Paris Was Ours (25 page)

The evening return could be arduous. Our shoulders sloped under the weight of the books. In one hand we might clutch shopping bags from Félix Potin filled with bottles of cheap wine and jars and canned goods on sale; in the other, there might be fragile packets from the
fromagerie
, wrapped in stenciled paper. One of us almost always had a baguette or two under an arm. In the ascent, the timing of the light switches was crucial: you could easily be stranded midflight in the near blackness of the stairwell, then have to grope along, guided only by the grudging red glow from the single button on each floor. To avoid this, we pressed the buttons ardently at each landing. It was a long trek upward, but we were young.

Some of us were familiar with Hemingway’s belief that if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. We weren’t impressed. We were a part of Paris; it was all around us. What we needed was real substance, for our bodies, now. While most of our meals were
taken in various eating places in the city, dinners were often shared at the kitchen table with anyone—friends, classmates, old boyfriends—who happened to be around. On the upstairs budget, nearly anything was edible. We were carnivorous, we children, but rarely bought fresh meat. When we did, it was usually horse—the cheapest cut at most butchers. The table was crowded: elbows and a wild assortment of cutlery, courtesy of previous tenants, collided as we touched on as many subjects as our youth could conjecture. We argued and tested, dissolved in mad laughter, ate what was in front of us, and drank something red from dark green bottles.

The quarters under the roof were our haven, but we didn’t hide there. Each day we strode forth into the city, claiming it as our own. Being on time for classes was de rigueur; otherwise we lived by the timetable of the Métro. If you missed the last one, you had to walk home, even if it was from all the way over at Nation. Our search for good but cheap food and drink took us all over the city. We would often march through the night, walking westward along the Seine from Boul’Mich’, cutting down from Clichy, up from Montparnasse.

We adored the restaurants that specialized in couscous: its meat-flavored sauce was served with limitless grain. Then there were the little Tunisian shops with their sticky sweets and rolls packed tight with tuna and olives. We loved the coq au vin at Chez l’Ami Jean, a hole-in-the-wall in the seventh arrondissement. Rue Cler was the place to go for
mimolette ancienne
and grapes, comely cucumbers, and freshly baked baguettes from which we would rip off chunks, still warm, to eat as we walked. Sometimes we would stand at a certain window on the corner of that street, where Normandy butter and cacao
from the former colonies scented the air. We let our eyes feast on the seductive array of mille-feuilles and
tarts
and a dozen types of patisserie before breathing in deeply and continuing on our way.

As students, we felt little anxiety or stigma about doing without. Student discounts were matter-of-fact, our bodies were strong, our minds inquisitive, and as for clothing, we were young and could wear what we pleased. We were, after all, the future. Our egos didn’t suffer, even when we got a one-day job cleaning a penthouse on avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie.
Mon amour
washed the windows, I the toilets, and we were each paid one hundred francs.

When I left to visit my parents and uncle in Hamburg,
mon amour
rode to the Concorde Métro station, where he laid down his beret and played his guitar in the windy passage. For a few days he worked on the ledge of the thirty-seventh story of a building rising up on the western front of the city in La Défense. Yet there he was, waiting safely at the Gare du Nord when I stepped off the train laden with care packages teeming with North German goodies, and we returned to our room under the roof.

Daughters of conservative parents, M. and I did not technically live in the servants’ quarters on avenue Malakoff. Only J. and
mon amour
were the bona fide tenants. M.’s official residence was a room in an apartment on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, while mine was quite a bit closer. Actually, it was downstairs. It measured about eight by five and a half meters—perhaps less, perhaps more—in the fourth-story apartment of the woman who owned the servants’ quarters in which we spent most of our domestic hours. How could I have
explained to my parents that I was living with
mon amour
? Impossible. Our clandestine arrangement seemed ideal, indeed, rather
parisien
.

