vagabond madeleines

onzieme

I live on rue Merlin. My room is on the fourth floor, it is white with white curtains. My window opens onto an internal courtyard that echoes around with the sounds of other lives. There are often two or three different albums playing at once—Neil Young, Arabic dance music, Colette (the ring-my-bell Colette, not the writer whose house I am yet to visit). Kids arguing, people coming home late, laughing, after a night out. Sometimes an argument rips through and is immediately forgotten. There is a bad accordionist and a good violinist. The roofs frame an oblong of sky which is crossed and re-crossed by pigeons and swifts. The pigeons flap around the eaves and coo in frothy voices, sounding just like their feathers look when they fluff them out to impress each other.

At the end of Merlin is rue de la Roquette, which roars loud and vulgar through the middle of the eleventh arrondissement from Pére Lachaise cemetery to Place de la Bastille. Merlin is at the mellow end, where nobody bothers to watch their laundry in the laverie. This end has the park where old men and little boys play petanque, and it is frequented by a better class of bum. They pour their early-morning wine into plastic cups, with steady hands. Our local is Bistro L’Artiste, where I drink kir and Macgregor drinks pastis because the French drinks are cheaper. The chairs are ranged in lines facing the street, in the Parisian fashion. I wonder how many people fall in love with the back of someone’s neck here. It’s a good arrangement. Everyone can watch the scooters and the dogs, and wonder about the guy who brings his laptop out to the public bench at night to play solitaire. Sometimes we have to wait ages for the waiter to bring us our bill—he walks all around us, stacking up chairs, bringing in the pots of bamboo, and when we catch his eye he grimaces in acknowledgement and leaves us alone for another fifteen minutes. We make up things in French to say next time. Do you want our money or not, monsieur? It’s free today, is it? A Quatorze Juillet special! But we don’t want to mess with L’Artiste, and we don’t mind sitting out on the street a little longer. It gets dark around eleven and the heat of the day is fierce enough to drive you out of doors and keep you there.

The Bastille end of Roquette is all bars and alimentations—general stores with methuselah vegetables and tins labeled in Arabic. If you walk down around here at night, everybody wants something from you—loose change, or a kiss, or five seconds of your attention. This is where the lovers pin each other against walls and shake their anguished heads. Non, non! The girl pushes her beau away and stalks down the street, smouldering. Don’t walk away from me! he sulks. Then he catches her up—she dawdles to make it easy. He takes her roughly by the shoulders—people really do that here—and whispers some magic words. They walk off together, kissing as they walk, gripping each other’s faces in their hands to keep them steady. Lots of little streets flow into Roquette at this end, lined with import-export shops selling nylon clothes, bande-desinée bookshops and bars where the music is never too loud. There is the Watercolour Tobacconist advertising Paella Thursdays, Pause Café where they always bring you water without being asked, bars with no names and the Bar With No Name, where they do free tarot readings every Tuesday. I went with Mac to Place de la Bastille on the eve of Bastille Day, which is not called by that name here, to see a Brazilian concert. The crowd was huge and well-behaved. It felt more like a Carols by Candlelight than a mad knees-up. The only things breaking the mood were the little fire-crackers that went off around the square all night. They looked like half-smoked cigarillos and hardly sparked at all, but they made a tremendous, very irritating noise. At midnight a spotlight shone on the gilded Mercury in the centre of the Place and I looked around the mellow crowd, trying to imagine shouted slogans, heads on spikes. Under the pizza vans, the prison. My imagination failed me.

Now that I’ve explored the eleventh a bit more, I am glad to have found a part of Paris that feels like it belongs to the present moment. So much of Paris is a shrine to itself, to culture long dead. You didn’t carve the Venus de Milo yourselves, I want to yell. What’ve you done lately? I came hear hoping for A bout de souffle and found Le Charme Discret. It’s a money town, after all. People have nannies and summer properties. Before I got to Paris I didn’t realise that Bunuel was a comedian, or that Surrealism was a political movement. Now the New Wave is a prized relic, Existentialism is a café with bad service and Jean Vigo is the name of a cinema that screens dubbed blockbusters. But like all shrines, Paris attracts pilgrims. I’m thinking of Alison, the New Yorker of the sultry ukulele, or Gretchen from New Mexico who is on holidays from a college where the curriculum is just a chronological ramble through the classics, from Homer to Einstein and Lacan. "The end of second year is a rough place to be," she says. "We’ve traded Ancient Greece for Descartes and we’re so saturated with doubt we’ve stopped being able to talk. Everyone in my class is in the same dilemma, so it gets pretty awkward."


la vache espagnol

It recently occurred to me that I have been in culture shock in Paris. It hasn’t happened to me for most of my trip, though I anticipated it, but now it has arrived. Even here I am well cushioned by Macgregor, his visiting friends and mine. I am hardly ever called upon to speak French, which is handy because je parle francais comme une vache espagnol, as Anton says. In fact I find it very soothing not to understand most of the conversations around me—it’s all just human noise. But I am beginning to have questions about the way people think here, and I can’t find answers because I can’t read. Unfortunately the language of advertising is very simple, so I am here trying to understand the culture and the only thing getting through is the nastiest dregs of it. I can read the titles of books and magazine articles, almost without registering them as French, because they are full of latinate abstract nouns. So I can see immediately how interesting they are, what an insight they might offer me, and I try to read on and find that I can’t. Bookshops, especially film or literary bookshops, give a jab of pain. It’s frustration, der. I should have expected it sooner or later.

