on the case

I have started making follow-up phone calls about the job applications I sent to various schools in Northern Italy. Before I began, I prepared a speech with care. Okay, I wrote it myself, and okay, I only looked in the dictionary twice, but those three or four sentences pretty much used up my entire stock of Italian, so I was stuffed when I was called upon to have an actual conversation (something I ought, arguably, to have anticipated). Think of it like this: it’s one thing to read a passage of Chaucer aloud, but it would be another thing entirely to have a good old chat with the Wife of Bath. So after a flood of incomprehensibility that began with Ah, si, si, certo… I had to stutter that I um didn’t um understand, and the confused secretary switched obligingly into English. Given that I may have to leave for Italy within the week to begin interviews, it seems I am a little under-prepared. Let’s see: if I cover a chapter of my Italian in Three Months book every day, I will be up to “object pronouns”, “likes and dislikes” and “ordering a drink” by the time I arrive. So at least I’ll be able to greet cutey Italians with: I like you. Let’s get a beer.

I’m enjoying my last few weeks in Paris. I keep finding new cafés to love, like the L’Industrie where you can nurse a black coffee for as many chapters of your novel as you like, and they don’t serve breakfast but they let you bring in a croissant from the patisserie across the street. I spent a fun night playing anagrams with Gideon, David and Macgregor. Any word nerd would love this game so it’s worth me telling you the rules, but it’s hard to explain so I’ll put it in a separate post that you can click on at leisure. I also went shopping with Macgregor in the Marais, as a celebration of his completing his film school application and my having applied for many jobs. We bought beautiful things packaged in fancy bags. It’s a funny thing—the cost of that carry bag must be added to the cost of your purchase. If somebody came up to you in the street and said, “Would you like a cardboard bag with rope handles for two euros?” you would say something impolite. But if you’ve shelled out for the self-striped classic white shirt with lacing detail on the cuffs, you’re going to feel let down if you don’t get the fancy bag.

Yesterday I went with Macgregor to the park, because the weather was proper August weather again and we wanted to be out in the sun. We chose Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Belleville, as I hadn’t seen it before. It is on one of the two hills of Paris. If I hadn’t been able to see Sacre-Coeur on the hill across the way, I would have thought I was in an entirely different city. Clusters of huge trees and green hillsides full of picnickers, and because of the slope, kids are always doing acrobatics and stacking it spectacularly on the steeper bits. French kids don’t seem to cry when they fall over, they just right themselves noncholantly and saunter off, as if it was part of the trick. This park was one of those places that seem to have a distilled aura of happiness around it. I’ve never loved Parisians so much, each on their patch of sunny lawn. The park itself was very beautiful and dramatic, but I think it was the modernist tower blocks all around that gave the place its particular loveliness. One does tire of the same-same Haussman-style buildings all over Paris, and it was perfect, in all that sun, to see the clean lines and jaunty red sun-shades of the ocean-liner-style apartment blocks. Like being in a Jacques Tati film, but less cloyingly quaint. It was all real, and all joyous. A man near us on the hillside was meditating, and I didn’t understand how he could keep his eyes closed on such a day, in such a place. I listened to contrived, educational conversations in Italian on my iPod, Macgregor read a David Sedaris book I bought him.

The birthday presents keep on coming. Matt sent me a great stash of music, including Nick Cave’s recent double album, which makes all the hairs of my scalp stand on end in tingly revelry, and a lush, moody album from The Woods Themselves, a Sydney band he has just joined (why did you have to have your rock n roll renaissance after I left, M? I always wanted to be a groupie). And I have a wonderful new pile of books beside my bed, distracting me from my Italian study. It comes courtesy of Tania, who had to listen to me whining loudly about the cost of books while she was over here for a Women in Engineering conference. Hurrah for Tania! Permit me a couple of quotes:

Here is Primo Levi in The Periodic Table, writing about his first exercises in chemical analysis at university (I have chosen a quote about chemistry, rather than about his incarceration in Auschwitz, though he writes with equal lucidity and care about both. After all, he chose his vocation, and his love for it survived his ordeal along with him):

One way or another, here the relationship with Matter became dialectical: it was fencing, a face-to-face match. Two unequal opponents: on one side, putting the questions, the unfledged, unarmed chemist, at his elbow the textbook by Autenrieth as his sole ally… : on the other side, responding with enigmas, stood Matter, with her sly passivity, ancient as the All and portentously rich in deceptions, as solemn and subtle as the Sphinx.

From Henry James’ The Europeans, this single exquisite sentence:

If we are good when we are contented, Eugenia’s virtues should now certainly have been uppermost; for she found a charm in the rapid movement through the wild country, and in a companion who from time to time made the vehicle dip, with a motion like a swallow’s flight, over roads of primitive construction, and who, as she felt, would do a great many things that she might ask him.

And finally some Flaubert, writing letters home from his travels in Egypt in 1850, years before he produced Madame Bovary:

When I think of my future (that happens rarely, for I generally think of nothing at all despite the elevated thoughts one should have in the presence of ruins!), when I ask myself: ‘What shall I do when I return? What path shall I follow?’ and the like, I am full of doubts and indecision. At every stage in my life I have shirked facing my problems in just the same way; and I shall die at eighty before having formed any opinion concerning myself or, perhaps, without writing anything that would have shown me what I could do.

So much for that. Reading Flaubert makes me wish even more keenly that we could travel in time as well as space. That’s my second reference to time travel and now you all think I’m a geek who has watched Back to the Future dozens of times. But the Egypt he saw and luxuriated in and wrote so delicately about is gone gone gone. How sad. Thank god he at least paid attention and took notes.