Читать книгу Village to Village - Alister Kershaw - Страница 6

It was love at first sight and I was astonished that it should be happening to me because the first sight had nothing in the least alluring about it. The roads from airports to cities rarely do. I was like a man who bewilders his friends by becoming infatuated with a particularly unprepossessing woman—warts and a squint and a harelip. ‘What on earth does he see in her?’ I’ve often wondered myself. What did I see in that dreary road which was taking me to Paris?

This sudden incomprehensible love affair might have been a little less mysterious if I had arrived in France with gooseflesh anticipations of romantic garrets and dangerous liaisons in them, the Latin Quarter and champagne at five francs a bottle, and artists’ studios—all the preposterous sentimental paraphernalia from absinthe to midinettes. But I had not included any of these notions in my meagre luggage, I had no preliminary yearnings towards the country. Rather the contrary. In Australia I had spent much of my time with a young woman who had visited France just before the war and had gone down with a bad attack of what someone called ‘French flu’. She babbled so fervently and persistently about France and Paris that she infected me with a perverse loathing for both.

The fact nonetheless inexplicably remains. A hundred yards from the airport we passed a café (‘Le Looping’, with the two o’s acrobatically askew to make the point clear) and puppy love overwhelmed me—puppy love from which this old dog has not yet shaken himself free. ‘Le Looping’ and the handful of unremarkable customers sipping their drinks on the terrace instantaneously bewitched me.

I knew, with no rational justification, that I was in a country which for me was unlike any other country. It was as though some indigenous evangelist had caused me to be ‘born again’. One life abruptly ended and another began. There and then I shed my twenty-five years. To this day, in my own head and heart I am twenty-five years younger than the miserable reality.

The passengers in the airport bus were a drab lot. It was only eighteen months since the war had ended. There had not been much time to spruce up. In my besotted state, they seemed to me as fabulous as troubadours. The houses along the road were dismal little pavilions badly in need of a coat of paint. I gaped at them as if each one were the Chateau de Versailles. And in the distance the Eiffel Tower looked so impossibly like itself as depicted on a thousand postcards and a thousand amateur paintings that the sense of unreality which I had been feeling deepened still further.

What had brought me to Paris was my eagerness to visit a writer I had admired since my school days. He and his wife were to become two of my closest friends. We saw a great deal of each other in the years ahead—in Paris, in the South of France, in the Loire Valley. Of all the countless occasions on which we laughed together, argued, drank wine, loafed on a Mediterranean beach, listened to music, none was as sheerly magical as that first evening in Paris.

Our relationship took shape from the very beginning. We were already friends by the time we left their studio and strolled together down the Boulevard de Montparnasse. For some reason, twilight in Paris, then at least, was not like twilight in any other city. It enveloped you in a wonderful blue and golden luminosity and it had its own special unidentifiable perfume. That one-and-only twilight dreamily descending on us was so unlike anything I had known that I had my first vague glimpse of a mystery which was to become more and more apparent as time went by: Paris was the city of the unexpected. You always felt as though something extraordinary were about to happen. Sometimes it did, sometimes not; but the expectation never diminished. One went on waiting.

Twilight aside, most things were in short supply in 1947. Fortunately, the writer had been familiar with Paris for thirty years or more. He was already on the right sort of terms with the proprietor of an unassuming restaurant in one of the side streets. So we were served with a mixture of raw vegetables, a sorrel omelette (I can still recall the metallic taste of that sorrel) and, thanks to the proprietor’s peasant brother, some wild duck. The wine was a muscular red with a powerful rasp to it but (a symptom of French flu?) I thought I had never drunk anything so delicious. It was served in cups as if we were in the prohibition speakeasy era because otherwise less privileged customers would have been clamouring for some and there wasn’t any too much to be had.

Afterwards we walked back along the boulevard towards the studio. We stopped midway for a glass of brandy at the Dome. Tourists had not yet ventured to return to Paris. The other customers on the terrace were all French, completely nondescript but fascinating because they were French. There were practically no cars on the roads. Those there were either had great charcoal-burning furnaces fixed to the back or carried dirigible-like bags of gas on their roofs. Every so often a fiacre went clip-clopping past. The air was almost startling pure. The stars were sharply visible in a translucent sky. I turned to the man at the next table and asked him for a light—speaking French for the first time in my life. I managed to make three ludicrous grammatical blunders in the course of that one short sentence. If he was amused by my linguistic ineptitude he was too polite to show it. La politesse francaise—that still existed, too.

