Paris Stories

by Mavis Gallant

  “Well, it was a long time ago,” said Grippes aloud, as if the sender of the letter were sitting on the edge of a kitchen chair, looking pale and seedy, smoking nervously, displaying without shame (it was too late for shame) his broken nails and unwashed hair. He fixed on Grippes nearsighted gray eyes, waiting for Grippes to show him the way out of all his troubles. The truth is, Grippes announced to this phantom, that you have no rights. You have none as a tenant, none in your shaky, ill-paid job, none when it comes to applying to me.

  Perhaps by now the man had come into a fortune, owned a string of those run-down but income-producing hotels crammed with illegal immigrants. Or had lost his employment and been forced into early and thread-bare retirement. Perhaps he was an old man, sitting down to meals taken in common in some beige-painted institutional dining room with soft-hued curtains at the windows. A woman said to be the oldest living person in France had frequently been shown in such a place, blowing out birthday candles. She smoked one cigarette a day, drank one glass of port, had known van Gogh and Mistral, and remembered both vividly. Perhaps the writer of the letter, in his frustration and desperation, had joined an extremist movement, right or left, and gone to live in exile. Wherever he was, whatever he had become, he had never received a kind or a decent or even a polite reply from Henri Grippes.

  Grippes felt humbled suddenly. Political passion and early love had in common the promise of an unspoilt future, within walking distance of any true believer. Once, Grippes had watched Utopia rising out of calm waters, like Atlantis emerging, dripping wet and full of promise. He had admired the spires and gleaming windows, the marble pavements and year-round unchanging sunrise; had wondered if there was room for him there and what he would do with his time after he moved in. The vision had occurred at eight in the evening on Sunday, the tenth of May, 1981, and had vanished immediately—lost, as one might have read at the time, in the doctrinal night. At the same moment, a computerized portrait of François Mitterrand, first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, had unrolled on the television screen, in the manner of a window blind. Grippes had felt stunned and deceived. Only a few hours before, he had cast his vote for precisely such an outcome. Nevertheless, he had been expecting a window blind bearing the leaner, more pensive features of the Conservative incumbent. He had voted for a short list of principles, not their incarnation. In fact, he resented having to look at any face at all.

  Utopia was a forsaken city now, bone-dry, the color of scorched newsprint. Desiccated, relinquished, it announced a plaintive message. Grippes placed the newspaper clipping, the coffee spoon, and the envelope side by side on the kitchen table, like exhibits in a long and inconclusive trial. He turned the spoon over and read the entwined initials of his ex-friend upstairs. Short of calling Mme. Parfaire to ask if she had ever, in any year, slipped a spoon into his pocket, he had no means of ever finding out how it had got there. Had he taken it by mistake? Only the other day, buying a newspaper, he had left it on the counter and started to walk off with another man’s change. The vendor had called after him. Grippes had heard him telling the stranger, “It’s Henri Grippes.” Respect for authors, still a factor of Paris life, meant that the other man looked chastened as he accepted his due, as if he were unworthy of contemporary literature. Apologizing, Grippes had said it was the first time he had ever done an absentminded thing. Now he wondered if he ought to turn out the kitchen drawers and see how much in them really belonged to other people.

  The spoon recalled to Grippes abundant, well-cooked meals, the dining room upstairs with the rose velvet portières, the Japanese screen, the brass urn filled with silk chrysanthemums, the Sèvres coffee service on the buffet. It was a room that contained at all hours a rich and comforting smell of leek-and-potato soup. Often, as Grippes sopped up the last of the sauce of a blanquette or daube, his hostess would describe enthusiastic reviews she had just read of books by other people, citing phrases he might appreciate or even want to use, such as “Cyclopean vision” (a compliment, apparently) or “the superstructure of essential insincerity,” another sort of flattery. Later, she might even coax him into watching a literary talk show. Grippes, digesting, would stare hard at false witnesses, plagiarists, ciphers, and mountebanks, while Mme. Parfaire praised their frank and open delivery and the way they wore their hair. When, occasionally, there was a woman on hand, prepared to be interviewed and to announce in the same straightforward manner, “Well, you see, in my book …,” Mme. Parfaire would make the comment that the women all looked the same, had terrible legs, and lacked the restraint and distinction of men. Whatever misleading reply Grippes might give when she asked what he was writing—“writing about” was the actual phrase—she responded with unflagging loyalty: “At least you always know what you are trying to say.”

