Paris Nonsense, Part VI

A tout le monde,

Rhonda and I stumbled today upon a startlingly extensive show honoring Yves Montand in the grand old Hotel de Ville (city hall). It covers every aspect of the entertainer's life, from his film and singing career, to his antiviolence politics, to his identity as a Frenchman—part historic exhibit, part moving adulation.

At one point, two very small Frenchwomen in their sixties entered a darkened room where I sat on crowded, carpeted bleachers facing a screen that showed clips of Montand's many TV appearances in France and abroad. "Mesdames," I called in a whisper and motioned to them that I would stand so they could reach empty seats behind me. They thanked me excitedly, and clutching each other's arms they climbed up to take their places in the audience.

The two women sat very close to each other and one of them sang along with all her favorite Montand tunes as the other held her wrists still on her knees and conducted each song by moving only her tiny index fingers. When other people in the room spoke, the ladies shushed them with annoyance and then returned to singing and conducting, commenting to each other with an occasional soft poke in the ribs. When Montand sang a sad song, they pulled out handkerchiefs and dabbed at their eyes, and when he did a comic dance they chuckled over his irresistible charm.

The rest of the audience was rapt, and nearly all stayed through the entire 20-minute video loop, but the two old friends were the only ones who reacted with laughter and tears, or for that matter any emotion at all. The French reaction to performance is very hard to read, as we noticed in two live performances this week. The first was in an oppressively hot, 10 by 10-foot underground piano bar where a young performer sang a repertoire of polyglottal patter songs while his audience sat stoically, puffing on their cigarettes. The singer sweated profusely, and it was hard to tell if it was due to the steamy heat or the utter nonreaction of his listeners who were squeezed so tightly he most likely could feel their smoky breath on his face.

The night before last night, we attended a performance of an experimental tap-dance, accordion, saxophone, percussion group, and with the exception of the mother of one of the tappers, saw the same blasé faces in the audience. But while their expressions indicated utter indifference, their enthusiastic applause at the end of each piece evinced an entirely different sentiment.

Despite a noticeable absence of scarves, this was a very stylish audience. The women had the lithe figures you see on nearly all French women—a near-anorexic slimness that would lead one to believe the French don't have nearly the number of cheeses that de Gaulle insisted made them so ungovernable, and everyone held their Gauloises either between their thumbs and index fingers, or all the way down where their index and middles met so they could clasp their hands tightly to their faces when they inhaled.

While finding seats among the red velvet couches and chairs, Rhonda and I began chatting with the dancer's sister and their Anne Bancroft–lookalike mother, an excessively chic woman with hair that matched her mascara, who wore a modified bowler tilted over her brow like Joel Grey in Cabaret.

When the club's atmosphere became sufficiently unbreatheable with cigarette smoke so that it had the quintessential Parisian jazz-club atmosphere, the troupe made their entrance down the center aisle. The tap dancers scraped and clacked their way to the stage as the musicians barked at their knees with baritone sax blasts and arrhythmic, dissonant accordion riffs.

As the only Americans in the room, Rhonda and I were able to express our delight with the performance in a way that no Frenchman, save the tap dancer's mother, seemed capable. She was terribly pleased at our obvious appreciation, and beamed at us after each tapping flurry her daughter made across the stage. When the show ended, she conveyed to us in a combination of rapid-fire French, the waving of her unfiltered Gitane, and a puffing pantomime of her hours-long labor, that she knew her daughter had talent even when she was in the womb.

*****

Waiting in line to ascend the Eiffel tower this, our last evening in France, a young child escaped from his mother and taking a large swig from his water bottle spat it on Rhonda's feet. No one came to rescue us from him or him from Rhonda, and then we saw his mother, surrounded by her six children who all seemed to be about six months apart and whose discipline she long ago obviously abandoned. As the children terrorized our group of fellow tourists, I dreaded sharing the claustrophobic elevator ride to the top, but then a thought occurred to me that brightened the situation; I finally had the opportunity to use the only French phrase I knew when I arrived. As I turned to the mother to tell her, "Madame, vos enfants sont insupportables!" she made her first move to control one of them—in Greek. My last chance for meaningful French communication was dashed, and it was time to return to our apartment and pack for the airport.

