The Republic of Love (26 page)

And here in Paris there is an epidemic of embracing lovers putting on their showy performances everywhere, in the Métro, in the student cafeterias bordering the Boulevard Montparnesse, on gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens, at the Louvre waiting in line for tour tickets, in the middle of the rue du Cherche-Midi with traffic rushing past, and even, astonishingly, in the luridly lit, massively furnished foyer of Fay’s hotel, where the desk clerk, slim, sweating Monsieur Martineau, stares candidly down her blouse front while she registers and twists his face into a little sexual pout.

Public and private acts overlap in this city and no one blinks. It must be that this is the season of ardor. The weather’s warmed up. In fact, it’s steaming hot. The arms of women are suddenly bare, and this bareness seems always to be begging to be taken in an embrace. Touch me, touch me, is the cry Fay imagines hearing in all the corners of Paris. Today she saw a bare-chested man, hair wild and black, mouth open, running across the Pont des Arts with his arms outstretched, and running toward him with little scissor steps was a woman in a tight white dress whose sandals clicked against the pavement as she ran.

Enough!

The linking of arms, the pressing of bodies, the touching of fingertips over tiny cups of coffee – all this makes Fay want to weep. It interferes with her concentration and keeps her awake through the long nights at the hôtel de l’Avenir. She sits on the edge of her bed gripping her forearms, rocking herself back and forth, trying to revive the cooler parts of herself. In the mirror
she sees the face of a wary woman who’s tired of being wary, sick of it. She gulps air. Touch me, she says to herself, to the medallion-printed wallpaper of her sixth-floor room, to the wobbly square of light that falls across the floor, bringing a glut of memory with it.
Embrace me.

“I’d like to put my arms around you,” Tom Avery had said to her the night she left home.

S
HE CAN’T REMEMBER
the tone of his voice when he pronounced this aberrant thing. Whether it was deferential or offhand, aggressive or halting, whether it leapt at her or fell through the air like a kind of powder. Why can’t she remember? Was he asking permission or drawing on some artfully phrased macho privilege? She remembers his face turning toward hers, puzzled, something in it anxious to explain. Was he laughing at her? No, she didn’t think so. It must have been that he spoke in exceptionally low tones, because young Gary Waring, ten feet away, banging with a stick on a tub of begonias by her front door, seemed not to have heard. The air was heavy and sweet smelling, for summer a dark evening, and cool after the rain. Grosvenor Avenue’s slick asphalt was streaked with weak, greenish, beautiful light.

What a bizarre thing for a man to say, especially a man she hardly knew, had only just met. “I’d like to put my arms around you.” Why, then, hadn’t she been alarmed? Why hadn’t she even been surprised?

What if she’d blinked and backed away from him?

A man had walked her home from a children’s birthday party, that was all, and now he was about to take her in his arms. What if she had stopped and thought about what she was doing? What if she had resisted?

But she hadn’t. She’d moved toward him through air that felt thin and neutral and had buried her face in the creases of his neck, smelling sweat at the border of his hairline and feeling its crisp tapered edge on her cheek. Her arms reached around him and she spread her hands flat against the damp tight weave of his windbreaker. Was that poplin, that closely woven cloth? His arms
tightened around her, and Fay remembers that they stood together like this on the street for at least a minute.

That incongruous embrace – what had it meant? His body, a stranger’s body, had fastened itself to hers in a manner that seemed unconnected with the arrows of ordinary appetite.

She told herself later, trying to make sense of it, that the two of them held on to each other in a way that was urgent rather than convincing. Weather and opportunity had supported them. Her throat had closed. Her lips were licked clean. “Oh,” she said aloud, and he held her even tighter.

A
T LAST
she’s taken hold of herself. She’s given herself a talking to. Four weeks in Europe is all she has. Each remaining day can be filled with accomplishment if only she puts her mind to it, but she will have to work hard to make up for lost time. Onward!

She’s been sifting through references at the Bibliothèque Nationale, translating texts, making notes. If, after an hour or two, her back begins to ache, she hurries out for a cup of coffee, then rushes back to her assigned table in the reading room, to her stacks of books and note cards. Once or twice every day she lifts up her head and asks herself: What am I doing here? What is all this
for
?

