Alésia is an easy enough place to settle into. You don’t feel judged by your appearance or looked down on in the unpretentious fourteenth arrondissement as I find you frequently do when you’re in the beaux quartiers like the old Faubourg Saint-Germain in the snobby seventh, the staid, residential areas of the seizième, out towards the Bois de Boulogne, or even in the elegant shops around the Madeleine and along the Champs-Elysées. Perhaps it’s partly me, being so acutely self-conscious, but shop assistants haughtily correct my French (even though it’s pretty fluent and, I’m told, barely accented for someone who was brought up in England) or, worse still, they simply retort ‘Comment?’ or ‘Quoi?’ brusquely, so I’m obliged to go through the whole ghastly linguistic performance again when all I want is to buy something like a cheese sandwich and get out again into the anonymity of the street.
Modest Alésia doesn’t go in for that kind of one-upmanship. It is peopled by small tradesmen and artisans dotted along the little streets and around dingy courtyards, who do everything from plumbing and plastering to gilding and carving furniture or violins. I don’t feel scruffy or threadbare amongst this kind of Parisian because they are mostly in grubby dungarees and the women often wear housecoats and headscarves when they go out to shop. And the only place where one risks being looked down on is at Noblet, the charcuterie which dominates the main Alésia crossroads and hits you between the eyes with its bright pink neon sign of a dancing pig as you ascend from the Métro. To emphasise the pig point, a mural above the shop’s red awning shows a young girl coaxing a reluctant beast to the slaughter with the words ‘Don’t cry, you silly pig. You’re going to Noblet’, but no trace of even this doubtful humour remains once you enter the palatial interior where all but the most well-heeled client would be cowed first by the variety of hams, saucissons, terrines, brawns, black and white puddings, gallotines and ballotines vying for attention among the other rich confections drowned in mayonnaise displayed on back-lit ceramic shelves, and then by the commanding stare and manner of the charcutier-in-chief and apparent owner, resplendent in spotless chef’s whites, seconded by his eagle-eyed wife, coiffed and dressed as if for an ambassadorial reception behind her cash register, disdainfully handing small change back to those fortunate enough to have been served.
After a few skirmishes with this redoubtable duo, whose hauteur reappears in even the lowliest of the underlings who slice the ham while stressing the smallness of your needs (‘Seulement deux cents grammes, Monsieur?’), I start to feel like the reluctant pig on the charcuterie’s façade and gravitate to more humble shops where, if the produce is not nearly as extensive or choice, at least I don’t have to declaim my order for a slice of pâté with the clarity and balance of a sonorous Racinian alexandrine. As soon as you start exploring, the back streets of Alésia are in fact full of little grocers’ shops, often run by discreetly courteous Arabs, who I think understand a bachelor’s needs implicitly since so many of them are too poor to have a family and live frugally alone. Ferreting out these small shops is a pleasant activity because in the evenings and over the weekends it allows me to get to know the area in depth, providing a welcome counterpoint to whole days at Réalités translating abstruse articles on art and literature as well as more frivolous ones on travel and cookery or writing captions and dreaming up titles for articles whose only real interest seems to lie in the wit and compression contained in the title itself.
There’s one street I go down regularly that looks much like the others with its long jumble of cheaply run-up apartment buildings, shops and cafés. It cuts across rue du Moulin-Vert about halfway up, and I’ve been wondering why its outlandish name, rue Hippolyte-Maindron, rings an odd bell. Réalités has got a big Larousse encyclopaedia, and when I look the name up and see that it denotes a nineteenth-century sculptor, the penny suddenly drops. I’m back in an instant to London, sharing a bottle of champagne with Francis Bacon in his studio shortly before leaving for Paris: Francis was asking me who I knew in Paris and lamely I’d said no one and he’d immediately not only recommended my going to meet Giacometti on rue Hippolyte-Maindron but written a letter of introduction for me to take to him scrawled in green felt tip across two pages of war photos that he’d ripped out of an old Paris Match that was lying on the floor.
