Going Ashore (27 page)

Two doors beyond, the traveller will find the Café des Grands Mots, celebrated as the meeting place between the Nouveaux Philosophes and exponents of the Nouvelle Cuisine. It is said that one of the latter, returning from an exploratory tour of America, cried to one of the former, “
Mon vieux, c’est une mine d’or!”
As a result of this perhaps apocryphal anecdote, the café is now known to Parisian cognoscenti as “The Old Gold Mine.” Typewritten notices signify the tables occupied by chefs and
philosophers, respectively, while a plastic shroud marks the place where Philosopher Anthelme Rendu on 4 September 1978 turned his back on his American publisher and began to sulk.

The tourist with a keen interest in quality souvenirs and artifacts can do no better than turn sharp right into the charming Rue du Dentiste Fernand Ladrerie. Here, at No. 22, all the crochetwork produced by wives of Cabinet ministers between 1908 and 1937 will at last have a fitting museum – that is, as soon as the present tenants of No. 22 have died off or have been coaxed into new quarters at some distance from Paris but handy to motels and auto routes. No evictions are performed in winter months, but in pleasant weather the sharp-eyed visitor can be sure of picking up many a “find” from among the motley effects grouped on the pavement: post-office calendars (about 7¢); paper roses (10¢ a bunch); gray or brown felt slippers (30¢ each). Knowledgeable Parisian antique dealers may well have got there first, skimming the cream; tufted bathmats and chrome-plated coffee grinders have a way of turning up in Faubourg Saint-Honoré shopwindows, quite disgracefully increased in price. Eviction aficionados have assured the author of this guide that cheap genuine French workmanship still abounds “if you know where to look,” citing as examples a foam mattress, circa 1960 ($17.80), and an electric steam iron, attributed 1954 ($12). The firm of Contre et Tourtière, at No. 31, will arrange for shipping.

So far so good, but “no one ever enjoyed budget-priced craft on an empty stomach” (Pablo Picasso), and the hungry traveller may well at this point be asking himself a legitimate question: “How about lunch?” All eating places suggested here will be found within the area bounded by the Rue du Fonctionnaire Leonce Mou; the police station at the end of the street; the Old Clothes Depot, unused since the terrible winter of 1963, when garments collected for the frozen poor were abandoned, owing to a sudden thaw; the Chinese restaurant known as Au Joyeux Bol de Riz (
not
recommended by this guide); and the Cultural and Theatrical Center – a venerable edifice at the far end of the Rue de l’Inspecteur des Finances Romuald Lampiste, where two much-loved French classics, “Mother Courage” and “White Horse Inn,” have been alternating ever since the theatre was inaugurated, in 1958.

Class A restaurants: Bien de Chez Nous, Jo-Jo la Bouffe, La Joie dans l’Assiette, and Paris Mon Paris are equipped with pinball machines, jukeboxes, and television sets – all in satisfactory condition. It is better to write one’s order on a slip of paper and hand it to the waiter, for an ambience of good cheer and lighthearted bantering sometimes makes it difficult to be understood. As this sample menu shows, even travellers whose language gifts are sketchy should have no trouble:

1. 1 hamburger avec petit pain, viande, ketchup, et cornichon
   .
   

2. 1 hamburger sans petit pain
   .
   

3. 1 hamburger sans viande
   .
   

4. 1 hamburger entièrement fait de macaroni
   .
   

Price differences will be slight, hovering in the vicinity of $9, tip included. You may want to leave something extra if service has been particularly attentive, or if you plan to lunch here again. Try to produce a sum of money that can be counted at a glance, and do not sit smiling and waiting around for change. Your waiter, anxious to get back to his pinball game, will have little time for “the pain and ecstasy of simple arithmetic” (S. de Beauvoir).

Among Class B restaurants, Au Repas Exquis boasts only a small transistor radio, but the premises are fitted out with loudspeakers, and the baffles convey a pleasing echo. La Croûte de Pain has no acoustical advantages to offer; by making a cone of the menu and placing one end to your ear and the other against the wall, however, you can hear, from the back room of the police station next door, real-life French vignettes your stay-at-home friends will envy.

