Ransacking Paris (17 page)

‘No, you know I love books but I can accept music is the best. Music is the most mysterious – the effect, I mean – and it crosses all languages,' I replied.

I thought I had won the argument but Sylvie launched into a passionate defence of writing as the highest art. She said all writing could be translated, so it too crossed all boundaries of language and then she talked about her teenage years in Brazil and how she was always a stranger, how confused she felt, how her sense of self had been dissolved. The characters in books were her friends, their experiences, their conversations, were hers. Her thoughts, her awareness of her emotions, her sense of being in the world, were all detailed and shaped by reading. She spoke intensely, her dark eyes holding mine.

‘
Je me connais quand je lis
,' she said.

I know who I am when I read.

Stendhal said ‘a novel is like a violin-bow and the soul of the reader is the violin-belly which gives off the sounds'. It means that the words of a writer are only given their sound, their richness and fullness, in the soul of a reader. The vibration enters the chamber and amplifies and diffracts and reverberates according to the shape and size and texture of the violin-belly soul so that every reader, reading the same book, reads a different book. I would have liked to say that to Sylvie, but it was too complicated for me to say in French.

*

I wrote more of the story of Dina and Theo, setting up my laptop on the trestle table, I spoke French, I sang at choir and I went to concerts, but I had to do something about the shoulder, back, rib and neck pain. It had not abated at all despite revelation, or despite knowing that it wasn't fatal. The internet self-diagnosis sites informed me the pain would abate but that it would take up to two years.

I was still going to Tristan de Parcevaux and swallowing painkillers to get through each day and, in the evenings, stronger ones to get through the night. Most days it was difficult to think, difficult to write and doing ordinary things like putting the washing-up away was slow work. One day I stubbed my toe on the wet, rolled-up carpet the street-sweepers used on the corners of streets to direct water along the gutters and whimpered. I was ‘shamelessly grovelling at the feet of pain' as Montaigne said. My happy disposition was taking a beating.

I decided to go to the American Hospital on the edge of Paris where the doctors all spoke English. I trudged along the streets, lost for a while, but eventually arrived at my appointment where I was diagnosed with ‘adhesive capsulitis', or frozen shoulder. I could put up with it and it would go away in time, or I could have a series of cortisone injections to stop the pain and then exercises to restore movement.

I made an appointment for the first injection. Suffering with patience might be a good thing, but I'd reached the end of my small allotment. I couldn't help agreeing with Montaigne that ‘without health all pleasure, scholarship and virtue lose their lustre and fade away' and that ‘no road leading to health was too rough or expensive'.

A week later I was back out at the hospital where a rheumatologist gave me the first injection. By the next day, the pain had reduced dramatically, not gone altogether, but enough to make the days seem bearable. Under the rheumatologist's direction I booked into a physiotherapy clinic in the sixteenth arrondissement for twice-weekly sessions, to start after my second injection if all went well.

I did feel as if I had failed some test, that I ought to have been able to put up with what, in the scheme of suffering, was minor, but I've long been suspicious of the doctrine that suffering was good for the soul. I'd been afraid to say it out loud, having a superstitious fear of the Fates who like to knock down anyone who defies them, and then I found brave Montaigne saying, ‘I disclaim those incidental reformations based on pain.' He suffered a great deal of pain through illness and there was much less relief from pain in his day and yet he still didn't take refuge in it supposedly improving his soul.

Anthony had been in Australia for three weeks for work meetings and arrived back tanned and carrying tales of bright heat and bushfires and days at the beach. While he was still jetlagged, we rugged up in our overcoats and went walking in the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden near the Seine in the fifth arrondissement. I put my gloved hand through Anthony's elbow and felt the comfort of his body even though layers of wool separated us. Up on the hill we saw stylish bee-boxes labelled ‘L'Hôtel des Abeilles', Bee Hotel, but no bees. It was too cold for gathering nectar. We wandered along a wintry path and on either side hardy marguerites and pansies gave splashes of colour. The pansies reminded me of my mother's garden, their dark red and violet and yellow faces so common and everyday, but if you looked closely, each one individual and beautiful. The branches of bare chestnut trees, twisted and knobbly from being pruned so often into neat cube shapes, reached over our heads in a long avenue. They looked like they were grasping for something, or ready to receive something from the sky with their deformed limbs.

