I’ve been like this for over a week, trying to make myself eat at the right times, and trying to stop smoking, which I should have given up long ago. I kicked the Gitanes when I got up to over two packets a day because they made me feel sick in the morning, particularly when I had a hangover. Then I took up small Dutch cigars, the long, thin panatellas which come in an embossed, cream-coloured tin, kidding myself that they’d be better for me because I wouldn’t be inhaling them. But of course I did inhale them, more and more deeply once they no longer made me dizzy. And now I’m dragging on them as if my life depended on it, even though they irritate my lungs and make the cough far worse.
It’s the tiredness, the general debility, that get me down most. Yesterday I struggled up and out for the first time to go to the doctor’s appointment Anne had booked for me. While he kept me waiting, I wondered how I could describe my tiredness to him to make the diagnosis a bit clearer, but when I was called it wasn’t at all as I’d expected because the doctor himself was sallow-looking and unshaven, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth in a smoke-filled room.
‘Tired? Tired?’ he kept repeating, throwing his hands in the air theatrically in a gesture of despair. ‘You don’t think I’m tired seeing sick people for ten hours every day? They all come in with whole shopping lists of what’s wrong with them, and of course they’re all tired, tired to death, every man jack of them.’
Having lit another cigarette, he sent me out with a prescription for cough syrup and vitamin C. Seeing the doctor look so ill made me perk up a bit momentarily, since I realised I wasn’t the only one to feel so badly run down, but I picked up the paper and saw that Jean-Paul Sartre, looking very frail on the front-page photograph, had been arrested for selling the banned left-wing La Cause du peuple on the streets. A whole wave of nostalgia for all the already half-forgotten madness of May 1968 – with Danielle at the centre of it – washed over me before I reached the rue de Poitou. As soon as I got to the apartment I climbed back into bed, longing for sleep, for oblivion, to diminish the pain; but I just lay there anxiously in the dark, listening to my erratic heartbeat, fearing that if I slept I might not wake up, and knowing that everything would get worse before any light dawned at the end of this long, black tunnel.
No sooner had I broken with Danielle than, with some insane idea that making a clean breast of it would solve the situation, I told Anne, who I think already suspected, about everything that had been going on. We then got into an almighty row, with both of us saying things about each other and our relationship that were both true and so viciously expressed that they’ve stayed imprinted on the air between us. I suppose the next move was predictable. I’d suggested a while back to Anne that, since her mother had settled a tidy lump sum on her, she should use it as a down payment on a small flat before it got frittered away on clothes; and she’s found a cheap place high up in a down-at-heel building on the otherwise pretty rue des Minimes, just north of place des Vosges. The idea was that she should rent this out to pay back the loan she had taken to complete the purchase, and we congratulated ourselves on how grown up we’d become, not to say how staid and bourgeois. But now Anne has decided to move out right away and live in her pied-à-terre herself until she can afford something better. I’d expected this to happen, deep down I wanted it to happen (and that was probably part of the reason I advised her to buy a place), but I’ve been taken aback by how quickly the whole situation has changed. Even sharing the possessions we have accumulated didn’t take long, since Anne was very reasonable and I don’t really care whether I have one or two teapots, particularly as in my present mood I can’t foresee hosting a tea party any time soon. In fact, I can’t even foresee where I’m going to live now that I’ve given the landlord the usual three months’ notice.
Anne has been looking in twice a day since I’ve been ill to make sure that I’ve got enough to eat. It’s very nice of her, and I’m all the more grateful since it’s entirely my fault that we are no longer living together. Oddly, now that we’ve decided to split, we get on much better, probably because we both appreciate having more time on our own. I certainly have all the time in the world, because everyone at Le Monde has been very supportive, telling me to take however long I need to get better and have a preliminary look round for a new place to live. I’m going to take my own advice and, as I recover, try to find a little studio in the area to buy. It must be something in my English upbringing, but it seems obvious that even in the short run it makes more sense to own than to shell out rent every month. Since I have next to nothing in the bank, the very idea would have been unthinkable if Le Monde hadn’t come up with an extraordinary offer to lend any employee that applies for it up to one hundred thousand francs interest-free to buy property. There have been murmurs of ‘paternalism’ and ‘récupération’ from some of the more left-leaning editors, but I didn’t hesitate to put in for the loan. I’m not altogether sure I’m eligible, since I’ve only just got going there, and of course they may have some proviso that you have to have French nationality to qualify. Still, the possibility of finding a place of my own has got me out of bed and asking around in the local cafés and in the scruffy little agencies that deal at the lower end of the market.
