B004MMEIOG EBOK (9 page)

Chapter 18
Postcards from Paris

Do not go with a so-called “Guide.” These “Guides” infest the Boulevards from the rue Royale to the Opera. They sneak up to you, want to sell you NAUGHTY postcards, take you to naughty cinemas, to “houses” and “exhibitions.” Walk away from them.

BRUCE REYNOLDS,
Paris with the Lid Lifted,
1927

“W
ell, they loved you,” Dorothy told me triumphantly. She waved another sheaf of report sheets. “Just listen . . .”

“No, please!”

I shared with Hemingway an acute embarrassment at having people say nice things to me, particularly when I was present. When Hemingway first met Scott Fitzgerald in the Dingo Bar on rue Delambre, he recoiled from the other’s compliments. As he wrote in
A Moveable Feast
, “We still went under the system, then, that praise to the face was plain disgrace.”

“A couple even asked if you did this professionally,” Dorothy said. “You should think about it.”

To imagine myself as a tour guide meant battling an avalanche of stereotypes.

The least offensive was represented by those individuals, umbrella or flag raised, whom I saw every day leading bedraggled crocodiles of visitors up and down rue de l’Odéon. Nobody looked too pleased, least of all the guide.

Maybe it was perverse, but I felt more empathy with the less reputable but more adventurous guides—the first cousins to the caricature William Faulkner described when he lived around the corner in 1925: “a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards.” Other writers were even more scathing about guides. Basil Woon, writing in 1926 in
The Paris That’s Not in the Guide Books
, claimed “the worst way [to see Paris] is with one of the professional guides who infest the boulevards and offer you obscene postcards. Most of these guides are Russians or Turks; a few are German or American. Most of them are thieves, and all are potential blackmailers.” (And yes, he really was called Basil Woon. In the 1920s, Paris also harbored a journalist named Wambly Bald and the translator Bravig Imbs. It’s conceivable they hid out in Paris to escape the smirks their names earned back home.)

Naughty postcards gave Paris a bad reputation

Fictional guides possess a buccaneering quality, an element of seduction and threat absent in their real-life equivalents, who are dull sticks. Are there really professionals like Richard Gere in
American Gigolo
who hire out to lonely women visitors to Los Angeles? Initially he’s their chauffeur, but driving in from the airport, he asks if it’s all right to remove his cap—the male equivalent of a girl suggesting she “slip into something more comfortable.” After that, his duties take on a more intimate nature. Alain Delon, oddly cast as an Italian in
The Yellow Rolls Royce
, starts as a guide to gangster George C. Scott and ends up pleasuring his girlfriend Shirley MacLaine while bodyguard Art Carney turns a blind eye. And Robert Redford, picking up two American women looking for a dirty weekend in
Havana
, takes them to the porn show at the Shanghai Theatre, then back to his apartment for a giggling threesome in the dark. In each case, everyone has a wonderful time, which is surely what we hope for from a trip abroad.

Sinister guides appear seldom in movies, and even then, their menace is ambivalent—more silly than sinister. My model would be Conrad Veidt in an obscure 1943 film called
Above Suspicion
. Most people remember him as Major Strasser in
Casablanca
, asking Humphrey Bogart, “Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?” In
Above Suspicion
, he wears a soft felt hat, tweeds, and a monocle, but he appears just as menacing. Accosting Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray in a torture museum, he displays a pair of pincers. “This elaborate piece was a fascinating device for removing fingernails,” he explains. “It is still in good working order.” Pointing to a metal effigy that, when hinged open, reveals a spiked interior, he explains, “Here is the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg—sometimes known as the German Statue of Liberty.” When Crawford, says, a little shakily, “You don’t look very much like a guide,” he observes with his shark-like smile, “And perhaps you don’t look much like tourists.” Disappointingly, he’s a good guy in disguise. I wish he’d stayed in character at least long enough to offer Joan and Fred some postcards. Undoubtedly they’d have shown something nastier than fornication.

“Y
ou’re thinking about this the wrong way,” said Terrance Gelenter as we sat on the terrace of Deux Magots.

