Paris to the Moon (6 page)

It looks tricky; it looks
hard.
The kids have to hold the weather-beaten sticks up just so; there's just one angle, one way to do it. As the carousel picks up speed, it gets going whirring fast and the hand-eye, or rather hand-eye-painted horse, coordination you need looks terrifyingly accomplished. To make things even harder, if two children are mounted one right behind the other, and the first child lances the ring, it means that the next ring, slipping down, only arrives at the base of the wooden egg as the next child arrives, making it just about impossible to aim. If the first child just knocks the ring, on the other hand, the ring starts trembling widely enough to make a good grab impossible. It is a tough game, and what makes it odder is that there is no reward for doing well at it. I have read about this game all my life: going for the Big Brass Ring! It's an American metaphor. But here there are little tin rings, and no reward for getting them except the satisfaction of having done it. You don't even get to keep the tin rings for a moment of triumph—Look, Mama!—to show the cluttered stick, rings on it like plums on the branch of a plum tree. The keeper takes back the batons before the carousel has even stopped.

It is hard for me to imagine Luke ever doing this: sitting up there, skewering his rings. For the moment, for a long moment, we sit together in the little chariots and just spin. He keeps his eyes locked on the big kids with the sticks, who come under the heading of Everything He Desires: a stick, a task, a seat on the outside horse. (For me, the sticks and rings game on the carousel looks more like a symbolic pageant. A Writer's Life: hard job, done intently, for no reason. Cioran used to walk in these gardens. I wonder if he watched this.) The reward for the Parisian children is, perhaps, the simple continuity, the reality that the spinning will never get a prize, but that it will also never stop.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

On nice days, when we don't have time to go all the way to the gardens, Luke and I go to the musical horse outside the
Oiseau de Paradis
("Bird of Paradise"), a toy store on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and he solemnly rides up and down on it while it plays "Camptown Races." On rainy days, we go to Deyrolle on the rue du Bac. It is an extraordinary place. It is on the second floor—almost all of the second story—of one of the old
hotels particuliers.
It is, I suppose, a taxidermists' supply house and a supplier too of education charts. But it is also one of the great surrealist sites of Paris. Downstairs, at street level, there is the old-fashioned kind of come-hither wraparound window entrance, so that you enter a deep-set door between two vitrines, an architecture that must have been familiar once in Paris—it was the architecture of every South Street shoe store in my childhood—though it is fairly rare now. (Mostly the windows are one sheet of plate glass, with a kind of false front showing the goods and the store behind.) But here you walk past a "seasonal" window, filled with taxidermized animals and bare minimum decor: artificial fallen leaves for autumn, cotton ball "snow" for winter, a few silk flowers for spring. Sometimes the animals inside the windows change too—an ancient, yellowing polar bear right now represents the Spirit of Christmas—but mostly it is the same bunch all year: a fox, a raccoon, a moose. (The polar bear must have been brought down on the same expedition that is celebrated in the window of a lead soldier store on the rue des Ciseaux, which shows an otherwise unrecorded late-nineteenth-century
French
expedition to the North Pole, with the tricolor hanging over an igloo and reindeer entrecote in a chef's
sauteuse.)

When you open the door at Deyrolle, there is a moose on your left and then an odd display case straight ahead, with snake embryos in little jars of formaldehyde. If you go up the stairs—and Luke will only go up the stairs clutching tightly to my chest—you will find at the top an entire bestiary waiting patiently for your arrival not in casements or vitrines but just standing on all fours on the floor around the casements and vitrines, looking bored and social, like writers at a New York book party They just stand there. There are several lions, genuinely terrifying in their direct address. They have been taxidermized—
reanimated
is the correct term—not to look fierce but just to look bored—these are French lions, after all—which of course makes them look more fierce.

And then a baby elephant and a jaguar and a gorilla, all just
there,
with all the other natural things—skeletons and skulls and case upon case of butterflies and beetles—all around. The walls are painted a fading blue-green; the cases are all wood and glass. The main showroom is a two-story space, with a balcony up above. They keep the ordinary farm animals, sheep and goats, up there, looking down on the stars, like the extras in
Les
Enfants du Paradis.

