Authors: John Baxter
B004MMEIOG EBOK (8 page)
Chapter 16
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
VOLTAIRE
T
wo mornings later, Dorothy and I met again in Les Editeurs.
“You ambushed me,” I said accusingly.
“Well, a little. Sorry.” She didn’t look contrite.
For the ten of us who assembled on rue de Rennes for the literary walk, the biggest surprise was the youth of our guide. About forty, blond, tanned, and soft-spoken, Andrew could have passed for Robert Redford’s nephew. A couple of women in the group regarded him with not entirely academic interest, while the older ones wondered if they could keep up with someone so fit.
They needn’t have worried.
At Deux Magots, Andrew positioned himself with his back to the café, facing busy boulevard Saint-Germain. Staring over our heads, he announced, “Here we are at one of the most famous cafés of Paris, Deux Magots. Established in . . .”
Literary memoirs often describe how a charismatic teacher ignited their interest in literature. “I longed for the next class when we would gather round the skirts of Miss Wilkins, hanging on every word as she read Emily Dickinson . . .” Whatever quality those educators possessed, Andrew had it in reverse. Having memorized Parisian cultural history down to the price of a
pipi
in the
toilettes
of Le Sélect in 1928, he wanted to be sure we knew every bit of it. One could feel the interest of the group drain away, as if sucked down some intellectual plughole. A few of us cast glances toward the chairs and tables set out on the sidewalk.
What if we sat down, just for a minute, and ordered a coffee, or even a glass of champagne . . . ?
“I wasn’t sure,” Dorothy said. “But I’d heard things. People said he was a bit . . . dry.”
Dry? Andrew was more than dry. He was parched. Desiccated.
He spared us nothing. History. Statistics. Quotations. Dates. And more statistics after that. Then he produced his latest book and read—or rather droned—a couple of pages. The desire with which some had looked on him gave way to distaste. Those who’d feared physical exhaustion no longer did so. Compared to this leaden progress, a walk to the mailbox was as thrilling as white-water rafting. It reminded me of something the director Terry Gilliam said about working with Robert De Niro on the film
Brazil.
The actor was so meticulous that it took weeks to shoot a few brief scenes. “We were all in awe of De Niro,” said Gilliam, “then we shifted round one hundred and eighty degrees and wanted to kill him.”
If Andrew’s soporific lectures affected me less than the others, I put it down to having survived a traditional Catholic education, administered by the sort of priests and nuns you’d expect to find in an Australian country town. Their aim wasn’t to educate but rather to create a mind barren of all information, a blank page, receptive to the church’s multitudinous thou-shalt-nots. Over decades of droning lessons and Sunday sermons, I’d built up a partial immunity to boredom, in the way that repeated snakebites make you resistant to venom. Faced with Andrew, however, even my energy began to fail. As we reached Place Saint-Sulpice and the church towers loomed over me, I feared the consequences if I stepped inside. What if I fell into a trance, was taken for dead, and woke up a week later interred in the crypt, like a character out of Edgar Allan Poe? Rather than risk it, I dropped back, slipping away around the first corner.
Girls on a café
terrasse,
1920s
Over a gin and tonic on the terrace of the Café Flore, I relaxed into the ambiance of the late afternoon. If only Andrew could see Paris as I did—the way it had been in the 1920s, when the cafés’ wicker chairs spilled onto the sidewalk and new arrivals from America lingered over a glass of white wine, absorbing the street life flowing by, so unlike anything they knew at home: the taxis with their hooting
klaxons
, the
boulevardiers
in tightly fitted three-piece suits, tipping their hats to the women in their cloches and silk stockings as they shared a
fine à l’eau
with a friend and wondered what the night would bring.
The love of a city, like the love of a person, often begins in the first instant of encounter. The rest is discovery and exploration. “We didn’t feel out of place,” wrote the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan of his first evening in Paris.
