As I stare at the mausoleum door, considering how best to gain entry, some tourists pass by my spot. I duck behind the ferret-laden wall but couldn’t be sure they hadn’t seen me. It was a pair, man and woman I think, slumped over each other in matching red cagoules. He was wearing a Jimmy Morrison T-shirt and sobbing theatrically on his partner’s shoulder. Still drawing crowds, she was saying in French, patting his hair. They were holding cheap plastic flowers in their arms. Honestly: Apollinaire, Éluard, Stein and Toklas — all these graves and you choose Jimmy Morrison to fawn over. I suppose for most people it is not so much the graves that draw you there as proximity to the idea of who might lie beneath them, marking the mark they made on you.
I am pretty sure that they did not spot me, but one can’t be too careful. I had been lucky so far because of the rain: no one had seen me scale the wall in the CCTV blind spot and enter the site, and all of the paths I had taken were tumbled down and grown-over, completely empty of the selfie-stick hordes. This couple was the only problem I had encountered. That was fine: I had time and it was worth my while to be scrupulous. I set my mouth in a straight line, made sure all my paperwork was safe in my pocket, and watched them as they rounded a corner away from me.
I stalked them for a while, picking my way over the reaching elbowing tree roots and avoiding the more vocal crows that were strutting about. We passed Balzac, we passed Chopin. They bickered and sobbed the whole time — it was quite extraordinary to watch. What a business, I said to myself as I smelt the air and hopped from grave to grave charting their progress. They checked their guidemap about an hour into their walk and after a huge row — voices raised, raised hands — they went in different directions. I hope the wife left to go apply lipstick and make her way to Oscar Wilde’s grave to give it a big old kiss. That’s the tradition, isn’t it? Anyway, the now-lonely man’s sobbing was very rude and distracting and louder than ever, putting me off, making me angry, so I ran up to him and broke his neck, etc., etc., and dragged him off the path. I propped him up beside a grave where the name had been worn away, off the beaten track. The weather did something Gothic, the crows turned their backs, the trees shook heads or hands above me in the wind.
No challengers, you know, I whispered to the cold man. No hard feelings, pas de sentiments forts. I’m thorough about these things.
I stayed with him for a while to make sure he would be quiet for ever and ever, and told him about my ideas for spending the money, how I’d spend the year with Elisabeth. I told him about my whiteboard in my parents’ attic where I’d set about making my plan — the plan about all those powerpacks in my rucksack to keep my phone going as long as possible, the plan to send an email automatically to the officials who control the Père Lachaise site about where to send the money once the year is up. I told him and his now-greying hands about the gun, and how I’d keep anyone out if they tried to remove me. I emphasised the word they with a ferret-like hiss. I told him even about my parents and I think I cried a little on his Jimmy Morrison t-shirt. Then I dried my tears and told him about heraldic testicles and we both cheered up, I think, and all in all it was very pleasant until the flies came, always so quick.
I made it my business to leave.
Paris: A Manifesto in Twenty Arrondissements
Julian Hanna
1.
We met at a hostel on Rue Mouffetard where I was staking out the ghosts of my literary idols. “How many arrondissements have you visited?” she asked. Never having registered the existence of any arrondissement except the fifth and sixth, I answered: “Two”. She said: “You should really learn to drift [dériver]. Paris is like a vast board game, suitable for endless play. But when you die it’s over — for you!”
2.
Will I ever collect the letters you sent poste restante? The narcissism of love drawn out by the fever dream of Paris is insatiable, it has no end but death. Nothing has faded in the least: every visit to Paris is as fresh and vivid as the moment I last walked these streets, dreaming awake. The post will wait for you — but for how long? How many dead letters can it hold? I drank too much and forgot to collect them; you wouldn’t tell me what they said. I wrote from Paris: I’m in Paris. I wrote to another woman, missing you both (such things are possible). All those letters are dead now, and Paris is still Paris.
3.
Never have I found out what I want from Paris, or what Paris wants from me.
4.
