The Existential Englishman

by Michael Peppiatt

  Another pleasing aspect of my current existence is that Anne and I seem much more in harmony since we are both delighted with the changes in our situation. So it should follow that I just get down to improving my freelance prospects, pursuing my literary dreams and enjoying my generally enhanced lot. Instead, with implacably perverse logic, I do everything to upset the apple cart. Instead of controlling my infatuation with Danielle, with her unwavering gaze, friendship with Beckett, literary prowess and all, I fuel it. I memorise passages of her book, Meurtre, with its hauntingly raw evocations of madness and death, phrase by staccato phrase, fantasising that they were written to me, whom she didn’t even know when she wrote it – at a café in the Marais, which still serves her as a base when she comes into the centre of the city from her apartment up north in Belleville. Just as things improve with Anne, I fall more heedlessly headlong in love than ever, even though I could never conceive of a ‘steady’ relationship with Danielle, or even a passing affair. None of the conventions apply. She doesn’t attract me in that fierce, overwhelming way that I would immediately recognise as raw sexual need. It feels more like drowning than desiring, and it has something to do with her complete openness and acceptance, which makes me drop my guard completely. When I look into her eyes, I am naked and totally vulnerable. Being in love with Danielle has nothing to do with pleasure, not even with vanity. It is about some kind of truth that I feel impelled to find, a despair that has to be explored, and it is constantly, exquisitely, painful.

  We sit for hours opposite each other in another small café on the Ile Saint-Louis, where the owner discreetly polishes glasses behind the bar and no other clients ever seem to come in.

  ‘Tell me, tell me…’ she says, holding my hands in her cold, reddened hands. She seems to seek out cold and hunger, pain and suffering, as if they are the only real things.

  I look at her, swallow hard, try to speak. But nothing comes because there’s nothing to say beyond things I’m too ashamed to say and that she doesn’t want to hear: that we shouldn’t be here, breaking taboos, falling in love, setting ourselves up for a fall; that I want her, I want to complete this journey with her, I want to undertake that hard, dangerous exploration with her, but that I am weak and riddled with guilt because I already have a lover who trusts me and who I feel responsible for, just as I am beginning, I don’t know why, to feel responsible for this deeply hurt, unfathomable woman sitting opposite me.

  ‘Dis-moi, dis-moi…’ Danielle says again.

  How can I tell her that we’re both suffering before we’ve really begun, that the steps we have already taken into the labyrinth will lead us further and further in until we lose our way, lose ourselves and any notion of the normal life we have left behind.

  Stealthily, in anonymous hotels where rooms are rented by the hour, we become lovers. There is no transition or exultation, no before and after in this intimacy, only a shuddering cry and an increase in pain. I sense that Danielle has had countless lovers and that I am passing through her, diving through her to find where she is, who she is. None of the emotions I am familiar with have any bearing. I am not jealous of her past, more overawed by it, and she seems unconcerned about my relationship with Anne, as if it could never be of any significance. Danielle is freer, more self-determined and independent than any woman I have known. I also suspect that she is braver, more ‘virile’ than I. But now we are fully guilty, and for weeks we meet in these rented quarters, with their lingering smell of sex and urine, to explore our torment, to drag each other further down into the unknown, as if condemned by some exterior force to compound our transgression. Whatever it is that binds me to Danielle is stronger and more deadly than love. I glimpsed her pale, serene face the other day as she slept beside me and wondered whether it was someone to love that she wanted, or someone to die with. And through her, I suddenly realised, I had unearthed my own death wish.

  During the short, anguished moments we spend together, I try to glean a few stray facts about Danielle’s life. She was born in Brittany, and since both her parents were in the Resistance she was brought up by her grandmother; as a child, her dominant memory was coming across the body of a man hanging by the neck from a tree. Her brilliance and originality as a writer was recognised early on; although she was offered a place to study at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, she turned it down and found a job working in an art gallery, which gave her the freedom to live and write as she wished. She appears to have lived in very different parts of the world, in North Africa and Italy, New York and Thailand. The little I find out only underlines how mysterious she remains. It’s not that she tries in any way to create that impression. Enigma seems to be her natural element.