There are also—and this is the weirdest touch—lots of domestic animals, family pets, Siamese and Scotties and cockers, who stand there on the floor too, among the lions and jaguars, looking furtive, forlorn, a little lost. Mme. Orlovska, the owner, who has become a friend, explains that they are unclaimed taxi-dermed pets from the old Deyrolle regime. Apparently year after year people would come in, weeping and clutching the cold bodies of Fido and Minochette, the house pets, and beg to have them taxidermized, restored, revivified. The taxidermists would go to laborious work, and then, two or three months later, when the pet was  at last stuffed into its immortality, the owner, consoled with a new living (though mortal) pet, would have forgotten all about it. No answer to calls or bills or what she calls "cornrnands of conscience." So the unwanted permanent pets— who were perhaps, as pets always are, mere courtesans of affection, feigning a feeling for food—get replaced, as courtesans will, and find themselves at the feet of the lions and elephants.

The big game are themselves souvenirs of a hotter time in Deyrolle's history, when hunters would have their African catches mounted and leave an extra lion or a leftover gnu to the house, as a sort of tip, like gamblers in Monte Carlo in the same period giving a chip or two to the croupier. The house makes its money now, Madame explains, mostly selling bugs and butterflies to decorators. "We can't find any large game anymore," she complains. "The laws are so absurdly tight. If a lion dies in a circus, we cannot touch it. If an elephant falls over in a zoo, we cannot reanimate it. Is it better for a thing of beauty to die and molder away than to be made a work of art?" (The government is worried, as governments will be, I suppose, that if fallen elephants are turned into merchandise, however lovely, then sooner or later elephants will not just be falling. Elephants will be nudged.)

Luke is as frightened (and fascinated) by the small game as he is by the large; he clings to me tightly throughout—and then every day demands to be taken back. I think he feels about it the same way that I feel about the Baudrillard seminar I am attending at the Beaubourg. It's scary, but you learn something.

I've attended this public seminar, given by Baudrillard and friends at the Beaubourg. Jean Baudrillard is, or anyway was, the terror of West Broadway back in the eighties. He was the inventor of the theory of "the simulacra," among much else, and famously insisted that "reality" had disappeared and that all that was left in its place was a world of media images and simulated events. ("The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" was his famous slogan, meaning that it was a pure television production.) Before the seminar I imagined Baudrillard as tall and spectral and high-domed as Barthes had been. He turns out to be a stocky, friendly little guy in his fifties, with a leather jacket and a weather-beaten complexion.

The seminar consists of a three- or four-man panel: an economist; a sociologist; Leo Scher, the all-around thinker. Each gives a presentation, and then Baudrillard comments. The other day, for instance, the economist was giving a lecture on exponentiality "Exponentiality is fatality," he announced grimly, and went on to point out what every first-year biology student is told, that the "exponential" proliferation of biological life—each codfish has a million codfish children; each codfish child has a million of its own children—means that the codfish, or slime mold or antelope or, for that matter, French intellectuals, would cover the world in ten or so generations, unless there were something—several somethings—there to check them.

(The girl in front of me scribbled in her book, in French, of course, "Exponentiality is Fatality")

"Therefore," said the economist, "I propose that there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon"—he wrote the word in capitals on the blackboard— "which prevents this from happening. I call this principle the Regulon."

No one protested, or pointed out that, as I think is the case, Darwin (among many others) had solved this problem awhile ago without recourse to the Regulon. (Predators eat most of the cod-fish; the rest just die. Life is hard; the Regulon is called life, or death.) Baudrillard nodded gravely at the end of the exposition. But yours underlines the point I am making," he added, almost plaintively He paused and then pronounced: "There is no Regulon in the Semiosphere." (And she wrote it down and underscored it: "There is no Regulon in the Semiosphere.")

There Is No Regulon in the Semiosphere. There is no way of stopping media signs from proliferating, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information, no way of keeping the CNN weatherman out of your sky. There is nothing to eat them. There Is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is a wildly abstract way of saying that there is no "natural predator" to stop the proliferation of movies and television; they do overwhelm the world, and with it reality. It is hard to see how you save the carousel and the musical horse in a world of video games, not because the carousel and musical horse are less attractive to children than the Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up.

