Strangers in Paris

In my last posting I wrote of exile. Pico Iyer writes of "lonely places":

 .. there are 101 kinds of solitude.... Some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them. Each makes its own accommodation with wistfulness and eccentricity and simple, institutionalized standoffishness. As with places, so with people.  

So with expats, it seems to me. In some lonely places expats are in danger of growing into self-caricatures.

In New York everyone's from somewhere else and the cacophony of souls whirls itself into a sublime dance. Here the inherently conservative French culture (belied by brief interludes of the avant garde) finds the solution to every problem is simply to be French. That certitude about formalities appeals to many Americans who live in a stew of contradictory life-styles. And yet, and yet. Sometimes the charming expressions of the French language seem forced upon the tongue. Sometimes I want to say something different.

And even though France is very French, so many people move here that parts of Paris seem like the British Isles, Africa, or the Maghreb. People like me make their homes here. The charms of Paris are in flights of the imagination, and sometimes making your home here can feel better than being at "home." (And sometimes it feels worse.) In the immigrant-rich Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris (which was a stronghold of the FLN during the Algerian war) African women walk with their colorful dresses pulled down their bare shoulders, their proud heads in turbans. Arab men wear long gowns, African men lavish robes.

And yet I have listened to a number of French women tell me how, when they were young and came here from the provinces to find work, they would cry themselves to sleep every night, feeling nothing but the chill of the old spinster Paris. Some ten years ago in the Goutte d'Or we paid our respects to African sans papiers lying on cots in Eglise St. Bernard, weak from hunger strikes to protest their alien status.

Some of the strangeness of being a stranger can be seen in certain kinds of homes that are not mentioned in the clichés of Paris. If you take the RER south from the Charles de Gaulle airport, for example, along walls near La Courneuve are built paper and wood shacks roofed with corrugated steel, on which children's toys are scattered. In the past few years my walks along the sparkling Seine passed by tent cities where tricycles and toys were scattered. These were homes of families, not nomadic hippies. Workers from an expanded Europe had come to find jobs, but they couldn't get apartments. You see doors in the wall ramparts along the Seine, from which people emerge. An old man has lived with his dogs in one such shelter for as long as I've been walking past. Some people have slept under those urine-scented bridges for years, and others have hung fabric along the quai to protect their nooks in the old stone walls by the Seine.

I made friends with a homeless man named Alphonse who told me he had been in subsidized housing till the funds were withdrawn. Now he was on a list several years' long, waiting for housing, living on the street with his shopping cart and collection of books. He always wanted to chat and expound his theory of benevolent dictatorship. He has disappeared, but his less voluble colleague still snores half the day in the doorway of a cinema. For years a woman showed up at Place Maubert in many different kinds of dress (perhaps she was not homeless, perhaps she lived nearby) waving a cigarette butt in your face, ranting unintelligibly, and relieving herself occasionally on the sidewalk. A group of men with the swollen red faces of drinkers sometimes gather on the cobblestoned rue des Anglais, with a golden retriever that gets her heavy body up each time another clochard appears, to greet him as is his due. When I had just moved to Paris I emerged one day from the cheerless La Pitié-Salpétrière (the hospital where Princess Diana was rushed), when a deranged woman screamed violently across the Avenue “Bienvenue en France!” on a cold and rainy afternoon. Le clochard is supposed to be a colorful character, a brand of philosopher. But when Jacques served on jury duty he heard about the horrors of life for the madmen who live on the street.

Compared to these hardships, how can I possibly feel the sting of exile? But I do. Especially yesterday, when Americans finally rose up to try and shake Washington out of its dogmatic slumbers, I wanted to be there.

And yet, and yet. Hemingway wrote in a cold flat on the 6th or 8th story of rue Cardinal Lemoine and could barely afford the twigs and logs to make the place bearable. He preferred writing in cafés or on the Seine with his sausage and bottle of wine.

Life on the street

And, for him, Paris was a moveable feast.

Connections in Paris

When I moved here I felt as if all the connections I had with Paris slipped away. Paris was different, perhaps because our relationship was suddenly different. It was not that I had romanticized Paris before---I had read a number of Balzac novels to practice my French, and felt the lingering aura of his underworld. But we had been different. A few months after moving here, I wrote a dark song about:

The stone walled city,

where redemption is lost

and the stars rarely dare

to shine.

And yet now I am encountering unexpected connections to the old city. Here is an odd one.

