Groundwork, p.42
Groundwork, page 42
10. 3, rue Jacques Mawas; 15th Arrondissement, Paris. Still another two-room apartment with a sit-down kitchen, on the third floor of a six-story building. Age 24. Not long after you arrived in Paris (February 24, 1971), you began having second thoughts about the breakup with your girlfriend. You wrote her a letter, asking if she had the courage to try to make another go of it, and when she said yes, your good-and-bad, off-and-on, up-and-down relations with her continued. She would be joining you in Paris in early April, and in the meantime you went out to look for a furnished apartment (the ship had paid well, but not well enough to allow you to buy furniture), and you soon found the place on the rue Jacques Mawas, which was clean, filled with light, not too expensive, and equipped with a piano. Since your girlfriend was an excellent and devoted pianist (Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven), you took the apartment on the spot, knowing how pleased she would be by this lucky turn. Not just Paris, but Paris with a piano. You moved in, and once you had taken care of the household fundamentals (bedding, pots and pans, dishes, towels, silverware), you arranged for someone to come and tune the out-of-tune piano, which had not been played in years. A blind man showed up the next day (you have rarely met a piano tuner who is not blind), a corpulent person of around fifty with a dough-white face and eyes rolling upward in their sockets. A strange presence, you found, but not just because of the eyes. It was the skin, the blanched, puffball skin, which looked spongy and malleable, as if he lived underground somewhere and never let the light touch his face. With him was a young man of eighteen or twenty, who held on to his arm as he guided the tuner through the front door and on toward the instrument in the back room. The young man never said a word during the visit, so you failed to learn if he was a son, a nephew, a cousin, or a hired companion, but the tuner was a talkative fellow, and after he had completed his work, he paused for a while to chat with you. “This street,” he said, “rue Jacques Mawas in the fifteenth arrondissement. It’s a very small street, isn’t it? Just a few buildings, if I’m not mistaken.” You told him he wasn’t mistaken, it was indeed a very small street. “It’s funny,” he continued, “but it turns out that I lived here during the war. It was a good place to find apartments back then.” You asked him why. “Because,” he said, “many Israelites used to live in this neighborhood, but then the war started and they went away.” At first, you couldn’t register what he was trying to tell you—or didn’t want to believe what he was telling you. The word Israelite might have knocked you off balance a little, but your French was good enough for you to know that it was not an uncommon synonym for the word juif (Jew), at least for people of the war generation, although in your experience it had always carried a pejorative edge to it, not an outright declaration of anti-Semitism so much as a way of distancing the Jews from the French, of turning them into something foreign and exotic, that curious, ancient people from the desert with their funny customs and vengeful, primitive God. That was bad enough, but the next part of the sentence reeked of such ignorance, or such willful denial, that you weren’t sure if you were talking to the world’s biggest simpleton or a former Vichy collaborator. They went away. No doubt on a deluxe world cruise, an uninterrupted five-year holiday spent basking in the Mediterranean sun, playing tennis in the Florida Keys, and dancing on the beaches of Australia. You wanted the blind man gone, to remove him from your sight as quickly as possible, but as you were handing him his money, you couldn’t resist asking one last question. “Oh,” you said, “and where did they go when they went away?” The piano tuner paused, as if searching for an answer, and when no answer came, he grinned at you apologetically. “I have no idea,” he said, “but most of them didn’t come back.” That was the first of several lessons that were hammered home to you in that building about the ways of the French—the next one being the War of the Pipes, which began a couple of weeks later. The plumbing equipment in your apartment was not new, and the chain-pull toilet with the overhead water tank was not in proper working order. Each time you flushed, the water would run for a considerable length of time and make a considerable amount of noise. You paid no attention to it, the running toilet was no more than a minor inconvenience to you, but it seemed that it created a great turbulence in the apartment below yours, the thunderous sound of a bath being drawn at full throttle. You were unaware of this until a letter was slipped under your door one day. It was from your downstairs neighbor, a certain Madame Rubinstein (how shocked the piano tuner would have been to learn that his wartime address still harbored some undead Israelites), an indignant letter complaining about the unbearable ruckus of midnight baths, informing you that she had written to the landlord in Arras about your carryings-on, and if he didn’t begin eviction procedures against you at once, she would take the matter to the police. You were astonished by the violence of her tone, dumbfounded that she had not bothered to knock on your door and talk about the problem with you face to face (which was the standard method of resolving differences between