Paris Was Ours (22 page)

From a room in Old Havana we moved to an attic on the
rue Saint-Dominique—after living with the ambassador in the ambassador’s residence for a year, that is, putting up with his rudeness, his snide remarks, his foul moods. I spent a year being his maid, without being paid a cent, in addition to my work at UNESCO. After we moved, he decided that I would continue to be his maid, and I agreed because having won his trust through my silence—at the time, I didn’t talk—the job allowed me a degree of freedom. I was able to move between his residence, the office, and the embassy without being so controlled; I was given permission and a Carte Orange to use in the Métro, and I could meet with certain trusted Latin Americans without having to turn in reports on them to the embassy’s counterintelligence people. Playing stupid is always the right thing to do with Communists.

What did they consider stupid? I spent my days reading newspapers in French and trying to learn the language by watching television and listening to the people talking, not trying to insist on speaking Spanish—excuse me,
Cuban
—or pretending that the French were under the obligation to understand me just because I was a Cuban “revolutionary.” And I’d pick up all the invitations to art exhibits and museums that came into the office—activities that the Castro officials avoided like the plague. I was stupid because instead of visiting the city’s stores and shops like all the other wives accompanying their diplomat-husbands—and never buying anything, because what would they use for money? — I would go to museums, try to learn French, and socialize with the Latin Americans friendly to the embassy, or at least the ones the embassy thought were still its friends.

Five years went by like that. I loved walking through the
Champ-de-Mars, the Champs-Élysées, loved going into bookstores to hide in a corner and read books forbidden by the embassy—that’s how I got to read the books of Armando Valladares and some of Reinaldo Arenas’s and my maestro’s, Guillermo Cabrera Infante. The people in the embassy pressed me, since I liked books so much, into throwing out all the books that Alejo Carpentier had written when he was cultural attaché in the Castro embassy—thousands of titles! I didn’t do it; instead, I organized a library that they later proudly showed to all their visitors.

I loved the libraries, the museums. For several months the Louvre was a very special refuge, as were the Musée Gustave Moreau and the Jeu de Paume. I would lean back on a bench in the place de Furstenberg for hours, smoking; I would walk the streets of the Latin Quarter passionately, like something out of a François Truffaut movie; I would drink
kirs
in the bistros and nourish myself on baguettes slathered with butter and Bonne Maman strawberry jam! I smoked and smoked and smoked, like my idol Serge Gainsbourg. And read and read and read, like my other idol Bernard Pivot. And so I gradually acquired more freedom, although more than once, looking over my shoulder, I discovered that some official from the embassy was following me. I became an expert in messing with their heads. I would carry wigs, hats, scarves in my purse; I’d gotten a new coat. And whenever I could, I’d slip into a stairwell to put on a disguise to throw them off, or sneak down a corridor to the building’s back exit.

As I gained more freedom, other things began to draw my attention. First, money. I discovered that in order to have all the things I liked—books, records, that sort of thing—I first had
to learn to respect and like money. Before, it hadn’t mattered to me, or I had actively disliked it. Now I wanted to save money so I could take presents back to my mother in Cuba, and the only way to get the things I liked was to do what in Cuba had become the only way to live—become a criminal. Another diplomat’s wife invited me to sell the cases of rum that the government sent to be given out as gifts for New Year’s. We set ourselves up in the busiest corner of the Barbès-Rochechouart Métro station and started selling rum for twenty francs, then moved on to Cuban cigars and gasoline chits. The rum was a hit among the Muslim population.

One afternoon I went to rent
Le grand Meaulnes
in its old version—the movie based on the Alain-Fournier novel—and the clerk asked me if I’d let him take nude photos of me for his customers. I said OK. Later I modeled for painters, among them one very famous one, Monsieur B. My baby face and teenager’s body were perfect for his paintings. What I’m saying is that I led a double life, and on a diplomatic passport.

I figure the dossier they have on me in the offices of the Sureté is as thick as a brick. The ambassador, playing dumb, would praise my job performance—and in every conversation with his illustrious visitors he would say that I’d learned more than anybody in the embassy about this city. At one of those moments I was wearing a tulle skirt I had found in the
marché aux puces
at Porte de Clignancourt and a velvet jacket I’d bought for almost nothing at a Guerrisol—an Arab shop that sells dead people’s clothes—and Alberto Moravia, his hand beneath my tulle, was stroking my behind.

“What a lovely outfit!” crooned the publisher Ingrid Feltrinelli, eyeing my costume. “Who is it?”

I didn’t know a thing about labels or designers; all I knew was that my fingers were throbbing from all the needle pricks I’d given myself that afternoon as I’d sewn up the skirt. So I lied.

“Dior, it’s Dior.” (Dior, forgive me—I can’t ask forgiveness of
Dios
, another designer that’s done pretty well for himself.)

I loved Paris with all my heart. But I had to get a divorce and flee the city I loved best for that other one, which I also loved very, very much, though with increasing reticence. I returned to Havana. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be going back to Paris six years later, married to a Cuban filmmaker, with our year-and-a-half-old daughter (what I had to do to take her with us!), on a three-month visa. I knew that
that
departure would be the last … I sensed it. My passport was no longer that magical shade of Prussian blue that symbolized the diplomatic corps. My passport was gray, like any other government official’s. I had been invited to Paris as a writer and the assistant publisher of the journal
Cine Cubano
, and I carried several novels and poems in my suitcase filled with books. My mother stayed behind, alone. I’d charged her with taking care of my library.

