I rewatch The Tenant. The French supporting cast are dubbed into English, with American accents. In that regard, it’s a mess, but the scene with the severed head is still beautiful.
I watch Monsieur Hire for the fifth time and Michel Blanc’s title character listens to the fourth movement from Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor for the hundredth time as he stands at his window watching Sandrine Bonnaire’s Alice in the apartment opposite. It is, I now think, possibly the saddest film I’ve ever seen.
12.
I figured I had until Friday. Although maybe she worked weekends and had nights off in the week.
I’d grab four or five hours’ sleep each evening and get a shower, but, more importantly, I had a space that was my own for part of the day. The effect of haunting the Gare du Nord during the small hours was isolating. Choosing to be alone in Marie’s apartment was different. I could sit and think, read her books, smell her clothes. I could be close to her. One night, ten minutes after leaving, I pictured the coffee left out on the table rather than put away in the fridge. My body flooded uncomfortably with warmth. I debated whether to go back and decided the risk that she would return while I was there was greater than the risk that she would correctly interpret the meaning of the coffee on the table.
The following evening I found the coffee in the fridge and, on the table, a postcard from Cécile saying she would be away for the rest of the month. I undressed, put my watch down on the nightstand and got into Marie’s bed. I pulled the covers over my head and imagined she was there with me. I was tired but sleep was a long time coming. When I woke, I sensed that something was different. I tensed, listened. The rattle of a letter box. There were two other apartments in the building, but neither had shown any signs of life. I got out of bed, straightened it, grabbed my clothes and shoes and, as I heard footsteps on the stairs, slipped into the closet. I pulled on my jeans as I heard a key being inserted in the lock.
13.
I heard somebody enter the kitchen, deposit a bag, rummage, light a cigarette. The uncorking of a bottle of wine, the pouring of a glass. I stared through the slats, but focused on a mental image of the kitchen. Had I left anything out? Then, what lay in front of me swam into focus. The nightstand — my watch. I heard movement. A shadow entered the room and Marie walked around the end of the bed, passing within inches of me. She put her glass down on the bookshelf and moved to the bed. With the angle of the slats, I couldn’t see her top half, but if she were to look at the nightstand she couldn’t fail to see my watch. Her movements suggested she was undoing buttons. The white blouse landed on the bed. She moved to the bookshelf, picked up her glass and left the room. After a moment I heard the shower. I opened the door, took three strides, recovered my watch. The door to the shower room was open. Marie was in the shower with her back to the doorway. I entered Cécile’s room to get my bag. In the kitchen I saw Marie’s glass on the table, the bottle next to it. I poured half a glass and drank it. As I closed the door, the sound of water ceased. I crept downstairs, put on my shoes and left the building. I looked up at the kitchen window, as a silhouette passed across it. Marie would have poured herself another glass, her lips, which I had kissed only once, meeting the imprint of mine on the rim. I waited in the shadows until the kitchen light went out, leaving the faintest hint of another light within. A few minutes later this was extinguished also. I checked my watch and left.
14.
The next time I went back to Passage des Soupirs was late at night. After midnight. The window was dark. I removed my shoes before climbing the stairs. At Marie’s door, I paused, listened. Nothing. No crack of light. I turned the key, listened. Nothing. I pushed open the door, stepped inside, closed the door behind me. Listening. Nothing to hear over the thump-thump in my chest. Without my bag (left-luggage locker), I advanced unencumbered. On the table: handbag, cigarettes, lighter, ashtray. Draining board: wine glass, residue.
There was a creak.
I froze.
Deciding Marie had turned over in bed, I moved towards the doorway. There was a hump in the bed, facing away, towards the nightstand. I listened. Deep breathing. I entered, took two steps to the end of the bed. Waited there for a moment, listening to the breathing, which remained the same. I moved to the side of the bed and bent down. Her mouth was slightly open. A lock of hair had fallen across her forehead. I lifted it away. As I removed my hand, a sigh escaped her lips and she shifted her head. I froze again. As she turned on to her other side, her eyes opened — then closed. In seconds her breathing found its rhythm again. I walked back around the bed, took a last look from the doorway and passed into the kitchen. I put my hand into her bag and found something soft. The red silk scarf. I lifted it to my nose and breathed in, closing my eyes. I tied the scarf around my neck and moved to the door.