I am on my way to tai chi class, up in the 10th arrondissement. I walk along rue St. Denis, where I see only one prostitute. In years past there had been many, or perhaps that was another section of the street. She is large and blonde and bares her breasts even in the winter, presumably on the evenings when she really needs money. Her neighbors greet her warmly. She disappears down a dark passageway, divided by iron grills, Balzac's Paris, bearing no resemblance to the Amsterdam prostitutes in their gleaming white-tiled cells. I pass a man drinking a beer, muttering in deep guttural French to himself. I turn the corner on rue Saint Sauveur. I cross the beautiful cobblestoned rue des Petits Carreaux. Dusk is subtly lighting the cafés and Parisians rushing to meet their friends.

And there is, suddenly, a connection. A language school, a human resource center, which I imagine is a job agency, but in French sounds almost like a classical institute. This archaic looking store front belongs to Robert's cousin! Eleven or twelve years ago I lived in Portland, Oregon and had a friend from LA, who was in love with a man named Robert, whose cousin owns this place.

My friend was Beate. I was unsuccessfully looking for work in Portland, and she---well, this is how the story goes.

She had a rare autoimmune blood disease. We talked and laughed, hung out in the hot tubs of Portland run by hippies, went out for drinks and went dancing in an old blues club, just the girls, just for "therapy." We had a typical girlfriend situation except that she was undergoing treatments that entailed being drained of her blood, which was then irradiated, and returned to her veins. She never let me too close. I reminded her too much of her older sister. But we gossiped and hung together. Her daughter was developing a wildly successful career with her MBA, but she never introduced me to her daughter. At one point a suitor showed up. A friend of a friend of a friend, he was determined to marry her. He never got that far. He seemed a little like a gold digger, haunting the terminally ill older woman. We had coffee at Torrefazione's and met people, what with her LA personality and my New York personality. We passed a nice year. And she was in love with a man named Robert who avoided getting close to her the way she avoided getting close to me. Robert had this cousin in Paris, whose school I had dropped in on during a trip to Paris, investigating job prospects for my future life. No, Robert's cousin told me, we don't give you working papers, you need working papers FIRST, as I was to hear over and over again.

A year or so after I moved back to New York from Portland, my sister called to tell me about a notice in the newspaper. Beate had died. Beate had already distanced herself from me as my life continued its saga over time and space. And I wouldn't see her again.

Dragon flying over Jardin des Plantes

There it was, Robert's cousin's school. And I still don't have working papers. Some things last a long time. But not everything.

Dante in Paris

Yesterday we celebrated the 17th anniversary of our relationship. We had a late lunch at the Fourmi Aillée, a teahouse for elves located on the rue Fouarre. The vin blanc fleuri loosened our senses to the former feminist bookstore, still featuring its literature along the walls, with its ceiling mural of cloud wisps against that pale Parisian sky, the delicate blue that Renoir created so well. The restaurant's music evokes nothing but feelings, with a ravishing Beethoven Piano Concerto, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, arias from Figaro and Cosi fan Tuttie, and Peer Gynt, inter alia.

The rue Fouarre becomes rue Dante as you walk a few steps north. In 1308 Dante was said to have attended what was then one of the foremost universities of Europe, located in the Square Viviani (just north of the restaurant). Dante bedded down nearby in straw, hence the street's name Fouarre.

Bitter Dante at the College de France

I felt a vertigo in time, remembering our thousands of footfalls through Paris over 17 years. It was a strange coincidence that l'addition for lunch (quiche and salad, outstanding) came with two business cards, one of the Fourmi Ailée and another of a restaurant we had been to some ten years earlier, L'Eté en Pente Douce at the foot of Montmartre. In those days, since Jacques' apartment was rented out to tenants, on our visits to Paris we stayed in odd short term rentals. The one at the foot of Montmartre had been decorated with gauze.
 

Dante's stay in Paris was commemorated in the Divine Comedy by a tribute to the professor, Siger of Brabant, a dissident (and persecuted) Averroist who taught pure Aristotle, unassimilated to Christianity. Averroes, the brilliant Arab philosopher of 12th century Andalusia, had taught that philosophy and religion both reach truth, but by different pathways. How apt that was for our anniversary, at a time when we are deconstructing the effects of Paris' Cartesian logic on our relationship. La coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.