  I get a glimpse of the different compartments of her life as we go round Paris dropping into new cafés, where I’m surprised she is greeted as a regular, and into modest lodgings where she knows we can spend the afternoon. As we cross the lobby of yet another Hôtel des Voyageurs, key in hand and pulse racing, I inwardly hum ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, which I know by heart, to keep anxiety at bay. But we are not broken-hearted, like the lover in Elvis’s song. That’s something you usually survive. As we make love we are falling into darkness, falling further and further into an endless, deeply compelling black hole of despair.

  One of the cafés we often pass by at Châtelet but never go into is called ‘Le Terminus’.

  ‘It’s called the “Terminus”,’ Danielle says to me each time we walk past with a laugh, as if we are sharing a private joke. ‘“Le Terminus!”’

  I smile back. But I don’t give the name a second thought. It’s just where a lot of the Paris bus routes come to an end, and it’s where I get the 96 to go to Montparnasse. I have no idea what she means when she points it out or what state of mind she is in. Then I realise that my obsession with Danielle is not so much about what she is thinking and feeling but about her overpowering, almost annihilating impact on me.

  Danielle has disappeared, without warning. During the Algerian war she had close links with the FLN, and after May she disappeared to Czechoslovakia for a time. She never mentions her political involvement, which to me makes it all the more impressive, but now I am concerned that she may be in real danger. She could be anywhere in the world, and I would have no way of knowing what had happened to her. I’m suddenly aware of how secret our relationship is: I know nobody from her world, and she no one from mine. We exist only for each other, and now that she is not here, I feel as if my life has lost its centre.

  Danielle’s absence also creates a truce. As the icy spring thaws into summer, I no longer scramble to invent impromptu meetings and library research to explain to Anne my afternoon absences and late-evening returns. I can’t imagine she doesn’t know I am ‘seeing’ someone, but even though I constantly expect a showdown she gives no sign of realising that anything is amiss. I feel like an incompetent spy who is bound to be caught out, who deep down even wants to be caught out, and the constant froth of guilt all but boiled over a few weeks ago when I was with Anne waiting for the Métro at République and saw, against all reasonable expectation, that Danielle was standing right beside her, like some ghost in a Shakespearean play…

  With Danielle gone, I’m like a recovering alcoholic, still deeply dependent on her but realising day by day how much more in control and freer I am while she is not there. Anne and I take up our relationship where (in my mind at least) we left off, and we begin to discuss whether we’ll go back to Brittany in August or wait until the beaches are deserted again in September. I have come to love Paris more and more as it empties out, week by summer week, and turns into a mirage of shuttered shops and empty streets. When I walked into the place des Vosges the other day, it was like a great, empty stage, with only a big, old dog dozing in the shade of the central grove of lime and chestnut trees. Even the cars disappear, so that on a shining day in mid-August you can position yourself at certain crossroads – the place de la Concorde or the place Saint-Michel – and see the whole
silent city spread out unimpeded in front of you. Freed of traffic and pedestrians, Paris basks in the glory of its own buildings, monuments and bridges. Shorn of its present, its past becomes vividly alive. Whenever I can, I return to the tiny Ile de la Cité to remind myself of how it must have looked when the early, primitive Parisii moved out from their precarious settlement to either bank of the fast-flowing Seine, setting in motion a pendulum that was to define the whole evolution of Paris.

  I think I am freer but I spend much of my day like those early settlers retracing my steps with Danielle from Left Bank to Right and back again, stopping for long moments on the bridges, particularly at dusk, to watch the water slide by like time flowing beneath one’s feet. Why else do people pause so often as they cross the Seine, if it is not to feel more acutely their own lives slide past, minute by liquid minute? When I stand again in the middle of Pont Notre-Dame or Pont-Marie, I see her hand next to mine, both whitened by gripping the edge of the parapet hard, as if to stop ourselves from jumping into the void.