Meanwhile, a number of well-rehearsed rituals, performed mainly around lunch or dinner, fill the lonely days. One takes me right across the city to the picturesque Conservatoire Rachmaninoff, just beside the Seine in the sixteenth arrondissement. This whole area would normally be right outside my beat, but once you’ve wangled a student’s Conservatoire card, which is easy enough, you can eat very cheaply and well in the canteen, starting with borscht and pirozhki, then moving on to a substantial beef Stroganoff with kasha or a lamb shashlik. All the waitresses are old White Russian émigrées, so bad-tempered that at first it takes your breath away as they curse you, then slap a dish down before you as though you’re a dog, making French waiters look almost amiable by comparison. But the trick we insiders have is to pride ourselves on their rudeness, like connoisseurs, egging them on to further feats of incivility so that before long you go to dine there as much to be on the receiving end of their boorishness as for the food.
My other spontaneously regular itineraries lead across the river for a quick browse at Shakespeare & Co, where wispily bearded George Whitman sits, smoking endlessly and spitting noisily into a tin he keeps at his elbow. Although the selection of new and second-hand books is so varied you often find something of real interest, the atmosphere has always felt fake to me: an American tourist’s idea of what a bookstore abroad should look like, with its evocations of the Beat Generation and a bevy of scruffy-looking would-be writers scribbling away in corners all over the shop. Before it closed, Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare & Co on the rue de l’Odéon was of course the real thing, because the best writers gathered there at a time when that meant Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, Joyce and Pound; and of course this expatriate bookseller (who moved in the same lesbian circles as Natalie Barney) had the distinction of looking after the needy Joyce and publishing Ulysses. But that was the magic moment when Paris attracted every great writer, and to some extent Whitman’s rickety old façade and sagging bookshelves enshrine it, so I always look in whenever I pass by. Other invitations to browse crop up all over the quartier, one of my favourites being José Corti’s bookshop on rue Médicis, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, which specialises in the Surrealists; earlier on in its history Corti himself actually published work by Breton, Eluard and Aragon, which for me gives his dusty premises a special aura. From there several elegant streets lead down to place de l’Odéon, but I usually choose the rue de Condé for its closed, sternly classical façades which snootily exclude you as you make your way towards the flow of human traffic on boulevard Saint-Germain. I’m too overawed by the Flore and the Deux Magots’ reputation to go into either on a whim, but I enjoy circling round them, envying the groups of people, clearly less impressed by their literary and artistic h
istory than me, sitting nonchalantly over their drinks. Just behind the two famous cafés is the Petit Saint-Benoît, a traditional, red-and-white-tablecloth bistro which I hear writers who live in the area like Sartre and Marguerite Duras use day by day as their ‘canteen’. I’ve actually had supper there a couple of times with Bacon and Duras (whom Bacon knows through Sonia) and I’ve enjoyed the straightforward food and unpretentious atmosphere a lot. But I’ve never seen Sartre settling down to his salade aux lardons and boeuf gros sel. Someone told me he’s become so famous now that he barely goes out for fear of being mobbed by fans. I went in there the other day under my own steam for the very first time, thinking my finances could stretch to their lunchtime dish of the day, but there was still no Sartre, nor indeed anybody I could put a name to.
