Paris Was Ours (7 page)

We came out of the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station and walked along boulevard Saint-Jacques. “First, I will show you Uncle Salih’s bar. It’s a very small, popular place. You will love it,” said Mustapha, and as we turned into rue de la Tombe Issoire, where the bar is, he continued: “Uncle Salih is a very kindhearted Algerian. He came to work in Paris before your mother expelled you into this world to disturb us with your hallucinations about the movies.”

We laughed.

I loved Uncle Salih from the first moment, and Mustapha also introduced me to his girlfriend, Martine, using such flattering words: “This is my friend the Assyrian god who escaped from the hell of Mesopotamia and the Arab Peninsula and wants to become a cowboy!”

We all laughed.

Martine said: “Mustapha has told me a lot about you.”

And I told her: “He told me a lot about you, too, when I met him in Nicosia years ago.”

Martine looked at Mustapha: “Have we known each other all that time?” And they laughed and kissed each other. Mustapha started reading poetry in French, and Martine put her head on his chest as he idly ran his fingers through her hair.

“Don’t worry, you’ll learn French very soon and discover how alluring this language is,” he said, looking at me, before getting up to bring us another carafe of red wine.

Mustapha was in love with Martine. I remember, when I was visiting him at his home in Tunis, that he said: “I can’t sleep alone anymore. I think of her all the time.” When I asked him, “Why don’t you try to settle in Paris?” Mustapha had given me an ironic smile and answered: “I am an independent man, and in love with a student!” He explained: “The Arab intellectual can only live in Paris for two reasons: asking for political asylum like you, or working for one of the Arab magazines based in Paris or London—you know, those magazines belonging to Saudi Arabia and Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. And I, as I told you, am merely a poor and independent poet, I don’t want to fall into the trap of producing propaganda for these dictatorial regimes.”

He concluded, joking: “Is it not enough that I fell in love with a beautiful Frenchwoman?”

Mustapha poured the wine, then clinked glasses with Martine and kissed her. Because he loves to play the clown, he started telling funny tales about the things he and I used to do, and suddenly turned and looked me straight in the eyes: “What did your mother tell you when she looked into your eyes?”

“I don’t remember, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I answered, embarrassed in front of Martine.

“Oh, you’ve become a shy guy suddenly, huh?” said Mustapha, cackling with laughter. He put his arm round Martine: “He told me once his mother looked into his eyes when he was a little kid and told him, ‘You have beautiful eyes, like the eyes of prostitutes.’” We all laughed. And Mustapha didn’t stop until two in the morning, when he fell asleep in Martine’s lap. And we all went to the university campus in rue Dareau, a few meters’ walk from Uncle Salih’s bar, to Martine’s room.

The next day, Mustapha told me he had an appointment with some friends and suggested meeting at four o’clock. We were in place du Châtelet. “Do you know how you can spend the time until then?”

I answered: “I will find me a nice bar.”

Mustapha looked at me: “I told you I came to arrange your life. I don’t want to hear about bars every time I meet you. I suggest you go and spend a few hours in Centre Pompidou.”

“What is that?”

We walked five minutes and Mustapha pointed to a huge, modern building. “This is the Centre Pompidou, I’m sure you’ll like it.”

When Mustapha left me, he didn’t know that he was giving me the most valuable present of my whole life. Centre Pompidou was an incredible mine from which I extracted all that I had been deprived of during my twenty-eight years. That afternoon I became captivated as I walked between the shelves in the library, with books of literature, of movies, music, and art, dictionaries, even cookery books grabbing my attention.

“I would love to be jailed here,” I said to myself as I sat on the floor leafing through several books at a time about making movies, writing scripts, about the lives and memoirs of actors, directors, and filmmakers.

Translated from the Arabic by Christina Phillips

Friends of My Youth

I
T WAS STILL
possible to live on five dollars a day when I was a student in Paris, but only if you took your main meal every day at the university restaurant. Five dollars worked out to roughly twenty-five francs back in 1972, ten of which went to pay for my vest-pocket room in a charming pension right around the corner from the Duroc Métro station, where the boulevard des Invalides discreetly disappeared into the boulevard Montparnasse. Other friends lived in cheaper lodgings in crummy neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, but I had already spent my childhood in crummy lodgings back home in Philadelphia and saw no reason to repeat that experience here. Living in such a central location meant that I rarely had to waste money on public transportation, as I could easily walk home from the Comédie-Française or the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées or the Cinémathèque or the Latin Quarter at any hour of the day or night, while other friends had to watch the clock and make sure they grabbed the last Métro before the subway system closed down, around one in the morning. Otherwise, they’d be walking forever.

The remainder of my budget was disbursed in three equal parts: five francs a day were set aside for alcohol and tobacco;
five francs were earmarked for entertainment; and the remaining five francs paid for food. For thirty-five francs a week, thanks to dirt cheap student ticket prices, I could go to the opera, attend two or three piano recitals, and take in a couple of plays. Five francs a day would also cover a baguette, a couple of oranges and bananas, the occasional liter of milk, and a once-a-day trip to the student restaurant. By economizing—say, by skipping a Maurizio Pollini or Alexandre LaGoya concert or a Genet play at the Odéon—I could slip in a weekly dinner at the Alliance française on the boulevard Raspail, where the food was both plentiful and good. This would set me back five francs, but if I cut my sliver of camembert into sufficiently tiny portions and matched each tranche with a massive slice of bread, I could consume enough to go without eating the entire next day. A meal at the student restaurant, by contrast, cost just one franc sixty centimes, roughly thirty cents. But even at that rate, it was overpriced.