I breathed the winter air of Paris and felt that I’d been reborn. We stayed with a painter in the Marais. My husband, my daughter, and I slept on an IKEA sofa until somebody gave us a crib for the baby. We lived for three months with no money, boiling spaghetti—no sauce—and drinking milk, both of which the painter bought us. Fortunately, friends I had met during my previous sojourn in Paris often invited us out for dinner. On April 5, 1995, when my second novel,
La nada cotidiana
, was published by Actes-Sud, those friends, or almost all of them, cut off my lights and water—they stopped speaking
to me. The embassy sent an emissary to warn me that I would not be allowed to return to Cuba. At that, the French authorities informed me that they would never give me political asylum
or
legal residency, that I either had to go back to Cuba or go to the United States. I spent many long days in the police station on the rue de Lutèce. After hours of interrogation by a lieutenant and the chief of police himself, I would return to the Paris streets, step into Notre-Dame, light a few candles stolen from the dead, and go back home, feeling a little better. For ten years we paid taxes and waited for French citizenship. My books sold very well and my face was on ads in the Métro. I was a member of the Cannes jury, and I was still “undocumented.” Once I became a Spanish citizen, the French made me a French one. But none of that kept me from loving this city. When I felt lonely and miserable, I’d go down to the Seine with a white plate of meringue and leave it for Oshún, the mother-goddess of rivers, the goddess of love, an offering so that she would help me. Now that I think of it, that may have been one reason they wouldn’t give me the papers, because if some gendarme saw me leaving a plateful of meringue on the bank of the Seine, he must surely have said that I was absolutely out of my head, batty,
alienée
, ready for the insane asylum!

The fact is, I
was
mad—mad for Paris. In the bookshops of the rue Beautreillis I learned what freedom was, talking to the people there. Yes, I know, Parisians are difficult, but you have to prod them. Here, I realized that the words the French use most are “découragé,” “solitude,” “ridé” … The phrase inevitably used by men to reply is “Oui, mais non …” My greatest problem was water and the use they made of it. They’ve not only replaced water with wine, but they shower very infrequently. The
BO in the Métro killed me—it still kills me—not to mention the smell of rotten cheese between the teeth, the wine on the breath, and the clouds of dandruff, which looks like snow in the middle of summer. I didn’t have too many problems in the winter. Although I’m not cold natured, I adapted by wearing caps, gloves, scarves, and all the paraphernalia that goes with overcoats. It wasn’t easy—when I didn’t lose my gloves, it was my beret, and I still have the sense sometimes that the umbrella is my third arm, because when it starts drizzling, it drizzles! And with that irritating
drip, drip, drip
that would make you think that half a dozen drummers were playing a rumba beat on your head with their fingertips.

I must say that I’ve gotten along well with the Parisian men. With the Parisian women it’s another story. Those women are tough. If I were a man, I wouldn’t have all that patience. If men’s stinginess is proverbial, women’s is biblical. I remember the time that painter we were staying with introduced us to his girlfriend. We invited her to dinner; I made
arroz con frijoles negros
and
picadillo
, with
platanitos fritos
—practically the Cuban national meal. She looked at the plate as though instead of a Cuban dinner she was standing before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The painter had warned us that the surprise of the night would be left to his girlfriend. We thought he was talking about the wine, but no—she proceeded to drink all our wine, and then our rum, and then absolutely all our liqueurs. The surprise of the night was (Beethoven, please—da-da-da-
dum
) … cheese.

She took from her bag a small silver package, a little wrinkled and not a little mashed, opened it before our astonished eyes, cut us each a tiny piece of camembert as though slicing
up a gold nugget, rewrapped her cheese, and tucked it back in her purse. The only reason my husband and I didn’t burst out laughing was out of respect for our friend the painter.

What do I love most about this city? Its passion for art, its resistance to anything that’s happening to us in the present, when the discourse is increasingly political and/or religious. Paris resists, with its art exhibits, its editions, its bookstores, its museums, its designers, its artists, its writers. Paris resists in art, no doubt about it. Though Paris no longer functions
because of
its artists. Paris is not just the center; it’s also the suburbs and their infinite anguish, racial problems, stories of abandonment, of unemployment, of inability to “fit in.” But I’m not going to tell any politically correct stories. What I’m interested in is the cultural life of this city—its theaters, its movie houses. That’s why I stayed here; that’s why I decided to create and make a life for myself in Paris. That’s why I had to give birth to Paris—a difficult childbirth, no question, but in the end, the child has brought exceptional love into my life.

Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley

Montparnasse and Beyond

I
HAD AN INSTANTANEOUS
connection to Paris. All the clichés applied. I loved it and thought it was great. I liked every part of it, including my tiny room on the boulevard Edgar Quinet. It was a typical nineteenth-century working-class building—one room, no heat, and a communal toilet in the stairwell. The hallways were dark and you had to turn the light on when you left or entered the building. The room had a single bed and a propane gas cooker. There was only cold water running out of the sink, and in the wintertime even that stopped at nine. It became a real stopping-off point; at one moment I had five people sleeping there. I had a generous concierge, Madame Fernandez. I thought it was all wonderful. I was living the dream.

Montparnasse was still as it had been in the early part of the century. The boulevard Edgar Quinet was easy to live on. It had its own subway stop and there was a food market twice a week out in the center. Le Monocle—the biggest lesbian bar in Paris—was also on the street. There were very friendly prostitutes on the nearby rue Delambre. I didn’t patronize them, but they would help me out by cashing traveler’s checks for me from time to time.

I went to classes at the Sorbonne and to the École du Louvre. Because of the French system with student passes, I could wander freely in the museums. It was months of looking. I wasn’t particularly predisposed toward pictures; it was a slow conversion.