Haunting Paris Read online

  Everything about the Americans shines, their teeth, their nails, their skin; do they scrub themselves daily with pumice? And naturally they’ve got on tennis shoes, Americans wear them everywhere, even indoors. Ana Carvalho has watched many American programs on television and considers herself an expert on their peculiarities. No wonder they all come to Paris on holiday, what is there for them to do at home, nothing but autoroutes everywhere and wild creatures running loose on the streets. Armadillos. No, that’s Texas, these people are from Florida. Alligators, then, and sharks, which explains why they’re all bristling with guns. Thankfully, there’s nothing like that at the beach in Hossegor, where she goes for her own vacation.

  Ana Carvalho hopes their presence won’t dérange Madame Sylvie too much, but on the other hand, a little bother might shake her out of her misery. At least she’s no longer wild with grief; the look in Sylvie’s eyes after Monsieur Julien’s passing had given Ana quite a turn. Many a time she had gone upstairs to make sure Sylvie was all right, to keep her company through the dark watches of the night. Hopefully, that phase is over, but even if she no longer fears the worst, Ana still frets about Sylvie, the way she’s shut herself up in the apartment like an old woman, as if fifty-three is any age at all, a mere girl compared to herself, long past retirement age and still working her fingers to the bone.

  Ana enters Sylvie’s apartment and finds her sitting in the dark. Oh là là là là, not again. It’s enough to sink anyone’s spirits, playing lugubrious music all day long. And that little dog listening at her feet, it’s a wonder he hasn’t succumbed to melancholy as well. Give her a gay little tune, something to set one’s feet tapping. “Quand on s’promène (pum pum) au bord de l’eau,” she sings as she puts on a pot of coffee, “comme tout est beau (pum), quel renouveau (pum).” Now that’s a song, and sure enough, Coco is up on his hind legs, didn’t she say he was musical? She’d taught him to dance like that, by holding a biscuit just out of reach. A cowering little mite he was then, but look at him now, ready to take on anything, even the great big Rott down the street.

  Ana Carvalho wonders if Sylvie has done anything about the checkbook that fell out of Monsieur Julien’s desk last week. A bit of money, perhaps, like winning the lottery. Well, she certainly wouldn’t turn down a windfall, it would be a welcome addition to the nest egg put by for retirement in Hossegor, with maybe a small patch to grow thistle and nigella for her darlings, it’s highway robbery what shops charge for birdseed these days. Ana continues to hum as she throws open the shutters, admiring the pale pink of the leafing sycamores, the blue sky reflected in the river, the bateaux-mouches droning past quai d’Anjou. Their bright lights rake her ceiling at night and their amplified commentary breaks into her dreams, but she is used to the hubbub of the tourist boats now, rather likes it, in fact.

  While Ana finishes cleaning up and wrings out the mop, Sylvie prepares lunch, marinated quail and wild mushrooms bought from the grocer that morning. On her own she would have been satisfied with bread and cheese or an omelet, but she always tries to have something especially nice on the days Ana Carvalho comes to clean.

  The concierge wonders where the Americans are eating. Some shockingly expensive place, no doubt. Made of money, the people from America, but do they know value? For them there is nothing between the Love Burger and the Tour d’Argent. She’ll drop a hint in their ear about the bistro across the bridge. Impeccable! An honest kitchen, where the food is fresh, the prices correct. Ana Carvalho is a notable grippe-sou and enjoys pinching pennies on other people’s account as well as her own.

  At the other end of the island, the Taylors linger over coffee and Will remarks that Sylvie is younger than he expected. Fabienne had said her friend was a woman of a certain age, which he, like Byron, understood to mean certainly aged. Not that he can peg anyone’s age anymore, even his graduate students look no more than twelve, despite Fabienne’s tales of their flings with middle-aged professors. But then scandals are to Fabienne what truffles are to pigs, she can sniff them out anywhere. Difficult to picture her and Sylvie as friends, but lucky for him, he would never have found this place otherwise, all the hotels and apartments booked months in advance for the bicentennial. And certainly not at the price, several thousand francs cheaper than other apartments on the island, but that might be because there’s no elevator, it’s a wonder he didn’t get a hernia carrying luggage up five flights of stairs. Will signals for the check, and he and Alice stroll by the river, enjoying the mild spring weather.