15.
“Belleville,” says the recorded voice on the Métro, with an upwards inflection on the second syllable, as we approach, and then, “Belleville”, with a dying fall on “ville”, as the platform appears. “Couronnes,” asks the voice, answering, “Couronnes,” with that same downward cadence. “Ménilmontant.” Up on the last syllable. “Ménilmontant.” Down.
I ascend to street level and walk up Rue de Ménilmontant, past vape stores, mobile phone shops and Cash Converters, past graffiti on the ends of buildings painted by people born since I was last here. I turn right into Rue du Retrait and left at the end into Rue des Pyrénées. In the plate-glass window of the hairdressers on the corner, I catch a glimpse. Even at night, the red scarf stands out. I take the steps up.
As I walk down Passage des Soupirs, I insert earphones and listen to Christian Miller. There’s a light on in the window of what was and could possibly still be Marie’s apartment, so I wait for the track to finish and then walk on to Rue de la Chine and then Rue Pixérécourt until I get to Rue de l’Avenir and I see what I didn’t see before: Rue de l’Avenir, angled away from anyone walking north up Rue Pixérécourt, is a dead end.
On my way back to Passage des Soupirs, I listen to the Brahms. I listen to it once, then remove the earphones and put them in the left-hand pocket of my jacket. From the right-hand pocket I take out the keys. The window on the top floor is now in darkness. Just as I haven’t changed much in thirty years, it’s possible the locks haven’t either.
Paris, You and Me
Gerard Evans
You may say I’m a dreamer / but I’m not the only one.
As a child, hearing John Lennon sing this line, and indeed this song, freed something within me — gave me permission to go beyond what my parents had presented as the harsh parameters of reality, beyond the presumed ridicule of my friends. In my mind, I leapt over fences and obstacles to where I wanted to be. To where I wanted the world to be.
To read later about the events of Paris 1968, made me feel others had also dared to step over a line in their heads. Little did I know that Paris would be the place where my dreams came true.
I mentioned to my mum that I’d been asked to write about Paris and her immediate response was “Ah, city of romance!”. Because it is, isn’t it? OK, there’s the Situationists, the French Revolution, the Left Bank, the artists and Sartre and all that, but my mum cuts through pretension and knows what matters. That’s the measure for me.
Some background: I got an email one day, that’s how it started, though it wasn’t apparent at the time that the two lines within would turn my life upside down forever.
It was from a woman called Joanna, who enjoyed my writing. We started conversing. To cut a long story short, I lost my heart.
It happened over the course of six months, as penpals, before I even knew what she looked like, which was around five months. Emails got more regular and more anticipated. Meeting was the obvious next step. She agreed and my keyboard knees went weak.
I was very angry indeed back then — freed up by punk, years of Thatcherism and bitter political arguing had stuck me on a nihilist cortisol carousel of anger that I couldn’t get o
ff, often robbing me of nuance and pleasantness. This was reflected unapologetically in my writing, so the idea that someone could read that, warts and all, and still want to meet me was the chance of a lifetime. I knew the stakes.
But where to meet?
I suggested Berlin. It felt like a geographically generous gesture, being much nearer for her in Poland than me in London. As time ticked on, however, I lost faith in the idea of Berlin: I’d only been once, a week after the wall came tumbling down and I didn’t enjoy it at all. It felt aggressive and lacking in the charm that I’m told it now possesses. Berlin was also, more crucially in this context, a psychologically safe place. A place that treads a neutral friends/ lovers line. At forty-two, I’d been single for ten years and achingly lonely for most of those — a quiet desperation, a grief without a pang. Life hadn’t begun at forty. Berlin felt like a cop-out from what I really wanted. Like playing a 7 instead of a King.