She’s spent an hour with the elderly, passionate French folklorist Hélène Givière, discussing the possible authenticity of the Amboina mermaid, captured off the coast of Borneo in the early eighteenth century. The creature, a full fifty-nine inches long, was kept alive in a barrel for four days and seven hours, and during that time it refused to eat. Naturally she (it?) died, and later, excreta like that of a cat was found in the barrel. Madame Givière, whose graying hair is exquisitely unkempt, has examined the original source document and also a drawing by Samuel Fallours, who was the official artist in the Dutch East India Company, and she has concluded, sadly, that the animal was probably an eel.

Another French scholar, Gabrielle Favian Grobet, a chignon pulling tight her elastic features, gave Fay an entire afternoon. It was Madame Grobet, in her bold imaginative article “Sirène: Les
tentations sans amour,” who first broke down the archetype of the sea temptress, the wicked voluptuary propelled by forces outside her consciousness. “The siren,” the heavily perfumed Madame Grobet told Fay, “has been thought of as part of nature. She has been denied her volition, her soul. She has been thought of as something driven, something culpable, the embodiment of eros but without a body. A nice irony, no?”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Besides these visits, Fay has been three times to the Louvre, where she has examined tiny Egyptian mercreatures formed from clay, miniature mermen, merwomen, a merdog, even a mercat, and she has made arrangements in her imperfect French to have each of these artifacts photographed, and further arrangements to have the photographs converted into slides.

She splurged one day on an expensive lunch at the Station Buffet at the Gare de Lyon, where the walls are covered with immense painted mermaids voluptuously wagging their full breasts and rounded bottoms, one of them wearing her hair in an endearing Gibson Girl mop.

She has visited a private collector (pouchy, wizened) in his apartment in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, and there, seated on a carved pink-and-silver sofa and drinking iced Scotch, feeling lopsided and provincial, she listened as he bitterly excoriated all feminist scholars, particularly those from North America, and allowed her to gaze at a Phoenician coin stamped with the image of Atergatis, the feminine counterpart of Oannes, the Babylonian fish god.

She has gone to the marble foyer of the École des Ponts et Chaussées, climbed halfway up a stairway, leaned backward over the banister, and photographed a wan sculpted mermaid entangled in twisted marble foliage, its long tail rather ugly and reptilian. (It pleased her to see the mermaid of myth flourishing here among engineers and technicians!) She has taken the Métro to Trocadero, walked two streets over to the rue Longchamps, and found, after only a minute or two, the extraordinary Belle Époque building (number 12) whose ornate front door is surrounded by two ecstatic
double-tailed sirens, diving down toward a bouquet composed of an anchor, rope, and swirling waves, their faces masked by sexual desire and numbed by their enforced solitude. This, Fay decides – and she stops in the street to make a note – is the mer-condition: solitary longing that is always being thwarted. No, not thwarted – denied. (She had observed, one week earlier, the same chilly denial, only more prim and simpering, on the face of the Copenhagen mermaid.)

S
HE HAPPENS TO SEE
one morning, while sitting and writing postcards in a café on the Avenue du Maine, a parade of pilgrims who are walking to Chartres, forty miles away. A thousand pilgrims filling the broad street.

At the table next to her sits a heavy, purple-faced, talkative woman in a dirty raincoat who is drinking, though it is only ten o’clock in the morning, a glass of dark beer. It is she who tells Fay – mumbling, hissing into the beer foam – about the annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, about the magic number one thousand, and the fact that the walkers traditionally begin their trek with a mass at Notre Dame.

They are coming from that mass now, still bathed in a coating of holy spirit – or so Fay thinks, watching them file past.
“Ils sont fous,”
the purplish woman concludes, blowing into her glass and licking the thick rim.

But Fay is enchanted by the procession, which bears lightly along on its wisps of hymn song a bearable, sentient faith. The love for God, God’s love. She wonders, a little enviously, what it feels like to be part of that holy contract. These pilgrims are of all ages and include a great many sturdily shod children whose composed, steady eyes seem to gesture toward a world in which responsibility, for the most part, prevails. (Seeing them, she thinks of her nephews, Matthew and Gordon, their hard, perfect young legs and arms.) Elderly women, both angular and ample, are present, and also numbers of very young women, fine-featured, pale of skin, some of them beautiful, and a scattering of priests, mostly middle-aged, who are not leading their charges but mingling in a
way which Fay supposes must manifest the newer, more democratic Catholic Church. What she finds most startling, though, is a handful of marching friars – if that is what they are still called – robed in coarse brown cloth, their absurd tonsures shining in the bright sunlight. They look like extras on a film set, moving foward with clumsy, sacred assurance. What sort of man these days, in the last years of the twentieth century, chooses rough hooded garments and cruel barbering?