Final Day Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 29
Cheeses awaiting our return: 217

Paris Nonsense, Part V

Mesdames et Messieurs:

The water wasn't running when we woke this morning in our new apartment near Beauborg. Yes, a small disaster, but it has set the scene for some unexpected adventures, and the apartment is so charming, despite its location on the umpteenth floor, that we don't really mind. Parisians call the top floor the toutou etage but one might accurately describe this place as being on the toutoutoutouTOU etage. Rhonda and I are unsure if our lack of alertness is from not having had a shower since yesterday morning or if it's oxygen deprivation from the altitude of our new digs.

When the water pooped out, I earned the role of waterboy, a figure from 18th-century Paris that we learned about at the sewer museum. When the city first started providing Parisians with potable water from large neighborhood fountains, people who had the financial wherewithal not to wait in line paid one of 20,000 waterboys to fetch a pail for them. Those boys with little patience and even fewer scruples simply dipped their buckets into the Seine and delivered to their clients a healthy serving of cholera soup. When I climbed the stairs this morning with a five-liter bottle of Evian from the corner market, Rhonda eyed me suspiciously and took a distrustful sniff before using her ration to brush her teeth.

Still unshowered by late afternoon, we began to feel a tad sticky and stinky from a combination of sweat, pastry and crepe drippings, red wine, and some particularly odiferous cheese, and I was worried that we might be a bit too ripe to attend a theater performance for which Rhonda had purchased tickets. Even if Parisians did live up to their reputations for being bath-averse (and they do not), we were ready to give them a true run for their money, but that turned out to be a moot issue.

We entered the small Left Bank theater off an alley and descended a long flight of stairs into...a converted sewer! A tall, round tunnel blocked off from the main system by a stone wall at one end, it had an olfactory je ne sais quoi that in no uncertain terms explained the space's history. The performance was of an original play tied loosely together by Cole Porter and Noel Coward songs. When the female lead introduced "Night and Day" with the familiar lyrics, "Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops when the summer shower's through," I checked under my feet for hypersensitive rat hordes to see if I should make for safety through one of the two remaining manhole shafts above our heads.

More distracting was the long scarf worn by the female star. She tossed it around her neck repeatedly and at one point relinquished it to her male co-star who I was sure was going to hold it to his nose to filter the fetid air. The rest of the audience didn't share our point of reference that made the scarf prop so funny, but Rhonda and I had a hard time controlling our laughter, and managed to remain silent only by the fear that if we gave in to a guffaw, we would have to aspire a huge gasp of the theater's ambience.

Day Ten Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 26
Cheeses to go: 220*

*Note to all you sticklers: I have been sent numerous suggestions that this figure is wrong, in both current and historic French cheese terms. For the record, my version of the Columbia World of Quotations cites deGaulle as asking how one can govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese, and I have handy no 21st century reference for how ungovernable, based on available cheeses, the people of France have become. I stand by my current statistics.
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part IV

Liseurs et liseuses:

You may find it hard to believe, but the French are nothing if not practical, especially when it comes to museum design. The Paris sewer museum has a display showing the history of the sewer system that is built over a steel-grate floor, beneath which rush the turds of two million Parisians. Where else do you know a people to have devised a display that allows museum-goers sickened by the stench of an exhibit to vomit right where they stand and have it end up, no muss no fuss, exactly where it should? One of the other Americans who attended the museum with us spent almost her entire time underground with the sleeve of her sweater held unstylishly across her nose (I must admit to doing the same a bit after my mouth became dry from breathing through it), and it occurred to me that a nice touch would be if they had officials standing by with some especially ripe cheeses to wave under noses and revive visitors who fainted from the sewers' aroma.

