Travelers' Tales Paris (34 page)

One foggy February day I had decided to take the Métro rather than a bus. After the automatic doors banged shut, I had an intuition that I had made a grave mistake. Claustrophobia pierced my outer calm, and my worst fears were confirmed as fumes filled the car and then the lights went out. The train pitched us forward as brakes squealed. Dead calm and darkness. There was a black-out between Château Rouge and Barbès-Rochechouart. Smoke filled the train, which moved along like a slug through the dark tunnels, stopping every five seconds. I felt the invasion of fear, my palms sweating. There I was, a messenger with letters which had to be mailed. But no one was allowed to get on or off the train. At each stop, a voice from nowhere announced, “No one may descend at this stop. Please stay on the train.”

The following day, Paris showed me a different face. I walked through the winding streets, watched the old men playing
pétanque
. The sky was bright blue, and the sun was out. A large plant being unloaded from the back of a car resonated green against the ancient stone walls and I felt full of a Paris I loved, a place of intense
magic. I went to the Musée de Cluny. One room was huge and white, full of headless white statues on a stage. I could imagine living in that room. The whiteness and mystery of that scene pitted against the roughness of 11th- and 12th-century artifacts fascinated me, and I lingered over the rich detail of the medieval tapestries, jewelry and relics. Paris, a sphinx of a city, could change like that in a day. And Paris was changing me.

One day I noticed a small, peculiar sign on the door of the neighbor who lived directly across from me, a man I rarely caught a glimpse of. He was apparently African, and wore a traditional long and colorful robe. I stopped to read the sign. He was a shaman, a medicine man! His sign read “The Grand African Medium.” Fascinated, I began to look for him every time I came in or out. Eventually, I found a reason to knock on his door. He was there, and kindly invited me in. His apartment was very plain, no decoration, just a few colorful African cloths thrown over a chair or two. He chatted with me very sociably, unpretentiously. I gradually got to know him better as time went on. He told me of his village in Mali where his grandfather was medicine man. He even invited me to stay with them if I ever got down to Mali. I felt very lucky to have been his neighbor, although I never did make it to Africa.

I wandered the winding streets of Montmartre on foggy nights, visited Masses in Latin at Sacré-Coeur (which seemed like pieces of performance art to me), heard Gregorian chants sung live in a medieval chapel, bickered with the Tunisian vendors at the Wednesday market, and suffered daily pilgrimages to the top of the Sacred Hill. I climbed the belltower of Sacré-Coeur, a tightlywound spiral of endless stairs straight up a narrow stone cylinder, but well worth the bird's-eye view. And I spent many hours inside my apartment making art: magical, mystical paintings overwrought with shamanistic symbolism. I made the acquaintance of a French man, an enigmatic person and artist himself, who became my constant companion as we strolled the maze of streets, drank, and played chess in the cafés of Montmartre. Living there, in that place,
turned out to be a turning point in my travels and in my life. From there, I traveled on to Turkey, where I later spent long periods of time and gathered experiences that changed my life completely.

One last vivid memory of Montmartre remains in my mind. After I had moved out of my apartment, and was leaving with my belongings—my cat and a large suitcase mostly filled with books which I dragged to the bus stop—I passed a man I did not know or recognize who said something to me. I will never forget what he said: “You haven't changed.” I was shocked, and stopped to find out what he meant, who he was, but he seemed to disappear. I was left with only the image of his face looking directly at me, the eyes burning, and his mouth moving with those words. To this day, I take that experience as a visionary one. What he said was full of truth, but I did not realize it at the time. The enigmas of that man and his unexpected words had sealed off my time in Paris with a fitting postlude. I had to recognize in that moment, as I was getting on the bus, with the tolling of La Savoyarde in the background, that this hill had infused me with its very old magical spell. Montmartre would change my life, only much later.

We stood in awe watching the red sunset behind Sacré-Coeur at the summit of Montmartre and its pink and orange reflection in the pools before the Palais de Chaillot. Silently we congratulated ourselves on providing the memory of a lifetime for the mature, cultured young gentleman that Kevin had become on his “Grand Tour.” With the magnificence of Paris laid out at our feet, I turned to my son and asked gently, “Kevin, what are you thinking of right now?” Expecting a nugget of inspired brilliance, I was dismayed to hear him say, “I wonder how my Little League team is doing tonight.”

I was crushed! Despite our best efforts, our son's mind was still back in the all-American pastime.

To most, thoughts of Paris bring back memories of lost passion, lingering kisses along the quays, whispered conversations in sidewalk cafés. But my heart fills with love when I recall this light-hearted memory of my son's childhood.

To this day, eighteen years later, whenever someone expects us to hold forth with some brilliant reply, our stock answer, followed by knowing smiles all around, is “I wonder how my Little League team is doing tonight.”

