In the large attic room where traveling salesmen unpack their wares, things are a lot more straightforward. A ruddy-faced purveyor of ladies’ underwear promises her a camisole, a pair of panties, and a slip if she is a little bit nice to him. He chases her around the table waving a camisole; she only just manages to get away, laughing hysterically as she runs down the stairs.
The kitchen is in the basement, and from halfway down the stairs where she enters the orders she can watch the staff on either side of the table, chopping and slicing and dicing. They work like lightning. The fattest person has her wedding and engagement rings fixed to her chest with a safety pin, jingling in time with her knife. She lingers for a moment to listen to the shouting.
In the cleaners’ storeroom where they have coffee, she hears all the gossip about the guests while the most athletic cleaner practices her gymnastics on the floor. There’s plenty to take in: how couples behave, what they leave behind on the sheets.
Bodily fluids, wine stains, blood and excrement.
She works with a middle-aged woman who keeps inviting her home. This is her first lesbian approach. It’s a bit sad to have to say no, because the woman is very nice, and teaches her useful tricks—like wiping glasses with a used hand towel, which is much quicker than taking them all the way down to the kitchen to wash and bringing them back up again.
In every room, in the beds she makes, in the bathrooms where she mops the floor, countless dramas have been played out. Her future is uncertain, and she fears it. But she thinks she could probably run a small hotel herself, creating a backdrop for breakups, passion, and suicide.
A hotel is a novel with no ending. As she cycles home in the twilight the darkness falls inside her, and the walls become porous once more.
Then she steps into Nanna’s life, into some as yet unlit episode, or along some horrific but strangely reassuring sidetrack in the story of the girl whose father shot himself with a Parabellum.
She can’t stand it any longer. So she takes off with her former classmate Monki. She carries out the maneuver so skillfully that her mother is taken unawares.
It’s just a short trip, after all. She’ll be back soon. They put on their student caps (it’s the last time she wears hers) and hitch to Paris; they are there in three or four days. Without having been raped. Or robbed.
Just laughed at a few times because of their caps; the Germans and the French don’t seem to understand what they mean.
They find a cheap hotel on the rue Dauphine not far from the Pont Neuf. Five francs a night, but only three if you share un grand lit. Which they do. However, after a short time Monki leaves her to take up a job as a waitress in Spain.
She stays on alone in the crap hotel room. What is she supposed to do in Paris? She hasn’t a clue. She doesn’t know anyone. The rusty faucet drips slowly into the basin. She washes her feet in it, picks up her sketch pad and goes out.
Her idea is that she is in Paris to absorb the atmosphere, expand her senses, and gain new impressions.
Loneliness plods patiently along beside her. She isn’t entirely present, and has no need to fear it. In a museum she draws ancient Roman statues. She gets into the habit of dropping in to see an Armenian who runs a gallery; he is an elegant gentleman who offers her mint tea.
She finds her way to the Musée de l’homme, where she meets the stuffed Hottentot woman, much to her surprise. Actually, she isn’t stuffed, the exhibit is a cast. A naked black woman with huge buttocks. Exotic. But still a woman.
How can they put a woman on display? She is shaken. She visits the museum several times; she sits on the floor in front of the woman and draws her.
She has no intention of ever forgetting this woman.
The evenings, most evenings, she spends at the Tabou jazz club, long ago abandoned by Juliette Gréco. However, there is good modern jazz on offer, and soon all the staff seem to recognize her. Like the melancholy Monsieur Moustache, for example, so called because of his drooping black mustache. He serves her many glasses of red wine and forgets to take her money.
There is no plan behind any of it. And the future is a hole.
She doesn’t do anything in particular. That’s not quite true—she works her way through a novel by Albert Camus. Then a few more. Occasionally she takes out her notebook containing math problems. She is thinking that she ought to complement her arts studies with the scientific side. In order to become something. A doctor, maybe.
Or an architect, like Ricki. She stares gloomily at the math problems and realizes that she will never be able to solve them. After a while she throws the book into the garbage can, which stinks of tobacco. Just a short trip? The weeks pass. Without her noticing how it happens, she gets trapped in Paris.
She is neither happy nor unhappy. She drifts around. She sits in cafés. She receives the stream of people coming toward her. White, black, Asians and Arabs: the river that never dries up in the violet light of evening.
During the day: with her sketch pad in the Jardin du Luxembourg among the birds and the trees. In the evening: the metallic smell of the Métro. The beggars. The poverty in the back streets.
She inhales the smells of greasy food, sweat, and oblivion. Paris is a perfect counterpart to the emptiness inside her; it makes no demands. Nothing hurts her. She is trapped in Paris as if she were in a dream. It is a flight.
As if life itself isn’t a flight. Perhaps it is more about being present. She contemplates the glittering water as it gushes down the gutters. She leans against the stones of the Pont Neuf and gazes at the barges down below. She can watch the children playing in the streets around the rue Dauphine for hours.
From her window in the hotel room she looks down on the courtyard at the back. It is raining. A man is dancing, holding an umbrella over a woman who is sweeping the yard. The woman is singing, and the man dances like a bird.