Have you read À rebours? The yellow book that corrupted Dorian Gray came from Paris. When Wilde was convicted of gross indecency he resisted the temptation to take the night boat with the others, choosing to stay and fight the philistines. When he was freed he returned to Paris, finally having no alternative. London was left to those without sin, while the sinners went to Paris. (That is why this is about Paris and not London.)
5.
Paris is Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise: fame, sex, death. Robbie Ross (who now lodges in the same tomb in a convenient little cubbyhole) gave the job to the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Epstein was a true cosmopolitan: raised by Polish Jews on the Lower East Side, he moved to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts and was later sucked into the Great London Vortex. Why the modernist Epstein? Epstein, whose next project was The Rock Drill, a terrifying transhuman figure fused with an actual drilling machine; Epstein, who served in the Jewish Legion and left after a breakdown without firing a shot. When he finished it, the tomb was declared obscene by French customs police. Unveiled by Aleister Crowley it wore a bronze butterfly to hide the Sphinx’s balls — now it sits encased in glass to keep out the necrophilic kisses of adoring fans.
6.
We discovered that Latin Quarter cafés were too expensive and intimidating, so instead we wandered in cemeteries for free. We nosed around Shakespeare and Company, still grubbily bohemian under old George’s stewardship, with army surplus sleeping bags laid out in the upstairs rooms. We bought cheap editions of Colette and Duras and Sagan.
7.
Will it ever be like that again? Then it all felt like a different era: the Paris of my dreams, the Paris of Proust and Pierrot le fou. But now it seems like the same era: cinemas projecting celluloid, cafés without laptops, letters written and received poste restante, photos that remained unseen till you returned, heavy stacks of paperbacks, cigarettes anywhere you liked (except at Le New Morning), ignorance of the world beyond the city walls, so beautifully cut off from anything except Paris. The timeless analogue city spread out in front of you, international but not yet global, the city in the age of mechanical but not yet digital reproduction.
8.
Never was there an authoritative source for anything — only occult tips passed from stranger to stranger like secret passwords, like currency between young lovers. We left our provincial towns and descended on Paris like the chosen ones, wearing black polo necks in the hope we’d be recognised by others like us, smoking idly in cafés while we waited to be sucked up into the mother ship of Western culture.
9.
Have you ever been a local? Emma Bovary, stuck in the sticks, dreamed of Paris:
In the city, with the noises of the streets, the hum of the theatres, and the bright lights of the balls, they were leading lives where the heart had space to expand, the senses to blossom.
I know the feeling of walking through somebody else’s fantasy on your way to work. But when I go to Paris I forget myself and fall headlong into the dream.
10.
Paris is a firecracker exploding in a carriage of the Métro with a deafening bang, then another and another, as smoke fills the enclosed space and the bomber-jacketed boys who lobbed them in at the last second, just as the automatic doors slid shut, stand doubled over in laughter on the platform. You suddenly realise you’ve arrived on Bastille Day, this isn’t just any normal day in Paris — or is it?
11.
We drank cheap wine at an outdoor table, watched the stack of little saucers we’d read about growing higher by the hour,
noted the warm feeling of rising intoxication — reading, writing, eavesdropping, looking — all perfectly manageable until you try to stand and pay the bill, and you miss the step and fall down into the moonlit cobblestoned street.
12.
Will I write a letter to the new lover whose room I just left, her scent still on my clothes, and another to the old lover, who is still unaware of being “the old lover”? Caught in my romantic reverie, standing on a bridge in Paris like so many others have done forever into the future and the past, I think: yes. And I will send a third letter to the wife I haven’t met yet, warning her never to let me go to Paris.
13.
Never had I breathed air and drank wine like this. I grew up in a city of a few thousand, less than a hundred years old. The people there never thought to do anything but live and work and die. How does a city like Paris exist with this level of romance? Doesn’t it interfere with everyday life? How do people go on with Métroboulot-dodo, surrounded by the scent of sex and the sight of the Sacré-Coeur, steeped in the sound of the language spoken by Stendhal and de Sade, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir?