  On the towpath, several men have their lines in the water. A man reels in his catch and Will goes down to the lower verge to watch. But Alice is afraid of the water ever since the incident at Ginnie Springs. She had gone diving with a group of friends when a sudden panic spread that one of them was missing. Her best friend swam frantically back to the cave to look for Ben, but he was waiting for them on the bank; it was Katy who drowned. For years afterward, Alice had nightmares of being trapped in the cave, watching in horror as the water rose around her.

  Even now, if she closes her eyes she can feel the water lapping at her ankles, rising to her knees. Abruptly she turns away from the river. There’s no point dwelling on it, the past is the past.

  Sylvie finds it harder to leave the past behind, it shadows each step she takes. Every morning, she and Julien turned left to pass the bread makers’ syndicate with its lingering aroma of warm bread, and she takes the same route now that she is alone. Coco trots ahead, barking loudly at the Rottweiler in front of the Hôtel de Lauzun before adding to the pile of droppings under its gilded balcony. He zigzags across the narrow street chasing down smells, but when he comes to rue des Deux Ponts with its speeding cars, he waits for Sylvie and they walk down quai de Bourbon all the way to the tip of the island. When they reach the footbridge leading to Notre Dame, Sylvie turns and retraces her steps.

  Every evening, as she did with Julien, she turns to the right, admiring the circular gallery of Hôtel Lambert, where the two of them had once spent an evening with the Rothschilds. As she passes the square Baryé with the NO DOGS sign affixed to the gate, she thinks how Julien found it illogique that dogs weren’t allowed in parks but had free run of the streets. After the quiet stretch of quai de Béthune, she again crosses rue des Deux Ponts, this time into the livelier quai d’Orléans. At the crowded footbridge, she turns back once more.

  When they walked around the island together, she’d say to Julien, One fine day. Luxuriating in the feeling of time stretching before them, she’d repeat the words. One fine day. He’d nod, waiting for the next part. When you retire, said Sylvie. And they both laughed, knowing he never would; there’d always be another lecture to give, another patient to see.

  Italy, she said. Florence.

  La Réunion. He kissed her hair. Or Florida, if you like.

  She knew he was only saying that because on gray winter days he’d seen her looking longingly at Fabienne’s photographs of palm trees silhouetted against a cloudless sky. But she didn’t care where they went, as long as it was together. In any case, like true Parisians, they always took their vacations in August, always on the rocky coast of Brittany, where Julien ran into the waves with the vigor of a man much younger than his years. The thought makes her happy and she closes her eyes, feeling the sun on her face, smelling salt spray on the rocks, and when she opens them again she is alone on the streets of Paris, with only the dog to keep her company in the encircling gloom.

  In the dusky light we call “the hour between dog and wolf,” not quite day, not quite night, I am jolted at the sight of Sylvie standing alone in a pool of lamplight. My breath catches in my throat as she turns her head, searching for someone in the shadows. I say that as if I still have breath, as if I still inhabit my body, when I am now incorporeal. But no language exists for how one apprehends the world as a spirit, our emotions remain too strongly tied to the body, things are still “heartbreaking,” “breathtaking,�
� even when there is no heart, no breath, but only their phantom habits.

  Strange how these habits linger, how I still feel the throbbing of my scarred eye, still smell the pipe smoke clinging to my beard. Death has not transformed me into a spirit floating in ether, I remain as firmly grounded as when my feet touched the earth, when I listened to my patients and tried to decipher the hieroglyphs of the human mind. What remains at the end is what makes us human, not our bodies but that deepest part of us—some call it mind, some call it soul—whose secrets are impenetrable even to ourselves.

  No longer an actor in my own life, I am now only a spectator to the lives of others as I wander the streets and watch scenes play out in lighted windows, from the concierge’s lodge at street level to the grand windows of the bel étage, from the modest middle-class panes to the stingy dormers of the attics. Small wonder that when the Lumière brothers premiered the first moving pictures in Paris, we were instantly smitten, they reminded us of the darkened theater of the streets where you can remain solitary in a crowd, cloaked in the anonymity that night confers upon us all.

