The close proximity between the Lariboisière and the Gare du Nord has always attracted some of the city’s most destitute individuals. The journalist Maxime du Camp already noted in the 1870s that the hospital “welcomed the puniest and most anemic part of the population of Paris,” but today the down and out come for the “salle de shoot”, Paris’s only safe injection site for drug users, which is housed at the hospital. Some of these users gather at an entrance to the Gare du Nord at the bottom of the Rue de Maubeuge. “Do you know who I really am?” shouts one woman continuously as I walk past, but she’s not looking at me. Are train stations chosen by people lost inside their own heads because they offer at least the possibility of a destination, the opportunity to get “back on the right track”?
Finally I am inside the station. The glass canopy gives everything an immense scale, but the Gare du Nord lacks that most poetic of locations: the salle des pas perdus. The Gare Saint-Lazare and neighbouring Gare de l’Est have these antechambers, once empty spaces where travellers paced aimlessly, their purposeless footsteps literally being transformed into lost energy. Today these halls are micro shopping centres, designed to optimise the time people spend in the station, but the Gare du Nord does not even have a waiting room. Instead, with platforms extremely close to the entrances, travellers arriving early or waiting for delayed trains are forced into tight spaces as train replenishing vehicles ping relentlessly past.
When they began mushrooming in cities in the nineteenth century, train stations were quickly compared to cathedrals. Claude Monet painted both, and Théophile Gautier, writing about the Gare du Nord, noted that “in comparison with recently built churches, we easily see that the railway is the religion of the century.” But if the St Pancras station, at the other end of the Eurostar tracks, has the grace of a great temple, the Gare du Nord is more of a crumbling gargantuan shrine.
It may give a scruffy initial impression of Paris, but I like idea of the Gare du Nord as a kind of secular church, a pantheon to function and a shared sense of adventure. Which is the most important in today’s city, the train station or the cathedral? Outlining a project for “Rational Improvements to the City of Paris,” Guy Debord — him once again — along with other members of l’Internationale lettriste movement, had different destinies in mind for both. Whilst religious buildings were slated to be completely or partially demolished, all members agreed that train stations should be kept as they are. “Their rather moving ugliness adds much to the feeling of transience that makes these buildings mildly attractive,” they noted. The only improvements they recommended were to remove or scramble all visual and aural information regarding departures in order to promote the dérive.
In 2012, the artist Sal Randolph also chose to play with the sensation of both rigour and mystery that is peculiar to train stations. Randolph created the Bureau of Unknown Destinations, a three-month residency at the Proteus Gowanus gallery in New York that encouraged temporary displacements by train. What if you turned up at a station one day and really didn’t know when and where you were going? In addition to a downloadable Psychogeographic Destination Kit that anyone could — and can still — use, Randolph also distributed free round-trip tickets. The adventure began with the opening of an envelope that revealed the destination. Liberated from the decision making process, the traveller was free to truly experience small unknowns.
This morning I could go to Amsterdam or Düsseldorf, Cherbourg or Amiens, to another country or to the extreme limits of France. Or why not just take a stopping service and get out at a previously unimagined suburban town? Until the middle of the 1990s I could even have taken a daily train, complete with vintage Soviet carriages, from here all the way to Moscow.
There is the attraction of the unknown, the excitement of discovering a previously unvisited location and experiencing new scenery on the way, but there is also the melancholy of tracks followed many times before. Has the Gare du Nord become my terminus? Looking out to where the tracks narrow and join, it seems that my country of birth is now further away than ever. The steel alloy cords are stretching longer, the tunnel is getting a little darker. The electric pull is now little more than a gentle pulse, but I still stand listening to the tracks and imagine that some of the messages are for me. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Poisson Soluble
Lauren Elkin
We met at the Salon du Livre, and we met again on a street corner near the Gare du Nord, as I had been wandering without any particular destination in mind, and he had just had his hair cut at a barber’s he liked in the neighbourhood. He stopped me with a hand on my elbow. I let him leave it there, less out of a desire to be touched than out of a lack of desire to shake it off. Nadja! Mon âme errante, he said.