All European capitals have their Gelenter, the go-to guy of the expat culture. A transplanted Brooklynite, he’d retained the style and manner of his onetime profession, selling
schmutter
in the garment district. Where his love of Paris came from nobody knew, but it was as passionate as it was unexpected. His website, Paris-Expat.com, generated just enough income to support him in a tiny fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the far side of Père Lachaise cemetery. Not that he spent much time there. When not installed on the terrace of Deux Magots, chatting up pretty tourists and exchanging Jewish jokes with the waiters, he could be found hosting a book launch, participating in a TV or radio documentary, or officiating at a restaurant opening where, after working the room, dealing out business cards by the deck and blatantly propositioning every woman under eighty, he would, if not subdued, climb onto a table and favor the crowd with an a cappella performance of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

“Is there a
right
way to think about it?”

But I’d left the question too late. His attention, always focused on the sidewalk, and the women on their way to work, had been caught by a girl crossing rue Bonaparte. His bearded face took on the look of a satyr in heat. Another five seconds and he would be bolting outside, accosting her in his inexact but rapid-fire French, offering his card, suggesting that she might care to meet him in the bar of the Hotel Lutetia that evening for
un
coctel
, and after that . . . well, who knew? Because, this was, after all, Paris.

I poked his ribs, hard.

“What?”

“Concentrate, will you? What’s the ‘right way’ to be a tour guide?”

He waved toward the departing young woman. “Did you
see
that
tuchus
?”

“Yes. But explain what you mean about ‘the wrong way.’ ”

Reluctantly, he switched back to my problem.

“Look at it this way. You’re not a guide—you’re a writer.”

“Yes . . .”

“But a writer who, if the money’s right, finds time in his busy schedule to show you around Paris as only he knows it.”

“That’s just playing with words. If I offer a guiding service, I’m a guide.”

“You remember that scene in
Ninotchka
where Garbo arrives in Paris and the porter takes her bag?”

Of course I remembered it. She asks him, “Why do you want to carry my bags?” The porter replies, “That is my business.” And she says, “That’s no business. That’s social injustice.” And he replies, “That depends on the tip.”

(I
missed
Billy Wilder. That he’d left behind so many wonderful films only made it worse. And he deserves credit for one of the funnier telegrams ever sent to the United States from Paris. As he left Hollywood in 1962 to cross the Atlantic for the making of
Irma La Douce
, his secretary said, “All I want from Paris is some cravats from Charvet for my husband and, for me, a real French bidet.” Billy agreed and promptly forgot. He even ignored her increasingly hectoring messages. Of the many demands on his time, shopping for plumbing fixtures didn’t rank high. Finally he cabled:
CRAVATS SHIPPED BIDET UNAVAILABLE SUGGEST HANDSTAND IN SHOWER
.)

“So it’s all about the money?”

“It’s
always
about the money,
bubeleh
. What do most guides charge for a walk around Paris?”

“About ten euros a head.”

“Then you should charge a hundred. No, better—two hundred.”

“For what?”

“For a walk around Paris.”

“Who’d pay that?”

“For a morning with a real Paris writer? Who lives in the building where Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce used to hang out? You’d be surprised.” Warming to the idea, he said, “I’ll promote it on Paris-Expat. It’ll be a sensation. You watch.”

I was just about to thank him when he went on. “And I’ll only take fifty percent.”

Chapter 19
The Ground Beneath Our Feet

In Bangkok

At twelve o’clock,

They foam at the mouth and run,

But mad dogs and Englishmen

Go out in the midday sun.

NOËL COWARD, “
Mad Dogs and Englishmen”

E
scaping from Gelenter and the goldfish bowl of Deux Magots, I retreated to the Chai de l’Abbaye, my favorite quiet café in rue Buci. It gave me a chance to think.

There was something crazy about the idea of taking people for a walk in Paris. Parisians grow up with the
promenade
, or stroll, as a natural part of their lives. There are no French-language guides to walking in Paris. Why give swimming lessons to fish?

But tourists are not Parisians. Very often, like survivors of an accident, they hardly know who they are, or where, or what they are doing there. On the most fundamental of levels, the cellular, crossing the Atlantic is an ordeal from which it takes the tourist a few days to recover. Watching their moony slow-motion progress, one thinks of patients under treatment and looks for the rolling metal drip stand with its bottle and tube. The French language, which incorporates the most precise vocabulary for sensual enjoyment—
connoisseur, gourmet, bouquet—
has also contributed the best terms for non-feeling—
ennui, cafard, longueurs.

In her novel
Foreign Relations
, Alison Lurie suggests that when we visit a foreign country, we retain full use of only two senses. “Sight is permitted—hence the term ‘sight-seeing.’ The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event; a proof that you were ‘really there.’ ” But sound, smell, and touch are all muffled or blocked.