When I lived here with my family, in the early seventies, there was nothing I liked more than walking up the boulevard Beau-marchais to the Cirque d'Hiver, the Winter Circus. It is a wooden octagon, visible from the boulevard, but set well back, on a little street of its own. A frieze, a kind of parody of the Pan-athenaic procession, runs around its roof: clowns and jugglers and acrobats in bas-relief. Inside, it has a hushed, intimate quality; the hard wooden bleachers are pitched very high. I don't recall that I ever actually went inside when I was a kid—I was too busy with movies—it just seemed like the right place to walk to. But now we've been to a winter circus at the Winter Circus. The Cirque du Soleil, from back home in Montreal, put on its slightly New Age show, and we took Luke and sat in the top rows. They brought the lights down when the circus began, as though it were a play, which struck me as an odd thing. I always think of circuses sharing the light of their spectators. What happened to the summer circus? I used to think that the circuses must have toured all summer and then came into winter retreat on the rue Amelot. But now I suspect that there was a summer circus once too, but they closed it. The Circus. Regulon got it, I guess.

It was a good circus, though a little long on New Age, New Vaudeville, and Zen acrobats and a little short, absent in fact, on the lions and bears I had promised Luke. (We have a standing joke about lions in Paris; as I push his
poussette,
I announce that I am terrified that there may be lions in this quarter of Paris— "and I'm so scared of lions"—and he roars, lustily.) At the end, though, the troupe took its final bow and threw those little glowing green bracelets up into the audience as a favor. A few came up as high as we were. The French fathers, soccer players to a man, snatched at them from the wrist as they flew up, like men slapping futilely at mosquitoes. I stood up and with years of incompetent Central Park softball under my belt, I pounded the right fist into the left and pulled one in like a pop-up. Then I handed it to Luke. The other fathers in the row looked at me with pure hate. I shrugged and have never felt so obnoxious, so proud, so imperial, so American.

We have found Luke a baby-sitter, or I suppose I have to say a nanny. Her name is Nisha Shaw, she comes from Sri Lanka, has long hair in a beautiful braid and beautiful lilting English, and she is the wife of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy's chauffeur. She is lovely and loving, and she sings all day to Luke in a high-pitched soprano, singing songs that seem just out of focus. "Blowin' in the Wind" and a song called "Softly Sings the Donkey/As he goes to hay/If you don't come with him/He will go away." Softly sings the donkey—the theme tune of the American liberal abroad. We have already, in a few weeks, become a strange island of Sri Lankan, Icelandic-Canadian, West Philadelphian, Franco-American civilization within a bigger culture. I imagine these are songs that she's heard over the radio and in school, songs that are part of her own little monoculture, just as we have made up ours.

Every morning as Luke and I wait for Nisha to arrive before I go to work in my office, we look out from the kitchen into the courtyard. Every morning, just at eight-fifteen, a hand emerges, holding at its end a tablecloth or a sheet or something that it shakes out. She is known as the Shaky Lady, the Aurora, or Dawn Goddess, of our home. We made up a song in her honor— Oh, Shaky Lady/Oh, Shaky Lady, be good to me"—and she seems to shake with such authority, such intensity.

The odd thing in making a big move is the knowledge that your life will be composed of hundreds of small things that you will arrive at only by trial and error, and that for all the strikes and seminars you attend, the real flavor of life will be determined, shaped, by these things. The Semiosphere comes at you in little bursts. Where will your hair be cut? What kind of coffee will you buy, and where? We have been searching for the right mocha, everywhere we go: at La Vieille France, a pastry store on the rue de Buci; at Hediard, on the place de la Madeleine; at Whittard, an English coffee importer that has a counter in the Conran on the rue du Bac. Our old Dean & DeLuca blend is gone now, and we must find a new one. The Shaky Lady will preside over some kind of coffee, but even she cannot know quite which one, not just yet.