The corner was like a great bowl of light, little figures moving into it and fading out, and beyond was all of Paris. Paris was around us and how could it be alien in our minds and hearts even if no Frenchman ever spoke to us? What it offered to us was what it had offered to men from other countries for hundreds of years; it was a lighted place where the imagination was free.
Though Andrew was interested in Paris, he didn’t love it. Oscar Wilde scorned such people who “know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Andrew knew the facts but not what they signified. He could recite them, but he could not bring them alive. And in a guide that’s fatal.
“H
e looked ideal,” Dorothy said. “Good credentials, pleasant manner. . . .
Such
a disappointment.” She flourished a handful of papers and started quoting from them: “ ‘Frankly boring’ . . . ‘Not what we expected’ . . . ‘We didn’t finish.’”
“Well, you’re stuck with him, it seems.”
“Not necessarily.” She gave me one of her pointed looks. “Anybody can be replaced.”
My sluggish perceptions finally delivered her message.
“You don’t mean
me
?”
“Why not?”
“I’m no guide,” I protested. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Oh, John!” she said in exasperation. “You live here, for goodness’ sake. Just tell them some of your stories.”
“Stories?” I said uncertainly.
“And didn’t you say you were looking for a way to get some exercise?”
“Yes . . .”
“Walking is excellent exercise.”
“Well . . . let me think about it.”
“Think quickly,” she said.
“Why? The next seminar isn’t for twelve months.”
Dorothy looked cross. “You don’t think I’m going to put people through that again? I told Andrew this morning that we wouldn’t need him for the other two walks.” She snapped her Filofax closed. “The next one’s tomorrow, at three.”
At the next peg the Queen turned again, and this time she said, “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk—and remember who you are!”
LEWIS CARROLL,
Alice in Wonderland
S
tanding on boulevard du Montparnasse next afternoon with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, I watched my first tour group convene.
Just tell them some of your stories.
How easy she made it sound.
What stories?
About whom?
A musicologist friend, in a moment of weakness, once agreed to lecture an arts group on the history of Western music. Plunging in at Gregorian chant, he staggered out of Stockhausen and serialism two hours later to be met by an accusatory stare of a lady in the front row, who hissed “You forgot Scriabin!”
In ones and twos, the members of my group straggled out the front door—two pairs of middle-aged ladies in sensible shoes, a pretty but dazed girl who appeared to be suffering from terminal jet lag, and a short, bald man with a heavy red beard. Would it be politic to mention that he was a near-look-alike for Landru? Probably not.
“Is that everyone?”
“One other lady thought she might come,” said one woman, in a heavy Southern accent. She looked over her shoulder at the empty doorway. “But I guess she changed her mind.”
Six, out of a possible fifty. Word of Andrew’s soporific stroll had spread.
“Perhaps we’d better start . . .”
I introduced myself, then said, almost shouting over the traffic noise, “We’re standing on boulevard du Montparnasse . . .”
Within a minute, I started to feel some sympathy for Andrew. Street corners are no place to explain anything more complex than the way to the nearest métro stop. And unless you have a voice trained to project, anything you say barely travels two meters before fading into the general city din.
I had an additional problem, which had only dawned on me the previous evening as I went over my possible route. The eastern end of boulevard du Montparnasse, where the seminar held its courses, lacked even one site of literary interest. Nobody of artistic significance had lived, died, or slept here. It explained why Andrew started his tour in front of Deux Magots. At least there he had something to talk about.
Half a kilometer away lay the Luxembourg Gardens, Odéon, and a plethora of significant locations. It was just a question of going there. What would Hemingway do? I made a dangerous decision and pointed toward rue Vaugirard.
“Now we need to walk.”
“How far?” asked the girl with the weary look.
“Hardly any distance at all,” I lied. Buying time, I asked, “Where are you from?”
Telling me about Omaha kept her alert for two blocks, but as we began the third—and still only halfway to the Luxembourg—she faltered.