I can’t afford these restaurant-bound sallies often, and now that Anne isn’t ministering to both our needs, I’ve hit on ways of eating economically. The Auvergnat shop on rue Rambuteau where I’ve been buying cured meats and cheeses since I arrived in the Marais has a particularly good York ham that they carve by the slice, and I noticed that when it dips towards the bone they take it out of its metal truss and put a new ham in. So I asked if I could buy the old ham bone, which they sold me for a couple of francs, and I’ve managed to get three meals and a soup out of it; since the Auvergnat owner regularly puts a bone aside for me now, this has become a staple, along with other easily prepared things like eggs and salad, pasta and rice. But if I’ve been working all day, I like to get out in the evening, and the simplest, cheapest option is to go to the Pied de Cochon, the largest and most popular restaurant in Les Halles. You usually have to push your way through a heaving crowd of meat porters in their bloodied white gowns to get to the bar, but once you’re there, standing under the bright yellow neon strip lighting, you can get a steak or grilled pig’s trotter and chips, with a couple of beers thrown in, for the price of a starter in fancier establishments. I go there a couple of times a week now that I’m alone because it’s not just cheap but cheerful, and the banter going on between the porters and the girls serving behind the bar veers quickly from the merely suggestive to the downright lewd. One of the simpler games is for a waitress to bang down a large Toulouse sausage on the counter before you and inquire: ‘Is that yours?’With the basic pattern of life so clearly displayed, from the dead meat swinging on hooks in the Halles’ huge pavilions and the living consuming it off the zinc, there seems little point in beating about the bush, since the porters have only one thing in mind and the whole outlying area is patrolled by prostitutes. Often that is the last contact I have as I wend my way home: a shadowy figure in a doorway cooing endearments. But I tell myself I’ve fallen far enough from grace to want to engage in a stale, bought embrace, and to drive the point home I boot a half-rotten cabbage from the market refuse along the pavement until it cartwheels under a bulky, abandoned barrow. I walk over to retrieve it and continue my game, but I’m brought up short by the sight of a body in an ancient overcoat curled up, and presumably asleep, inside the barrow, its head and shoulders wedged as if for protection into a broken orange crate.
All my walks take me past Châtelet and the Café Terminus, and I wonder why Danielle always remarked on it. Had she foreseen the end of our relationship? It’s possible, but I doubt whether she had any idea that I’d break up with Anne as well. From having too much of a private life, I now have exactly none, which is a nice piece of poetic justice that I’m beginning to cope with, even savouring at times the complete freedom it brings. In any case my most pressing worry now is that, unless something changes soon, I’ll end up like that poor sod in the wheelbarrow with nothing but an orange crate over my head. I still haven’t heard whether Le Monde will give me a loan (my going in there so sporadically these days can hardly help) or found a studio I like, and new tenants have already been lined up to move into 17 rue de Poitou. When Anne told me that, if I was really up against it, I could stay with her for a while, I was hugely grateful but horrified by the idea. It would be deeply embarrassing for us both to be cooped up together again in a poky little space. On the other hand, it’s starting to look like that or some sort of hostel, and in the end she and I agree that whatever money I’d be saving would be better spent as rent given to her to pay off a fraction of her mortgage.
The moment I move in, of course, I can’t wait to get out. The worst thing about being down on your luck isn’t so much that you no longer eat as well or sleep as comfortably as the unforeseen humiliations it brings. The only loos in Anne’s building are communal, one for the six little lodgings per landing, and there’s nothing like squatting in one of these evil-smelling stalls while praying that a sudden intruder won’t send the flimsily locked door flying open to bring you down a peg or two. The lodgings, with their scuffed floral wallpaper, are more like cheap hotel rooms because only a cardboard-thin partition separates them. Next to where we huddle in self-conscious separation, our old double bed strictly divided down the middle by an imaginary sword, another couple live as if completely unaware that we are there, a few feet away. I say a ‘couple’, but it is only the man we hear regularly berating the silent wife in guttural Arabic. It sounds as if he slaps her during these tirades, which are punctuated by a series of very loud farts. There is no escaping him. Both Anne and I have banged on the partition so hard that it seems about to fall down, but our protests are greeted by a further, patently sarcastic volley of farts. I have come to loathe this creature next door so violently that I can only fall asleep once I’ve imagined all the ways I might beat him senseless.
He leaves very early in the morning, and by the time I get back from Le Monde he’s already at home behind a locked door. I lie in wait, but in vain. Then one morning I see him coming out of his lodging as I come up the stairway and I stride over to him with my fist raised. He’s slight, dark and ferrety-looking with a prominent moustache, and he cowers gratifyingly against the wall. A short, sharp jab on the nose, then a left hook to his sallow cheek is all it needs. ‘What are you doing?’ I suddenly ask myself, appalled at the rage rising up in me. ‘You can’t hit a man for farting.’ I drop my fist, and still trembling walk quickly back down the stairs, trying to contain my fury. About the only advantage of this awful hole is its proximity to place des Vosges. I swing in under the big archway and hope the square’s massive, red-brick symmetry will begin to calm me down.