I don’t have to make an effort to recapture the enchantment of Paris as it was then. I don’t have to recapture it at all because it has never left me. The Occupation had had one good effect at least. It had stopped progress dead in its horrible juggernaut tracks. The city had remained unchanged since 1939. Whole districts had remained unchanged since long before that. Old photographs taken around the turn of the century showed streets in which every feature was still recognisably the same. Urban planners and architects scampering after a freakish design to awe the fashionable boobies had not yet been let loose. Politicians had not yet started erecting monuments to their own glory, as hideous as themselves. The first time I saw Paris was practically the last time anyone saw it.

Disenchantment might have succeeded my first raptures. It didn’t. Far from it. I became more and more lovesick with a love devoid of any reservations. Paris was totally without blemishes in my eyes. I didn’t notice the warts and the squint. I loved all sorts of incongruous trivia. I loved the early-morning noises—tables and chairs being set out on the café terraces, shutters being opened along the street, the grumbling of the first metro like some underground beast roused from hibernation. I loved the policemen’s capes and kepis and the smell of black French tobacco and the uncomfortable metal seats in the Luxembourg Gardens and the cheese merchant leading his flock of goats and luring them on with a strange little tune played on a panpipe.

Street singers, I discovered, could still assemble a ring of listeners. No one was in too much of a hurry to stop for a while. Their repertoire of sentimental or melancholy little songs was pretty much as it had been back in the 1930s, back in the 1920s. Afterwards they sold the sheet music to their audience. Coins thrown from the surrounding windows clinked on the pavement.

Wandering haphazardly around I came on obscure courtyards and alleys in which artisans were working at tasks I had never known existed—manufacturing by hand brass nails to be used in restoring antique furniture, piercing holes in pearls, stringing them (a separate craft), moulding fantastical masks, making wigs out of human hair, carving pipebowls out of ivory. I discovered the passages, the covered arcades—the Passage Choiseul and the Passage Vivienne and the rest of them. They were lined with odd little shops which looked as though they had the same stock as they had had in 1900. The few customers looked as though they, too, had been there since 1900.

Above all, I surrendered wholeheartedly to the peculiar spell of Paris cafés. There are probably only half as many now as there were forty years ago. Then there seemed to be one every hundred yards or so. The Australian pubs I had been used to were places where you went for a drink. You didn’t actually sleep in the cafés (although one charitable proprietor did actually allow me to do just that when I had nowhere else to go) but for the rest you virtually lived there.

Some of the cafés were too like Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome for my taste but these were in the minority. The bulk of them—and these were the most enticing ones as far as I was concerned—were dingy little places in dingy little streets, the walls and ceilings dark with smoke, the benches upholstered in the red cloth known as ‘moleskin’. These were the cafés where men stopped for a coffee at seven in the morning on their way to work (although the coffee so soon after the War was concocted from roasted barley), where they played dominoes or draughts or cards in the evening and were given messages which had been left for them during the day and where towards the end of the week they borrowed a few francs from the owner.

Winter was the best time to be in the cafés. The terraces were glassed in and large wood-burning stoves created the sort of stifling atmosphere one needed and the condensation on the window somehow made you feel even warmer. There was a sort of malignant pleasure to be derived from seeing people outside hurrying through the sleet. Periodically the coffee machine emitted reassuring little jets of steam. There was a comforting racket—uninhibited but amiable arguments, cards being slammed triumphantly down on table-tops, dice rattling and the winner bellowing exultantly when he scored the all conquering 421, the patron yelling at someone that he was wanted on the telephone. Chestnut-sellers would drift in and newspaper boys with L’Intransigeant-L'Intran, if you were a genuine Parisian—and L’Aurore. Cops and whores and factory hands mingled fraternally.

I got to know a good number of cafés and was happy in all of them but in the end I had to choose one particular one for my personal club: it wasn’t done to spread oneself around. My café was mostly frequented by workers. They wore the same blue overalls that French workers had worn for generations together with the berets that before long were only to be seen on the heads of tourists. I was broke by this time and sufficiently scruffy to be admitted as a member of the guild. I never learnt to play belote, the universal card game, but that was overlooked when I proved myself an expert thrower of the dice. I made some good friends there. The patron’s wife used to sew an occasional button on my shirt and—this was the ultimate proof that I had been accepted—the patron would help me out with a small advance or let me run up a bill when things got too tough.