  The night of Utopia had alarmed her, and Grippes had been no help. He remembered now that the tenth of May, 1981, had begun blue and bright and ended under a black cloudburst. It was possible that God, too, had expected a different face on the window blind. Rain had soaked through the hair and shoes of revelers in the Place de la Bastille. Older voters, for whom the victory was the first in a lifetime, wept in the downpour. Their children responded to the presence of television cameras by dancing in puddles. The public prosecutor called Mme. Parfaire to say that Soviet tanks would be rumbling under her windows before next Tuesday. She arrived at Grippes’s door, asking for reassurance and an atlas: She thought she might emigrate. Unfortunately, all the foreign maps were unwelcoming and un-French. Grippes offered champagne, so they could toast the death of the middle classes. The suggestion struck her as heartless and she went away.

  Left to himself, he had turned his back on the damp, bewildering celebration and stood at the window, imagining tanks, champagne in his hand and disquiet in his mind. He had helped create the intemperate joy at the Place de la Bastille, but why? Out of a melancholy habit of political failure, he supposed. He had never for a moment expected his side to win. By temperament, by choice, by the nature of most of his friendships, by the cross-grained character of his profession he belonged in perpetual opposition. Now a devastating election result had made him a shareholder in power, morally responsible for cultural subsidies to rock concerts and nuclear testing in the Pacific. Unfolding a copy of the left-wing daily Libération on the No. 82 bus, which runs through diehard territory, no longer would signify a minority rebellion but majority complacency. Grippes was nearing the deep end of middle age. For the first time he had said to himself, “I’m getting old for all this.”

  Down in the street, as if the tenth of May were a Sunday like any other, cinema lines straggled across the sidewalk to the curb. It seemed to Grippes that it was not the usual collection of office workers and students and pickpockets and off-duty waiters but well-to-do dentists from the western regions of the city and their wives. The dentists must have known the entrepreneurial game was up and had decided to spend their last loose cash on an action movie set in Hong Kong. Grippes pictured them sorted into ranks, surging along the boulevard, the lights of pizza restaurants flashing off their glasses in red and green. Their women kept pace, swinging gold-link necklaces like bicycle chains. There were no shouts, no threats, no demands but just the steady trampling that haunts the nights of aging radicals. Wistfully, as if it were now lost forever, Grippes had recalled the warm syncopation of a leftist demo: “Step! Shuffle! Slogan! Stop!/Slogan! Step! Shuffle!” How often had he drummed that rhythm of progress on the windowsill before he was forced by the sting of tear gas to pull his head in!

  Having set his dentists on the march, Grippes no longer knew what to do with them. Perhaps they could just disband. Those to whom the temptation of power had given an appetite could stroll into Chez Hansi, at the corner of Rue de Rennes, and enjoy one last capitalist-size lobster, chosen from the water tank. What about Grippes? What was he supposed to be doing on the night of change? Reminded of the steadfast role of the writer in a restless universe, he had poured himself another glass a
nd settled down to compose a position piece, keeping it as cloudy and imprecise as his native talent could make it. Visions of perfection emerge and fade but the written word remains to trip the author who runs too fast for his time or lopes alongside at not quite the required pace. He wrote well into the night, first by hand, then after removing a new version of “Residents are again reminded …” made about fifteen typed revisions of the final text.

  The next day (as Grippes recalls the affair), he deposited his article at the editorial offices of the most distinguished newspaper in France. The paper had printed it, finally; not on page 1, with nationwide debate to follow, but on 2, the repository for unsolicited opinions too long-winded to pass as letters to the editor. Under a provocative query of some kind—say, “What Tomorrow for Social Anthropology?”—page 2 allowed the escape of academic steam and measured the slightly steadier breathing of neomone-tarists, experts on regional history, and converts to Islam. A footnote in italics described the correspondent’s sphere of activity. Grippes’s label, “man of letters,” confirmed his status and showed he was no amateur thinker.