14.
Have you ever stayed out all night, wandering between the banks of the Seine, smoking unfiltered Gauloises and talking to stray dogs, killing time in never-closing cafés?
If you have serious ideas about life,
If you make artistic discoveries
and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter,
if you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that
IT IS PARIS BEGINNING TO SPEAK TO YOU
15.
Paris when you were free to travel and nothing was recorded, no one saw the band except the people who were there in the room. Travelling was a dream, because nothing could be verified and nothing made any sense or had any purpose and no one could even find you for weeks or months at a time.
16.
We never really had Paris, but we didn’t want to have it anyway. We only wanted to breathe the air of Le New Morning for a while and drink overpriced coffee at Le Select.
17.
Will we ever have it again? Let’s meet somewhere cheap and dirty and far from the tourists. In a basement bar where we can kiss and not be recognised (but still be seen).
18.
Never has there been anything like Paris in the brief gap between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet, when the poor could finally travel and everyone saw the City of Light for the first time. Maybe there were other times, but this was one.
19.
Have you read Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris? He is sitting in a square, Place Saint-Suplice in the Latin Quarter (where you’ll likely sit). He describes everything that happens, which is to say nothing (just as you’ll do in that pristine notebook you’ve got hidden in your bag). The book could go on forever but it stops after about fifty pages. Three days drinking coffee and brandy and watching buses and pigeons and nuns. Does he exhaust Paris? No — Paris exhausts him!
20.
Paris is inexhaustible — there is never any end to…
Paris Montage: Coincidence is the Mystery of the Metropolis; Montage Crystallises that Chaos
Richard Skinner
i. Gare de Lyon, twelfth arrondissement
These people are fools, but did I have the nerve? I was scared at first but, after a while, there was an ecstasy in it. We lifted wallets, handbags, watches even. The best time of year was during summer when the station was crammed full with tourists, travellers, merchant stands, porters and station agents. Me and my accomplices (whose names I never knew) worked all through the summer. Every day was the same— “Can I do it?” — and every day I managed it. It became an addiction. They say you should never return to the scene of the crime but, when my two accomplices were arrested, I couldn’t resist. I pushed my luck too far at the Hippodrome. I got sloppy. I lifted a bundle of cash from a woman’s handbag while she watched the horses but, as soon as I left, two men appeared either side of me. It was Jeanne who taught me that prison is a model of the soul. That’s where I found love.
ii. Champs-Élysées, eighth arrondissement
“New York Herald Tribune!” There she is. My little elf with her petite figure and short hair. It’s crazy, but I love her so much. But she doesn’t love me, I know. That’s a pity. What a fox she is. She seems happy to see me. She smiles. I buy a paper and ask her to come to Rome with me. I hate France. She doesn’t answer. I know she lies. I caress her silly lies, she’s got brown eyes. Sometimes, I get furious because I’m sad. That cop. He shouldn’t have got in my way. It’s too bad but you have to live dangerously till the end. Life’s pretty funny, you never know what’s around the corner. I guess I’m weak. I pass my idle days with my idle ways. I wonder why she never wears a bra. Later, after I’ve seen the guy who owes me money, we’ll make love, I know we will. I want her too much. I’ve got jazz playing in my head. It’s nice to wake up next to a girl. She keeps me warm, but we never kiss. And later on, maybe I’ll tell her my real name.
iii. Boulevard Raspail, sixth arrondissement
It’s horrible to have to wait for bad news. I know it’s bad news, I can feel the cancer in my stomach. It changes the way you look at everything, like someone has reached inside your brain and wiped everything clean. I have always felt the desire to be desired — my singing career, my fans have meant the world to me, defined me — but now I just wish people would leave me alone. I feel like an accidental tourist in my own life. Everything feels strange, new. My dress feels silly and whimsical. My lover doesn’t really love me, my friends don’t really care for me. I now realise a great many things that I should have before. But I couldn’t see them and, even if I could, I didn’t want to admit them to myself. It’s time to face up to a lot of truths. I’ll live every day as if it’s my last, because it could be. Time has stopped. I’m wandering aimlessly in the city. Perhaps I’ll go to the Dôme for a cognac. I’ll kill time before it kills me.