There was a theory bandied about at the time that the French government had never forgiven students for bringing the nation to the brink of civil war four years earlier and that the food served in the university restaurants was designed along explicitly punitive lines. Soggy, revolting eggs, noodles that seemed to be vaguely animate, bread with the texture of macadam, and an assortment of grotesque entrées that seemed to have been lifted from the Jean Valjean Cookbook were the standard nightly fare concocted by the despised Pompidou administration. It was awful food, demoralizing food, and the fact that it was food served in a country renowned for its cuisine was an irony that was not lost on us. But it kept us alive, so we ate it.

Not all of my friends dined in the student restaurants. Some shared flats with friends and had kitchens of their own. Some lived with families as au pairs or tutors. And some simply earmarked a larger portion of their daily budget for food and ate in inexpensive restaurants. But those of us who had little money, or who wanted to stockpile as much cash as possible for concerts, plays, books, and alcohol, always ate in the student restaurants.

In Paris, I had many friends, some of whom remained close friends for the next forty years. Others I never saw again once my
Wanderjahr
was over. But I always tried to keep my disparate groups of friends segregated from one another, as their passions did not dovetail and I am sure some of them would have hated others. One group consisted of drinkers and carousers. A second group was made up of intellectuals, including a brilliant young composer who would later found the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble and a German American in an impudent fedora who was always devising Ten Best lists but could never complete the one ranking the great composers because after according the obvious titans—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, and Wagner—the top slots, he could never decide which of the remaining colossi—Schubert, Liszt, Chopin, Stravinsky, Berlioz, Schumann, Haydn, Debussy, Mahler—most deserved the remaining positions. So the next day, he would switch to novelists. Or painters. But the result was always the same. Where did you put Botticelli? How could you leave out George Eliot?

A third group consisted of American medical students I met at the reviled student restaurant that bordered the jardins du Luxembourg. They would go to school for a year, flunk out,
and come back the next year to do their first year all over again, once they had learned a bit more French. Some of them had already done the same thing in Cairo or Guadalajara. The French didn’t mind them coming back again and again, as long as the students themselves didn’t mind getting flunked. By doing each year twice, these desperate, indomitable young men hoped to eventually be admitted to some third-tier American medical school. They were splendid fellows, but I am not sure how many of them ever became doctors.

A fourth group consisted of people who had roughly the same eyeglass prescription as me. Shortly after I arrived in Paris, I set out for Pigalle with three Canadian friends who also lived in the charming little boardinghouse on the rue Mayet. Right down the street from the
funiculaire
that carries overweight tourists up to Sacré-Coeur, we were set upon by a group of Algerian revelers while exiting a restaurant. No harm was done, though a fair few punches were exchanged, but I lost my eyeglasses and my passport during the melee. The passport resurfaced a few days later, thanks to a Good Samaritan who dropped it off at the American Embassy, but the eyeglasses were gone forever. When I found out that replacing them would set me back several hundred francs—about two weeks’ living expenses—I decided to do without them until I returned to the States a year later.

This worked out well enough at concerts and movies, where I could sit close to the screen, but up in the rafters of the Comédie-Française, which I would visit perhaps twice a week to take in
L’avare
or
Le médecin malgré lui
or
Oedipus rex
, it was hard for me to make out the actors’ facial expressions at such a great distance. And so I got into the habit of trying on
complete strangers’ glasses whenever my paths crossed those of the obviously bespectacled. Mostly, they were young women. Initially, when I explained my predicament and asked if I could try on their glasses, they might have thought this was some sort of ingenious come-on, but they soon learned that I was quite sincere, as I would usually stop conversing with them as soon as I had established that our prescriptions did not match. This was true even if they were phenomenally cute. My interest in them was purely ophthalmological.

The girl whose prescription most closely matched mine was a plump, vivacious girl from Finland named Una. We met at the Alliance française, where I first bumped into so many of my friends, because Beck’s beer cost just one franc forty, and shortly thereafter she agreed to lend me her eyeglasses on nights she herself would not be needing them. We became friends of a sort—I once visited her at the house where she worked as an au pair in Versailles, where she made me lunch and rowed me around the Grande Jatte—but my interest in her was never romantic. I was only in it for the eyeglasses.

The principal members of my carousing group were an Australian surfer who could hold his liquor and a breathtakingly handsome young boy from Boston who could not. I became friends with Mick, my friend from Sidney, after I met his French girlfriend, Claudine, in a Monoprix on the rue de Rennes. There, after determining that I was American, she informed me that her boyfriend—who spoke little French—did not actually like French people and would be very happy to meet an American. We soon became the best of friends. Lurking at the periphery of that group was a feisty bohemian type from California named Annie and a girl from Seattle named Terry, who
had a friend named Cammy from Long Island, who talked me into accompanying her to Morocco, where she could buy colorful Goulimine beads to be sold in America to raise enough money to bring a French girl named Josiane to the States. On the way back from Morocco, while we were crossing a bridge outside Pamplona, a white horse suddenly appeared on the far side of the river. It seemed terribly symbolic, though I never figured out of what. But I think about that horse every day, and when I do, I think of my African adventure with Cammy. Finally, there was a lanky sophisticate from Saint Louis who was destined from birth to desert the Show Me State and move to New York City. When I visited Jay in Saint Louis two years later, his house was filled to overflowing with
New Yorker
s, the magazine that has long served as an intellectual and psychological lifeline to so many sophisticated provincials who dream of a magically urbane life in the Big City, yet are presently stranded in the prosaic hinterland. The whole time I knew Jay I understood that it would be impossible for him to live in Saint Louis after spending a year in Paris. Impossible.