  His entry looked a bit crowded, wedged next to that of a dealer in rare stamps calling for parasocialist reform of his profession, but Grippes was pleased with the two-column heading: “UTOPIA OUR WAY.” “Now that the profit motive has been lopped from every branch of French cultural life,” his piece began, “or so it would seem,” it continued, thus letting Grippes off some future charge of having tried to impoverish the intelligentsia, “surely.” After “surely” came a blank: Page 2 had let the sentence die. In the old days (Grippes’s prose had suddenly resumed), when he went to the cinema there was room for his legs. He could place a folded jacket under the seat without having it stuck with gum. Ice cream, sold by a motherly vendor, tasted of real vanilla. Audiences at musical comedies had applauded every dance number: Think of “Singin’ in the Rain.” In spite of a flat cloud of tobacco smoke just overhead one seemed to breathe the purest of air. Now the capacious theater under Grippes’s windows had been cut into eight small places, each the size of a cabin in a medium-haul jet. Whenever he ventured inside, he expected to be told to fasten his seat belt and handed a plastic tray. Subtitles of foreign films dissolved in a white blur, while spoken dialogue could not be heard at all—at least not by Grippes. He knew that twenty-three years of right-wing government had produced a sullen and mumbling generation, but he felt sure that a drastic change, risen from the very depths of an ancient culture, would soon restore intelligible speech.

  This was the clipping Grippes had found in the jacket pocket, along with the spoon. He had to admit it was not perfect. Nothing had ever been done about the cinemas. The part about rising from the depths made the 1981 Socialist plan of intentions sound like wet seaweed. Still, he had staked a claim in the serene confusion of the era and had launched an idea no one could fault, except owners of theater chains. And “man of letters” had remained on the surface of the waters, a sturdy and recognizable form of literary plant life, still floating.

  Last June, it rained every night. Wet clouds soaked up the lights of Montparnasse and gave them back as a reddish glow. At about three o’clock one morning, mild, moist air entered the room where Grippes sat at his writing desk. A radio lying flat on the table played soft jazz from a studio in Milan. A cat slept under the desk lamp. Moths beat about inside the red shade. Grippes got up, pulled a book from the shelf, blew the dust off, found the entry he wanted: “19th June—Half past one. Death of my father. One can say of him, ‘It is only a man, mayor of a poor, small village,’ and still speak of his death as being like that of Socrates. I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough. I reproach myself for not having understood him.”

  It so happened that Grippes had just written the last two sentences: same words, same order. Almost instantly, the cartoon drawing of a red-bearded man wearing a bowler hat had come to mind—not his father, of course. It was Jules Renard, dead for some eighty-odd years. Renard’s journals had been admired and quoted often by Grippes’s father, dead now for more than forty. A gust of night wind pushed the window wide and brought it to with a bang. The cat made a shuddering movement but continued to sleep. Lifted on a current, a moth escaped and flew straight back.

  Grippes wondered how much of the impressive clutter in his imagination could still be called his own. “At least you always know what you are trying to say” referred to unexamined evidence. Like his father, like Jules Renard, he had been carried along the slow, steady swindle of history and experience. Pictures taken along the way, the untidy record, needed to be rearranged by category or discarded for good. Thousands of similar views had been described in hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and books, some in languages Grippes had never heard of. His inspiring goddess had found nothing better to dish up in the middle of the night than another man’s journal, and even had the insolence to pass it off as original.