  But sometimes a fissure opens between these parallel realms, when a moving image projected on the screen looks out into the audience with sudden recognition, a recognition fatal for the living. Those firmly in the grip of life have nothing to fear; even animals with their heightened perception remain insensible to our spectral presence. Any danger from the restless dead is only to those wavering between life and death until one or the other claims them. That’s when they are most vulnerable to subtle shifts in the atmosphere, to a current of air on a windless day, to seeing visions that, once seen, they cannot unsee.

  The door between two worlds opens only in one direction: I cannot cross the threshold back to Sylvie, and I’m terrified of her willfully stepping over it toward me. So when Sylvie turns her head, I press myself deeper into the shadows to avoid detection. But just as the persistence of vision creates a fluid whole from the disconnected frames in a film, so the persistence of memory dissolves separate moments of strong emotion into a dreamlike continuum. Like Dalí’s melting clocks, time runs together as I find myself inhabiting two different decades at once, this mild summer evening in 1989 when Sylvie lingers alone near the Street of the Headless Woman and a similar night some thirty years before, when she came to dinner at the house on rue de Bièvre.

  Sylvie, too, is thinking of that dinner in the distant past. She hasn’t set foot inside the house on rue de Bièvre for thirty years, but she’s convinced it remains just as she remembers, the celadon walls, the priceless tapestries, the mirror frames dulled to a soft gold, everything lustrous yet muted by the patina of time. The dinner invitation was an unexpected kindness, she was only the piano teacher, after all. She had worn her good black dress and arrived much too early to find Madame Dalsace putting peonies in a vase. Isabelle looked startled and asked Sylvie to excuse her for a moment while she gave the maid some last-minute instructions.

  Julien Dalsace came in fastening his cuff-links and stopped short on seeing Sylvie. She blushed, realizing she had caught her hosts unprepared by arriving punctually, and cast about for something to say, her fund of small talk limited, but Isabelle returned and took up the slack with a flow of conversation that required little from either her husband or Sylvie.

  The doorbell rang, announcing the other guests. Odile was the last to arrive, trailing a chiffon scarf and a smug young man. Isabelle sent for the children and they came down to shake hands, kiss cheeks, and give perfunctory smiles as people exclaimed at how much they had grown. They turned gratefully to Sylvie, who didn’t talk to them in the bright, artificial tone adults reserved for children, and Alexandra whispered that she had practiced her Clementi all afternoon, she was sure to play better than Charles tonight. Alexandra was fiercely competitive, she couldn’t bear to be second best. Her brother shrugged. “It’s not a contest,” he said, but Sylvie could see how much the recital mattered to Alexandra.

  Sylvie clasped her hands nervously when they sat down at the piano, but Charles and Alexandra got through the duettino without any obvious mistakes. “Bravi,” Odile’s young man called out, a little louder than necessary, to show he had said it correctly, in the plural. Isabelle nodded, taking it as a compliment to herself. Charles was coming along quite well, she said, but Alexandra needed to work harder, Sylvie was too lenient with her.

  Noticing that the child was biting her lip to keep from crying, Sylvie got up at once and moved to Alexandra’s side, whispering words of encouragement in her ear. When she straightened up, she noticed Julien’s eyes fixed on them, his face marked with an unaccustomed frown.

  “Since you’re up, mademoiselle,” Isabelle said, “perhaps we can persuade you to play?” Isabelle’s commands were always framed as requests. Sylvie’s hands turned clammy at the thought of performing for strangers, but to draw attention away from Alexandra, still red with mortification, she promptly seated herself at the piano.

  Though no one could have found fault with Sylvie’s playing, she sensed that something was missing, some essential thing that transported her at times into a different sphere, where she was unaware of anything except the music, unaware even of that, because she and the music were no longer separate but dissolved into one.

  Certainly I did not find anything to criticize that night. Listening to the depths she explored in the familiar piece, I thought she had known sorrow perhaps though still so young, and at the thought of suffering and youth, my thoughts turned, as they often did, to Clara, and I was taken aback at how easily I would have given up everything in that room, in the world even, to ask her pardon that I had survived the war and she had not, to kiss again that smooth forehead or glimpse once more that beloved face. Then with a frisson of amazement I realized that in fact Sylvie bore a passing resemblance to my sister, not her coloring, but the contours of her face in the lamplight.