tenants in New York apartment buildings) but instead had gone behind your back and contacted the authorities. This was the French way, as opposed to the American way— a boundless faith in the hierarchies of power, an unquestioning belief in the channels of bureaucracy to right wrongs and rectify the smallest injustices. You had never met this woman, had no idea what she looked like, and here she was attacking you with savage insults, declaring war over an issue that until then had escaped your notice. To avoid what you assumed would be immediate eviction, you wrote to the landlord, explained your side of the story, promised to have the malfunctioning toilet fixed, and received a jovial, thoroughly heartening letter in response: Youth must have its day, live and let live, no worries, but just go easy on the hydrotherapy, all right? (The nasty French as opposed to the good-natured French: in the three and a half years you lived among them, you met some of the coldest, meanest characters on the face of the earth, but also some of the warmest, most generous men and women you have ever known.) Peace reigned for a while. You still had not seen Madame Rubinstein, but the complaints from downstairs had stopped. Then your girlfriend arrived from New York and the silent apartment began to fill with the sounds of her piano playing, and because you loved music above all other things, it was inconceivable to you that anyone could object to the keyboard masterworks emanating from the third floor. One Sunday afternoon, however, an especially beautiful Sunday afternoon in late spring, as you sat on the couch listening to your girlfriend play Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, a chorus of shrieking, irritated voices suddenly erupted downstairs. The Rubinsteins were entertaining guests, and what the angry voices were saying was: “Impossible! Enough! The last straw!” Then someone began whacking a broomstick on the ceiling directly below the piano, and a woman’s voice cried out: “Stop! Stop that infernal racket now!” It was the last straw for you as well, and with the voice still screaming from the second floor, you burst out of your apartment, ran down the stairs, and knocked—knocked hard—on the Rubinsteins’ door. It opened within three seconds (no doubt they heard you coming), and there you were, standing face to face with the formerly invisible Madame Rubinstein, who turned out to be an attractive woman in her mid-forties (why does one always want to suppose that unpleasant people are ugly?), and with no preamble of any kind, the two of you immediately launched into a full-bore shouting match. You were not someone who was easily agitated, you had little trouble keeping your temper under control, you would generally do anything possible to avoid an argument, but on that particular day you were beside yourself with anger, and because your anger seemed to lift your French to new levels of speed and precision, the two of you went at it as equals in the art of verbal combat. Your position: We have every right to play the piano on a Sunday afternoon, on any afternoon for that matter, at any time of any day of any week or month as long as the hour is not too early or too late. Her position: This is a respectable bourgeois house; if you want to play the piano, rent a studio; this is a good bourgeois house, and that means we follow the rules and behave in a civilized manner; loud noises are forbidden; when a police detective was living in your apartment last year, we had him thrown out of the building because he kept such irregular hours; this is a decent bourgeois house; we have a piano in our apartment, but do we ever play it? No, of course not. Her arguments struck you as lame, cliché-ridden tautologies, comic assertions worthy of Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, but she delivered them with such fury and venomous conviction that you were in no mood to laugh. The conversation was going nowhere, neither one of you would budge, you were building a wall of permanent animosity between you, and when you imagined how bitter the future would be if you kept on going at each other in this way, you decided the moment had come to pull out your trump card, to turn the dispute around and steer it in an entirely different direction. How sad it is, you said, how terribly sad and pathetic that two Jews should be fighting like this; think of all the suffering and death, Madame Rubinstein, all the horrors our people have been subjected to, and here we are shouting at each other over nothing; we should be ashamed of ourselves. The ploy worked just as you had hoped it would. Something about the way you said what you had said got through to her, and the battle was suddenly over. From that day forward, Madame Rubinstein ceased to be an antagonist. Whenever you saw her in the street or in the entranceway of the building, she would smile and address you with the formal propriety such encounters called for: Bonjour, monsieur, to which you would respond, politely smiling back at her, Bonjour, madame. Such was life in France. People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect. Add in the contingent fact that you and Madame Rubinstein were fellow Jews, and there was no reason to fight anymore, no matter how often your girlfriend played the piano. It sickened you that you had allowed yourself to resort to such an underhanded tactic, but the trump card had done its job, and it bought you peace for the rest of the time you lived on the rue Jacques Mawas.