  But that is something I would never contemplate when I am alone, and now that the city has emptied out I return with a sense of deep relief to my explorations of the Marais. Since it is one of the poorest areas of Paris, not many people here can afford to leave the city but it is still quieter than usual and more relaxed, with the concierges sitting outside on the pavements sunning themselves. I slip more easily and often unperceived into the great residences, the hôtels de Sully, de Beauvais, de Rohan-Soubise, and some of the slightly lesser known ones, d’Albret (with its broken pediment and bull’s-eye window), de Saint-Aignan and de Guénégaud, glimpsing courtyards, staircases, frescoes and balustrades that I didn’t know existed. A smell of hot earth and dense vegetation wafts up from the overgrown gardens, and even the feral cats have slowed down to bask in the heavy sunlight. The confusion I have been living in begins again to recede, as if I had rediscovered my bearings, and I try to achieve some control over this love that has come into my life like a disease. But although I promise myself that I will never see Danielle again, I still whisper her name on the long summer afternoons as I pass my hands surreptitiously over the warm stones of the Marais’ palaces, letting the centuries that they have stood there and the history they have absorbed seep into my veins.

  PART TWO

  (1969–77)

  5

  The Empty Room: 17 rue de Poitou, IIIe (1969–71)

  ‘You seem in a better frame of mind. More yourself,’ Anne remarks cheerfully as we sit over breakfast planning our day amid the gleaming new crockery that she has been steadfastly purchasing. I suspect that, if nothing more glorious, I am one of the few international arts correspondents, freelancers or ‘stringers’ to lay claim to no fewer than three large new teapots.

  ‘Yes, I feel better in my skin,’ I reply gamely, making use of a good French colloquialism that I picked up recently. I’ve discovered that a way of becoming fluent is to use whatever new expressions you come across immediately, whether or not they have the slightest bearing on the situation in hand. I was amused the other day to hear someone whose mind was scrambled by a bad hangover saying, ‘My eyes aren’t in front of their holes’, and I’ve been trotting it out whenever I’ve got a hangover or am feeling a bit out of it, which occurs all too frequently. And at some later point I’m hoping to indicate the complexity of my inner state in a neatly balanced amalgam of the two colloquialisms: ‘I feel better in my skin, but my eyes aren’t in front of their holes.’

  Anne is also sounding more optimistic, and it’s true that our life together has become more normal now that Danielle is at least temporarily out of the picture. Like me, Anne has left Réalités, and she’s found a new job at the American Embassy as a layout designer on the in-house magazines that they circulate there. The job is not only well paid but comes with various fringe benefits. One of them is that Anne has her office in the prestigious town house just off the place de la Concorde where Talleyrand (memorably excoriated as ‘shit in a silk stocking’ by Napoleon) lived for the latter part of his glittering diplomatic career; I can’t go in there without thinking of the subtle guile it would have taken to have served three monarchs as well as the Revolution and Napoleon; I’m also tickled by the idea that, as a great gourmet, Talleyrand was said to spend an hour every day discussing recipes and menus with his famous chef, Carême.

  Another advantage for both of us is that Anne’s job gives her access to the embassy’s elegant staff restaurant, where we can eat attractively subsidised hamburgers and club sandwiches, and to the adjoining PX store, which has all the home comforts that Americans in Paris might lack. Over the past couple of years, without being particularly conscious of it, I’ve developed a robust anti-American stance, mainly derived from the endless, depressing news from Vietnam and what the camarades said about US imperialism generally; and for a while I resisted Anne’s attempts to lure me into the store. Then I went in once and became instantly hooked when I saw what was on offer at incredibly reasonable prices, from emblazoned sweatshirts and ox-blood penny loafers to cornbread mix and household goods of a quality that would cost a fortune elsewhere in Paris but come as standard here. The result is that Anne has replaced any stale bedsheets and towels with fine, smooth or fluffy American-made cottons; and now that I lounge around after my morning shower in a thirsty, toga-like bath sheet and fire up my first Gitane with a shiny Zippo, my anti-Americanism finds itself subtly but unmistakably on the back foot.