Already during that ride from the airport I had an unformed feeling that I would stay in France. There was no theory behind it, no solemn renunciation of my native land. Simply I was glad to be in France and couldn’t imagine why I would want to leave. As weeks and then months went by I knew, again without making any solemn decision, that I never would leave.

I surmised that problems would arise but the only one to which I gave any thought was finding somewhere to live. Accommodation was in short supply like everything else. Some of the furnished rooms I occupied caused even my adoration of Paris to waver a bit. They were dark sepulchres furnished with great looming wardrobes which I never dared open for fear that a desiccated corpse might tumble out. Almost invariably a crucifix was pinned to the wall, presumably to discourage the vampires and werewolves who normally hung out there.

During a brief marriage, my wife and I lived in a crazy Left Bank hotel. I wrote about this fantastical establishment in a book which I published some years ago but since nobody read it there can’t be any harm in repeating myself. It was a ramshackle place with a lift permanently stuck between two floors, with telephones which had apparently not worked since they had first been installed (a friend of mine used to summon his breakfast by blowing a powerful blast on a hunting horn), with doors which didn’t lock and taps which didn’t run, with a brass plate at the entrance arrogantly announcing that English was spoken when my wife and I were the only people in the place who spoke it.

The Florida was eccentric in plenty of other ways, in every way—the maddest box of tricks I ever came across. All the credit for the prevailing zaniness belonged to the proprietor. When we first met him, he struck us as a bit lugubrious. That was a mistaken impression if ever there was one. Before long we realised that Harlequin was lurking under that chapfallen exterior, only waiting for a chance to bound out and start dancing. Things that would have driven any other hotel proprietor out of his mind were just what Louis relished most. Whenever we inadvertently set fire to the curtains or broke window, he was frankly delighted. Mishaps of the sort were clearly what he had been hankering after for years past to interrupt the monotony of existence. The lengthy periods when I was unable to pay the bill didn’t worry him in the least. During such periods I not only failed to pay his bill, I borrowed money from him. He thought this reversal of normal procedure was hilarious. And on my birthday he presented me with a bottle of brandy.

Other Australians—writers and painters mostly—began to install themselves at the Florida. They were the sort of company Louis liked best. They were fellow-lunatics. Somebody came back one day with a collection of water pistols. Presumably Louis had had a deprived childhood; he had never seen water pistols before. He took to them enthusiastically. Ambushes were constantly being laid thereafter along the corridors and whether he was drenched or did the drenching Louis had the time of his life.

At fairly frequent intervals we would throw boisterous parties. You couldn’t have kept Louis away from them—not that we would have dreamed of excluding him because he was more boisterous than anyone else. Wine spilt on the carpets, cigarette burns on the furniture and similar minor accidents made the hotel even more dilapidated than it had been before. Our cavortings eventually drove the staider guests in the place to go elsewhere. Louis was only too pleased to see the last of them although he didn’t admit it. ‘This used to be a respectable hotel,’ he would say, trying hard to sound querulous. ‘You’ve turned it into a mad house.’ But he couldn’t conceal his pleasure at the transformation. He was much more at home in a mad house than in a respectable hotel.

I would have happily stayed at the Florida for the rest of my life. I knew I would never find anything like it again. But there was Louis’s wife. She was a cheerful old girl who was always ready to down a glass or two of wine with the rest of us. But she was not a madcap like Louis. He was too busy playing with water pistols to worry about the finances of the Florida. Berthe, on the other hand, fretted a good deal over the declining receipts. Decent bill-paying clients were increasingly rare. Those that did come never stayed long, not with water pistols being discharged along the corridors.

Berthe took over. Almost tearfully Louis announced one day that Berthe had determined to impose a more conventional existence on him. He was to be exiled as manager of a café on the outskirts of Paris. We tried to reason with him. Away from the Florida he would be lost, an orphan. What sort of fun could he expect with a lot of suburban clerks and shopkeepers as his only clients? What would he do without us? True, true, said Louis with emotion, but we would not desert him, surely. We would come to dine at his café en famille, no? As often as possible. Every day if we wanted.