I have been drifting through the days like an expat wife— married to myself, the one who wanted to come here. Like a good expatriate I have been sticking to my own. On Saturday I went to a weekly writers’ group at Shakespeare & Co. It was fun, they’re good writers, and it led me to discover the reference library on the first floor of the shop—great news, as my budget can’t keep up with my reading in a country where Penguin classics are ten or fifteen euros each, and not much cheaper second-hand. I go to see old and new American films at the tiny cinemas that charge five euros. The French that I do know has mostly been reduced to a series of passwords to get me through the Metro gates or into the movies. I can still feel the language centres of my brain sparking off—I’ll hear the same word a few times and realise it is a grammatical building block—I know that if I learn it I’ll improve instantly. But I don’t bother learning it, and I feel almost proud of my indolence. Well, I’m not being entirely slack. I’ve circled session times in my Pariscope for some Italian and Danish films, which means I’ll have to deal with French sub-titles. Every now and then I have a meal with some of Macgregor’s French friends, and if I can’t contribute much I can at least understand the gist of the conversation, and nod and laugh at the right times. Every now and then I put in a whole sentence. "Australia is the more and more make a culture of work, work, work." Coruscating. In any case, finding English bookshops and films and meeting people has made me love Paris, even without understanding it. I keep seeing madeleines, the proper little Proustian seashells, scattered around the platforms of the Metro. As Mac’s friend Leisa said, they look as if they’ve escaped from a biscuit tin somewhere and are making a dash for freedom. How can you not be charmed by that?


and now to the finance news

I got my first piece of real finance world dirt from my bankers yesterday. I’ve been discussing international business dealings with two financial analysts, and when I say "discussing" I mean trying to get a word in edgewise, but not trying very hard because I’d rather listen to them talk than drill them on modal verbs. They tell me that their bank has recently released an internal report about the shady dealings of banks in different countries. Australia has been "red-listed," which sounds bad, for being very lax about checking into the origins of the money it takes from certain investors. We are notorious, apparently, for welcoming terrorist money. My students think it’s because Australia is so keen on quick expansion, it doesn’t want to ask tricky questions where big investments are concerned. With recent events in London, I sometimes catch myself wishing that militant groups wouldn’t bring their dirty business into my world, as if the ordinary people of Israel or Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else deserved it any more, and of course the question arises—has there ever been a time when the Anglo-Christian world hasn’t been deeply implicated in this dirty business? This is a tiny planet and the money runs around and around in it, busy as the devil himself.


jane and the time machine

Can I tell you about the wonderful books I’ve been reading? I’ve had a bit of a first and last things festival. It’s amazing to see how writers’ styles and projects change as they mature, as they try more and more relentlessly to say a really true thing. This quest to rid ones work of every false note, every attractive inaccuracy or almost-right word—it’s the life’s work of a really good writer, for whom ethics can’t be separated from aesthetics. So I like to see their first and last things. Carver’s first collection of stories. Forster’s first novel. Capote’s last book of stories and journalism—his last book, in fact, since Answered Prayers never did materialise. I’ll include in my list the gorgeous Mrs Dalloway, which I think appeared right in the middle of Woolf’s career but, since it is about looking back from middle age, counts as a sort of Last Thing, in a philosophical rather than biographical sense. God, the terrifying compassion in it. But that’s me, that’s me! I shudder in my seat on the metro. Me with all my mistakes behind me instead of ahead! How can she lay it all out so clearly and calmly on the page?

And I’ve just finished Persuasion. It’s a devourable book, but apart from the satisfaction it gives in its own right, it also offers firm proof that somebody went back in time to visit Jane Austen. I always thought she’d be the first person I’d visit if the opportunity arose—not so I could observe her genius at work, although I’d like to see her being relentlessly polite to a boring aunt. Really, I just want to tell her things won’t always be so bad. I want to tell her about equal opportunity employment and birth control and de facto relationships, about a time when women are allowed to test out a few people before they decide what they want out of a life partner. Having read Persuasion it seems clear that somebody did visit Jane, and I think it happened just before she wrote this novel. Here is a heroine who, eight years after a bad decision, long after her first bloom of youth is gone, gets another shot at happiness. Judging from the tone and the layered, compromised characters, I think her visitor brought back some modernist literature and maybe some writings on psychoanalysis (Nabokov snorts at me from beyond the grave). The traveler definitely brought a film and the means to play it, because in chapter fourteen Austen cuts on a soundscape. Clever woman! One moment you are in the Musgroves’ drawing room sourrounded by the noises of four children in high Christmas spirits, and the next you are rumbling into Bath in Lady Russel’s coach. Robert Altman couldn’t have done better.
Ha, I’ve just noticed what I said. Twenty-first century and all, I still fear making a major stuff-up. I wish older people wouldn’t try and shield me from disappointment. We do look around, us twenty-somethings, we know plans don’t always work out. Still, art is a major consolation, and so are my Italian books. Macgregor cracked the whip on me and I’ve finished chapter one. I can now say "But Washington, too, is a beautiful and famous city," with barely a stumble, and I’ve just about mastered the definite article.