Nine

February

Perhaps the one link possible between two souls was compassion.

Simone de Beauvoir

One chilly day in February I discovered St-Gervais, just behind the Hôtel de Ville in the fourth arrondissement. It was built in the mid-seventeenth century, a French baroque church with Greek columns, a cupola and painted wooden statues. Madame de Sévigné attended St-Gervais – it was only about ten minutes' walk from her house – and commented on the sermons in her letters, but I had only gone in because I was tired from wandering and wanted to sit for a while. At a side altar there was a continual ‘Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament', a white host, or flat circle of bread, visible in the centre of an elaborate golden spiked monstrance with people praying in front of it. I sat there, musing, looking at the people kneeling, their hands clasped, their heads bent. What was happening in their minds? What stories were they telling themselves? In my childhood and teenage years I had tried to believe that the white round of bread was Christ and whenever I swallowed it in Holy Communion I tried to believe I was being filled with His spirit. Truthfully, nothing ever happened. Nothing at all.

I often went into churches in Paris. At first it was a tourist impulse not to miss any grand sight: Notre Dame and its rose windows, St-Sulpice and its Delacroix, the extraordinary looming dark splendour of St-Eustache, and then there were the free concerts in churches every Sunday, but there was also childhood comfort.

Every Sunday my parents took my brothers and sisters and me, dressed in our best dresses and shirts and hats, to Mass, first in the tin church up the road with its five pews on either side – we filled up two rows at the back – and then in the solid brick church in town. Mass, the ritual of sitting and kneeling and standing and listening, was tedious, but in the town church, St Patrick's, there was light coming through stained-glass windows, the smell of incense from Benediction and cold smells of concrete, white marble altars, the warm feel of wood under my legs, sweaty in summer, badly sung hymns, babies crying, other people's hats and lacy mantillas, Pauline Frogley in a wheelchair, short Mr Kelly with his tall blonde wife, paintings of soldiers hammering nails into Jesus' hands, prayer books with guardian-angel holy cards tucked in them, the sound of the priest's Irish accent.

Sitting quietly in church looking around was something I knew how to do.

That day in St-Gervais, I sat looking around, feeling critical and tired. There were a few elderly women praying and an anxious-looking man with his hands clasped; what good did they think it would do, talking to themselves in this old building? I kept sitting, resting. The monstrance was polished gold, the altar white marble. Candles flickered on the gold. I could feel the soaring space above and around me, the dim light from the stained-glass windows high above. And then I became aware of a peaceful calm beginning to ease into me. It came first to my breath, slowing it down, and then my ribs expanded, making more room for my heart, and then my body felt warm and my muscles eased. I became still, without thought, centred.

It's a state that arrives sometimes, which many people think of as spiritual. For me, it has never come when it's bidden by prayer or meditation even though I tried for years. In my experience it comes most often in the bush, although, like joy, it arrives when it will. It was the ‘peace that passeth understanding' as sacred texts refer to it, deep and warm and calm.

I went back to St-Gervais a few weeks later in the early evening. I didn't want to admit it, but I realise that I must have been trying to find the switch to turn it on again. This time, as I sat on a woven chair in the church gazing at the ornate paintings and stone scrolls, I was startled to hear the sound of chanting. I turned around and saw double rows of robed and hooded monks walking up the centre aisle. For a split second I thought I had fallen back several centuries or was hallucinating, but they were contemporary and real. Their faces were somehow modern – I think it was their shaved chins and the glimpses of ordinary haircuts under their cowls. The rhythmic chanting was powerful, hypnotic, impossible to walk away from, male voices seeming to bind the earth together. Later I found a leaflet in the church, which explained they were an order of city monks founded in the 1970s. They didn't have an abbey but rented apartments because they believed they should not be attached to property and they worked at part-time jobs in offices and shops. But each morning, and at lunchtime, and in the evening, they came together and chanted in St-Gervais. On the leaflet, they had written, ‘If you want to know what we believe, come and listen to us sing.'