—Sharon Huck, “
Bon Anniversaire
”

LAWRENCE OSBORNE

I
T IS ALMOST CERTAIN THAT THE
A
RABS LEARNED THE SECRETS OF
the art of public bathing, with its meditative and homoerotic dimensions, from the 400 bath houses of the Alexandria they conquered. In the modern equivalent of Alexandria the Islamicized art of corporeal purification has come home to roost in the city where the largest Roman ruin is a municipal bath and in which the desire for solitude is so intense that its ultimate gratification may rest only with the
hammam aturki
, the
bain turc
. Our peasant, now that some months have passed and he is firmly established as a naturalized citizen of the City, has become so addicted to this far from gratuitous pastime that he spends almost all his money on the joys of steam rooms, refrigerated pools and the manic manual skills of the little Maghrebian masseurs who can be picked up almost as easily as street girls and for a fraction of the cost. A light and intensely individual eroticism holds court in the depths of the
hammam
in almost alarming harmony with a communal serenity enforced by the habit of the masseurs in the smaller establishments of interrupting all operations at five o'clock precisely, unwrapping their wicker mats between the massage tables in the direction of Mecca and offering up their devotions in quiet but heartfelt undertones.
The object of the
hammam
is to escape the City and the world around it. Not only does the Moslem, as in the mosque, escape the City of War, but the sensual atheist, too, escapes from the asphyxia of the present and exiting by a series of illusionist doors in the form of underground chambers and ante-chambers, of mystic waters and fountains, leaves his existence behind, flirts more openly than ever before with his own body and suffers a sudden and vertiginous loss of toxicity—a brutal advent of cleanliness that leaves him in a state of memoryless disorientation for hours and even days afterwards.

The Turkish bath, with its mystique derived from the tendency of the European to indulge in infantile fantasies of the opulent, promiscuous, sorbet-eating East, the East of exemplary consumerist living which was never actually observed from close to, retains—in the high-class tourist establishments at least—the aura of the opium-smoking 1920s. The guides who cater to well-heeled international itinerants or local businessmen, the Gault-Millau for example, do not hesitate to include sections on the Turkish baths and the baths which they recommend are all devoid of true alien content, with the notable exception of the glorious
hammam
of the Mosquée de Paris. They are approximations to the original which compromise with Scandinavian modes of ablution. The systems of massage used, for example, with their—to our mind—tame and unimaginative hand-chopping and shoulder-kneading (as opposed to the more athletic and strenuous tendon-wrenching of the masseurs of the Middle East), seem to us to be entirely heretical in the context of the true
hammam
, as are their inclusion of such contraptions as saunas, exercise bicycles, vegetarian restaurants and bars. Let us be as explicit as possible: the true
hammam
is not a health club or a glorified gym. It is a place of non-activity, of withdrawal. The slightest athletic movement spoils the peculiar spiritual density of the small rooms, where every occupant is aware of every other down to his fingernails and the trails of sweat moving down his spine. Slowness of movement and reaction, a dropsical detachment, enable the bather to feel intimate with his fellow sufferers and to feel a primitive sympathy for his greatest defects, even for
the rolls of diseased fat, the distended and craven bellies, the shrivelled-up penises that tempt bravura—or, for that matter for his greatest points of superiority, for the baths sometimes throw up disciplined and poetic male bodies that move with the ease of hammerhead sharks and which restore the dim memory of Roman court favourites, Neronic love-boys and professional Adonises expert in the nibbling of imperial testicles.

An example of the
hammam
that has missed its destiny is the Hammam St-Paul on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais. It might have been difficult, of course, to maintain a scrupulous Moslem profile in this Jewish neighbourhood, with kosher butchers and cinnamon-scented bakeries filled with seven-armed candelabra only a few doors down, and the façade itself betrays other points of origin: the gold mosaic lettering set into a chocolate wall and sculpted lions' heads on either side of a window with a blue push-out blind are clearly affected with 1930s mannerisms. A cramped lobby downstairs in a quaintly rectilinear style provides you with a staircase leading up to the first-floor restaurant and reception area housing a bar, a large and sunny space with rows of empty tables, rubber plants and semi-recumbent male forms draped in white bath towels. Subtending to this area are the mauve cubicles reminiscent of an obsolete swimming pool and from here, after undressing in distressing and anemic solitude, you descend the stairs to the baths. A crude thermal titillation awaits you. You sweat even before you push open the door that leads into the nondescript showers and by the time you have penetrated one set of doors further into the hexagonal steam lounge—the purgatory between the hell of the full steam room and the paradise of the icecold pool in the central atrium—your armpits are thrashing about in a swelter of racing moisture, you are reeking, your heartbeat has tripled, your eyeballs are popping like fragile ceramic objects accidentally thrown into a roaring oven. In this gasping, vapid little
room long spruce deckchairs are ranged around a circular table of the same wood bearing a variety of French newspapers. You are intended to seat yourself, prevent yourself from passing out by checking the dairy odours emanating from your boiling skin, and leaf through one of these soggy and glutinous journals with nimble fingernails.