It was in the 348-square-meter home of Madame, a widow with a long name that had known better times, that I kept the bulk of my possessions. Entrance to my room, which looked out upon some plane trees on the avenue, was not by way of the servants’ door in the kitchen but through the front entrance, easily accessible from the red-carpeted, cream-colored stairwell with its tidy brass-fitted elevator. The stairwell’s scent was of polish and the perfume of the building’s other residents, who lived, apparently in utter silence, behind their own heavy doors. Our occasional exchanges were brief: “Bonjour, monsieur.” “Bonjour, mademoiselle.” The latter was sometimes accompanied by a slight tip of an elderly gentleman’s hat.

In the downstairs room, nothing was permitted to fall into disrepair. Although never used, the marble fireplace was dusted each day by the maid, who lived in a
banlieue
. The bedding came from one of the finest shops in Paris. The mattress was flat and firm and the headboard could have welcomed Napoleon III himself—in style, not in age. The room’s palette was cream and pale blue, like the light that flooded in through the three windows at the far end. Two armchairs, upholstered in silk the color of that Normandy butter, seemed to wait attentively near a round mahogany table. I sat at a lady’s writing desk, also from the Second Empire, to pen my letters home. Several meters above me, stucco detailing wound along the perimeter of the ceiling. And just outside the door was the bathroom, clean, spacious, and for my use alone.

My landlady was often away at the ancestral home deep in
the Dordogne; her long-winded descriptions made it sound as if she journeyed there by calèche. In her absence, I was welcome to use the kitchen, which retained no vestige of the previous century. I could eat in the vermilion-paneled dining room, at the massive table gleaming with lacquer. Yet I remember taking only one meal there.

On the sunny day my father stopped in Paris for a visit en route from the Amazon, I showed him my virginal chamber. He pronounced it neat as a pin and suggested we meet again for dinner. “Invite a friend,” he added, smiling. Later, when I arrived on my own at the restaurant high up on the Eiffel Tower, he looked surprised. “But where is your young man? I thought you would bring him along,” he said, and I realized that, of course, he was aware that I wasn’t alone in Paris. Clearly, I did not know my father as well as I had thought.

Family and friends passing through Paris were our tickets to the city’s finer cuisine. We weren’t mercenary, and enjoyed their company as much as the food. Cousins of
mon amour
took us to some of the best-kept culinary secrets on rue Mouffetard; a friend’s uncle offered Maxim’s. There were creamy hot chocolates at the rue de Rivoli, oysters at École Militaire. Sometimes we ate well even without being guests. It was lovely when it happened, but gone the next instant. Paris was about so much more than food.

The postal system went on strike. No letters entered the city from October to the beginning of December, and none went out; we hoped our families were well. But the Métro still ran and garbage was collected, at least most of the time. It was the season, so, dressed in our best, we made our entrance at the opera house, climbed its Grand Staircase, and kept climbing.
Arias rose to fullness, we found, even where we sat—up high, near the ceiling. Somehow, when Nureyev came to town as Tristan, we managed tickets. At the Musée Rodin we wandered in the rain under trees that had lost most of their leaves; at the
marché aux puces
we strayed through the lanes, bargaining for trinkets while “Padam, padam, padam” sounded in the background from a distant accordion. We played pinball in Gitane-clouded cafés where radios aired Georges Brassens singing “Les amoureux des bancs publics.”
Mon amour
shot pool with old men. I browsed the stalls along the Seine, finding treasures. All of us studied and wrote, laughed and loved. On the eve of my twentieth birthday I wept into the monogrammed pillowcase on the fourth floor with a melancholy that was bittersweet,
mon amour
at my side.

A light snow fell in early winter. In photographs taken then, Paris looks as it did in images surviving from the turn of the last century, grainy and shadowed. I wear an ankle-length coat; his hair is long and dark against the snow. We are turned inward. A short time later, I lay gasping for air in our room under the roof, hearing voices singing “Sono andati? Fingevo di dormire” inside my head.
Mon amour
took me to the hospital and waited for the IV drugs to work their magic, his face as pale as the snow had been. “Don’t worry so,” I whispered, smiling up at him from the narrow cot in the emergency room. “It’s only asthma. I am not Mimi.”

