Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  The truth is, we are not convinced that for 90 francs we are experiencing the hammam at its most disconcerting and gratifying. In fact, our peasant rarely consents to part with 90 francs at the St-Paul unless he feels the need for the cold swimming pool—admittedly a luxury at most hammams. Depending on the area he finds himself in, there are numerous alternatives that remind him more of the hammams he has crawled through in the cities of North Africa, and more particularly of the exquisite massages he has enjoyed in the cheap unmarked bathhouses of Meknes and Fez, where the hot flagstones touched in the dark, the powerful hands of masseurs, the overpowering heat of underground vaults, produced in his mind the most powerful memories of all his various travels across the globe. His passion for these places was born in these distant cities and has mostly been prosecuted ever since on the margins of deserts, where the poignance of the public bath—the most potent and rich symbol of urban civility and utility—is at its greatest faced with the puritanism of the nomad. It was here that he discovered his distrust for the nomad, the scorner of bathhouses and therefore of libraries.

  As in Alexandria, the hammam is the pivotal point of urbanity. It is the place where accumulated surplus time is spent and where the equivalent excess of eroticism is displayed and dissipated without action or violence. How significant that it is at the heart of the Islamic world that the hammam has imposed itself, as much at the centre as the much-vaunted mosque: that heart which is contested by, on the one hand, the classical urban tradition of intellect, leisure, tolerance and development and, on the other, the nomad pastoral tradition of disruption, perpetual violence, ascetic scorn, military rigour and social fluidity...the whole gamut of desert puritan values so glorified by Ibn Khaldun for the sake of its austerity and moral purity, but which can only destroy the precious fabric of the hammam, refusing to recognize as it does anything but the sterility of the moving man. In this way, invisibly seduced by our own desert jeremiads, our whining nomadism in the form of a thirst for the purity of the primitive, we see the Turkish bath as a locus for unparalleled sybaritic corruption, for discreet copulations and the begetting of illegitimate children. The fate of the bath in the life of the European city reflects this prejudice. Contrary to our myths of the Middle Ages, public bathing was popular in the European cities of the 14th century. The Church’s edicts against “washing,” so beloved of those desiring to prove in the most irrefutable way the pitiful backwardness and barbarism of this otherwise irritatingly arrogant continent, turn out on closer historical inspection to be tirades against the bi-sexual public baths of which the German city of Augsburg contained dozens, eventually closed down on orders from the bishop and in which—men and women being entitled to rent private cubicles—a vast number of bastards were reported to have been sired. The Church did not care whether people were clean or not, it cared about their legitimacy. And yet the Church also, beyond its sense of spiritual responsibility, perpetuated the sneer of the original nomads, the greatest of whom is Moses. The urban mind of the Mediterranean, with its own fascination for the human body, only relinquished its bathroom habits under intense pressure from the outside, from the spiritual guerrillas of the desert. It seems to us, lying in the arcaded courtyards of the world’s hammams, subdued by the bubbling of fountains and drowsily aware of the naked bodies propped against classical pillars and scraping oil from their arms, willingly immersed in the only form of collective masculinity devoid of aggression, in a calm enjoyment of architectural details, self-enclosing fraternity, absence of loud throats and locker-room wit, borne along by the immemorial forms of a relaxation that is eminently horizontal and silent, that we have returned to our Greco-Roman roots, however uproariously funny this may seem to fellow hyperboreans. Even the smallest Parisian hammam gives us this nostalgia—the “pain of returning.”

  I love prostitution in and for itself.... In the very notion of prostitution there is such a complex convergence of lust and bitterness, such a frenzy of muscle and sound of gold, such a void in human relations, that the very sight of it makes one dizzy! And how much is learned there! And one is so sad! And one dreams so well of love!

  —Gustave Flaubert, writing to his mistress, Louise Colet (1853)

  There is, for example, the small place on the corner of the rue de Tombouctou and the Boulevard de la Chapelle in the Goutte d’Or, called El-Baraka but ominously missing from the telephone books. Situated between the railway lines fanning out behind the Gare du Nord which sprawl under the boulevard and a gaping hole at the angle with the rue de Chartres formed by the destruction of a block of tenements and which is now like a chalk quarry covered with gargantuan figures of street art, cubic skeletons and running gangsters depicted falling into the hole, the El-Baraka is announced by its delicate blue tiles and Moorish lancets rising unexpectedly out of the hurly-burly of the boulevard. A small neon sign is all that tells you there is not the usual Moroccan restaurant with whining lutes underneath. Instead, the vestibule is cramped, dark and hot and above all it is grave as all true hammams are. There is no joking and elbow-nudging here. The bath is a serious enterprise. For 50 francs you have a straightforward sweat and for a further 20 you can hire one of the two or three white-haired masseurs at the top of the stairs and take him down with you into the depths. The baths themselves are simple in the extreme: a shower and spotless defecation area, a long hot-room in dark blue tiles with basins set at regular intervals into the wall with a continuous bench running between them and, at the far end, properly screened by heavy plastic ribbons, the steam bath itself, a small triangular room in the same blue tiles. Despite the absence of extra luxuries the El-Baraka is a place of asylum. It is used only by the local Moslems, sandalled loan sharks, grocers scarred with smallpox, oily clerics, students, train drivers, small-time landlords. It is an advantage of the familiarity that reigns in the El-Baraka that the attendants personally tie the knot in your bathrobe and in general speak to you with a certain outlandish deference. The drying and rest room, where the wet clients stretch out on their mattresses, has high mirhab-shaped windows giving on to the rue de Tombouctou and the boulevard—where the Métro trains crash along the overhead track—and lying between the walls of tiles in the heat of a burning afternoon while the myriad voices babbling in Arabic and Turkish on the suffocating boulevard seep into the silence of the baths, you know that you are no longer in the Paris of the glass towers and Napoleonic relics, you are in the Nilotic Paris, the Paris of Mesopotamia, the Flower of the Desert. And all this, at the Baraka, for 50 francs!