11. 2, rue du Louvre; 1st Arrondissement, Paris. A maid’s room (chambre de bonne) on the top floor of a six-story building facing the Seine. Age 25. Your room was in the back, and what you saw when you looked out the window was a gargoyle thrusting from the bell tower of the church next door—Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, the same church whose bells tolled without interruption on August 24, 1572, ringing out the news of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. When you looked to your left, you saw the Louvre. When you looked to your right, you saw Les Halles, and far off, at the northern edge of Paris, the white dome of Montmartre. This was the smallest space you have ever inhabited, a room so small that only the barest essentials could fit in there: a narrow bed, a diminutive desk and straight-backed chair, a sink, and another straight-backed chair beside the bed, where you kept your one-burner electric hot plate and the single pot you owned, which you used for heating water to make instant coffee and boiled eggs. Toilet down the hall; no shower or bath. You lived there because you were low on money and the room had been given to you for free. The agents of this extraordinary act of generosity were your friends Jacques and Christine Dupin (the very best and kindest of friends—may their names be hallowed forever), who lived downstairs in a large apartment on the second floor, and because this was a Haussmann-era building, their apartment came with an extra room for a maid on the top floor. You lived alone. Once again, you and your girlfriend had failed to make a go of it, and once again you had split up. She was living in the west of Ireland by then, sharing a turf-heated cottage with a high school friend a few miles outside of Sligo, and although you went to Ireland at one point to try to win her back, your gallant gesture went for naught, since her heart had become entangled with that of a young Irishman, and you had walked in at an early juncture of their affair (which eventually came to naught as well), meaning that you had mistimed your trip, and you left the green, windy hills of Sligo wondering if you would ever see her again. You returned to your room, to the loneliness of your room, that smallest of small rooms that sometimes drove you out in search of prostitutes, but it would be wrong to say you were unhappy there, for you had no trouble adjusting to your reduced circumstances, you found it invigorating to learn that you could get by on almost nothing, and as long as you were able to write, it made no difference where or how you lived. Day after day throughout the months you were there, construction crews worked directly across from your building, digging an underground parking garage four or five levels deep. At night, whenever you went to your window and looked down at the excavated earth, at the vast hole spreading in the ground below you, you would see rats, hundreds of wet, gleaming rats running through the mud.
12. 29, rue Descartes; 5th Arrondissement, Paris. Another two-room apartment with a sit-down kitchen, on the fourth floor of a six-story building. Age 26. A number of well-paying freelance jobs had lifted you out of penury, and your finances were now robust enough for you to sign a lease on another apartment. Your girlfriend had returned from Sligo, the Irishman was no longer in the picture, and once again the two of you decided to join forces and take another stab at living together. This time, things went fairly smoothly, not without some bumps along the way, perhaps, but less jolting ones than previously, and neither one of you threatened to walk out on the other. The apartment at 29, rue Descartes was surely the most pleasant space you occupied in Paris. Even the concierge was pleasant (a pretty young woman with short blonde hair who was married to a cop, always smiling, always with a friendly word, unlike the snooping, ill-tempered crones who traditionally managed Paris apartment buildings), and you were glad to be living in this part of town, the middle of the old Latin Quarter, just up the hill from the place de la Contrescarpe, with its cafés, restaurants, and vivid, boisterous, theatrical open-air market. But the good freelance jobs of the past year were drying up, and once again your resources were dwindling. You figured you would be able to hang on until the end of the summer, and then you would have to pack it in and return to New York. At the last minute, however, your stay in France was unexpectedly prolonged.
