Paris Was Ours (24 page)

The journalists marveled at—which is to say resented—the seamless perfection with which my colleague interpreted the half-finished sentences of their American interlocutors in elegant Cartesian paragraphs. His French seemed inhuman to them, or, as one of them put it, “inauthentically objective.” Later in my twenties, reading Walter Benjamin’s great essay on
Nicolai Leskov, I would understand why. Benjamin describes two classes of storytellers: the “resident tiller of the soil” and the “trading seaman,” who are merged in the figure of the artisan. Every master was once an itinerant journeyman before he returned to settle in his village, and this description also fits the translator, who brings to his work both “the lore of faraway places” and that “lore of the past” that, Benjamin writes, “best reveals itself to the natives of a place.” It reveals itself in and through their mother tongue, and one cannot translate literature—connect with the deep taproots of meaning—without having one. Those suave polyglots who speak ten languages without an accent but are at home in none do not, as a rule, make great translators. A smudge of one’s native soil on the pristine surface of a translation is a signature—both a flourish of pride and a mark of humility—proper to an honest artisan.

On a visit to Paris a few years before I moved there with Will and Arkie, I had made what I thought was a galling mistake on a live French television broadcast,
Apostrophes
, a famous book program that ran for ninety minutes on Friday evenings, in prime time. I was telling a story about Isak Dinesen’s Swedish husband, Bror Blixen, a white hunter of whom she wrote, “He did not know whether the Crusades came before or after the French Revolution.” She intended the remark as a compliment—it came from a bluestocking who suffered for her cleverness in the patrician yet philistine society of Kenya, and who revered conspicuous virility. But when I came to the Crusades (
les croisades
), I called them “les crosières” (a
croisière
is a pleasure cruise). There was polite hilarity on the set, and a friend who had seen the program promised me afterward
that the slip had been “utterly charming.” He then dared to surmise—as only, perhaps, a Frenchman would have—that it had been intentional.

“
PEOPLE HUGGING
—
embrasse-moi
!” That was Will’s first observation of and in the Luxembourg Gardens. The day had a desolate, winter beauty: earth and sky were the same Parisian
gris de perle
. We were making our way down a long allée of plane trees, toward a cluster of shaggy ponies stamping their feet. The tennis courts were empty, the fountains were dry, the waffle stand was shuttered, the boccie courts lay under a crust of snow, and the only evidence of life was, in fact, the passionate young couple (if indeed they were young—an assumption one should not make of the lovers in Paris parks). He had buttoned her inside his overcoat, their bodies were swaying, and the wind mingled strands of their hair. Will studied this wooly beast with its two heads and four legs, intrigued but a bit doubtful.

There are many rules of conduct in the Luxembourg, but none that I know of pertain to displays of affection. Two of you may share a single garden chair, entwined like the figures in a Moghul painting. You may also pull two chairs together to make an impromptu divan. You may strike the classic cinematic pose, bending your lover half backward, in full view of the Senate and its armed guards. You may stop suddenly, in the middle of a path, in the middle of a sentence, and fling your arms around each other, obstructing the passage of flâneurs, who will make a silent, uncomplaining detour around you. You may neck at a café table, or perched on the rim of a fountain, or astride a balustrade, or pressed against a chestnut tree, or on
a bench inside the children’s playground, provided you have paid your entrance fee and have a child with you. You may not, however, take any sort of carnal liberties on or with the grass.

When the bare trees are coated with hoarfrost, the Luxembourg has the air of a vast, dust-sheeted summer palace. Even in summer, the precise allocation of space, the maniacal tidiness and symmetry, are somehow those of an interior—a very grand, formal French salon where, as a guest, you are invited to have a good time, but where you are also on your best behavior. The Luxembourg, one should note, is a
jardin
. It is not a
bois
, or even a
parc
. While dogs are welcome in most French restaurants, they are forbidden in the Luxembourg. The tulips grow in perfectly weedless, monochromatic beds. The lawns are as smooth as cashmere, and Will could have told you what happens if you dare to dip a foot—even an adorably infantile little
pied
—into those inviting, forbidden pools of green. “Policeman blow whistle!
En garde!
” Indeed, a
gardien
in a smart blue uniform, with gold epaulets and a legionaire’s hat, is instantly upon you, scowling under his mustache and wagging his finger. The presumption, under French law, is always of guilt: “Vous savez très bien, madame, que la pelouse est interdite!” (“You know very well, madame, that the lawns are off limits.”)