The Cultural and Theatrical Center, mentioned above, is well worth a pause. For a modest tip, the porter, M. Barnabé Ruse, will show you the poster advertising “White Horse Inn” and will also supply you with the key to the only convenience in the neighborhood. In exchange for the key, it is customary to leave a deposit of about $125. On leaving the center, turn left into the paved alley between Nos. 34 and 36. Facing the kitchen entrance to Au Joyeux Bol de Riz and just past the Bureau for the Verification of Sandpaper Regulations (Ministry of Commerce Annex) is
the door you are seeking. Don’t forget to return the key and collect your deposit. It might be wise to ask M. Ruse to call your hotel and make certain the rooms retained for your group were not given to the Japanese charter group after all.

Somewhat less impressive in appearance but a nonetheless spirited rival in the race for public funds and subsidies is the Center for Advanced Art and Culture, at the corner of the street. The original windows (1955), replaced after May, 1968, are notable for their iron grilles. Three wide iron bars traverse the front door. Visitors are usually allowed in one at a time. Having been frisked and admitted, the refined traveller will surely want to take part in the celebrated Monuments Competition, during which participants are permitted to sit down. In a darkened room, the visitor listens to the recorded description of a French architectural structure of historical importance – as, for instance:

(The cultivated reader has of course guessed by now that this is the description of the Maternity Hospital in Borgne-la-Villa, Dordogne.)

After inscribing his name and address and the answer on the ballot provided, and after the ballots have been collected, sorted, counted, and checked for fraud – “The state can’t be too careful” (Landru) – the winner will receive at his home, in the course of time, an agreeable prize. Foreign competitors should remember that prizes fall under customs and excise regulations of most countries, and that a plastic reproduction of the
immortal “Public Health” is of interest only to truly ardent connoisseurs, particularly when its value, set at $7, has unaccountably been translated into $700 in the home country – a sharp reminder for the erstwhile traveller that “the fun’s not always in the winning” (Napoleon Bonaparte).

AS DUSK FALLS
– “Dusk! One of the few institutions not yet under the management of Social Security!” (André Malraux) – the traveller, footsore but happy with his “finds,” falls into the Métro to be whisked “home.” With luck, he may be able to see a few rush-hour passengers taken hostage by a gang of
loulous
– sprightly youths from the industrial suburbs – and will observe, with unspoken admiration, the stoic faces of the other voyagers and their entire discretion with regard to their neighbors as these are knifed or slugged or kicked in the shins, and the words of Mme. de Sévigné may recur to remind him that “an ounce of minding your own business is worth a ton of mugging any day in the City of Light.”

In the lobby of his hotel, cleared of all charter groups, including the Japanese, the East German, the Swedish, and the Australian, the traveller may notice the Action Committee of the striking hotel staff sipping Campari-and-soda and cracking jokes. A caution: After carrying his “finds” up the eight flights of the service staircase, the traveller often feels a slight letdown as he unlocks the door to the room. Perhaps here the author may be allowed to address the visitor directly: Work fast before falling into a black or discouraged mood. Stow your bargains in a safe place. Use a pillowcase to clean the washbasin and bath. Make a tidy heap of effects left by the previous occupant: pajama top with wine stain and torn collar; match folders from the Drug Store des Champs-Élysées; memo reading “Eighty – repeat eighty – thousand barrels per day unrefined;” scraps of paper napkin bearing the names “Vanessa,” “Ingrid,” “Julie,” and “Sabrina” with scribbled numbers. (“Romy Schneider” or “Catherine Deneuve” means only that Julie or Ingrid
looked like
Schneider or Deneuve. According to Roland Barthes, “women’s names can indeed turn out to be of mnemonic utility.”)

