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I’ve no idea who reads this.
For their (that’s your) edification, an update:
I went to Paris last weekend. I saw Madame, who is in excellent form and taught me many new things. Mostly about the value of being loved. Also how to play the illegal Parisian parking game.
I have quit my job. I go home March 22. I miss my kids but nothing in the world could keep me here. Some words that might describe this decision, how it was made and what it provokes: frustration, depression, relief. Nervousness, failure, self-doubt, frustration. Exhaustion, paresse. Relief. Anxiety, indifference, confusion. Giddiness. Relief.
I’ve no idea how I’m going to get my things shipped. Less pressingly but more importantly, I’ve no idea what to do with myself once departed from la douce France.
I leave for a week in Cairo this evening.
And now I am going to take a shower.
À plus.
There was home, and now there is here.
I am tired. I have to teach tomorrow. I’ve begun counting weeks, days of work. Has time started moving more slowly? It seems so.
Nine days ago I was huddled in the warmth of my parents’ house, the warmth of family and of the closeness of all familiar things. Today I am perched on my makeshift bed, using a stool for a desk and trying to spark up enough Ambition to make a plan for the next step. My feet are freezing and Lucile is cuddling with her boyfriend in the next room. I am alone. My fingers darting across the keyboard. My mind darting back and forth – between languages, between anxiety and determination.
A glance at my books, arrayed haphazardly in temporary-turned-permanent piles on the desk, on the floor. My books, my comfort.
Another glance at the teaching materials piled separately, quarantined, the anxious leap of my heart and the catch of my breath, and I quickly look away.
I am alone, and I am tired, and I have to teach tomorrow. This is more difficult than I ever imagined it could be.
Today I taught about Thanksgiving. I tried to find a way to do so without using any images of happy Injuns feeding grateful Pilgrims. Unfortunately, the words “voler,” “coloniser,” and “massacrer” scared my little guys a bit, and scandalized my bigger guys. So much the better, I suppose.
I did tell about how there were religious radicals from England who were having a hard time of it and went off to seek a new life in what became the United States, and how they were called Puritans and didn’t like to have any fun, and then they had to eat lots of corn. Or something. In one of my classes, this provoked Christopher to cry out: “Oh, alors, ils étaient des Témoins de Jéhovah!” If only.
I asked my CM2’s who populated the land in the Americas before the Europeans.
– “Les hommes préhistoriques!”
– “Les Français!”
– “Christophe Colomb!”
– “Les Japonais!”
… ouf.
In another of my classes, the mention of Native Americans caused Amandine to yell, “oh, les peaux rouges!” – the redskins! – and start pounding her fists on the table and chanting a sort of French version of “ooga chukka ooga chukka.” I told her that she was mocking several cultures about which she didn’t know a single thing, and that that’s racist. She said “mais ils n’ont pas de culture parce qu’ils n’existent pas!” They don’t have culture because they don’t exist. Fantastic. (Not quite up there with Madame’s famous “Racism against American Indians isn’t racism because American Indians don’t have souls,” but close.)
More mystifying than any of this about pilgrims and natives to my little lovelies was, somewhat unsurprisingly, the concept of “turkey.” Making an entire holiday out of stuffing and eating a huge one for no apparent reason scandalised them as much as colonialism and genocide did. And they were all disappointed that Americans don’t eat hot dogs on their feast days. Pride made me decline to tell them that, well, we do, sometimes.
I asked them what they were thankful for. They’re kids, so they said football and pie and Harry Potter. One kid out of 124 mentioned a member of his family. One kid mentioned Morocco, where her family comes from. Would-be teacher’s pet Julie said, “English class.”
All of this just made me very tired and very hungry and very, very sad I wasn’t at home yesterday (where apparently Uncle Steve made up to Victoria for his white repertoire of karaoke songs by singing “Old Black Joe” – thus demonstrating that a tie of insensitivity and total madness binds my family together even when we’re apart… us and Kramer, apparently).
Paris est un vrai trompe-l’oeil, un superbe décor habité par quatre millions de silhouettes.
– A. Camus
How struck I was this evening to read that phrase as I sat, so ostentatiously American, like a misplaced property amid all that décor, at a café du cinquième, drinking my crème and tapping my fingers on the table, reading La Chute first to persuade the waiter that despite my accent I do speak French and am not the idiot he takes me for, and then because I suddenly began to adore what I read.