She isn’t happy, but she is grateful for the opportunity to be alone.
She reaches out for words, trying to grab hold of them. Lying on her stomach in bed, it is night and the bedside lamp is buzzing as usual. The words flock around her. Some are kind, others scornful. Every word has its own form. And they keep her company.
Not because she writes them down. She simply allows them to come. The man with the umbrella and the woman with her broom, singing. That could have been a possibility. To try to write about it. She doesn’t do it.
Nor does she pay any heed to time. In the morning when she wakes, she lies in bed watching the dust motes swirling in a ray of sunlight from the window. A thousand tiny, dancing fragments. She thinks she has never seen anything more beautiful. Yet another day awaits her, another blank canvas.
On one such day as she gazes blankly at the window of a shoe shop on the rue Montmartre, she is addressed by an enormous, coal-black man. He has kind eyes, and is smartly dressed in a suit and tie.
His French is easy to understand. He is studying law, and comes from Senegal—just like the poet Léopold Senghor, who has written about négritude. She has read some of his poems.
The man invites her to a café. They talk about racial segregation, a topic that interests her greatly. While they are sitting at the table, a breathtakingly beautiful couple walk by. A woman with red hair like Rita Hayworth, and a slender black man in glasses, with a scarf nonchalantly wound around his neck.
They are so terribly beautiful that it hurts. Even her nipples and her sex hurt. In Paris a black person and a white person can live together, her companion says, but that’s not true of many other places in Europe.
He claims to be the son of a chief with seven wives. She doesn’t believe him, but he assures her that it’s true. They see each other again. He asks her to visit him in his hotel room. She laughs and tells him that she has a fiancé. But they see each other again. And he proposes to her.
That makes her laugh even more. Won’t he be going back home to Senegal? What would she do there? He maintains that as his European wife, she would be able to do whatever she wan
ted. Paint, write poetry, run a nightclub, get to know the country, or simply relax. It is no problem whatsoever.
And yes, she believes him.
They stroll along the streets and through the parks. He puts his arm around her shoulders. She can’t marry him, because she isn’t in love with him. But that’s not a problem either. He can make her fall in love with him through magic, he says. In order to achieve this he takes photographs of her in front of monuments and churches, and asks for a strand of her hair and a nail clipping.
He is going to post everything to the shaman in his village, and swears that she will soon be besotted by him. Although she has a number of issues, they evaporate in his presence. Senegal—why not?
They are sitting in the sunshine with a pastis in the Place de la Contrescarpe. He has sent the package to his village, but unfortunately she hasn’t fallen in love. She smiles at him and his shaman.
Just you wait, he says, straightening his tie.
But what if she does fall in love and they get married, would she be expected to share him with a whole heap of wives? Her friend throws back his head and laughs out loud.
What does she think? He’s a modern African!
He is the only person she gets to know well in Paris. He is intelligent, childlike, warmhearted. And she is curious about the shaman’s capabilities. Shamanism is about the influence of the spirits, the effect they can have. She thinks she knows something about all that. Sometimes she is already in Senegal.
That isn’t her, of course. It is an eighteen-year-old woman who has broken away from everything and nothing. She has nothing against the idea, and yet it really doesn’t concern her. When they don’t see each other, she forgets about him, but when she is on her way to their next meeting, she looks forward to it. She is not in love. If she were to go with him to Senegal, and if he were to acquire six more wives, she wouldn’t be jealous, for that simple reason.
It would suit her perfectly. Him too, presumably. They would follow each other’s orbits like two supreme planets. They would not destroy or annihilate each other. She is excited, enjoying being alone in Paris.
However, she receives an unexpected telephone call at the hotel, and is summoned down to take it by Madame la concierge. The dinosaur in the scruffy little office has no intention of leaving her alone.
It turns out that Mom is on her way, along with Aunt Marta; Mom is treating her to the trip. She books a double room for them at her hotel, the Hôtel des Grands Balcons, which in spite of its stylish name lacks both large and small balconies. If they find the room too basic, they can always move to a better hotel.
Mom loves Paris. The fact that she wants to come is a good sign. But in the hotel room once they have arrived: utter despair. Tears, booze, curses. Even calm, steady Aunt Marta doesn’t know what to do.
The girl hasn’t forgotten her mother’s unhappiness, she has simply taken a little break from it. However, Mom’s view is that they have come to take her home. Five weeks in Paris, or is it six, and what has she actually been doing?
She finds it difficult to answer. She didn’t have any kind of plan for her stay. She hasn’t studied the language, she has merely picked her way through a few books with the aid of a pocket dictionary. Stood reading in bookshops and at the stalls of the bouquinistes along the banks of the Seine. Trotted around museums and galleries. She has walked miles and miles. Hundreds of paintings in the Louvre, with elements of light and shadow. A language where nothing is absolute.
She has drawn. She has wandered the streets for hours. She has visited the cast of that defenseless woman several times. She has spent many evenings hanging out at Tabou. She doesn’t mention this, or her Senegalese friend. You can’t just drift around, Mom states firmly, without listening. And it’s true, she has to admit it: she hasn’t done anything in particular.