Before we left the U.S., Rhonda had confessed a bit of insecurity concerning her wardrobe, having heard that Parisian women all dressed so chic. Amy (mentioned earlier) had thrown out a helpful suggestion, having recently returned from Paris with a suitcase full of scarves. "Just tell Rhonda to bring some scarves." Amy told me. "In Paris, it's all about scarves." I passed this advice on to Rhonda despite the fact that I have never seen her wear a scarf, could not imagine her wearing a scarf, and in fact, don't think she has ever even owned a scarf. Rhonda, as expected, scoffed at the scarves, but after about 15 minutes in the Paris sewers, watching everyone grasping at any available fabric to cover their faces, she did sheepishly admit to me, "Well, I guess Amy was right. It is all about scarves."

A delightful young German woman who is spending the month leading groups gagging and retching through these subterranean tunnels loaded us down with all sorts of fun facts, like that rats can sense a coming flash flood of effluence faster than humans, so if you see a bunch of rats running through the sewer, you should run too. Rats are smart, too, she told us. The sewermen used to use a quick poison to control the rat population, but some of the more wily rats pointed out to their friends the ominous brevity between snacktime and death, so they decided to stand around in groups and watch while one rodent ate the bonbons. If the sated rodent dropped dead, none of his pals would partake. Now the sewermen use slower-acting stuff, presuming that these furry little guys may be smart, but that hunger and patience have their limits.

*****

Yesterday, I called a friend of my mother's, Jacqueline, to introduce myself and invite her on Saturday when Rhonda and I plan to rent a car and drive off to Maison Picasiette, a house in Chartres whose owner completely covered it, inside and out including the furniture, in ornate mosaics. It is possible to believe that, because he seemed to have tiled everything on his property except his wife, that the vast amounts of broken crockery he used was produced by his wife throwing dishes at him in a perpetual state of rage. While at first enthusiastic about this junket, Jacqueline then hesitated. "Umm, there's just one thing I have to warn you about" she told me. "This is kind of personal." I thought she was going to tell me she had some form of disability that would require me to carry her to the car, or empty her colostomy bag, and I asked her the problem. "Well, I just want you to know that if I have to, I can hold off for a while but ... I'm a smoker."

When she found out that Rhonda and I smoked, too, her relief was palpable and her excitement about seeing Maison Picasiette returned. "Thank God!" she told me. "You know I have some of that gum, but I don't really like it. I just keep it around for when friends visit from the States and get so upset." All the pharmacies here have huge posters in their windows advertising Nicorette gum and standing in front of them you will invariably find one or more Parisians puffing away. The posters all have photos of sexy young people billowing smoke from their mouths and nostrils with no text of explanation save for the gum's brand name. Now I understand that Nicorette may never make it here as a cessation aid, but is catching on big time as another way for the French to cope with the insufferable American tourist.

Day Nine Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 22
Cheeses to go: 224
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part III

Mes petits moineaux...

Forgive me if the following seems choppy or distracted. We only yesterday found the boulangerie with the very best croissants in our neighborhood--why we didn't try it earlier I am not sure, as its name in English means "Everything with Butter"--and just at this moment I am eating my first almond croissant from there. My fingers are a little sticky and a fairly intense endorphin rush is limiting my vocabulary.

After nearly a week here, I thought it might be time to regale you with tales of the wild Parisian nightlife. How I wish I could tell you that my nights have been as full as my days, but aside from a conversation in a bar last evening with an older gentleman who wanted to have a discussion about politics, specifically concerning my President Kennedy and his President deGaulle (I believe he had had a couple of drinks before I arrived), there hasn't been much to report. His English was worse than my French, but through his whiskey slur I was able to understand the man to compliment my accent when out of my mouth from I know not where I told him in perfect French that it was late and that I needed to go home right away.

Rhonda and I were a wee delayed earlier in the evening on our way to a concert of Bach partitas, because Rhonda was in the bathroom sharpening her elbows so she could poke me should I start snoring during the performance. We had planned to pass an easy day and simply find a relaxing place to sit and read and eat some more cheese, but in our search for the perfect site at which to vegetate, we ended up wandering as much as usual, and whenever we sat down in a cafe, we would realize how close we were to yet another thing we had talked about seeing and we ended up, yet again, hithering here and yonning there. It turns out to be a Parisian routine that is hard to break.

