applies in Australia. Neither of my parents had any education past primary school; my father's parents were a farmer and a housemaid, my mother's, a house painter and a barmaid, all hard-working and quiet people. My father owned a farm but it was a small patch of dirt to support a family of ten – eleven counting my grandmother lying in her dark room with no windows to the outside. The house was shabby: boards rotted on the veranda, in one of the bedrooms white ants had destroyed the walls, and cement, which made do as plaster, was falling off the walls in the kitchen. We had no heaters, no indoor toilet –
The Land
newspaper for toilet paper in the cracked fibro lavvy outside – and no hot water unless it was heated in a kettle.

For most of my childhood I had no shower and no bath, ineffectually washing in a small tin dish. In my first few weeks of high school in town, I was drinking at the water-bubblers one lunch-time and realised the girl next to me was looking at my arms. I noticed for the first time that both my arms from wrist to past the elbows had several ‘high-tide' layers of dirt on them, dirty, dirtier and dirtiest. I had not realised I was dirty until I saw myself through her astonished gaze. Stendhal was right, the people are dirty – ‘dirty, damp, blackish' – but I think I spent the following decades hiding evidence of my grimy body. I succeeded well enough; I'm not ‘the people' anymore. I'm one of those who can talk about them, watch them, from a balcony in Paris.

*

Annie Ernaux came from ‘the people', which for her meant a small town in Normandy called Yvetot. Her mother and father moved up from being a farm labourer and factory worker to run a café. Her mother had ‘ideas' – and so did Annie – so she was sent to a convent school where the other girls were middle-class. She tells a story in
Retour à Yvetot
which is almost a copy of my dirty arm experience, although in reverse. At home, her family used bleach to wash everything: sheets, curtains, even their hands. Annie didn't think anything of this, didn't even notice it, until, in the first French class, Jeanne, a girl whose parents were ‘chic', exclaimed: ‘It stinks of bleach!' and ‘Who smells of bleach? I can't stand the smell of bleach.'