Eventually we moved across the city to Nation where twice a week the morning market sprang up beneath our window, rough voices extolling the creaminess of the brie, the deep purple beauty of the aubergines. The refrigerator in the kitchen was actually a cupboard; its back was a screened opening in
the building’s outside wall. It worked well in winter, but with spring the ice melted, the milk turned sour. The kitchen sink doubled as the bathtub—but the place was ours alone. Meanwhile, still battling, J. and M. rented a studio on rue Mouffetard until, at last, the fire died out and they went their separate ways. Gaston spread his wings and disappeared south.

The following year we moved again, this time west to a ground-floor studio that faced south, overlooking a garden. We slept on a water bed. Here the building’s garbage was tossed down a chute straight into the giant
poubelle
in the basement. Our concierge was Madame Hiret, plump and high pitched, her hair tightly coiled, and she spoiled and petted us almost as much as she did her fat little dog, Voyou.
Mon amour
and I gave each other one of our own, an Afghan. We folded her into a canvas bag to take to classes on rue de Varenne. We chased her across the Pont-Neuf and through the Bois de Boulogne, kicking up leaves, and one day we knew that no matter where we might find ourselves in the world, Paris would be an ache in our hearts.

Yes, we were young students in Paris. We had gone there because we knew it was the city of love and learning and light. Where it would lead was not as important as where we were at the moment. Looking at the city, we thought we saw our whole lives. Perhaps we did.

A Mild Hell

I
N MY FIRST
years in Paris I felt a shyness about going into cafés where I wasn’t known—
a timidity peculiar, admit
tedly, in a man already in his forties. I preferred to wander the streets in the constant drizzle (London has the bad reputation, but Paris weather is not much better). The whole city, at least
intra muros
, can be walked from one end to the other in a single evening. Perhaps its superficial uniformity—the broad avenues, the endlessly repeating benches and lamps stamped from the identical mold, the unvarying metal grates ringing the bases of the trees—
promotes the dreamlike in
substantiality of Paris and contributes to the impression of a landscape “stripped of thresholds.” Without barriers, I found myself gliding along from one area to another. (This inside/outside dichotomy of Paris as experienced by the flâneur keeps showing up in [the German essayist Walter] Benjamin’s notes: “Just as ‘
flânerie
’ can make an interior of Paris, an apartment in which the neighborhoods are the rooms, so neatly marked off as if with thresholds, in an opposite way the city can present itself to the stroller from all sides as a landscape stripped of all thresholds.”)

Eventually I was able to distinguish what Parisians had labeled a “stuffy” quartier from a “happening” one, a workers’ neighborhood from the home of the young and up-and-coming, but these distinctions were all acquired later and in conversation. At first, when I had to depend on my own observations, Paris impressed me as a seamless unity in which, by American standards, everything was well tended, built to last, and at once cold (the pale stone walls, the absence of neon, the unbroken facades never permitted by city ordinance to pass a certain height or to crack or crumble without undergoing a periodic facelift)
and
discreetly charming (lace curtains in the concierge’s window, the flow of cleansing water in the gutters sandbagged to go in one direction or the other, the street fairs with rides for kids, the open-air food markets two days out of every week, segregated into different stalls under low awnings: this one loaded down with spices, that one with jellies and preserved fruits, not to mention the stand of the pâtissier and the baker, florist, butcher, fishmonger, the counter selling hot sausages and
choucroute
—or two hundred kinds of cheese). That water in the sandbagged gutter reminds me of something the great American poet John Ashbery once said in discussing the peculiar unaccountability of artistic influence: “I found my poetry being more ‘influenced’ by the sight of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was yearning to read at the time.”