She hasn’t thought about the future. She hasn’t set a date for her return home. They go out to eat at a depressing place, and Mom keeps on badmouthing Dad.
Once again she is caught up in Mom’s unhappiness. Mom’s reality is stone, a heavy weight, incontrovertibility. But it is insulting to be dragged home against her will. Humiliating. Everything within her rises up in protest. She sees herself through her mother’s eyes: a young girl, thoughtless and fickle. That too is an insult.
Mom doesn’t have room for anyone but herself.
That’s the way it has always been, but now it has been reinforced by the misery Dad has heaped upon her. She doesn’t believe Mom has come to take her home. Mom has come because she couldn’t stand being at home. She has been driven here by sorrow. This is not the moment to discuss motives, and she must keep the realization to herself.
It is the communicating vessel.
Refusing to cooperate with Mom would involve disregarding her pain. She promises to go home with Mom and Aunt Marta. She gives assurances, makes promises. And as she does so the past few weeks fade away.
The lack of demands. The sparkling mornings. The blue twilight. The man dancing beneath an umbrella. Everything, including time’s capacity to remain outside of time, and the thoughts that are not thoughts but feelings and poetry, a form of writing that is not written, and those powerful sensory impressions—all of it is diluted and dispersed.
One thing she absolutely insists on: she is going to see her Senegalese friend one last time. This causes a scene in Mom and Marta’s hotel room. Who is this guy? Mom stares at her.
A Negro? She really is on a downward slope.
She leaves rue Dauphine feeling much more upset than she would like to be. It is raining. Yellow leaves float along the surface of the Seine. They have arranged to meet at an Ethiopian restaurant. They eat, and afterward it rains even more heavily and she goes back to his nearby hotel room.
Before they walk through the main door she tells him that she has no intention of going to bed with him. He nods, of course not; she is just sheltering from the rain.
They are greeted by la concierge, a bleached blonde who taps on the reception desk with a coin. No women in the room. The wrinkled blonde and the man from Senegal negotiate, quietly at first and then increasingly loudly, until he presses something, presumably a banknote, into her hand.
The woman still shouts after them as they walk up the stairs; the girl doesn’t understand what she says, but it is obviously something rude and disparaging.
His hotel room is as sparse as hers. There is nowhere to sit except on the bed. He quickly removes his clothes. Before he closes the curtains, she sees how amazing his body is. Dazzling. More beautiful than any of the Roman statues she has sketched. He lies down on top of her.
She protests a little. Not very much.
His tongue, his soft fingers. He is panting, repeating jouissance, la jouissance, a word that is as lovely as his body. Let us give each other pleasure, do not deny us un peu de jouissance.
That word—she has never forgotten it. He touches her everywhere, she touches him. She has no protection and is afraid, but he chivalrously withdraws and spurts his seed over her stomach. She listens to the rain hammering on the windowpane, inside herself, everywhere. In her mind’s eye she sees Mom and Marta, waiting.
The image is washed away by the water.
They make love again as the water flows through time, through the years, splashing and gushing and forming whirlpools and waterfalls. This is her last night in Paris, and the hours and days behind her are carried along with the river, flowing down to the sea.
The whole of her time in Paris rushes away so that she can be transported home like a parcel, a knapsack. Her friend just wants to keep on going, but she can’t stay. After all, eventually she will have to go.
We won’t see each other again.
Mais si. Many times. We will see each other very often.
Non. I am leaving tomorrow.
When he understands what she is saying, there is no reasoning with him. He holds on to her. Won’t let her go. She has to push him hard, almost fight with him to get out of bed.
He throws himself on his back and repeats that they will see each other again.
He falls asleep. In the darkness she gropes for the most important items of clothing and puts them on. She avoids looking at the dragon at reception, but can feel the woman’s harsh eyes on her back as the door closes behind her.
The streets are shining. From the treetops high above, the heavy scent of burgeoning greenery drifts down. This is hers and hers alone: those past few hours and this leisurely stroll back to the hotel. At least there are a few things in life that are hers and no one else’s.
She leans against the rough stones of the Pont Neuf. She stands there for a long time. Down below her the River Seine, fast-moving gray waves with a pigeon-blue shimmer. Glimmers of light enveloped in moisture are reflected in the water. She has no negative feelings toward him.
She does have negative feelings about the rest of it: the journey home, Mom’s attempt to blackmail her, the imprisonment that is waiting for her. But Mom’s incarceration is worse. Mom is trapped in a horrible sense of loss, an amputation, an incomprehensible humiliation. In spite of everything, the girl has at least had a breathing space.
During the journey home she picks up fragments of the conversation between Mom and Marta. A Negro, what a little fool she is. Marta tries to speak up on her behalf, but there is no point. It is mortifying, not least being dragged home like this.
Sometimes she really hates her mother.
But she tells herself that she is going home voluntarily, so that Mom’s misery won’t be compounded. So that she won’t be hurt anymore.
Their train arrives in Travemünde. She has been here before. With a German family in a blue Volkswagen. She was fifteen years old. That was in a completely different life. The tickets for the ferry have all gone. Every hotel is fully booked.
A Fortune Foretold Page 16