Roll up for the night in the cleaner-looking of the two blankets. The unmistakable scent of Paris air-conditioning (fleur-de-lis and smoldering
Gauloise) will remind you of different nights in other capital cities – how the air-conditioning in Rome tended to rumble rather than to whine, how in London it smelled of smoked haddock. Drifting off, you will ask yourself the questions that inevitably follow a satisfying first day in Paris: “How can I get on the Anglo-American volleyball team?” “When are the Anabaptist Church sing-alongs held?” “Will there be time to visit the bacon-and-sausage shop set up by Mathilde, discarded wife of the Under-Secretary for Colonial Interference, M. Gontran Clubbe – a shop said to have been patronized for a time (22 July 1970) by leaders of the Opposition?” It will then cross your memory that something important to your Second Day seems to be lost or missing. A clean bath towel? No. The missing something used to be in the secret compartment of your handbag or the inside pocket of your jacket, and it contained your passport, your airline ticket, your folding money, and your traveller’s checks.

Do not hesitate. Roll out of the blanket, get into your clothes, and descend the eight flights of the service staircase. In the lobby you will notice some of the striking staff trying to have a game of billiards on the reception desk. Borrow a piece of chalk and make your way out to the street. Sit down on the sidewalk and think hard before you write. “I am a tourist who has been robbed to the marrow” will bring you two pay-phone tokens and a postage stamp. “Just released from jail after serving sentence of three months for talking back to a post-office employee. Who wants to lend a hand?” will encourage useless suggestions. “Hungry Yorkshire terrier at home awaits your generosity” is good for lumps of sugar. Strongly recommended by the author of this guide, who has been writing it to good effect on the pavements of Paris for the past twenty years, is this: “My five children, kidnapped and removed from France by foreign-born spouse, are now exposed to Anglo-Saxon culture. Please help raise jet fare to fetch them back.” Within seconds you should acquire a bale of banknotes – more than enough to convey you, first class, champagne laid on, caviar around the clock, back to wherever you started from. For “does not the untrammelled mind know when to cut its losses and to look upon them as worthwhile, even at Paris prices?” (Marcel Proust).

LOUISE, MY SISTER
, talked to Sylvie Laval for the first time on the stairs of our hotel on a winter afternoon. At five o’clock the skylight over the stairway and the blank, black windows on each of the landings were pitch dark – dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities. The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar. My sister had been in Paris six months, but she still could say, “What a funny French word that is, Puss – ‘
snack
.’” Louise’s progress down the steps was halting and slow. At the best of times she never hurried, and now she was guiding her bicycle and carrying a trench coat, a plaid scarf, Herriot’s “Life of Beethoven,” Cassell’s English-French, a bottle of cough medicine she intended to exchange for another brand, and a notebook, in which she had listed facts about nineteenth-century music under so many headings, in so many divisions of divisions, that she had lost sight of the whole.

The dictionary, the Herriot, the cough medicine, and the scarf were mine. I was the music mistress, out in all weathers, subject to chills, with plenty of woolen garments to lend. I had not come to Paris in order to teach
solfège
to stiff-fingered children. It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels can’t always be choosers. At first I gave lessons so as to get by, and then I did it for a living, which is not the same thing. My older sister followed me – wisely, calmly, with plenty of money for travel – six years later, when both our parents had died. She was accustomed to a busy life at home in Australia, with a large house to look after and our invalid mother to nurse. In Paris, she found time on her hands. Once she had visited all the museums, and cycled around the famous squares, and read what was written on the monuments, she felt she was wasting her opportunities. She decided that music might be useful, since she had once been taught to play the piano; also, it was bound to give us something in
common. She was making a serious effort to know me. There was a difference of five years between us, and I had been away from home for six. She enrolled in a course of lectures, took notes, and went to concerts on a cut-rate student’s card.

I’d better explain about that bicycle. It was heavy and old – a boy’s bike, left by a cousin killed in the war. She had brought it with her from Australia, thinking that Paris would be an easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time. The promises that led her, that have been made to us all at least once in our lives, had sworn faithfully there would be angelic children sailing boats in the fountains, and calm summer streets. But the parks were full of brats and quarreling mothers, and the bicycle was a nuisance everywhere. Still, she rode it; she would have thought it wicked to spend money on bus fares when there was a perfectly good bike to use instead.