  A few notches away from Milan, the BBC was proposing a breakdown in human relations. (Cressida to Quentin: “My cab is waiting, Quentin. I think everything has been said.” Quentin to Cressida: “Am I allowed to say good-bye?” Door slams. High heels on pavement. Taxi loud, then fading. Quentin to no one: “Good-bye. I shan’t be denied the last word.”) The departure of Cressida was stirring dejection or inducing sleep across Europe and the Middle East, down the length of Africa, in India, in Singapore, in Western Samoa. Men and women who had their own cats, moths, lamps, wet weather, and incompetent goddesses were pondering Quentin’s solitude and wondering if it served him right. Grippes pulled a large pad of writing paper from under the sleeping cat and drew a picture of a London taxi. He drew a Citroën of the 1960s and a Peugeot with an elegant dashboard, out of some fifties film, set on the Riviera, then a tall Renault, all right angles, built in the thirties, still driven in the early forties by black-market operators and the police. He shaded it black and put inside three plainclothes inspectors.

  The Renault, as it approached his grandfather’s house, could be heard from a distance; it was a quiet afternoon, close to the end of things. The car turned into the courtyard. Two of the men got out. They had on city suits, felt hats, and creaky, towny shoes. Young Henri’s grandfather stood in the kitchen with his arms folded, saying nothing. The two men looked in the usual places, turned up loose tiles and floorboards, slashed all the pillows and bolsters with a knife. As a rule, these sudden descents ended with everyone around the kitchen table. His grandmother had already wiped the faded red-and-blue oilcloth and had begun to set out the thick glasses and plates.

  From the window of his wrecked bedroom (the gashed pillows lay on the floor) Henri watched the strangers digging aimlessly outside. They were clumsy, did not know how to use a spade, how to lift the clods they turned up. He saw them the way his grandfather did, cheap and citified. But to hold the law cheap one needed to have powerful allies. His grandfather had physical strength and a native ability to hoard and hang on. The men threw the spades down and came back to the house. Their shoes left mud prints across the kitchen floor and up the scrubbed stairs.

  In his room, which had been his father’s, down and feathers rose and hovered with every approaching step. One of the visitors took a book down from a shelf over the washstand. He made the remark that he had never seen books in a bedroom before. Henri started to answer that these were his father’s old school-books but remembered he was not to mention him. The man gave the book a shake, releasing a shower of handwritten verse: Henri’s father’s adolescent attempts to reconcile the poetry of sexual craving, as explained in literature, with barnyard evidence. The second stranger offered Henri an American cigarette. It was too precious to waste in smoke. He placed it carefully behind an ear and waited for the question. It was, “Where would you put a lot of contraband money, if you had any?”

  Henri answered, truthfully, “In the dark and in plain sight.”

  They went down to the cellar, pushing Henri, and ran beams of yellow light along racks of wine and shelve
s of preserved fruit in earthenware crocks. About every fourth crock was stuffed with gold coins and bank-notes. The men asked for a crate. Henri, promoted to honest member of the clan, checked the count. He droned, “… four, five, six …” while his grandmother wept. A few minutes later, he and his grandmother watched his grandfather being handcuffed and hustled into the Renault. He could have brained all three men with his locked hands but held still.

  “Forgive me,” said Henri. “I didn’t know it was down there.”

  “You had better be a long way from here before he gets back,” his grandmother said.

  “Won’t they keep him, this time?”

  “They’ll work something out,” she said, and dried her eyes.

  Today Grippes was wakened abruptly at about eleven-thirty. Two policemen were at the door, wanting to know if he had heard anything suspicious during the night. There had been another incident concerning Mme. Parfaire. This time, the intruders had broken a Sèvres sugar bowl and threatened the dog. All Grippes could say was that the dog was nineteen years old and deaf and had certainly not taken the threat to heart. After they went away, he shuffled along the passage to the kitchen. The cats—a tabby and a young stray—ran ahead. (He swears they are the last.) The first things he saw were the jacket on its wire hanger and the soiled windowpanes. At a window across the court a woman, another early riser according to Grippes time, parted her curtains. She had nothing on except a man’s shirt, unbuttoned. Standing between the flowery folds, she contemplated the sunless enclosure. (The cobblestones below are never dry, owing to a stopped drain. For years now tenants on the lower floors have been petitioning to have the drain repaired. Their plight gets not much sympathy from occupants of upper stories, who suffer less inconvenience or accept the miasma of mosquitoes and flies in summer as the triumph of nature over urban sterility.)