None of this means that I experienced a renewal of faith in Paris. In fact the opposite happened. In the winter in Paris I finally admitted out loud for the first time that I no longer believed in any kind of God, not the Catholic one I was brought up with, nor the overarching Power, the Brahma, of eastern spirituality. At least not One who could or would intervene in any way. Perhaps Brahma had breathed out the universe and one day would breath it in again, but in the meantime there was just existence and I had to create my own meaning. I was sitting in the lounge-room in the rue Simart on the black couch when I ‘confessed' it to Anthony. He grinned and said, ‘Me neither.' We had reached the void at the end of clear thinking together, which was some kind of relief.

*

Being brought up Catholic is one of the few experiences I share with most of the French memoirists, all except Rousseau.

Montaigne held to his faith and defended it, but his mind is more that of a sceptic and a freethinker, particularly when he says he has ‘a loathing for that distressing and combative arrogance which has complete faith and trust in itself: it is a mortal enemy of finding out the truth'.

Madame de Sévigné is described as ‘pious'; she was brought up by an Abbé, her uncle, and often discussed sermons and theological questions in her letters. The loss of both her parents when she was young must have formed in her the idea that the world was fundamentally dangerous, she couldn't afford not to believe in some kind of overarching protection. She was by temperament someone who longed for meaning, but she also seems not to have allowed herself to think outside the intellectual framework she had been given. Today she might be a Buddhist, a rigorous one, or an agnostic, questioning everything with wry humour.

Stendhal and de Beauvoir were avowed non-believers, because faith, they both said, offended their intellects. With Stendhal though, I think it began with emotion. He heard a priest say that his adored mother's death ‘came from God'. He was only seven years old and says he ‘began to speak ill of GOD'. It's not difficult to see the proud, heartbroken boy raging against the God who had used His power to take all happiness from his life. It is perhaps not a long step from antagonism to disbelief.

In her youth de Beauvoir was a passionate believer, not just because of convention, but because of her desire for expanded experience, and it was for the same reason that she stopped believing: ‘ “I no longer believe in God”, I told myself with no great surprise [she was thirteen years old] I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life […] As soon as I saw the light, I made a clean break.'

I remember the same moment, at the same age – except I didn't make a clean break. I was standing in the dim and dusty Infant de Prague hall, our school assembly hall, where Sister Julian, a short fat nun with a sensitive soul, was trying to teach choir. She was a plain woman and we thirteen-year-olds mocked her because she constantly fiddled with the fob-watch pinned under the folds of her habit, which made it look as if she were stroking her breasts. I had a soft spot for her because she had loaned me Frances Hodgson Burnett's
The Secret Garden.
I loved the walled garden and the mysterious way it transformed everyone who went in there, but it didn't stop me from joining in the mocking.

It was a winter term and I was wearing an ill-fitting pleated uniform that made me look like a sack tied around the middle. Its hem was lumpy and it was always grubby no matter how many times I rubbed at stains with a washer. It is strange that the banal details of life sear themselves in memory when something life-changing is happening. In one moment, standing there in the hall, the thought appeared, ‘There's nothing there. God doesn't exist.' On the outside, to anyone watching, nothing had happened; I was still an awkward pimply girl standing in a country hall, but continents had dissolved beneath me. I had caught a glimpse of the void and leapt back. It terrified me so much that I instantly changed the thought to ‘What if God doesn't exist?' and told myself that it was all right, it was just a doubt. Doubts were admissible. I lacked de Beauvoir's courage, which meant it took me many decades to finally face what had happened that day.

Afterwards I went to church with determination. I tried to listen to the priest's words, to meditate on Christ's suffering, to imagine that I was consuming Him in Holy Communion, to feel His loving spirit. It wasn't a spiritual longing or that I had a devoted nature – I had neither – but a fear of nothingness.

