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.