One of the brown-clad friars abruptly leaves his place in the procession and makes a dash for the café where Fay is sitting. His face is boyish, rounded in its features and pinkened by the morning heat. He glances her way, blinking at the café’s dim entrance, and then, with a look of swooming deliverance, catches sight of a door marked
“Toilette.”

In a minute he is out again (Fay feels the enacted comedy of his lifted robe, the collision with stained porcelain). He stumbles slightly at the exit of the café, made dizzy by sunlight, then dodges the crowds of people who have gathered along the street and runs forward awkwardly, his skirt hiked up in one hand, hurrying to rejoin his companions.

“Fou,”
growls Fay’s neighbor. Her glass is empty. Her tone is both harsh and elegiac.
“Complètement fou.”

At which Fay smiles and shrugs. She finds herself unexpectedly affected by the young friar’s clumsiness and the beauty of his sandaled feet, feet that will carry him to the outskirts of this immense, puzzling city, and beyond. His maladroit body, its shaved modest head, stirs in her a kind of love and cracks open seams of sentimentality she would have thought beneath her. Well, I love him, she says to herself, I love him.

Fou
says a contradictory voice inside her head.

She loves, too, the raddled, rude face of the crooning woman next to her, and the waiter who is leaning over her table, picking coins off a saucer. And the dull brown plastic of the café table, she loves that as well, and the way her felt-tip pen fits in her hand, a part of her body, dispensing freely its inked loops and dashes and points of serious emphasis. “Paris is heavenly,” she writes to
Onion, to Strom, to Iris Jaffe, to her sister, Bibbi, to Clyde and Sonya, to her mother and father, to Simon and Stephanie Birrell, to Robin Cummerford, to the staff at the folklore center, “but I can’t wait to get home.”

T
HE VILLAGE CHURCH
in Marigny, in the east of France, dates from the sixteenth century, but the small stone cross that stands outside its door is much older – twelfth century, or perhaps even earlier. Its general configuration is rudimentary, and the carving, with its look of compaction and pitted antiquity, is exuberantly primitive. A square-faced angel with blunt spread wings – a male angel, certainly – is fixed to its center, staring expressionlessly, endlessly, down into the eyes of a muscular mermaid whose magnificent tail is wrapped three times around the base. Her hands, their tiny roughened fingers, cling to the vertical axis as though it represented the only refuge in the world. Her face is a veil of rapture, her neck luxuriantly long, her breasts eroded ovals, rather widely spaced, and where the nipples once stood there is today only a pair of twin depressions filled with calcified stone, faintly green in the late-afternoon light.

Fay has traveled three hours by train and another hour by taxi in order to photograph this wonder. Its location, not just its corruption of Christian symbol, makes it rare. Marigny is far from any seacoast and has neither river nor lake, not even a spring. No one knows where the stone cross came from, but according to the village people – Fay has spoken in her slow, inaccurate French to a number of them – the Marigny mermaid has always stood on this spot.

The stone is soft. She knows from her reading it was probably carved in a day or two by an illiterate mason, an aesthetic transaction so brief and so small when poised against the grid of history that its perfection must be put down to a random accident. Like the elegant unicorn, the audacious griffin, the fleet centaur, those legendary creatures bubbling out of a dark age – not really dark at all, but stained with oddly slanted light – the medieval merfolk exploded from stone or wood to express a twisted, fey longing for
the inexpressible. They never existed, and, what is more, no one ever believed they did.

Fay has a certain respect for the medieval mind, for the attention it paid, on the one hand, to a straw-and-turnip economy, and to the playful imagination, on the other hand, that shaped its bestiary. Magical creatures were a kind of shared joke or mad desire. No one believed in such beasts, not even children, not even sailors sodden with rum. Never mind the thousands of mermaid sightings, sightings which occurred as late as the eighteenth century – none of it meant a thing.