The Neon Groves of Paris: Surrealist Journals June 1994; Days 4 & 5
Paris Kiosque - June 1996 - Volume 3, Numero 6
Copyright (c) 1996 Michael Fontana - Used with permission
Day 4
This day woke up cold and rainy, a soaking rain outdoors through which I could
see my breath, an occasional wind that carved me like the hands of a sculptor
carving one of Andre Breton's Haitian masks. I visited the Musee d'Orsay where
I discovered a taste for Rodin and the beauty of Rimsky-Korsakov's wife. After
the museum I walked along the Seine, where I saw four boats bobbing on the
water. I took this as a positive sign because the fourth sepharih on the
Kabbalistic Tree of Life is El or "mercy."
Beneath the bridges lay the bedding of homeless people, wrapped in plastic
bundles to protect against the rain and splashes from the river. Once I left
the banks of the Seine for the streets above, I discovered the streets clogged
with multi-colored bicycles and unicycles, protesting the normal congestion
there by automobiles.
I next walked over to Notre Dame, where the exterior of flying buttresses
impressed me bt the cavernous and stolid interior did not. Nevertheless the
lapsed Catholic in me needed to light a candle. As I did I looked over to the
person next to me and it was she or she was her: the same complexion, the
circles under her eyes now absent, her lips richer and fuller in pink blossom,
and that same wonderful sniffle, only now less intense that upon our last
meeting.
I waited until she finished her prayer over the candle and followed her into
the street, where I touched her arm to draw her attention toward me. "I'm
sorry to bother," I said in English, "but I must know your name."
She looked at me as if trying to distinguish a threat or familiarity. Locating
neither, she only said this: "I don't speak English. Un peu de français.
Je suis Polish, n'est-ce pas?"
I'd assumed somewhere in my heart that language would be the least of our
complications, that we might intuit each other rather than having to sully
ourselves in ordinary words. I watched her disappear down the street and
drowned my personal sorrows with a visit to Shakespeare & Co., discovering that
my fellow Cincinnatian Edmund White had just read from his biography of Genet
there. As if to taunt me still further, the fates had determined that I'd find
an otherwise difficult-to-find-in-the-states novel by Anna Kavan, and price it
at 100 francs.
Day 5
My final day in Paris. A sense of defeat like the fallen petals of roses at my
feet, hints of the beautiful color and fragrance of a love that might have
been, but even those traces fading away as they were stripped from bodily
context. I tried to inspire myself with a visit to the Eiffel Tower but having
seen it so often in pictures and films, having seen Chagall's rendering of it
on a postcard back home, and having especially been subjected to an ugly
imitation for years at an amusement park just outside of Cincinnati, it seemed
anti-climactic. My dreams of it were sturdier than any actuality, as with so
much else in my life.
Beyond the tower itself sat tacky souvenir shops, peddlers of Eiffel Tower key
rings, engravers of names on grains of rice, charcoal-sketch artists and
crepe-dippers. It reminded me of rue Pigalle, where the romantic hungers that
a visitor might bring to Paris are prostituted and facsimilated.
I left there by Metro and then rode the funicular to Sacre Coeur. The church
itself was sealed off to tours as a Mass was about to commence outdoors.
Priests movved through their rituals, dressed in white robes that seemed to
erase their bodies in the pale burning of the sun. The funiculars remained
crowded with people moving up and down the hillside from Montmartre. Tourists
talked throughout the Mass, blocking sacred words with murmurs of
disappointment at their inability to enter church. Men stood by the ropes that
cordonned us off from the Mass and drank beer as if at a rodeo or a wrestling
match.
I took the funicular back downhill and surrendered to another American impulse;
I decided to shop. I rode the serenaded by a three-piece group of young men
who performed love songs in exchange for coins in their guitar case. The flea
market was congestedd with people, with a high concentration of kitsch per
square inch on the market tables. I was pushed along in the sweat and noise.
A man who bared most of his body sat in an open space, his flesh ruined with
burns. He hid his face in his hands, his wretched story written out on
cardboard signs. He attracted more of a silent, awestruck crowd than the
one-man band nearby.
A coin fell at the ruined man's feet with the precision of a glass clapper in a
ceramic bell. I looked at the hand that had dropped the coin. It was a
woman's hand, each finger decorated in a ring of gold, though clearly not rings
of marriage; rings of decoration, rings to reflect an interior artistry. I
followed the hand as it next reached nto a pocket-book. It extracted a white
handkerchief that I suspected to be woven with the delicacy of a moth's wing.
I walked over to where the woman stood and dropped coins of my own onto the
ground at the man's feet, adding a chorus of chimes to hers. I spoke to her in
my ruined French: "Voulez-vous manager, s'il vous plait?"
The insensibility of the sentence seemed to fall aside as a barrier between us.
She looked into my face and recognized me from the day before. Most
importantly, she seemed to recognize my gesture as a gentle one, even as
evidence of it was scooped into the hands of the ruined man.
We travelled to Place Stalingrad at last, where she led me to a restaurant
called L'Epoque. No one there spoke English or Polish but we were fed well
nonetheless, three courses in all, which I took as a final divine sign becase
the third sephirah on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is binah or
"understanding."
We fed on lamb with mushrooms, duck paté, and a lemon tart, along with wine
and water, cafe au lait and chocolate. Between mouthfuls of food and drink
that otherwise prevented words, I learned that the woman's name was Kasia and
she was from Krakow. She traveled here alone because a gypsy had read her palm
and told her that Paris held a key for her, one that would unlock many
treasures.
I don't know if she discovered that key, which I imagined to be as gold as her
rings and hidden somewhere on the back of her tongue so that no one cold steal
it away or even suspect that she carried it. I don know that her room at
L'Abricotel was small and pleasant, smelling of its namesake as we slept
spooned together on her bed, as if providing us the grove in which to satiate
our hungers and our thirsts, the way no ordinary food could ever do.
Michael Fontana contributed "The Neon Groves of Paris: Surrealist Journals June 1994"
as part of the Travelers' Tales, Francescape and Paris Pages
writing contest.