The double-page spread reads: ‘Mon cher Alberto j’espere que vous allez bien J’ecris cette lettre pour introduire un grand ami à moi Michael Peppiatt qui arrive maintenant à Paris J’espere vous revoir bientot Alberto Francis.’ I’ve been carrying it around with me, neatly folded in my copy of The Portable Nietzsche, and haven’t really given it much thought as I moved from address to address. But now, I think with a rush of excitement, Giacometti is living right next door to me, he’s a neighbour! Perhaps he’ll turn out to be like Francis, always out on the town, and I could resume the old routine of ‘drifting from bar to bar, person to person’ that I’ve begun to miss in this cold, stand-offish city – which has become all the colder since I moved out of David’s generous, gregarious orbit and made a vow never to use the expensive electric heating in my little room, both to save money and also as a challenge to myself that I can tough the winter out as long as I keep my overcoat and gloves on.
So I go back and lay hands on the letter, and since it’s only six o’clock in the evening it seems as good a time as any to go round and introduce myself. I try to remember the little I know about Giacometti. He had a show at the Tate last year but I didn’t see it, which is embarrassing; I’ll have to admit it if he asks; perhaps he won’t mind when I tell him it was because I was living in Spain… I wish I had a better idea of the kind of sculpture he does, I’ve got an image of very spindly dark figures in mind but not much more. I remember looking at a book about him and being struck by how incredibly messy his studio was – and probably as cold as mine. I suppose Giacometti will ask me for news about Francis, I know they admire each other’s work, so that should keep the conversation going a bit… they have friends in common, like Michel Leiris and David Sylvester, both of whom I know well enough to talk about, and Isabel Rawsthorne, whom I don’t, but who Francis told me had once lived with him… Francis told me Giacometti took a great shine to his boyfriend, George Dyer, and when he went over for his Tate show he half-joked to Francis: ‘When I’m in London I feel homosexual’. I certainly hope he doesn’t feel like that when he’s back home, in our Alésia, because I’m fed up with everyone turning out to be queer when you’d least expect it. But worse than all that, Giacometti is also world-famous, more famous than Francis, as well as continental and existential, which in themselves are bound to make him more important. And here I am, clutching a couple of pages of Paris Match in my hand, about to burst in on him on the flimsiest of pretexts, I think, as I find number 47 and go through the shabby entrance and see, as if to throw the situation into even starker relief, that someone, probably Giacometti himself, has written GIACOMETTI in white letters, like a warning, on the ground-floor door of a higgledy-piggledy building with a big, dirty window, set back in a small courtyard off the street.
I wonder whether Giacometti has already sensed that someone has come into his lair, yet another of the tiresome visitors from Porlock that must bedevil his everyday existence, particularly since it seems so easy to track the world-famous artist down once he’s in his studio. The whole little ramshackle building is intensely quiet, as if everyone is listening closely and watching to see what I’ll do next. My hand is raised to rap lightly but distinctly on the door, but my face flushes with embarrassment when I think how impertinent, how unacceptable it is for such a new arrival – such an ‘obscure young man’, as Bacon’s friend, Sonia Orwell, once called me so woundingly – to interrupt the greatest living sculptor in the world hard at work on a half-finished spindly figure. In the silence behind the door, was Giacometti palping and pinching the clay on a long, emaciated body or feverishly sketching head after head or, and here my hand drops completely, engaged in some other, intimate activity? After all, what do art
ists do when they’re not working…? I turn round, appalled at how brash I would look if Giacometti suddenly tore open the door in irritation, and I run back onto the street like a thief, sweating with shyness.
Yet I also feel a loss. Bacon had recommended I get to know Giacometti, and I’m sure knowing him and spending time in his studio, which I found eerily fascinating now that I’ve seen more photos of it, would transform my life in Paris. I go back to his studio, not just once but almost as a matter of course, during the weekend and when I’m on my way back from work in the evening, and, once I’ve circled the street a few times trying to summon up the necessary resolve, exactly the same thing occurs: the same silence, the same embarrassment, the same abrupt scarpering. I’m just waiting for the moment when disgust at my own timidity will outweigh this awkward self-consciousness and allow me to knock confidently on the door.