At this point, providence intervened and changed my life. By chance, we’d paused by an antique shop.
“Good grief!” I said, staring in the window. “Look at that!”
The slim metal tube, richly enameled, and prominently displayed on a stand, was obviously the star item of the shop.
“An opium pipe!” I said, mostly to myself. “Do you know how
rare
they are? You almost never see them on sale. I wonder what he wants for it . . .”
With the exception of alcohol, no narcotic exercised such a potent influence over European art and culture as opium. Alfred de Musset smoked it. Lord Byron drank it as laudanum, dissolved in spiced alcohol. Opium’s chemically refined forms of morphine and heroin provided a faster, more intense sensation, but artists and thinkers preferred the drug raw. It allowed them to spend an entire evening dreaming of a world transmuted into pure movement and form. To a culture that created the vine-like curlicues of art nouveau
,
Monet’s water lilies, and Debussy’s evocation in music of fountains, clouds, and the sea, it was the ideal narcotic—organic, transcendent, and ostensibly benign.
Every arcane pleasure creates a gadgetry that, for certain enthusiasts, is as satisfying as the thing itself. Like golfers with their matched Bobby Jones woods and membership of Pebble Beach or Saint Andrews, some
opiomanes
cared less about the effect of the drug than about owning the most richly decorated pipes, the correct lamp for heating the drug, the needles for holding it in the flame, and of course using only the best opium. Indochinese Yunnan was much preferred to the cruder Benares variety, English Mud, grown by the British in India and foisted on the Chinese.
“Opium had artistic significance, you know. Picasso smoked. He said the scent of opium was the least stupid smell in the world, except for that of the sea. Jean Cocteau was an addict. One of his best books is about a detox treatment at a clinic out in Saint Cloud . . .”
A silence from behind me made me turn. All six members of my group huddled, staring.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “We should get moving.”
“No, no,” one woman said. “It was interesting. Go on.”
“About . . . opium?”
“Yes.”
How to explain the significance to the French of opium? The difference in sensibilities. How the English love sun, while the French seek shade. Opium offers no thrill, no high; rather, it’s a key to the space
between
sensations . . . a state that evokes that most French of all concepts,
le zone. . .
“I don’t understand how you smoke it,” said the bearded man, peering into the window. “I mean, the pipe has no bowl.”
I explained how one took a little of the opium gum, rolled it into a pill the size of a pea, toasted it over a flame until it began to bubble, then fed it through the tiny hole in the spherical smoke chamber, where it vaporized into a few puffs of cool smoke—the stuff of dreams.
“And tell me,” said the most timid of the women, “Were there really . . .” Her voice dropped. “ . . . opium
dens
?”
“Of course. And still are. The French call them
fumeries.
Some are actually quite luxurious.”
A circle of faces leaned close.
“You see . . .” I went on.
Even though I was almost whispering now, they heard me perfectly. I was once again witness to a truth about public speaking. It wasn’t how loudly you spoke but what you had to say.
Girl in an opium
fumerie
“ . . . opium numbs the sense of time. Cocteau said the effect was like stepping off the train of existence. But it takes three or four pipes to get the full effect. And for that, you need . . .”
“A place to lie down,” said the bearded man.
“Exactly!”
We nodded together, no longer guide and party.
Conspirators.
T
wo days later, as I crossed rue Vaugirard in front of the Sénat, the bookseller who has his shop opposite our apartment emerged from the post office, looked over my shoulder, and said in surprise, “But what’s all this?”
Straggling across the road to join me were the people who’d signed up for my second tour—all twenty-seven of them.
I shrugged. “Mes admirateurs.”
“Merde alors,” he said respectfully.
As they gathered around, I said, “Now, if you look over at those railings next to the main entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, according to Philippe Soupault, sadomasochists in the 1930s used this as a pickup spot . . .”
Hemingway might not have approved, but I knew Henry Miller would.