Dante wrote of his professor in the Paradiso:

«Celle-ci, d'où ton regard me revient,
est la lumière d'un esprit qui en graves
pensées trouva qu'il tardait à mourir ;
c'est la lumière éternelle de Siger
qui, enseignant dans la rue du Fouarre,
syllogisa des vérités qui éveillèrent l'envie.»

"He comes back to me, the light of a spirit who in deep thought found himself slow to die (he may have committed suicide). The eternal light of Siger, teaching on the rue du Fouarre, philosophised truths which stirred up envy"

Dante knew well the bitterness of exile, just as Jacques has also known from his years in the United States, a bitterness I have felt in my own exile in Paris. Dante wrote in Paradiso:

You shall leave everything you love most: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste others' bread, how salty it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes ascending and descending others' stairs ...

Beasts of Paris

Beasts at Reims Cathedral

Being a moveable beast myself (wolf? cat? fox? griffon?) perhaps I am coming home to the land of beasts here in Paris. The splendid bestiary of the Musée de Cluny, a block away from our apartment, displays the apogee of the Gothic bestiary. The most native art form of France, the gothic style, featured beasts mostly imaginary. Gothic flamboyant, the lush architecture of the Cluny museum (which was formerly a pied-a-terre for the prosperous Abbé de Cluny from the provinces) is resplendent with beasts. (For maximum beastliness visit the Cathedral at Reims whose exterior features some 2,300 statues of which more than 1,000 are animals, real and imaginary. In addition, at Reims was discovered a labyrinth modeled after the lair of the Minotaur.) Inside of the Cluny Museum you have the most wonderful of beasts, woven into the Unicorn tapestries.

On a less intimate level, the Cathedral of Notre Dame not only features magnificent beasts on her portal of the Last Judgment, but keeps a full time exorcist on staff.

But let us travel back onto that Roman road that departs a few blocks from the center of France, at Notre Dame's parvis, and winds up the Montagne Ste. Genevieve, the rue Mouffetard that I have written of in previous posts. At the other end of rue Mouffetard is l'Eglise St. Médard, whose leafy spires I used to see daily through my window in my small apartment at the edge of the square. What a pretty sight. It calmed me, cornered as I was in a deux pièce with a kitchen whose walls you could touch as you stood in the middle.

St. Médard had been a chapel built in the 9th century along the Roman road that has become the rue Mouffetard. A church was erected on the site around the 14th century. During the 17th-18th centuries it was a gathering place for the Jansenists, a fierce and dissident cult that adamantly opposed the reigning Roman Catholic church, but had a membership of luminaries including the brilliant Blaise Pascal and the deacon Francois of Paris. Its fanatical members gathered around the grave of Francois and went into trances and convulsions to achieve the healing power of miracles. So the Jansenists had beasts to deal with. The king Louis XV found this sufficiently alarming to order them off the site in 1732, whereupon someone wrote on the church doorway,  
De par le Roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.  

By order of the king, it is forbidden to God to perform miracles in this place.

The beasts of heresy have always been chased, but never vanquished, in Paris.

Liberté en vélo

In the rainy fall of my first weeks in Paris I lived near rue Mouffetard, the narrow cobblestone pathway over Montagne Ste. Genevieve that dates back to Neolithic times, was an early Roman road, and now is a hangout for students and tourists. One night, facing the marché  at the bottom of rue Mouffetard, I met with another American transplant for an evening drink. The rainy wind slapped at taxis and battered the few trees, and the traffic circle gleamed black and slick.  I waited to meet this man who had taught music to my nephew at St. Ann's in Brooklyn, and had now forsaken his career as a concert horn player to get a doctorat at the Sorbonne.  Mysterious choice, I thought.  As I waited in the warmly lit café an old skeletal bicycle rounded the slick pavement, and there he was.

A bicycle, in this weather?  Yes, he told me, he always travels by vélo. To chase away the blues of Paris, his advice was twofold: ignore the labyrinthine social codes of Parisians, and ride bicycles everywhere you go.  Never go down into the yellow lights of the metro, where you are faced with sad, gray faces.  Ride your vélo into the bracing wind! Freedom from the metro, and freedom from the society.

But--blues in Paris?  But---you may sputter--it's Paris!  I had already felt those blues descend, those first few weeks in Paris. Hemingway describes it.  "All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife--second class--and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked."  Those were the streets I also walked every day. And the light was drained from the city.