The Luxembourg is a great rectangle, but its corners are soft—it feels circular once you are inside the gates. A dirt track runs around the periphery—delicious for jogging. You can smell the hyacinths from the rue de Vaugirard, and the damp, faintly sour scent of the well-turned-over soil, and as you move from sun to shade, the smells change, as does the temperature of the air. If you run, as I did, early on weekday mornings, you will have the paths nearly to yourself—everyone French is at
home smoking. The Parisians are, or at least were, twenty years ago, weekend athletes. Nevertheless, they pride themselves on their form. There must be some unwritten code about who may
faire le footing
in the Luxembourg and who must stay at home on the treadmill. No one shuffles or groans. No one wears old Camp Minnewaska T-shirts, cutoffs, John Deere caps, or Kool-Aid-colored nylon boxers over baggy sweatpants. There is no more flab or cellulite on view than there are dandelions among the grass blades. The muscles are firm, the flesh is rosy, the outfits are soigné, and the brows, only a little moist.

Will went to the Luxembourg whenever it wasn’t raining, after lunch with Arkie, and a nap. He was generally accompanied by the lovely dark-haired girl from the Dordogne whom I had hired to give my aunt a few hours of well-earned rest before I came home from the library. The French referred to her as his
jeune fille
, precisely defining the romance of their relationship. They fed the goldfish in the sailboat pond and watched the “dancers,” as Will called them, practicing tai chi in beautifully laundered kimono jackets. He played in the crumbly brown sand of the
bacs à sable
—six neat little boxes that must look, from the air, like an expensive tin of shortbread from Fauchon. Was this deluxe sandpile, I wondered, tucked behind the labyrinth of hedges because the architect of the Luxembourg thought that
les petits
needed privacy? Or because he thought that the inevitable disorder of their games, quarrels, picnics, and toys was so unseemly?

I was always impressed when my son nodded to someone whom I didn’t know—the pony driver, the ticket seller in the playground, a gardener at the Orangerie, an old man playing chess—and said, “Bonjour.” (His
jeune fille
, I suspected, was
as popular in the Luxembourg as she was at the firehouse.) By the spring, his grasp of French, while focused mainly on bakery products, was deft enough for the odd joke, as when I caught him at, and scolded him for, a piece of mischief, and he replied, with a sheepish grin, “Touché!”

Will does not, he says, remember much of Paris, although I hope that his senses do. Perhaps the city and its labyrinths figure in his dreams, and perhaps, when he is Arkie’s age, the smells of hyacinths, waffles, or Gitanes will suddenly bring the scenes of that year back to him, miraculously fresh, like the disinterred body of a saint. But one of the greatest charms of having lived next door to the apartment of Simone de Beauvoir, chased the pigeons of Saint-Sulpice, and played in the Luxembourg as a little boy is the Proustian glamour of being able to claim that one did so.

Ma Vie Bohème

S
OMETIMES, WHEN MOST
in the city lay sleeping, I would rise from the mattress and slip over to the window to watch the slate rooftops turn silver in the moonlight. I didn’t have to slip far. The room measured about three by three and a half meters—perhaps more, perhaps less. There was enough space for the bed, sagging toward the wall with lumps pressed in by generations of strangers, a slender armoire supporting the ceiling, and a chair. The remaining floor planks stored the odds and ends that accumulate in the course of a student’s life. Bathed in ethereal light, the room seemed suspended, safe, even cozy.