That was all very well and we weren’t shy about taking him up on the invitation to dine at his café. We had some memorable gatherings there although Berthe saw to it that no one carried a water pistol. Meantime, however, I had to look for alternative accommodation. I wasn’t prepared to return to one of those ghoul-haunted furnished rooms and I knew I would never find a hotel as easygoing as Louis’s Florida. The brief marriage had come to an end so that I didn’t need an unduly extensive establishment. Not that I could have afforded it even if I had wanted to. I was writing a book which fortunately for the reading public was never finished. Nobody had shown any interest in giving me an advance on it. For the rest, I picked up a bit of money doing odd jobs. The owner of my chosen café hired me for a while to wash dishes in his minuscule kitchen and occasionally I had a night’s work at the great central markets. My wages from these activities were enough, barely enough, to pay for something very modest indeed if I could find it.

In the end, I did. My new residence was modest all right. It was a sort of plywood cabin above a coal-shed in the courtyard of a big house in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs off the Boulevard Raspail. It was not merely modest, it was as austere as a monastic cell. My consolation was the concierge of the big house. She was of incredible antiquity and austere mien but I had got on the right side of her by offering to do her marketing one day when she was laid up with a cold in the head. From then on I was treated with extreme cordiality. I think I stood as high in her favour as the next-door concierge, her particular crony. Every so often she would invite me into her den to drink a glass of wine and would recount astonishing and frequently improper stories about different individuals who had lived in my shack or had had rooms in the big house. Chatting with her on one occasion, she asked me what I did. She was barely literate but she was French and I knew my stocks would go up if I claimed to be a poet. A poet, was I? Ah, that explained why we got on so well together. She esteemed poets—they were a cut above the ordinary run of people. Years ago, another poet had lived there—not in my cabin but in a set of rooms in the house. Monsieur Poonde was his name. Perhaps I knew him?

Poonde? Poonde? No, I had never had the good fortune to meet the illustrious Poonde. Then it dawned on me. Pound, Ezra Pound! It was quite true that he had lived there. Not long ago in a book about the great man I saw a photograph of the courtyard—my courtyard—in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Nothing had changed. It was exactly as I was to know it twenty-five years later. The same plaster casts, left behind by some forgotten sculptor, were leaning against the wall.

‘What sort of man was Monsieur Pound?’

‘A very noisy gentleman ...’

You ascended to my cabin by means of a stepladder. Inside, there was just enough space for the bed. Any visitors who might clamber up the ladder and open the door ran a risk of finding themselves tumbling into bed with me. It was too bad that no attractive young women ever came to call.

In the event, the only visitor I ever had was Pierre. Pierre was a taxidriver and I met him because he had entered a contest organised by some airline or other. The aim was to select the most typical representatives of various forms of transport—a London bus conductor, a Venetian gondolier, a Paris taxidriver. Pierre entered in the last of these categories.

One by one, candidates were brought before a jury and the same questions put to each. One question in particular was considered fundamental: ‘You are driving around in your cab and you are simultaneously hailed by a ravishing young woman and a poor old lady with two heavy suitcases. Which of the two would you take?’

The contestants felt confident that they knew the answer to that one. The poor old lady, of course, with the two heavy suitcases. And why would that be their choice? Why, because it was only right to be kind to the elderly—one has a heart, quoi—what sort of a world would it be if one didn’t spare a thought for the aged and infirm?

Pierre was ushered in. The same question was put to him and he gave the same answer as the other candidates. ‘Pas d’hesitation, the old biddy with the two heavy suitcases.’

‘And why?’

‘Mon Dieu, because there’s an additional charge for suitcases, voyons.’ He won.

The first prize was a free trip to Australia and someone from the Australian Embassy gave a cocktail party for Pierre on the eve of his departure. I don’t know why I was invited. I know why I accepted. There would be things to eat. I found something better than cheese straws or canapes. Pierre. A tall fellow of about my own age he bore a striking facial resemblance to certain depictions of Richard III. He was dressed in irreproachable taste—perfectly pressed grey trousers, beautifully shined shoes, a blue blazer with brass buttons. He could have passed for one of the diplomats present. His manners were conspicuously good, his French was of unusual elegance. Such worldliness was almost intimidating but I thought I detected a sardonic glint in his eye.

When the party broke up Pierre for some reason asked whether he could drop me anywhere. ‘If he was going towards Montparnasse ...’ He was. He made elaborate farewells and we went sedately downstairs together. I was still a little ill at ease in the presence of so much social aplomb.

Once in his taxi, Pierre was abruptly transformed. The refined upper-class diction made way for the characteristic drawl of the titi, the Parisian street boy. Dropping the ceremonious speech which was all I had heard so far from him, he addressed me in the familiar second person singular ‘Eh, bien, mon vieux, that was heavy going. I could see you weren’t loving it, either. Let’s go and drink some Calvados to get the taste of champagne out of our mouths.’