  But the best part of this new bonanza is that Anne has introduced me as an arts journalist on the Trib to a glib colleague of hers who works for the cultural attaché, and we’ve started getting the occasional invitation to events at the American Embassy. The most spectacular one was a reception at the newly restored ambassador’s residence, which stands next to the British Embassy on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The building is mid-nineteenth century, so much more recent and considerably more ornate than the classic Marais town houses (I’ve never seen so much blazing gilt), but being there with a host of people wandering from one glitzy salon to another and out into the gardens gives some idea of what it must have been like to spend an evening at the Hôtel de Sully, although a reception in that earlier, more restrained setting would have been comparatively formal and the champagne might not have flowed so abundantly. Above all, the host would probably have been rather cold and superior, whereas the US ambassador pumped my hand as we left, saying invitingly: ‘Come more often! Stay longer!’

  I’m something of a convert now, and Anne and I go to pretty much any function we’re invited to, aware that Embassy events not only bring glamour to our lives but help our strained budget by providing food and drink; I work out that once I’ve put away a dozen canapés and four glasses of champagne, I don’t have to worry about the next meal. We’re almost certainly on the ‘B’ guest list, but occasionally we get bumped up and invited to an ‘A’ list occasion, such as the lunch the cultural attaché organised for John Cage, who was in Paris having just published his ‘Song Books’. I was alarmed and then flattered to find that I had been seated next to him, until I guessed I was filling in for someone who had cancelled at the last moment. Then I became alarmed again since all I knew about Cage was what I’d picked up when I’d done some research for my Sunday Times interview with Xenakis, so I began my lunch by nervously downing several glasses of white wine and devouring every bread roll within reach. The austere-looking Cage, on the other hand, didn’t touch a thing, and he looked so preoccupied that I imagined, as an unseen hand began topping up my glass with claret, that he was composing another puzzling piece of silence in his head. As Cage continued to sit there wordlessly, my nervousness was transformed by the wine into a mindless babble that might have merely irritated Cage if I hadn’t chanced to describe a café I used to walk by in Barcelona, imagining it to be incredibly noisy since everyone in it was gesticulating wildly, only to find when I did go in a total, eerie silence, because it was the place where all the city’s deaf-mutes congre
gated to communicate in their vigorous sign language. Cage snapped out of his trance and began questioning me minutely about the experience for the rest of the lunch, which concluded with his resolving to visit the café and absorb that particular silence himself.

  These occasions are few and far between, though, and since I’m working at home I’m trying to become sufficiently organised and disciplined to keep my weekends free to spend time with Anne. When Danielle left, I was relieved as well as saddened, and I thought, as guilt began to relax its corrosive grip and I started to behave more normally, my old relationship with Anne would be revived. But it hasn’t happened, and it’s entirely my fault. There is a waywardness in me that, coupled with brute sexual drive, is stronger even than the pangs of guilt that pursue me like the ancient Furies, digging in their talons at unexpected moments of the day and riding roughshod over my panicked dreams. Perhaps because I felt cut so adrift in my secret liaison with Danielle, or that I wanted to free myself from it, I’ve taken advantage of passing opportunities to create a diversion. If it sounds like a recipe for disaster, it probably is. There’s been a Swiss divorcée (who told me the only positive thing she could say about her ex-husband, a dentist, is that he recommended the toothpaste she still uses); and an American painter, who suspects that the Paris art scene isn’t ready for her huge, explosive, abstract canvases, although she has also produced some vigorous heads of me where my features emerge quite recognisably out of a mass of warring, smudged charcoal strokes. Then there is the French general’s daughter who plays squash vigorously at the club I joined recently. It was only after we’d been to bed that she announced that she was about to get married, so she wouldn’t be seeing me again. But I have something to remember her by since she passed on a virulent dose of the clap, and as I wait at the Hôpital universitaire with a variety of other sheepish males for my injection, I go through in my mind the members I know at the squash club on rue Lauriston in the chic sixteenth arrondissement (the street, incidentally, where the French Gestapo tortured their victims) who might have given her the disease; and slowly I grow convinced I know who the original culprit was. Once I’d taken my jabs like a man and got over the unpleasant infection, a letter in her handwriting arrived at rue de Poitou. I opened it, terrified that she might be declaring herself pregnant, particularly as I saw the general’s name looming sternly out at me from the top of the card as I extracted it. But no, it was a tastefully engraved pasteboard invitation to her wedding.