A trompe-l’oeil indeed. I arrived, flustered and extravagantly exhausted, after some fourteen hours of travel and delays, to land in the middle of Paris’ semiannual parade du techno. I assume this has never happened to you, so take my word when I say that the sensation produced is one of total cultural schizophrenia. Feeling the bass beat in my chest almost as strongly as my extremely urgent need for caffeine, I fled to the café du coin, where I exchanged remarks on the volume of the parade with a very nice gay waiter. A few sips of coffee in my disoriented belly and I began to smile uncontrolably. You are familiar perhaps with that strained, tingling feeling in your skin as though it’s stretched too tightly over your bones, with that eye-stinging, mind-inverting exhaustion that comes of too much time on an airplane and disorients you even in your familiar places. That feeling, at that moment, made me grin comme une folle and I began, as I found I could no longer bear to look at the text of the New Yorker open in front of me, to laugh.
This laughter said: merde, Paris, c’est dingue – et cette musique! (Dr Kinbote: There is a very loud amusement park outside my window.) This laughter said: what on earth am I doing here? It said, too: fais bien attention, ma petite, c’est le début de l’aventure et il ne faut pas le manquer.
I gathered my wits about me, returned to my hotel – au coeur du Marais, quel rêve – showered, and took off. I had no destination but the notion that I had to get myself a cell phone, and fast – being not only completely alone but entirely cut off from all means of communication made me nervous and vaguely angry. I walked, and walked, and walked. Where is not important. I ate falafel, watched the old men playing boules in the Jardin du Luxembourg (returning to a habit I adopted last time I was here, I asked if I could join their partie and was, of course, roundly rejected), and ended up somehow near the Etoile, near Madame Sébaoun’s apartment, where nostalgia and loneliness finally set in.
I had expected some grand éclat, some délire, some kind of mad joy, upon my arrival – I expected to be astonished and thrown to my feet by the beauty of this city, but instead I simply felt that I had never left and things had gone on as usual without interruption. That banality was draining. I had only just arrived in Paris and already I wanted to move on – what I associate with my time as a student in Paris, I suddenly realized, is not the joy of life in Paris itself so much as the joy of newness, exploration, discovery. And now what I wanted from Paris was a nice, nostalgic weekend, but as I had no one to share the city with, to revisit old haunts and drink and laugh, I found myself entirely isolated, floating, detached.
So I bought a cell phone and called Madame. I left her a message and she never called me back.
I sighed and I wept in the métro and wept in my hotel room and called my parents and Rachel and went to bed.
The next day I had the brilliant idea of occupying myself for a few hours at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, where I had never been. Foucault’s pendulum – the beauty of perpetual motion, the bizarre spectacle of people gathered round pour “regarder tourner la terre” – inspired me. As did the vision – available only in Paris as far as I know – of airplanes mounted, as if in flight, in the highest reaches of a chapel. Extraordinary.
But I was still completely, completely alone. Walking down the boulevard St Germain, I saw, sitting at a café table, my pleasant seatmate from the flight over. I stopped and looked at her and considered asking her if I could join her. Anything for a friend.
I moved on. I went to hear Bach’s cello suites (played badly, criminally badly) at a church in the cinquième, drank a kir royal at a touristy brasserie on the quai near St Michel, flirted shamelessly with the (also gay) waiter, sighed, and headed back to my hotel. One of my favorite Paris sights – the place de l’Hôtel de Ville by night, bursting with imposing magnificence as it is (although, really, mostly just more décor) – buoyed me along the rue de Rivoli and into my bed.
Still, I woke up wondering what the hell I’m doing here. I took another of my long walks and stopped to say un p’tit bonjour to the kindest person I know. In his kind, roundabout way, he gave me a slap in the face and told me to stop being so damned miserable and to go after the world and enjoy myself. Almost a year ago he counselled me to take this year to be a dilettante and I followed his advice. He reminded me today that I owe it to myself to enjoy it.
So I made a better choice of music this time – Vivaldi at the Sainte Chappelle. “The Four Seasons” isn’t my cup of tea, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph what a venue. Quite literally stops my breath every time. Made friends with a nice old American couple – your standard vulgar Midwestern tourist types – who made the usual face that Americans make when they learn that one of their own has chosen to live in France, “of all places.” And the music was lovely, for what it was. How could it not be, beneath all those windows. I tried to fall in love with the lead violinist, a very talented young man, and failed entirely. As far as I can tell they don’t make lady musicians in France. Hélas.
Wanted to go out for a drink, but again, no partner. And so encore plus de flânerie. And another falafel.
And here I am. And this, of course, is not at all what I intended to write. I intended to write about all those little moments in my day that keep bringing me back to the crux of culture and identity (it would appear, at the moment, that I possess neither), and about the smell of the métro and all manner of other Proustian memory-tricks this city’s been playing on me. About the taste of the French language on my tongue and how I become each moment either more or less of myself, and so on. So it goes.
Tomorrow morning, to Toulouse – and newness. A bientôt.