  But whatever the advantages offered by the small baths of the Goutte d’Or and however much our peasant resorts to them because they are in his neighbourhood, it cannot be denied that no hammam in Paris, or in the West, can equal in vertiginous decor and graceful eroticism the baths of the Paris Mosque situated on the Place du Puits de l’Ermite. Although we have made a resolution not to stray into descriptions of the tourist dimensions of the New Disneyland, we cannot help descending into the much-frequented and familiar Hamman of the Mosque, which is in addition charmingly attached to the tearoom where blow-dried nymphets and pouting schoolgirls with their quaint little Maghrebian pastries, tiny one-mouthful “gazelle horns” and keblahs, oblivious to the fantastic world on the other side of the wall, where loin-clothed male bodies slump in an oleic dungeon of heat, where time moves slowly backward. As always, we have no idea what the female side of the baths is like, but here at least the ethos of the Ottomans ferments like yeast in the warmth. You wonder, in a moment of crass vulgarity, why there is not a mad Sultan spitting foam in one of its nooks and crannies or why at least there are no eunuchs in evidence—the calmness and luxury of the rest area with its veined marble columns and quietly murmuring fountain should be the ideal terrain for a multitude of obedient and heavily armed eunuchs....

  Ipaid the entrance fee and proceeded tentatively past the door, through a double layer of curtains made of heavy woolen weavings. A few more doors followed, and then suddenly I was at the opening of a
n enormous room, with naked bodies reclining languorously all about.

  I was taken aback. The scene was of a harem, painted by Ingres or Matisse, now come alive with the soft burbling of the women talking in different languages. The ceiling was decorated in intricate designs of red and dark green. In the center of the marble-floored room was a tall fountain, the cool water continuously gurgling out and over, splashing into a mosaic bowl. On all sides of the room were canopied platforms covered with carpets, on which small mattresses were placed, side by side. In every space there were lounging odalisques.

  This must be Tunisia, but no, it was the center of Paris, and no, these were not harem slaves, but Parisians.

  —Zona Sage, “Hunting the Hammam”

  Of all the secluded retreats which the City offers this is by far our favourite: the proliferation of geometric figures, assorted polygons, lozenges and stars in the painted wooden panels, the octagonal cupola opening up above the fountain, the dark red that predominates in the woodwork, the filtered light and the columns of the raised dais that surrounds the fountain on three sides are offset in the realm of sound by the steady murmur of the water sliding over the upper lip of the fountain and into the basin below, where bottles of water lie cooling. The dais is heated from below so that the tiles are always warm and mint tea is served with oranges to the reclining clients. Beyond the narrow doors that lead to the baths the decor is more Spartan and cavernous: white vaults brimming with condensation, raised alcoves framed with classical pillars with basins and taps where the stone flags are hot to the touch, the massage room with its single slippery bench and, in the middle room, an elegant central platform surrounded by columns with simply carved capitals bathed in a single shaft of light. The rooms become hotter progressively until at the far end you enter the final steam bath, a small chamber with, on the left, a raised platform and, on the right, a large circular cistern filled with sediments of grey clay. On the far side of the uncertain crater are two ventilators belching forth an agonizing heat. It is a point of masculine bravura to walk slowly around the cistern passing within inches of the searing ventilators, with no gesture of disbelief except a casual wipe of the brow and it is an athletic achievement to do this even once without passing out and tumbling ignominiously into the cistern, from where you would be fished out covered in horrible and outlandish burns. Here the fat men do best, leaning on their thermostable guts and, for once, eyeing their thin rivals with contempt. They do not blush or quiver as the slim carcasses do; they absorb patiently like heat-seeking reptiles and the sweat that rolls off them is measured and wise. For those less endowed by nature with subcutaneous armour it will be necessary to retire quickly to the lesser steam room, where the basins are thoughtfully equipped with hoses attached to the cold-water taps.