The day before, for instance, we sallied forth to the flea market at Montreuil, where despite its vastness we found nothing to buy except for a much needed umbrella, and when we consulted our maps we realized how close we were to Pere Lachaise cemetery and traipsed in the rain through a back entrance to visit the famous dead folk there.

The list of Pere Lachaise's tenants is, of course, legendary. Here lie Moliere, Corot, Chopin, Balzac, Jim Morrison--all the historical heavyweights. Alice B. Toklas is buried subordinately behind Gertrude Stein, queerly evocative of elderly husbands in Miami who walk 10 paces back from their wives, carrying their purses, and Oscar Wilde's tomb is covered with lipstick from his mourners' kisses. (The men who visit Oscar, one can only suppose, wear considerably more lipstick than the women who visit Gert and Alice.)

A life-sized bronze of Victor Noir, a journalist murdered by a cousin of Napoleon III at the virile age of 22, lies sprawled across his grave, his top hat tossed aside and filled by a recent admirer with fresh red roses. Monsieur Noir lies in an eternal state of sexual arousal, even in death, and his tomb has become the destination of many a barren Frenchwoman who come to rub his penis to restore their fertility. Judging from the shine on Victor's bronze crotch, there is a lot of moaning of "O Lourdes, O Lourdes!" when no one is looking.

Speaking of penises, we found ourselves later in the evening on rue St. Denis, where a friend of another friend of Rhonda's owns a sex shop. Rhonda had been told it would be nice if while she was in Paris she stopped in and said hello, so we strolled up the neon-lit cobblestones until we found the place, but Rhonda couldn't remember the name of her friend's friend and while she stood and pondered it, the automatic double doors whooshed open and shut a number of times, expelling elderly men who zipped up their flies as they exited. Witnessing this, instead of remembering the owner's name Rhonda promptly forgot her own friend's name and imagined the scenario of walking into the place and in broken Introductory French trying to explain that someone whose name escaped her had asked her to say hello to someone else whose name was written down on a piece of paper that she had left at home, and that was the end of that adventure.

But I get ahead of myself. Rhonda and I spent nearly the entire stroll from our apartment to the Bach recital near Notre Dame in a verbal pissing contest about who was more exhausted by all our meanderings. Apparently I won, because she chose to warn me a dozen times that she would hurt me badly if I should chance to slumber. I understood her concern when we entered Sainte Chapelle, an intimate and lulling little chapel despite its wraparound stained glass windows that soar 30 feet above the congregants. The acoustics were such that the slightest cough or turning of a program page would seriously interfere with the soloist's performance (a violinist with a name very similar to one of the cheeses we tasted on Day One). I was able to stay awake by searching for images of little boys with priests in the hundreds of stained glass panes that depicted every scene in the Bible, and was glad I did, because near the end of the third movement of the first partita, Rhonda chose to add to it a sonorous, if slightly dissonant, bass line rumble, and I had to elbow her awake, ending her impromptu duet with a staccato grunt.

Day Eight statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 20
Cheeses to go: 226*

*Note: Due to an unfortunate calculation error, Day Five statistics included an overstatement of the number of remaining cheeses. Please accept my apologies.
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part II

Mes petits choux:

Just as Rhonda and I wrapped up the remains of cheeses 15 and 17 (we had already finished off number 16, a lovely, creamy goat with a spicy finish and a name utterly unpronounceable by Americans), the sky burst, driving all the loll-abouts in the Luxembourg Gardens to shelter under the trees and pavilions. The gendarmes who had begun their closing-time sweep of the park by blowing shrill whistles and doing that French wavy thing with their hands were good-natured enough to wait for the rain to let up a bit before driving the 50 or 60 refugees who had gathered under a large awning out the iron gates onto the rue Gay-Lussac.

This was our first day not to be slaves to our museum and monument passes. After sampling our first few cheeses, Rhonda and I had bought the passes, good for three days at a bazillion museums and monuments throughout Paris. Being on a bit of a budget, Rhonda figured that to use them to best economic advantage, one had to visit 3.24 sites per day, and we studied the approved list and picked our favorites.