Then I find out from the chit-chat at the office that Réalités is planning a major tribute to Giacometti since he has just died, after a long struggle with stomach cancer, in a hospital in Switzerland. He had never been in the studio when I went; all my shyness had been for nothing. The letter of introduction is folded and tucked back into The Portable Nietzsche for good.
Anne looks very Mediterranean, so much so that she could pass for Spanish, or even Moorish, and sometimes I picture her with a yashmak on, and it fits well enough. She has very dark brown hair and eyes, and even in the depths of winter she looks tanned. She works in the layout department of Réalités and she dresses sexily in leather jupes-culotte and dominatrix boots. She tends to overspend wildly on the latter, but since a registered letter came the other day threatening ‘poursuites judiciaires’ she has foresworn making out any more cheques that will bounce. I don’t really know how we got together, since she had a boyfriend already and I must have come across as simply on the make, which I’ve noticed tends to turn girls off. There was mutual attraction, of course, and then it just happened, in a kind of late-night lunge. We don’t seem to have much in common beyond enjoying Vietnamese food and the cinema, but I feel a lot less lonely and life in Paris has taken on a whole new dimension.
Anne lives in Alésia too, in a grim cul-de-sac that makes my street look positively effervescent, but she has decorated her flat in bright colours and made it much warmer and more attractive than mine. Writing late at night bundled up in overcoat and gloves in my freezing, empty room, I imagined I was insensible to any form of domestic comfort. But after regular dinners at Anne’s bigger, cosier place, which almost always end up by my staying overnight, I see how much pleasanter life is with a warm double bed and the prospect of delicious coffee in the morning. Apart from the orange curtains that are so bright even at dawn that they wake me up and a Siamese cat that appears to be constantly on heat, leaving an indelibly acrid smell behind, my life has improved hugely and Paris no longer strikes me as such a cold, hostile place. Or when it does, I take comfort in my mind by retracing the evening itinerary that leads me to Anne’s embrace: down the ominous-sounding rue de la Tombe-Issoire, perhaps dropping in for a quick browse at the second-hand bookshop if it’s still open, then along rue de l’Aude, which I know is named after the Cathar country down south but think of as rue de l’Aube, the street of dawn, as I look up at the sky, murmuring: ‘Run slowly, slowly, O horses of the night’…
As Anne and I clear away the dishes after dinner, a more practical topic surfaces. We are both paying rent, even though I’m hardly using my place any more, and the two rents together would easily allow us to find a much nicer flat in a much better area.
‘Like the Latin Quarter?’ I murmur, distractedly enough.
‘Yes,’ says Anne, ‘or close by, near the Jardin des Plantes, which I love.’
‘Would I have a desk where I could write?’ I ask.
‘Of course you would. And since you don’t like them, I could leave the orange curtains behind and give the poor little cat to my sister, who doesn’t even mind the smell.’
‘All right,’ I say fluently, draining my wine with the decisive air of a man experienced beyond my years and used to taking radical decisions rapidly. ‘Let’s go over this weekend and see what we can find.’
2
Behind Duchamp’s Door: 12 rue Larrey, Ve (1966–67)
If I’d imagined that Anne and I could retrace the steps of Villon and his bands of drunken fellow students swaggering through the Latin Quarter, I was soon disabused when I saw how many cheap Greek restaurants and tourist shops had crowded into the area. Acting on tips from various Réalités colleagues, we visited a couple of small, dark flats overlooking either narrow streets filled with noisy cafés if they were in the front or dank, depressing courtyards if they were in the back. What we basically had in mind was Anne’s flat, only bigger and better; and her idea of going a little further out towards the Jardin des Plantes, which I liked when she took me to see it, won the day. All we really wanted was a reasonable space with decent light, and we soon found it on rue Larrey, a short dogleg from the Paris Mosque, with its closely guarded interiors and its mysterious ceremonies, and the Jardin’s own wide-open expanse – an intricate ordering of the natural world ringed round by dusty-looking museums.