Before long, I came to understand that Pierre was a dual or rather a multiple personality. Depending on the circumstances, he could switch in an instant from the proletarian taxidriver to the urbane patrician I had met at the Embassy party and then as quickly back again with, moreover, innumerable variations in between. This ability to metamorphose himself enabled him to establish relationships with an extraordinary range of people. He had friends and acquaintances in every milieu imaginable. I was present when he discussed Celine with a well-known author, when he argued with another taxidriver about the innards of different engines, when he expounded the significance of an artist’s paintings to the painter himself, when he gave some valuable advice on sexual peculiarities to a couple of tarts in a bar.

Whether or not the others learnt anything new, the two tarts undoubtedly picked up some useful hints. Sex was Pierre’s speciality. He recounted uproarious stories of his amatory prowess which would have startled Kraft-Ebbing. Women, we were given to understand, staggered back unbelievingly on first sighting his sexual organ. ‘Thirty-three centimetres!’ Pierre would proclaim in reverent tones as though he himself was awed by such a phenomenon.

Once, as we sat on a café terrace, Pierre was moved to boast of his dimensions yet again. ‘Thirty-three centimetres, Alister—can you imagine?’ The waiter, an old friend, overheard the revelation. So did practically everyone else on the terrace: Pierre was not coy on the subject.

‘Allons, Monsieur Pierre—thirty-three centimetres! It’s not possible.’

‘Mon ami,’ said Pierre with deep gravity, ‘I would be only too happy to provide ocular proof but I dare not. An inadvertent movement on my part and I might well put out one of your eyes.’

The trip to Australia which he had won left Pierre with only a hazy impression of my native land. I gathered that he and the bus conductor and the gondolier celebrated their triumph all the way there, throughout their stay and all the way back. I was touched to discover, however, that he had not forgotten me during his absence. He turned up one morning at the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and contemplated my cabin with commiseration.

‘Let’s have lunch together.’

‘No money.’

‘I can see that, espèce d’imbécile. Neither have I for the moment but I will have by lunchtime. Let’s go over towards the Champs-Elysées—always plenty of passengers there. If they’re Americans or English you can be my interpreter and your salary will be a decent meal. Allons-y!'

Thereafter, this was a more or less regular routine. Each morning I would take my place in the taxi beside Pierre and we would ply for hire. Towards noon, Pierre would count the takings. ‘Bien, bien, I think we can manage something a bit more succulent than we had yesterday.’

My talents as an interpreter were only rarely required. One day when we had picked up a middle-aged American couple, Pierre decided that it would be amusing if I were to pretend that I was French and had no more English than himself. The idea was that the Americans would talk together freely and that all sorts of scabrous remarks would be made which I would subsequently repeat to Pierre. Nothing in the least scabrous was said, to Pierre’s disappointment. Meantime, the Americans were asking this and that. I interpreted and Pierre would make an effort to reply in his badly broken English. From time to time, I chipped in on my own account but since I had established myself as French, I was obliged to use an English as fragmentary as Pierre’s and to assume a music hall French accent. When the Americans reached their destination, the woman gave judgment. ‘Your friend,’ she told Pierre, ‘understands English better than you do but you speak it much better than he does.’ Pierre was ecstatic. ‘Never forget,’ he would say thereafter, ‘that you may understand English better than I do but I’m the one who speaks it as it should be spoken.’

I was well aware that the amount of interpreting I had to do was a long way from compensating Pierre for the cost of my meals. Pierre promptly found a way of easing my conscience.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what. For a man of my distinction’—a derisive cackle of laughter at this point—‘for a man of my distinction it’s humiliating to have to curse drivers less skilled than myself, not to mention all those pedestrians with suicidal tendencies. Besides, the younger generation looks to me to set certain standards of behaviour. You have no reputation for gentility to preserve. I’ll teach you the basic insults to be delivered and henceforward, when I give the signal, you do the cursing.’

I learnt some superbly foul language under Pierre’s guidance and used it as instructed. ‘Look at that cretin walking right against the lights,’ Pierre would say, ‘let him have it!’ and I would let loose a spate of obscene invective.

George Orwell made it clear that he had greatly disliked being down and out in Paris. There were moments when I didn’t much enjoy the experience myself. Thanks to Pierre and one or two others, though, I had a happier time of it than Orwell.