Places in this context demand big questions. Was I about to meet a friend or were we already in love? Can you be in love without meeting someone? Yes, of course you can. You can be in love with an idea of love and you can be in love with the idea of a person. Their physical presence merely adds a third layer to the idea in some ways.
So I suggested a change of venue to Paris, the city of love, and nervously awaited the email response to the suggestive nature of the choice. Cards on the table.
Is Paris actually like that, a city of romance? It doesn’t matter. If reality is simply a consensual agreement — as it surely is — then ideas of cities are clearly that. We both saw Paris as the city of love and that was more than enough to make it a subjective reality. There’s no such thing as objectivity in love. Or cities. Remember, some people love Stoke.
I emailed Joanna and suggested we change the venue. Her response email simply bore the title “Paris, you and me”. I cried. Because I knew. The code was fading into clear text.
We met. I was just a dreamer and she was just a dream. I wasn’t in awe of the bohemian side of Paris, but Joanna’s dad evidently was. He was a successful Polish artist, now bedridden with a particularly nasty cancer. A photograph of her basking, with a Cheshire Cat grin, on the Left Bank was a beautiful gift to send him in the final weeks of his life. I will always regret that we never got to meet.
Anarchists in love? Perhaps, but really the only part of that sentence that we were thinking about was love. Neither activism nor Bohemia were of particular interest here. Paris was the city of romance and romance is an open ticket.
We spent three days living in a 1950s Hollywood movie. Paris was the perfect setting. We bought into that idea of reality and made it ours for those glorious days that remain the best of my life so far. We talked existentialism with sincere pretence; we walked lost in our bubble for endless anonymous miles, oblivious to the surroundings — though they generously let us do that. We kissed endlessly in parks and drank wine on pavements and fell in love as completely as any couple could. It was an innocent time devoid of cynicism and cerebralism. It was an innocent beauty all lovers know. I knew. Joanna knew. Then came the new.
Paris was the city where I started to stop being angry, subtly shifted my focus, and started living. Not magicwanded overnight perhaps, but I can trace back the chrysalis of the person I now am exactly: to midday, 31 July 2005, by a fountain on Place de la Concorde.
Reader, I married her. That was thirteen years ago to the day, as I write, and we are still as in love as we were on that first day. More so. We live in Sussex, in the UK, but we’d love to live and love once more in Paris one day. We dreamed the love and then lived the dream. She’s sitting behind me in the room as I write this and I’m reflecting on being the luckiest man ever. Before that, I never believed love could be like the films, but the evidence was overwhelming. Paris was a part of that evidence — the backdrop but also the collaborator. Berlin may have been the same had we ended up there instead, but for reasons unknown to me, Paris made it all downhill.
The Che Guevara quote comes to mind of course: all revolutions are born of love and all true love causes revolutions. Thirteen years on, my feelings toward Paris remain benign, romantic and grateful. Whether or not all this talk of Paris and romance is a construct or not isn’t of the slightest concern. Because Paris was the city of my revolution — they can’t take that away from me.
As a final aside, I revisited Paris last year with Joanna but also with my band, to play on an eclectic bill in a basement nightclub near the Seine. The line-up was good, but the audience were better: better than any audience we’d ever played to in Britain because they danced, dressed and interacted like the genuine creative freaks we’d always wanted to play to in London. Finally I get to stand on a Paris stage and sing about taking your desires for reality. The next morning, me and Joanna slope away from the band for a breakfast of pizza, espresso and wine. The restaurant has sparrows flying freely to catch all the drops off the table.
If Paris is what you make it, then I must admit I’m kind of pleased with myself. I was reasonable, I demanded the impossible. And got it.
Flogging a Dead Clothes Horse
Thom Cuell
When we came back the next morning with the same news, Malcolm was still in bed. Finally, Malcolm grew tired of it. He picked up the phone and started screaming to Sid about what a useless junkie he was and so on. Meanwhile, Sid had given the phone over to Nancy and while that was going on, suddenly the eighteenthcentury door of Malcolm’s hotel room flew off its hinges. Sid crashed into the room wearing his swastika underpants and motorbike boots. He dragged Malcolm out of bed and started hitting him. Then Sid chased a naked Malcolm down the corridor intent on beating the shit out of him. The ancient floorboards went up and down like a ship as the chambermaids started screaming “Monsieur, monsieur. Stop! Stop! Stop!”