Yes it’s me, yes it was very nice to meet you the other night, I said politely, because he had been very enthusiastic about his offer to help me with my writing career, even though we were standing in the stall belonging to my French publisher, and even though I thought I knew what he had in mind, which didn’t have much to do with writing. But I recognized in his enthusiasm a self-regard that I didn’t want to insult: beneath his lasciviousness it seemed important to him to be someone who could help me.
The March weather was indecisive; it was mildly cold; it showered a bit; but underneath my peacoat I was sweating. Yes yes it’s very funny to run into each other like this, in the road like this, I said in my passable French which occasionally wandered into fluency but mostly generated non-essential words and phrases and apologies that left my listeners confused. Very English, my French, highly reflexive. We crossed the street together as he told me about his friend whose car had broken down after the Salon and how he had had to drive to Porte de Champerret with jump leads to help him out even though he had been all the way in the south of the city at the convention centre where they held the Salon. He told me about how while he was up at the Porte de Champerret he stopped in a café for a drink and sat in the window where the neon sign advertising the industrial lager served there lit up his table green and yellow and turned his hands green and yellow and he took out his notebook and began to write about green, and yellow, and industrial lager, and jump leads and meeting me. I had made quite an impression, he said, the way my eyeliner had been a little bit smudged under my eye, but English girls always have slightly smudged eyeliner, don’t they? he said with a knowing smile. I haven’t really noticed, I admitted. That’s the sort of thing you should try to pay attention to, as a writer, he told me. Shall we have a drink in this café?
I allowed him to steer me into a place on the corner of a large boulevard. Inside it was very full of people escaping the rain; there was only a table in a cramped corner by a window with two short stubby stools for seats, placed not on either side of the table, but adjacent to each other. We squatted down, and I tried not to let my knee touch his, but there wasn’t much space to avoid it. He wore deep purple trousers, and a crisp blue shirt, and a violet and blue scarf was wound around and around his neck, below wavy silver hair that was slightly too long for London, but seemed right here. His sweater, of course, was slung around his shoulders. He asked me what I wanted to drink, and called out our order to the waiter. He all but called him garçon. It was impressive to see someone take charge of the café situation that way. I usually waited until someone came over to me, which could take a long time.
He asked me what I was working on, and no sooner had I begun to tell him than he began to tell me about what he was working on: it seemed he saw some continuity between our projects, though I had simply said “by chance,” par hasard, and he said “chance, le hasard, this is the very theme of my next book.” It was interesting to see how he pivoted from asking to telling, from genuine curiosity to that state you often see writers enter into when describing their work, as if they had been waiting all day, or all week, to be given the time and space to talk about it at length, and they gratefully settle into whatever time and space you would give them to do it, as i
f you’ve offered them a comfortable chair after a long day of standing.
Chance, as he saw it, was less to do with the vicissitudes of daily life or the controlled chaos of the universe and was entirely a question of paying attention. He could just as easily have been engrossed in his own thoughts, he said, crossing the street, having just had his hair cut; he could have been in pursuit of the next thing in his life, but instead he was walking in Paris, attuned to his environment, looking at the shopfronts, and the people, and the things they left strewn on the ground, and he was dodging cyclists in the bike lanes, which, he said, were idiotically inserted into the sidewalks, endangering pedestrians who didn’t pay enough attention to where they were walking, and who were often run over in spite of the printing on the asphalt which read priorité piétons, priority for pedestrians.
I hadn’t noticed the bike lanes, though it did explain why several cyclists had shouted at me or pinged their bells at me. And so in paying strict attention to his surroundings he was able to pick me out of the crowd of people crossing the street at that intersection, and so receive chance into his life, whereas had he not been paying attention chance might not have come his way.
Or it might have, I said. That’s the thing about chance, isn’t it? Maybe in running into me you’re not running into someone else you know.
My ex-wife does live around the corner, he admitted. Better to run into a beautiful and mysterious Londoner than her sour face. He had been married three times, he said. The current marriage was better than the other two, although she could be a bit clingy, and she didn’t like to go out as much as he did, preferring to read at home with the dog in her lap and the cat somewhere nearby. He didn’t wear a wedding ring, and I wouldn’t have expected him to.