  It brought me solace to imagine Sylvie as a child during the dark days of occupation, when streets were made unfamiliar by the flags of an occupying army, by menacing signposts in German, by children who disappeared without a trace from this indifferent city. I pictured Sylvie at her parents’ kitchen table, her head bent over her homework. An ordinary sight, a child preparing her lessons, but what comfort I draw from the scene, a reminder of the loveliness of quotidian life which hatred had all but extinguished in Paris.

  I shook off those somber visions and listened to Sylvie until the music came to a close. Once the piano lid was lowered, the children returned to their rooms and the rest of us resumed our broken-off conversations. Isabelle and Odile spoke in undertones about some scandal at the Jockey Club, and Sylvie must have felt like an eavesdropper as she glanced uncertainly around the room.

  Seeing her so clearly panicked at the prospect of small talk—an extreme case of shyness, in my professional opinion—I drew her into the circle where Max Gouffroy was praising a recent performance of Rigoletto. “That quartet in the final act, I’ve never heard it sung better, really quite sublime.”

  Sabine Gouffroy laughed. “Two women in love with the same man, no surprise the story ends badly.”

  “My dear Sabine,” Isabelle said, in her clear, carrying voice, “the surprise is that it ends at all. For Gilda to sing so long after she’s stabbed, it’s really quite absurd.”

  “No, no, Isabelle, you’re wrong,” protested Max. “It’s not absurd at all, opera has its own logic, just like dreams.”

  Isabelle raised her eyebrows; she seldom heard the words “you’re wrong” directed at herself. From the door, Berthe signaled to madame that dinner was served, and Isabelle led the way to the dining room.

  “I hope no one is superstitious,” said Sabine Gouffroy, “we’re thirteen at the table tonight.” An awkward pause followed, and I thought how much better it was to remain silent than to blurt out the first thing on the tip of one’s tongue.

  Sylvie looked around in wond
er at the vaulted cellar cleverly converted into a dining room, with a fire burning in the fireplace to take off the chill. Its flickering light burnished Isabelle’s bare shoulders, her golden hair. Like a painting, thought Sylvie admiringly. Then she noticed that the maid had to negotiate the narrow stairs laden with tureens and platters, but it didn’t seem to worry Isabelle as she constantly rang her silver bell for Berthe.

  At first Sylvie thought the company ill-assorted; Julien’s colleagues from the hospital had little in common with Odile and her “protégé” or with the famous photographer and his young model, so androgynous-looking that Sylvie couldn’t tell if the name was René or Renée. The only thing they shared was their appetite for talk, they would rather be hungry than bored, Sylvie thought, listening to them feast on aphorisms, banquet on irony. But as the truffled pâté was served and champagne glasses refilled, she realized the guests were not mismatched at all but carefully chosen—composed, in fact—so that their conversation had the zest of surprise. Even the disparate crockery was artfully random, like plants in a cottage garden. Everywhere Sylvie looked, Isabelle’s sure hand was visible. Sylvie’s mother always used to say that was la classe, la vraie classe! Looking at the glistening pâté, it seemed surreal to Sylvie that in another part of the same city, her mother complained daily about inflation, how turnips had gone up by fifty percent, to say nothing of haricots verts. And here was Isabelle apologizing because she hadn’t found white asparagus, they would have to make do with green.

  Unlike his wife, Julien rarely voiced an opinion, but listened courteously while his guests unfurled like ferns in the generous warmth of his attention. Only once, when Freud was mentioned, he cleared his throat. “When I met him in London…” he said, as everyone fell silent, “we spoke to each other in German, though he knew French quite well from working at the Salpêtrière with Charcot. By the time I saw him, he had great difficulty in talking, his jaw eaten away with cancer from his cigars. But his sense of humor was intact and he shook with laughter when I told him how I had been misled by an unfamiliar British accent, when someone introduced me as the young man from Paris, I protested, Non, monsieur, I am the Freudian, not the Jung man.”