My friend Amy in San Francisco has an arrangement with her girlfriend Laura who hates to shop, that after every three stops Amy insists they make to ogle shoes or scarves, Laura gets to pick a bar in which to have a cocktail. Rhonda and I planned to adapt this idea to sightseeing and determined that we would just substitute museum-going for shopping and cafes (or bars) for bars.

Fresh in the morning with a pastry and coffee in our bellies this plan seemed quite clever (I believe that Rhonda and I gave each other congratulatory if uncharacteristic slaps on each other's backs for our smarts), but even wearing the most comfortable shoes and visiting the most delightful museums, we exhausted ourselves in no time, and realized that the scheme would work better in reverse. By noon of our first day we determined that for every three coffees (or cocktails) we imbibed, we would treat ourselves to a stop at one museum or monument.

Still attempting to squeeze our money's worth from our museum passes we wore ourselves out, reluctantly forgoing one earned citron pressé (or pastis) in order to stop in a pharmacy to purchase matching pairs of Air-Pillo insoles. Part of me believes the three-day pass is designed to make the Paris visitor feel he is not accomplishing enough, to fill the tourist with doubts about his adequacies. Now that our passes have expired, we can enjoy the delights Paris offers at a more leisurely pace and without pressure or self-loathing.

This is not to say we did not linger over our favorite Renoirs and Degases or newly discovered Picassos, and enjoy them immensely. It is just that when we dragged ourselves through the Pantheon to pay our respects to Zola and Malraux and all the others who gave their lives for France and were entombed in the basement, we did so with a newfound respect for their wisdom in finding such a grand place to rest and take a load off their tired and aching feet.

Today's cheese-fest in the Luxembourg Gardens was a wonderful unwind, with a baguette and some fruit that we had managed to purchase with some difficulty in the markets on Rue Mouffetard. Each time I presented my selections to the fruit seller, he would yell at me harshly and wave away my money, handing my choice to another shopper and taking his or her money. On the third attempt, he inexplicably took my euros, wrapped up my purchase and barked his au revoir. I will never know what really transpired, and after slathering cheese number 15 on my baguette, I really didn't care. Later this evening in the Marais, back at Les Philosophes so that Rhonda could feed her tart-a-la-tomate monkey, the last pain of the memory completely faded when a man picked up the sweater that had dropped on the sidewalk from the back of my chair and instead of just handing it to me, draped it stylishly across my shoulders.

Day five statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 17
Cheeses to go: 239
Paris Nonsense continues...

Paris Nonsense, Part I

Mes amis,

Rhonda and I arrived in Paris yesterday and promptly planted ourselves at an outdoor table around the corner from our rented apartment where we feasted on the most exquisite tomato tart and stared at passersby. We read in one of our guidebooks about the acceptability in Parisian culture to stare—according to the author a popular way for one woman using public transport to study and adopt fashion sensibilities from another but now employed by anyone with a hint of curiosity about his fellow man. The book encourages Paris visitors to go native and stare freely, and Rhonda and I have been practicing in earnest. This being my first-ever trip to Paris and because of my shy nature, I started small by staring first at children, who by the way speak excellent French here and even look French. I cannot say for sure this is due to their attire and attribute it more to their attitude. Children here seem to master at a very tender age as much the unique Parisian comportment as the accent.

Speaking of children, I have yet to find any insufferable ones here. Those of you who heard me express pre-trip concerns that although I could remember very little practical French I had learned how to tell parents that their children were unbearable, will be either relieved or disappointed that I have had no opportunity to have the phrase "vos enfants sont insupportables" roll off my tongue to anyone. From Rhonda's own repertoire of seemingly unimportant French phrases, however, I have been able to steal one and use it appropriately when—after staring at a picturesque Frenchman or distracted by a pear tart in the window of a patisserie—I had reason to shout, "Mon Dieu! J'ai marché dans une crotte!" indicating to those around me that my shoes needed cleaning and that Paris's pooper-scooper laws could use a bit better enforcement (especially, I might suggest, in the Jewish quarter near the corner of rue de Rosiers and rue des Hospitalieres St. Gervais).

Day Two Statistics:
Cheeses tasted, 4
Cheeses to go, 242
Paris Nonsense continues...