He asked if I had come over specifically for the Salon du Livre. I said no, I often took the Eurostar to Paris for no other reason than I liked to be here, it was a good counterpoint to London, and this trip I had come with an open-ended ticket. I started to tell him how claustrophobic London felt these days, as if the city itself were narrowing, along with our futures. I had been toying with the idea of moving to Paris, and thought I still might, though I would need to decide quickly, before I needed a visa or something to do it. It’s all very unclear, I said, what is going to happen now.
He looked thoughtful. Some people can’t take the feeling of too much space in the world, he said. They want to feel snug. Like babies. You have to swaddle them or they freak out.
I sipped my coffee and imagined the Brexiteers swaddled like babies, slotted into an army of prams pushed by a million Boris Johnsons in bloomers and bonnets.
They are the enemy of chance, he went on. We have them here too.
I didn’t really know anyone else in Paris, so I saw him often. Chance became his watchword; he was truly a man obsessed. Always he would choose a street corner at random from his plan de Paris (no Google Maps: that was cheating), text me the address, and when we arrived we would walk into the first café we saw. He told me I should let chance guide my work, to be open to what it would conjure on the page. I acted like that’s what I always did. He fixated on my name, which he found all the more fascinating because I had given it to myself. And you’ve never read André Breton, he said. You’re sure. No, I said honestly, I just liked the name better than what my parents named me, which was Ashley. Nothing against the name Ashley, it just didn’t suit me. And Nadja does, he said. Yes, I said, reddening, at least I like to think so. It’s the beginning of the word hope in Russian, he said, and only the beginning. That’s why Breton’s Nadja picks it. I didn’t know that, I said. I thought it sounded exotic, like a woman who would wear brocade and fur. Ashley sounds like she should be wearing her boyfriend’s football jersey. It does, he agreed, topping up his pastis with some water from the carafe. And do you wear brocade and fur? Not very often, I said.
How is your French getting on? he would ask, and I would say badly, badly. Oh well never mind, he replied, André Breton lived in New York for years and protected himself carefully from English the whole time, so as to preserve the purity of his French. I lent him a copy of my book in French, and in exchange he brought me a copy of the Surrealist Manifestos. He made me read the Poisson soluble section aloud to him in my shaky French, correcting my pronunciation as I went. I looked up a translation at home. POISSON SOLUBLE, am I not the soluble fish, I was born under the sign of Pisces, and man is soluble in his thought! The flora and fauna of Surrealism are inadmissible. I was indeed born under the sign of Pisces, but I decided not to tell him as it would only over-excite him.
It was just as well he didn’t give me his own work to read; his novels sold very well but had titles like La Femme sur le balcon and Retrouvez-moi ici un jour. For all that he seemed like such a publishing world operator the night we met, at every meeting subsequently he was like some kind of self-declared priest of literature, never speaking of it as a business, only as a cult he served.
One afternoon we ran into a friend of his, an American writer, a man, of about his age, who was writing longhand in a black notebook in the corner of one of our cafés. This is Nadja, he said, and I held out my hand. Pleased to meet you, I said. You’re English, he said, shaking it. What are you doing in Paris? This and that, I said. Well, he said, with what I can’t be sure wasn’t a sneer behind his friendly façade. Enjoy it while you can. Soon it’ll be just as difficult for all of you to go anywhere, just like it is for us. We can go anywhere, but we can’t stay. See you around, he said, and turned back to his notebook.
He was always wanting to talk about my dreams, and I was always disappointing him, because I’m a terrible insomniac, and when I do manage to sleep it’s with a kind of dreamless relief. He thought dreams were the supreme conduit to creativity. How do you think I come up with the plots for my novels? he said, waving a hand, as if they hung from the walls like intricate tapestries. Wanting to prove my connections with the occult and therefore my unassailable access to creativity, I promised that the next time we met, I would read his tarot. He was in ecstasy at the idea. It’s you I’ve been waiting for, my Nadja, it’s sheer marvellous accident that has brought you into my life, you are the one to read my tea leaves and tell me what you see there, tell me and I’ll believe you!
