I’ve been back in Paris a week and a half, hiding out. I’ve been a fugitive, fleeing the city itself by keeping out of its sight. A head-in-the-sand tactic, but it almost works. I’ve hardly moved from our flat and garden, except to venture out for food, an occasional jog in the Buttes Chaumont park, a stroll down Belleville lane. My husband and son are away, but the cat remains. Mercifully, our noisy, inconsiderate next-door neighbors are gone, presumably vacationing. May they continue their holiday indefinitely.
I have not been up to much; I’ve advanced my novel a few, meager pages, caught up on the summer’s unread copies of The London Review of Books, and I have been sleeping. The last time I slept was in June 2011, in Egypt. I’ve been gathering this night manna with gratitude.
Usually I return to Paris, wanting Paris; now I am left wondering where the want is. Yesterday, walking down the Boulevard de la Villette, I came across one of the city’s iconic sights: a man peeing against a wall. His urine was flowing down the sidewalk and I would have to step carefully to avoid his pollution. Why tolerate the intolerable when you’ve got a mouth for shouting. “Sir, you are disgusting! C’est franchement dégoûtant, c’est sale !” He told me where to put it. I didn’t expect less of him. That agreeable exchange might have prompted me spin on my heels and head home to bury my head in the wild impatiens
but I continued on, Belleville-bound. When I got to Martha’s Place at the Place Sainte Marthe, I noticed someone had painted devil horns on the stenciled Kafka head next to the door. Why did they do that? What did Kafka do to earn the satanic headdress? Wasn’t he a vegetarian? A man of gentle digestions? This troubled me. Even horns painted on a stenciled head of Truman Capote would have bothered me. Authors, when they die, should get wings.
Here is Kafka prior to the defilement
“Anne!” I turn around and see Rémy or is it Jean-Pierre? I recognize the young man but can’t remember his name. He is unkempt, tall and of solid bourgeois stock; he has adopted the neighborhood like a motherless child, roams aimlessly, works not, sees a psychiatrist twice a week. Though lost at heart, he is bright and politically engaged in the Front de Gauche. Either he has a trust fund or lives off the measly RSA (revenue de solidarité active); my hunch is the latter. In short, he is the kind of person who will endear you while setting off your burglar alarm. “Anne! Are you going in? Would you mind if I played the piano? I’ve been wanting to play – I’ve had this music in my head…”
“OK, sure. But just for fifteen minutes. I’m only here to drop some stuff off.”
“That’s fine. Fifteen minutes should be enough.”
Should be?
As I go about my business in Martha’s Place, cleaning up, putting stuff away, going through the papers on my desk, he hunches over the keyboard and let’s his fingers do the talking. His music is improvised, occasionally melodious, its influences perhaps so wide and numerous as to escape easy detection. Jean-Pierre — or is it Rémy? — is a boy-without-borders, and therefore, most everything about him is hard to pin down.
“Time to go!” I announce after twenty minutes – I give him five extra. “I’ve got to run.” Obediently he stops and rises. At the door he wants to know about les filles and when they are due for arrival, but I decline the invitation to chat. I will not discuss “the girls” who I am paid, quite frankly, to protect. Not that Jean-Pierre or Rémy poses any danger, but it’s best not to have lonesome Frenchmen in need of a shower and a shave hanging around my center, where the students are predominately female. I’ve learned a thing or two since being a director. And this boy needs to be directed to the door and out into the greater hood.
I head up the rue Buisson Saint Louis and take note that the prostitutes have clearly not had any vacation this summer. They look tired and their skirts have gone up a notch. The injustice of it all burns me up: clearly there’s little I can do to stop this vile prostitution but maybe I could help on the vacation front. Why has nobody of the volunteer persuasion thought of starting a hooker holiday retreat? I have been in need of an idea to get me out of Paris and this one gripped me forcefully; these women hung out together, they seem to be neighborly competitors: wouldn’t they like to vacation together? I envisioned creating a collective that owned a spacious farm with many rooms and fields yielding fresh produce. The women would stay for a month, resting and restoring themselves, helping with chores, learning French, and maybe, just maybe, given the wholesome food and air, the easy camaraderie cleaned of competition’s vices, some would not return to the sidewalk. Wouldn’t the socialist government I helped vote in give me funding for the venture? And if they’re being wimps, maybe Kickstarter?
Wonder if Hollande would help out with this nice little spot?
Back in 1769 Rousseau wrote this of Paris:
There no longer exist in Europe either morals or virtue, but if there still exists some love for these things it is in Paris that it must be sought.”
Friends, I have sought it. Friends, I have yet to find it.