‘It’s your own fault you’ve fallen this far,’ I tell myself angrily as I criss-cross the formal parterres, breathing deeply and invoking the wise, far-sighted shade of Victor Hugo, who lived for a large part of his life in the house in the corner opposite. I’ve learnt that the foulest moods can be lightened by the unexpected. Did Hugo ever use a Turkish latrine and have a man fart at him, I wonder. Almost certainly, in that long, extraordinarily eventful life. I take heart at this, and the situation, as I trudge once more round the fountains, comes slowly back into perspective.
‘Once you’ve reached rock bottom,’ I reflect, ‘surely all that happens is that you either die or slowly rise back to the surface…’
6
Stone by Stone: 11 rue de Braque, IIIe (1971–72)
I’ve just dragged my arse into Le Monde full of Monday morning gloom, with our frigid bed, flimsy walls and phantom farter all too sharply etched on my mind, and there’s an official-looking envelope waiting for me on my desk. My first thought is that I have been fired. That wouldn’t be such a surprise since my appearances at the office, between emotional upheavals and illnesses, have been increasingly intermittent. I’ve refined the technique I used at Réalités of taking articles away to write or edit at home, the only place, I insist, where I can satisfactorily recast yet another French journalist’s disquisition on the ‘meaning’ of May ’68 or a review of a little-known, and no doubt justly forgotten, drama by Corneille for the vaguely ‘Anglo-Saxon’ audience our publication is supposed to be aimed at.
That way, of course, I can avoid the worst of the office routine and the ever-gro
wing tensions of office politics. Over the last few months the number of part-time sub-editors, translators and indeterminate odd bods drifting through Paris and landing at Le Monde en anglais has tripled. People I have never seen before waft in from the corridor, slide behind any available desk, sometimes putting their feet up in a B-movie imitation of the hard-bitten journalist, then proceed to boss the secretaries around. Others creep in mousily, and I regard them with equal suspicion since they just hunker down and make whatever half-baked work they’ve been given last all day. As our increasingly unstable Barry Lexington puts it in a loud, fake Southern drawl as he surveys their bended heads: ‘Them’s all just carpet bugs, sport, that’s found a place to curl up and go sleep in.’
I open the letter stealthily, but rather than a curt dismissal I find a complex form with numerous sub-clauses in tiny print offering me a loan of 80,000 francs without interest over a period of three years for the purchase of property. I glance at the bowed heads around me with a sudden swell of magnanimity: these poor sods have to make their way too, I think, stowing the contract carefully away into my inside jacket pocket, then gathering up an impressive sheaf of articles to edit at home. When I explain to our editor, Anaïs, that I won’t be back until I’ve finished working on these texts and also, hopefully, found a new place to live, she barely grunts because she is interviewing the latest batch of would-be temporary hacks and relishing their slavish attention.
There’s a café-bougnat on rue de Braque, a short street that links rue des Archives with rue du Temple as graphically as a dash in a sentence, where I’ve been a few times for lunch and a glass of wine. It’s a gritty kind of place, literally, because it provides coal and other fuels to the neighbourhood, and metaphorically as well, because you can just imagine a Jean Gabin-like worker in sooty overalls humping sacks of coke to his clients as proletarian tragedy and flickering shadows enfold him in a grainy, black-and-white film. And here we don’t have to look far for our Gabin: he’s a younger, plumper man called Bébert (short for Robert), married to the delectable Marie-Hélène, who runs the café-restaurant part of the establishment, serving drinks and good, cheap food while flirting outrageously with the locals who flock to her zinc-covered bar like animals to the trough. I’ve become fond of this place while I’ve been living in the Marais because it couldn’t be more basic – a mixture of stall-holders selling fruit and veg on nearby rue Rambuteau, welders, gilders, plumbers, ‘characters’ of all kinds without any evident means of support and the odd artist or photographer type – yet it really is a cross-section of the area, intensely human and intensely real. Bébert and Marie-Hélène both hail from the Auvergne where all good bougnats are traditionally supposed to originate, and they still have some of their staples, like the salt-cured ham and saucisson they serve, sent up from the small town where they were born. When I was at my lowest, having just broken both with Danielle and with Anne, I’d gone in there several times and appreciated their rough good humour as much as the excellent boeuf en daube, usually served by Bébert with his coal-smeared hands between deliveries of fuel.
The Existential Englishman Page 16