Before I had lived in Paris I had loved visiting the city in the late fall, for a Thanksgiving with no turkey but misty streets that discouraged all tourists but the intrepid Japanese. Fog enveloped Ile St. Louis, encircled by the glittering necklace of the Seine. The steps of Montmartre were wrapped in mystery, and all Paris was a Robert Doisneau photo. But living in Paris was different. And so, I started traveling by vélo.

In the container that brought my goods to Paris was an ex-racing bike, custom-built for my early triathlons, back in the mists of time.  And so I made good use of my little steel pony for several years, owning the hectic Parisian streets, as once I had felt I owned Manhattan by running over the Queensboro bridge every day to work.

Montségur

Jacques, my partner, took to the advice of my American friend like a boy to a bike. As a youngster in the departement of the Ariège at the foot of the Pyrenees, Jacques had torn up the countryside and villages on his little bike. He had climbed the formidable cliffs where the chateaux of the region were built on impregnable rock. He had also climbed the chateaux themselves, to their crumbling heights, long before they had been restored and opened to the public. Montségur, the spectral white castle at a height visible throughout the region, had been in the 40's and 50's an abandoned ruin. That had been where the last Cathares, remnants of a dissident Manichean sect, had awaited their death at the hands of crusaders in 1244.  It had taken the crusaders a 10-month siege to penetrate the fortress of Montségur and then burn the 215 Cathares in the meadow at the foot of the castle. Au bucher! To the bonfire! Little Jacques had climbed Montségur all by himself, and all because of the freedom of the vélo. (For more on the region, see my piece http://hubpages.com/hub/Another-South-of-France-The-Arriege.)

Au bucher! - (Reenactment)

And now we have Velib'! Stationed every few blocks a fleet of heavy, serviceable bicycles are waiting at computer-controlled stands, to be used at your convenience for a yearly fee of 29 euros, as long as your ride lasts under 30 minutes--then you pay for extra minutes.  Swipe a card, pick up a bike, and park it again at another station at your destination. Paris has no great heights to be scaled like the Ariège, but there are urban challenges to sharpen the spirit. Bike lanes intermingle with bus lanes and fellow cyclists swoop under your nose without warning. I have heard complaints of 90 euro tickets for traffic infractions (even while the younger set tears around the streets of Paris at top speed). Bicycle crashes surged to 700 in 2007, and there were three cyclist deaths that year, four the next. As of 2009, 11,600 bikes have been trashed, and 7,800 stolen, seen either as no one's property or as bourgeois symbols. But in general French motorists have a supple relationship with the road, as compared with Germans who attack city streets as if they were on the autobahn. Within a few days in Berlin I had been knocked out by a driver, perhaps because I am accustomed to the more perspicacious French.

And so, as I take off for the American library along the broad vistas of the Louvre, the Grand and Petit Palais, and Invalides along the Seine, I am glad for this direct relationship with the architecture of Paris. You can fly as on the wings of time, living with the ages of Paris. Liberté en vélo!

Hemingway's, and my, Paris

...wherever you go, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
                                                                               ------Hemingway


Paris stayed with me for 13 years of roaming, as I lived with and without my Frenchman on the other side of the Atlantic.  Our first night visiting Paris together we wandered beneath the shadow of Notre Dame and then watched her formidable towers from the Esmerelda, in those days spare rooms decorated like theatrical sets with doors that didn't lock.   In the morning we burst out into the Parisian April, a blur of medieval stone soothing my jetlag, as Jacques attended meetings and I waited in cafés of the stone-walled city.

And now I have lived here more than four years, have battled the reality of Paris as an outsider, and long for the rough and sodden days of Hemingway's Paris, when fishing in the Seine brought a good meal and men never sobered up at the Café des Amateurs on rue Mouffetard near where I, too, dwelt 3 years ago.

This blog is dedicated to the real Paris, that is to say, the Paris of the imagination, and the Paris of mutable time, that arcs from the ancient mountain of Ste. Genevieve (blocks away), the ruins of Roman baths (down the street), the asphalt by the nearby Sorbonne that had been ripped up in '68, the ancient center of a French Republic that struggled for existence (500 meters from here, the Parvis de Notre Dame), and the haunts of Hemingway like nearby Shakespeare & Co.  It is also dedicated to our travels--to escape the cold spinster Paris--which have taken us all over the world.  And it is dedicated to those of us who have tales to tell.