She’s quite right. Visitors to France suffer more than most. The language, even if you have some vocabulary, is often spoken with an incomprehensible accent and an even less penetrable
argot.
Why is a nectarine called a
brugnon
? Why is the Centre Pompidou known as Le Beaubourg? How heavy is a
livre
? Signage is the worst of all. Who but a local would know that
DÉFENSE D’AFFICHER—LOI DU 21 JUILLET 1889
means
NO POSTERS
? Or that a restaurant that “offers” something is giving it away, but you’ll have to pay for anything “proposed”?

In summer, these effects intensify. On any warm day, you can see the do-not-touch rule in action in the Luxembourg. The southernmost part of the park, running up to boulevard Saint-Michel, and known as the “Little Luxembourg,” consists of two identical stretches of lawn, flanked by avenues of geometrically trimmed trees. To protect the grass, use of the lawns is strictly alternated. Each summer’s day, however, a few sweating back-packers, staggering off the boulevard into the shade, glimpse the two stretches of grass, one crowded with picnickers and playing children, the other empty, and throw themselves down gratefully on the unoccupied one—only to be rousted in a minute by the indignant garden police.

As it gets hotter, energy drains out of pedestrians. Their most grievous error is to walk too fast. Begin strolling with a new arrival, and within half a block you’re talking to their back. Fortunately in summer they slow down until they barely seem to move. The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant, who, unfashionably, spends August in Paris when everyone else flees to the seaside or the mountains, described the effect precisely in her story “August.”

    
The movement of Paris was running down. The avenues were white and dusty, full of blowing flags and papers and torn posters, and under traffic signals there were busily aimless people, sore-footed, dressed for heat, trying to decide whether or not to cross that particular street, wondering whether Paris would be better once the street was crossed. The city’s minute hand had begun to lag; in August it would stop.

In summer and winter both, walking around Paris requires recalibration—not only a new way of walking but a different way of looking.

When I walk in New York, I look up. Manhattan is its buildings—as continually startling as the cliffs of the Grand Canyon. As much as the pyramids, they speak of the possibilities of power, the belief in perfectability, the promise of a future. In London, on the other hand, I look around. Nowhere are the social dissonances more startling, the range of physical types as varied, the languages, visual and aural, more labile. London seethes with change.

But in Paris, I look down.

(“And just as well,” a cynic might say, “given what you’re likely to step in.” This is unfair. Though the number of dogs in Paris hasn’t decreased, the amount of discarded doo-doo has definitely diminished. The city has discontinued the service known derisively as
le motocrotte
, which sent young men out on motorbikes fitted with vacuum cleaners to suck up the more obnoxious evidence. One even sees dog owners scooping up poo in plastic bags—as unimaginable a decade ago as a Frenchman ordering
un Coca
in a café.)

The great Paris flood of 1910

No, Parisians look down because the city’s story is underfoot. Though asphalt covers the larger streets and boulevards, underneath you’ll find the original cubical stone cobbles: large and rough-hewn for older streets, smaller and more precisely cut where the surface is new. For a while in the late nineteenth century, the city economized by putting down brick-sized wood blocks, a cruder version of the parquet common in apartments. That ended when the Seine broke its banks in 1910. As streets flooded, the blocks swelled and riverside roads erupted into an irreparable jumble.

After that, granite cubes, bedded in sand, became standard. Often arranged in fanlike patterns, they look innocuous, but only so long as nobody pries one up and throws it, as rioting students did in 1968. The sand under the blocks was an added bonus; all over Paris, a new graffito appeared: “Sous les Paves, la plage.” Under the stones, there’s a beach. A
flic
knocked senseless when a block hit his helmet didn’t share their elation, but bruises heal, and what remains of those days is the exhilaration of remembered passion, crystallized for me by one of the anonymous posters of
soixante-huit
: the image of a wild-haired girl, coattails flying, caught in the instant of flinging a stone, and the defiant delight of its black block capitals—
LA BEAUTÉ EST DANS LA RUE
. Beauty is in the street!

“Beauty Is in the Streets!” 1968 poster

But the students illuminated an ancient truth. If, as the
flaneurs
claimed, walking around Paris is an art, then the city itself is the surface on which they create. And since Paris is ancient, that surface is not blank. Artists paint over their old work or that of others, just as medieval scholars scraped back the surface of vellum or parchment to use it again. Such a sheet, called a palimpsest, bears faintly, however often it’s reused, the words of earlier hands. And we who walk in Paris write a new history with each step. The city we leave behind will never be quite the same again.