On warm nights when we left the window open, the roofs across the way appeared to beckon, daring me to climb out and dance barefoot under the Parisian sky. It was only as the stars faded and the day dawned that the reality of the room under the roof grew clear. Generally it reached its full glory at noon, when the sun was closest and most merciless. The walls and even the sloping ceiling of this nineteenth-century maid’s room seven stories above avenue Malakoff, in the sixteenth arrondissement, were covered with a relic of what had once passed for elegance downstairs. Styles had changed in the decades since the Haussmannian construction of the building.
Meters of cloth deemed out of fashion had been ripped from the walls of a dressing room in the master apartment below, then pressed into service in the servants’ quarters. There the glistening satin, with its jacquard motif of golden florals, received a new raison d’être far removed from its earlier elegance. When we entered the room, it was like coming home to a pulsing liver, pink and raw and oozing with pus.

I was not alone up there. Aside from the inner chamber in which I slept with
mon amour
—we, the lucky ones, with a door that could close out the world—the quarters included the entrance area, where J. and M. had their mattress shoved against the adjoining wall. The drama of their daily battles about nothing, peppered with fiery curses, was as heated and audible as their reconciliations in the dark. From here, a doorless entryway led to the kitchen, with its floor of grizzled tiles. This room contained a tilted table, a sink, two hot plates, and, center stage, a shower cubicle. Unlike many of those found in the low-end lodging of some other European countries, this spartan concession to twentieth-century hygiene wasn’t coin-operated. You didn’t need to have a franc or two lying next to the soap, ready to slip into the slot when suddenly the water went from sublime to ice. No, the temperature in this shower simply went from hot to horrible, and that was it—unless you cared to wait twenty minutes for the tank to reheat.

Mornings were struggles for civility as, stressed and squeezed, we vied for space and water. Reduced to laughter, we learned to manage. Then, too, there were not just the four of us, as Gaston seemed to live here also, appearing and reappearing like a young bird flitting back and forth to a nest under the roofs. Perhaps he slept in the shower; I can’t recall.

The other facility we shared was the toilet. Squat-type, it was equipped with a water tank that might have dated from the Second Empire, with a chain dangling and a sunken enamel basin with footrests on either side. A cracked window under the ceiling was good only for letting in the cold. There were actually two tiny rooms with toilets, separated by the long and narrow hallway that ran like a brittle spine under the roof. Doors lined either side of the hallway, but these portals stayed shut. The other residents came and went mysteriously; the only traces of their existence were brisk steps at decidedly odd hours along the creaking wooden floorboards, strains of music—Sylvie and Johnny and Maghrebian crooning—through the cracks beneath their doors, and the infrasound from the toilet closest to our quarters. (This one was to be avoided, except in emergencies.)

The trip to the far end of the hall was easy to accomplish during the day, but at night the passage was disquieting. The murky light from two low-wattage bulbs … the whispering in the woodwork … all those doors with unknown occupants … Past midnight, showing his true colors,
mon amour
would make the trip with me, standing sentry in the gloom of the hallway.

I had seen
La bohème
some years earlier, as a child. The romance and tragedy had awakened me, not just to opera, but to greater possibilities. One day I would be an artistic soul in a Paris garret; love and creativity would see me through everything. And now, here I was, living high under the eaves in Paris, not unlike Mimi, although I hoped that the coming winter would not see M. or me felled.

I had been lulled by the ease with which the bohemians
flitted in and out of their charming garret onstage. The opera hadn’t prepared me for the reality of reaching my own Parisian idyll: a climb of seven stories, day in, day out, often several times a day. If the dim upstairs hallway was the dislocated spine of our domain, then the coiled servants’ stairwell, deep within the building’s interior, was its digestive tract. We would begin our descent in the morning, laden with textbooks. The journey was a dizzying circle; only the landings outside the kitchen entrances of the apartments en route provided space to breathe. This was the route the garbage took, too, and its scent often lingered long after the bags had been carted to the
poubelles
in the courtyard.