The street is a fair way from the hub of the Latin Quarter, where the old heart of the city lies embedded in a huddle of narrow, medieval streets, yet it still remains resolutely scholastic, close to some of the great centres of learning, like the Collège de France and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and home to every kind of academic and esoteric bookshop as well as specialist printers who would print and bind your doctoral thesis – or indeed your budding novel – overnight. The flat itself is high up on the fourth floor of a plain grey, late Haussmannian building, with a modest living room and bedroom overlooking the street, and a small kitchen and bathroom off the corridor behind. I’m reasonably happy about it but that’s probably because I don’t have much to compare it with. It’s much more spacious than my room in Alésia and considerably brighter than the basement I shared with my two ex-Cambridge friends in Chelsea. More than anything it gives me the agreeable impression that my life in the city is progressing: I’m no longer flitting from room to room, and I have a partner I can share both the nights and all the other pleasures of Paris with.
We can already lay claim to a friend in the area, a writer I met while mooching round the Latin Quarter bookshops called Jean-Claude Montel. I’m very impressed by him because, although barely a year older than me, he’s about to have his first book published. I like him instinctively for his warmth and spontaneity – it’s not often in Paris you strike up a conversation with a complete stranger – although I have to admit I can’t follow a lot of what he says, not so much because of the language, which I love to listen to as he goes off on some extended riff, but because there are so many literary, historical and political references I don’t recognise (I’ve even taken to noting some of the recurrent ones down, and from the Larousse in the office I now know that Paul Nizan was a brilliant philosopher who died young during the war, and Averroes a learned medieval sage who appears to have written about virtually everything then on offer). Jean-Claude has already invited us over to dinner at his book-lined apartment a couple of streets away in rue de la Clef (I take the fact that he lives on ‘Key’ Street as a favourable omen), which both Anne and I enjoyed, despite the fact that I was flirting with Jean-Claude’s cute girlfriend in what I thought was a perfectly discreet way until Anne turned her most baleful glare on me and sheepishly I desisted. The conversation then broadened out, with Jean-Claude talking about the area and the artists and writers who had lived there, telling us that our building, far from being ‘banal’ as I had self-deprecatingly called it, was where Marcel Duchamp worked when he came back from New York in the late 1920s. I found this heartening since it lent a new glamour to our address, even though I had only the sketchiest idea of what Duchamp did, and I pressed Jean-Claude to tell us more.
‘I don’t know much more,’ he said, flushing, and I real
ised this was the first time I’d heard him confess to any such lack. ‘I think he lived in a very small studio up at the top that he made more practical by designing one door that could open two ways, into his bedroom and into the bathroom. It became very famous, this door, so perhaps it is no longer there. Perhaps Duchamp took it with him when he left the space or perhaps some rich collector bought it.’
I make a mental note to ask the concierge where the studio is or was, since it brings such lustre to our building, but in the suddenly accelerated chaos of the move I completely forget. Since I have no furniture at all and Anne’s is limited to a bed, an all-purpose trestle table and two rush-bottomed chairs (mercifully, as Anne promised, the cat-sprayed orange curtains have been left behind), we begin making timid forays into some of the bric-à-brac stalls at the Puces de Saint-Ouen, coming away with a classic bistro table and a slender, elegantly turned ash wood bench. For a time the Puces becomes an obvious destination for the weekend, with Anne developing a taste for heavily ornate, jangly Indian jewellery and my buying a second-hand US Navy reefer jacket from which I grow inseparable. I’m happy to leave any further household decisions to Anne, which she seems to understand implicitly once we’d pooled our available cash for new sheets, towels and tableware. As soon as we get ourselves roughly moved in, I feel like an explorer parachuted down by chance into an area of strange temples and mysterious grottoes and can’t wait to get to know my new arrondissement better.
The Existential Englishman Page 4