When I left school I never went to church again as a believer; faith had disappeared that day in the hall, the loss quickly disavowed but still it had gone, and by the time I had left school, there was no real thought about letting all the practices of religion go. But the inner structures were still there, most of all an urgent requirement for overarching meaning. I know I wouldn't have lasted a moment with Sartre and de Beauvoir and their friends who, as de Beauvoir says, ‘laughed high-minded souls to scorn – in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the inner life […] fell under their lashing contempt'.

*

I went to the physiotherapy clinic the American Hospital had recommended. The clinic was underground with windows along the top of the wall at ground level giving a view of feet walking past in the outside world. As I walked down the stairs the first day, and every time after, it felt as if I were entering a dungeon with instruments of torture spread out below me. There were benches, ropes, pulleys, chains and various pushing, pulling and walking machines with cogs and wheels. Elderly women and men wearing long underclothes – spencers and tights – slowly pulled on the chains and ropes or bent over benches in a genteel version of an Hieronymus Bosch hell. I had the dizzying sensation of stepping into my own inevitable future where life had slowed down and would one day stop. I wasn't even fifty years old yet. I wanted to turn and run.

‘
Bonjour, Madame
,' each of the elderly men and women said.

‘
Bonjour, Mesdames et Messieurs
,' I said. We were all in this together.

I stripped down to my tights and long-sleeved t-shirt and then was assigned one of the pulleys with chains and given a piece of stretchy yellow elastic and a chart with a series of exercises. I meekly pulled on the chains, unable to reach my arms more than a few centimetres from my body. My arm ached all over again. An old woman. I pulled on the elastic and tried to stretch my arms behind my back. I eased my neck sideways and back and forth, I rolled my hips from side to side. I thought afterwards that I never wanted to go back.

The dungeon was near the Metro exit at Monceau, which meant I had to change at Gare St Lazare and then at Villiers. St Lazare is a vast station and it was being rebuilt, the renovations requiring a long walk through a temporary corrugated-iron corridor to catch the connecting train. It was above ground so it wasn't warm like the underground corridors. It was, in fact, bitterly cold, colder even than outside in the weather.

Each time as I climbed the flight of steps to the corridor, I could hear the plaintive, singsong of a gypsy woman: ‘
S'il vous plai-a
î
t, Monsieur. S'il vous plai-a
î
t
.' Please, sir Plea-ease. Over and over, echoing down the tin walls. The sound alone twanged across my nerves. I could feel myself tensing, getting ready to do battle.

And then I rounded the corner and saw her. She was there every time, kneeling on the floor at the other end of the corridor. She wore long skirts and thick stockings and her black hair was pulled back into a bun – she would have looked at home in any of the last few centuries. She had three grimy children with her, one of them a baby in her arms, and they all sat on the concrete in the bitter cold. Her head and shoulders were mostly bowed and if she did look up, her dark eyes were plaintive.

The two older children, a boy and a girl, wore layers of gypsy clothes too, skirts and jumpers, but still they must have been freezing, sitting there on the concrete. They didn't run around or play or even speak. They had no toys or books, they just sat, unnaturally still and quiet. They both had the same thick dark hair as their mother and large dark eyes, although they rarely looked up.

‘
S'il vous plai-a
î
t, Mada-ame, S'il vous plai-a
î
t, Monsieur. S'il vous plai-a
î
t
.' Each vowel dragged out, the whining singsong grating on my pain-exposed nerves. She seemed to know, to be targeting me amongst all the hurrying travellers.

I felt hot and cold with discomfort and judgment. And a violent rage. How dare she make her pretty, dull-eyed children sit with her on the concrete in the freezing cold for hours on end? How dare she, more than anything, teach them to kneel before others? It was the tone that wormed into me every time, a tone that pleaded that she was inferior, and we, striding by on our way to work or to physio appointments, were fine lords and ladies who might take pity on her inferiority.

‘Just shut the fuck up,' I muttered under my breath.

I looked at her children but I couldn't look at her. They sometimes looked up at me, their large dull eyes and beautiful faces almost Biblical in their sorrow and poverty.