  The massages, by the axolotyl-like Hamid, are worth the 50 francs—but since you have only paid 55 francs to enter this stupendous hammam in the first place you will assume you have profited from a bargain. The massage is exactly as it would be anywhere in the Moslem world, since the movements are laid down according to physiologically tested ritual and are always executed with a methodical and patient exactitude. Contorting their bodies into bows, they stretch out the client from underneath by clasping his ankles and wrists, inflect his spine, pull the arms across the chest and move their hands along them as if squeezing a tube of toothpaste, displace each finger a millimetre from its joints, twist, thump, arch, distend, wrench, hiss, and cluck. The service involves maximal effort on their part, using every part of their own body. Those socalled masseurs who content themselves with slapping a supine pair of shoulder blades with the sides of their hands seem worse than absurd by comparison. At the end of this gruelling set of figures the client feels broken apart, unstuck and magically reassembled. No ligament, tendon, muscle or nerve seems to have escaped the treatment. The spine, in particular, suffers a realignment suggestive of blissful fracture. At the same time the masseur oils and soaps the entire surface of the body with scrupulous attention to detail—although unlike the masseurs of the Maghreb they do not hurl buckets of scalding then cold water over it, much to our regret. The washing of the extremities of the fingers, carried through with such thoroughness, expresses an inadvertent tenderness which is communicated through the square, flattened nature of Hamid’s toes and the similar bluntness of his fingers: through long hours of immersion in the tropical heat of the hammam they have become vegetal. They have the fibrous strength of tendrils of liana. You might well spend days of ecstasy in the Hammam of the Mosque, never quite able to tear yourself away from it through whole afternoons, as our peasant does (not only because he is indolent by nature but also because he can think of no better way to change identity). We might well suggest other hammams to you, the one next to the Chope des Artistes on the rue du Faubourg St-Martin, for example, ensconced at the bottom of its grimy little passageway next to the Buzy Body clothes store, or the incredibly simple and secretive baths at 126 Avenue d’Italie announced by an old fashioned black and gold sign—Bains et Hydrothérapie—and similarly hidden at the end of a run-down passage and courtyard which is truly in the middle of nowhere. But for the minimum price of around 50 francs it is impossible to improve upon the Mosque and nowhere else outside of the Goutte d’Or will the imperialism of the City be more easily disrupted. When will the day come when hammams are built on every street corner complete with muscly masseurs and carved moucharabiehs, polylobal arches and ceramic zelliges? When will the public bath drive out the fatuous private bathroom and regain the gigantism of Caracalla and Diocletian? When will the scent of scorched eucalyptus replace the obnoxious odours of shower gels and talcum powder? No doubt we are guilty once again of rash nostalgia of the past, but on this occasion we can claim the excuse that the hammam is not yet dead, that it thrives furtively under the City’s skin and that one day it might just possibly erupt back into the national habits. When that happens the Age of plenty will have returned to earth, the golden Age, the Innocent Age, the Oh How Much Better it was Age...the Age of the Turkish Bath.

  I continued my explorations and discovered the “gommage” room, where white-clothed attendants were vigorously scrubbing down women on two concrete tables. I asked some of the women waiting in line along the wall what this process was about. They said “gommage.” Even though I had no idea what that meant (“erasure?”), I was game for the total experience at this point, so I joined the others and waited in line. Several women in the large open showers on the side were smearing themselves with green mud.

  My turn came up for gommage and I lay on the concrete table. It turned out that this was not for the tame or tender. It was more intense than any spa treatment I had ever received anywhere, and felt like very stiff bristles scraping all over my body. By the time I had been completely gommaged I was down to a layer of skin that hadn’t seen the light of day in a generation.

  —Zona Sage, “Hunting the Hammam”

  But the hammams, as you slowly begin to realize, are only oases of peace in the livid organism of the City and like all oases they frame large tracts of desert between them. And one of these hostile Gobis of the Mind exists in all its terrifying largeness and imponderability inside the head of an ex-abattoir manager who lives on the third floor above the peasant’s apartment at no. 37 rue André Antoine, who—as it happens—is right at this very minute having a ferocious dream about Genghis Kahn and the Golden Horde. For M. Soufflet has something of an obsession with the Golden Horde. You see, they’re going to come back one day, that old bastard Genghis Khan will come back too and destroy our beloved Paris...for everything is at risk, the barbarians are coming—indeed, they’re already among us!—and it is only a matter of time before they start eviscerating children on the boulevards from the saddles of their stinking little ponies. It’ll be like the Boches, only worse. The Mongols aren’t even Aryans! And as history shows, the only thing they know how to do is wipe out cities, whole metropolises. Remember Baghdad, remember Delhi, remember Kiev! Curi
ous to say, the pugnacious little ex-meat man has a moving and thoroughly noble attachment to the values of urban civilization and we can only listen with the utmost gravity to the dire warnings of his dreams...it is only to be regretted that M. Soufflet, in his hatred for everything alien, throws the baby out with the bathwater by associating the Mongols with Turkish baths. In this way we see that curious nightmares inspired by the City leave no room for fine definitions. And M. Soufflet, fearing the contaminating breath of those ear-chopping goblins from the steppes, will never ever put a foot inside a hammam. There is nothing for him to do but suffer and dream.