iv. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, sixth arrondissement
I’m sick of it. Why is my luck so bad? I was born under Leo, the luckiest sign of all, but no luck for me — it’s pathetic. Where are your friends when you need them? Gone. Disparus. Just like that. When the news came through that my aunt had died and left me all her money, I was going to be a millionaire. I was going to have it all. Instead my lousy cousin got it. I’m penniless and on the streets. The sole of my shoe flaps. It’s embarrassing. I have to search through bins for food, or I steal. A street vendor beat me up the other day for stealing a tomato. Just one tomato. The last straw was spilling that sardine oil on my trousers yesterday. That bothered me more than anything. The nights are the worst. Sleeping on the hot streets and blocks of stone and then, when the vicious sun rises yet again, the light bounces off them, blinding me, burning me. There’s no escape. The sun is a monster, the city a cage and I am a clown.
v. 1 Square Albin-Cachot, thirteenth arrondissement
Oh, where’s the house? Is it this one? Yes, this one, but I don’t dare ring the bell. Instead, I walk on by and pretend to look in a shop window. Oh, who’s that entering the building? She must be one of the girls. She looks normal, like me. I imagine her climbing the stairs, going into a nice bedroom, undressing and getting into bed ready for a client. I picture a man hitting her, then holding her down roughly. I’m hot with shame. But I’m excited, too. There’s a bench over there. I sit down and take a deep breath. What am I doing here? For no reason at all that I can think of, the tears come. My husband is a kind man. He treats me well, but he treats me as if I were a child. I’m not a child. I have to do this or else I know I will leave him. I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I dry my eyes and put on my dark glasses. I’ll try again. I walk to the door and ring the bell. It buzzes open. I think of the priest and his wandering hands. The stairs are many and spiral. I climb them.
vi. Rue Mouffetard, fifth arrondissement
I came to my
new home here in the city with just one bag and a cardboard box. I left everything else behind. The country villa, the piano, my life. Everything was gone. When I arrived, the first thing I did was take my daughter’s mobile out of the box and fix it to the ceiling. The blue crystals remind me of her. The café on the corner is nice. I spend a lot of time there. Well, I have nothing in the new flat, just a bed. One day, just outside the café, a street musician played one of my husband’s pieces on a recorder. I hear the music in my head all the time. It was a sign. I’ll finish my husband’s piece. Then the young man turned up with my cross, which he found at the scene of the accident. He wanted to meet me to return it. I agreed to meet him for a coffee. His earnestness was absurd. He told me my husband’s last words, but they were a punchline to a favourite bad joke of ours, which I repeated. I told him to keep the cross. Some months later, the numbness started to go. Then it was just pain. If this is Liberty, I’d rather be a prisoner of love again.
vii. Eighteenth arrondissement
I’m so sick of it all. The world is ours? No way. No life here, no jobs. Just trouble. I’m so bored. That’s why we go into the city and fuck things up a bit. This time, we called in on Saïd’s crazy drug-dealer Astérix. Kung fu? Fuck that shit. He was an asshole. Then we got jumped by the police. Just like that. Saïd and Hubert both got nicked but I escaped. I watched a movie. Can’t remember what. I smoked a joint. I saw a cow. I fell asleep. I saw them again at the station. We missed the last train. We walked around the streets. We crashed a gallery with its shit art. Saïd and Hubert chatted up some girls. They were stuck up. Everyone was. Hubert lifted a credit card though. Ha! We tried to use it to get a cab back but no go. We tried to steal a car but some drunk guy interrupted us. We went to the mall and saw on the news that Abdel died. Then we beat up a skinhead. Hubert told me to shoot him, but I couldn’t. I gave him the gun. I don’t want it no more.
viii. Rue des Iris & Rue Brillat-Savarin, thirteenth arrondissement
We'll Never Have Paris Page 12