I brought my cards to the next café, all the way down by Alésia, and I probably did play up a bit the part of the mystical young woman, which he seemed to enjoy. When he drew seven cards in the form of a horseshoe it was the Knight of Cups who landed at the top, looking so stately in his armour, bearing the grail seriously in front of him, the wings on his helmet making him look a bit like a minor Greek god.
A Knight! he exclaimed, very pleased with this result. Tell me about this knight.
I recited what I remembered from the book that came with the cards. The purity of his horse, the evenness of his progress, all attest to his belief in fated patterns, and his own role in them. The Knight is well-acquainted with his inspiration and his creativity, I told him. He is not the young Page just starting out, amazed by the fish jumping out of his cup. But he may be too engrossed in his own self-perception to notice if a fish did jump out of his cup. The cups are the suit of feelings, especially love, and consciousness of those feelings. They are about nursing your creativity, and your relationships, not taking them for granted, or fantasizing them out of recognition. Yet the Knight can’t get down off of his horse without spilling whatever is in his cup. We’re all a little bit asleep, I concluded. It’s what we see when we’re asleep that can guide us when we’re awake, he said. I nodded, and moved on to the next card: the Hierophant.
That night at home I drew my own cards. I was going to have to make a decision about where I was going to live. They were inconclusive. Nothing dramatic, all minor arcana. Be brave, they said. At night I didn’t sleep, and tried to find my way through the beginning of a new novel, trying to let chance shape the text as it would.
My walks were making me feel ever more emboldened in the city; I could cove
r so much ground in a day, from the vaulted medieval streets in the 5th, where I’d once rented a very small maid’s room, to the packed streets of Château Rouge, where everywhere you turned there were people selling grilled corn on the cob and fish wrapped in leaves and some kind of milky liquid in plastic water bottles. I picked up playing cards I found in the street, intending, later, to think about what they might signify. I passed a lot of attractive women. I thought a bit about the girl I’d left behind in London, who was probably at her judicial assistant job at that precise moment, certainly not thinking of me. I thought about Baudelaire. I thought about how I used to read him in high school by torchlight under the covers like an idiot because I thought it was more romantic, or more rebellious, than just leaving my light on. I thought about the Poisson soluble section the writer had made me read, where Breton says that childhood is the closest we come to living our real lives, and that everything that comes afterward gives us a sense of having gone astray. I thought that no one who had grown up in Bromley in the 1980s, who had worn a scratchy brown uniform to school, who had slept in a damp chilly house and eaten boiled vegetables for dinner most nights while begging to be taken to Pizza Hut on the high street, who had rationed pastel-coloured bits of candy on a necklace until they turned your skin pink and blue, who had sat dully by as your friends collected scented stickers, who had waited desperately to grow up and get away, but was vaguely concerned about IRA bombs and Poll Tax riots and not at all sure how one could avoid getting caught up in such things, could ever think that that was real life and everything else a wrong turn. I thought about when they opened the Channel Tunnel, and you could suddenly drive or take the train to France instead of taking the ferry, as we had done a couple of wet summers in my childhood, before heading down to some unspeakable and unmemorable camping grounds in Brittany, where none of the other families spoke to anyone outside their caravan group and ate only sausage rolls they’d brought from home, and the only music we could get on the radio was French pop, all the more strange and foreign for the resemblance it bore to our own pop music, all synths and power chords, but sung in an impenetrable language. With the Eurostar it was as easy to get to Paris as it was to get to Bromley from north London — easier, probably. For now. I thought of my writer friend, and the way he seemed to think about adulthood the way Breton did. It seemed easy for him to think that way, having grown up right here, in Paris, near the Jardin du Luxembourg, with all of that literary and cinematic history steeped in his everyday life. He could afford to think about his life however he wanted. He could believe in chance: he had a mould just waiting to cast himself into. There was safety in that. With his scarf, and his quotations, and his raptures, and his trousers, he could not have existed elsewhere — he could not but be a Parisian writer. While the rest of us make what we can of ourselves.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 28