— John Lydon, No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1994)
Paris appears in the English imagination as a city of romance and rebellion. The Parisian spirit of insurrection has rarely been seen on the other side of the Channel. In particular, the general strike which took place in Paris in May 1968, with its heady mix of sloganeering and civil disobedience, has served as a touchstone for a certain vintage of English dissenter. One such dissenter was Malcolm McLaren, boutique owner and manager of the Sex Pistols.
If we believe McLaren’s account, the Pistols, and punk in general, were his attempt to recreate a Parisian moment (the 1968 Situationist uprising) in a London context. As the experiment crumbled he sent Sid Vicious to Paris to try to force a synthesis of the two movements. The danger of this approach became apparent one evening, as his hotel room door flew off its hinges to reveal Sid, clad only in underpants and leather jacket.
The enragés of 1968 became the template for stylish urban guerrilla because theirs was the first revolution to be globally televised. The insurrection had begun with the occupation of college girls’ dormitories — a signifier of the adolescent energy which is common to both rock and roll and revolutionary politics. McLaren and some early cronies, including designer Jamie Reid, attempted a similar sit-in at Hornsey Art School in June that year, but their efforts fizzled out. In December, McLaren was apparently involved in a famous action carried out by King Mob, whose members infiltrated Selfridges dressed as Father Christmas, handing out stock from the shelves to passing customers (later obliquely referred to by John Lydon in the lyrics of “Anarchy in the UK”). Three years later, in May 1971, British anarchist group the Angry Brigade channelled the spirit of 1968 by bombing a boutique. McLaren, by contrast, decided to set one up.
McLaren’s next attempt to recreate May ‘68 occurred when he forced the bedraggled remnants of the New York Dolls to tour the southern states of America, dressed in red patent leather outfits and performing in front of a Soviet banner. Unsurprisingly, the experiment ended with the band’s implosion. The right setting was yet to be found.
*
After he returned from New York in 1974, McLaren completely redesigned his store. The
interior was crafted to resemble a bomb-damaged London street, but the true inspiration was revealed by the pictures of Left Bank life displayed in one window. Outside, the London of 1975 was beginning to resemble the Paris of 1968: Roger Perry’s photographs of the graffiti of run-down West London showed the writing on the wall.
With his nose for trouble, McLaren liked this volatile atmosphere: he thought it might set up sparks. Yet this instability also caused real damage, not least to the person who thought he was in control. McLaren liked to play with fire but, in entering the world of John Lydon and his friends, he would be dealing with psychic material far more combustible than the stuff he was used to.
— Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming (1991)
One of McLaren’s famous early T-shirts featured a list of loves and hates, under the slogan “One day you’re going to wake up and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on”. The shirt didn’t mention any of the Parisian Situationists by name, but did include the first usage of the name “Sex Pistols”. A subsequent design, the “Only Anarchists are Pretty” shirt, explicitly referenced Paris ‘68 with slogans such as “Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité”. With his scattergun approach to iconoclasm, McLaren supplemented this with negative images of Marx and inverted Nazi insignia, creating what Jon Savage called “a chaos of meaning”. Later, “Prenez vos désirs…” would be used in a Crédit Agricole advert for loans.
McLaren and his associate (and later manager of The Clash) Bernie Rhodes made an abortive trip to Paris in December 1975, attempting to sell their retooled revolution back to the French. They were more successful in September the following year, when the Pistols arrived to perform their only French concert, at the Chalet du Lac. This time, the band unveiled McLaren and Westwood’s Anarchy shirts, and the new bondage suit. John Lydon was surrounded by fashion photographers, while McLaren and Westwood were dubbed “couturiers situationnistes” by Rock News magazine. The response to the Anarchy shirt must have been gratifying to McLaren, who told Paul Gorman in a 2007 interview that the French anarchist movement had “really framed my critique… this particular shirt celebrated that”.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 18