13. Saint Martin; Moissac-Bellevue, Var. A farmhouse in southeastern Provence. Two stories, immensely thick stone walls, red-tile roof, dark green shutters and doors, several acres of surrounding fields flanked by a national forest on one side and a dirt road on the other: the middle of nowhere. One of the stones above the front door was engraved with the words L’An VI—year six—which you took to mean the sixth year of the Revolution, suggesting that the house was built in 1794 or 1795. Age 26 to 27. You and your girlfriend spent nine months as caretakers of that remote southern property, living there from early September 1973 to the end of May 1974, and although you have already written about some of the things that happened to you in that house (The Red Notebook, Story No. 2), there was much that you did not talk about in those five pages. When you think about the time you spent in that part of the world now, what comes back to you first is the air, the scents of thyme and lavender that rose up around you whenever you walked through the fields that bordered the house, the redolent air, the muscular air when the wind was blowing, the languorous air when the sun lowered itself into the valley and lizards and salamanders crawled out from crevices in the stones to drowse in the heat, and then the dryness and roughness of the country, the gray, molten rocks, the chalky white soil, the red earth along certain paths and stretches of road, the scarab beetles in the forest pushing their mountainous spheres of dung, the magpies swooping over the fields and neighboring vineyards, the flocks of sheep that passed through the meadow just beyond the house, the sudden apparitions of sheep, hundreds of sheep bunched together and moving forward with the clattering sounds of their bells, the violence of the mistrals, the windstorms that would last for seventy-two unbroken hours, shaking every window, every shutter, every door and loosened tile of the house, the yellow broom that covered the hillsides in spring, the flowering almond tress, the rosemary bushes, the scrubby, stunted live oaks with gnarled trunks and shimmering leaves, the frigid winter that forced you to close off the second floor of the house and live in the three downstairs rooms, warmed by an electric heater in one and a wood fire in another, the ruins of the chapel on a nearby cliff where the Knights Templar used to stop on their way to fight in the Crusades, the static coming through your enfeebled transistor radio in the middle of the night for two weeks running as you strained to listen to the U.S. Armed Forces broadcasts from Frankfurt of the Mets versus Cincinnati in the National League play-offs, the Mets versus Oakland in the World Series, and then the hailstorm you were thinking about the other day, the icy stones hammering against the terra-cotta roof and melting on the grass around the house, not as large as baseballs, perhaps, but golf balls for nine-foot men, followed by the one time it snowed and everything briefly turned white, and your nearest neighbor, a bachelor tenant farmer living alone with his truffle dog in a crumbling yellow house and dreaming of world revolution, the shepherds drinking in the hilltop bar of Moissac-Bellevue, their hands and faces black with dirt, the dirtiest men you have ever seen, and everyone speaking with the rolling r ’s of the southern French accent, the added g ’s that turned the words for wine and bread into vaing and paing, the s’s dropped elsewhere in France still surviving their Provençal origins, turning étrangers into estrangers (strangers, foreigners), and all through the region the rocks and walls painted with the slogan Occitanie Libre!, for this was the medieval land of oc and not of oui, and yes, you and your girlfriend were estrangers that year, but how much softer life was in this part of the country when compared to the brittle formalities and edginess of Paris, and how warmly you were treated during your time in the south, even by the stuffy, bourgeois couple with the impossible name of Assier de Pompignon, who would occasionally invite you to their house in the adjacent village of Régusse to watch films on TV, not to mention the people you came to know in Aups, seven kilometers from the house, where you went on your twice-weekly shopping expeditions, a town of three or four thousand people that came to feel like a vast metropole as the months of isolation rolled on, and because there were only two principal cafés in Aups, the right-wing café and the left-wing café, you frequented the left-wing café, where you were welcomed in by the regulars, the scruffy farmers and mechanics who were either Socialists or Communists, the rowdy, talkative locals who grew increasingly fond of the young American estrangers, and you remember sitting with them in that bar as you all watched the 1974 presidential election returns on TV, the campaign between Giscard and Mitterrand following Pompidou’s death, the hilarity and ultimate disappointment of that evening, everyone soused and cheering, everyone soused and cursing, but also in Aups there was your friend the butcher’s son, more or less your age, who worked in his father’s shop and was being groomed to take over the business, but at the same time a passionate and highly skilled photographer, who spent that year documenting the evacuation and demolition of a small village that was scheduled to be inundated for the construction of a dam, the butcher’s son with his heartbreaking photographs, the drunken men in the Socialist/Communist bar, but also the dentist in Draguignan, the man your girlfriend had to visit again and again for the complicated root-canal work he performed on her, all the many hours she spent in his chair, and when the work was finally done and he presented her with the bill, it came to all of three hundred francs (sixty dollars), a sum so low, so incommensurate with the time and effort he had expended on her, that she asked him why he had charged her so little, to which he responded, with a wave of the hand and a diffident little shrug, “Forget it. I was young once myself.”
