My Hundred Lovers (20 page)
The apartment was enormous by Parisian standards, and opened up to the sky on both sides, with floor-to-ceiling windows. On one side it overlooked the busy street, but the windows were double-glazed and when they were closed every room was silent. On the other side there was a pretty square belonging to the Sorbonne, with trees and moss-covered statues.
Rue Saint-Jacques was once the starting point for pilgrims leaving Paris for Santiago de Compostela.
âYou are reversing direction,' said Horatia, whose opinion of Australia was low. She assumed that every young Australian woman would naturally wish to join the pilgrimage to Paris. âWhat does your country offer except sun?'
The woman felt a hot surge of emotion. âEverything!' she said.
âEverything for the body,' said Horatia. âIf you wish a sort of vegetable happiness I am sure Australia would be most suitable. It is the same with America.'
The woman hated it when Horatia, who had never been to America or Australia, made such pronouncements. âYou're being unfair, Horatia,' she said.
âBeing unfair is one of life's great pleasures,' Horatia replied. âWhen you are as old as me you may be as unfair as you like.' She smiled and offered the woman another kir royal and a rose-coloured macaroon.
During the day the woman walked the streets, looking for she knew not what. She was wondering if she had fallen for some old idea of Paris that was no longer true, if it ever had been.
What she noted with her fallible eye was the beauty of her object lover, the Pont Marie, still barnacled with vanished wishes.
Everywhere she saw the marriage of stone, window, light, air, the convergence of separate elements which together fashioned Paris's architectural splendour.
Horatia had a theory that people instinctively preferred civilised Paris and its desire to call beauty to heel or else barbarous Rome and its desire to let beauty go.
âYou can tell a lot about someone when you know if they prefer Paris or Rome,' Horatia said.
âCan't you like both?' the woman asked.
âDefinitely not,' Horatia said.
Walking the streets each day the woman noted that even the poorest shopped carefully for the plumpest fruit, the sweetest peach, for the mouthful of sugar from the sun-heavy grape.
Across the street from Horatia's flat an old building was being restored and every day at lunchtime the dusty workers stopped to eat under a tree in the courtyard. They took out their napkins, their baguettes and several different kinds of cured meats and cheeses. They shared a bottle of red wine,
vin de pays
, which they drank from little plastic cups. â
Bonjour
,
mademoiselle
,' they said courteously as she passed.
She went by metro to Saint-Denis, formerly the stronghold of Communist Paris, part of the working-class
banlieue
, home to Arabs and Pieds-Noirs and Maghrebis. This was another Paris, but still recognisably Paris. She noted the council tower blocks and the families with too many children but she also noted the care with which veiled women chose tomatoes at the street market. Men looked too long at her and women too narrowly.
Like them, she did not have money, but unlike them, she had the luxury of being able to pause between the hours in which she earned the notes she exchanged for food and shelter. These people on the outskirts of Paris appeared to live their whole lives without pausing.
As she walked she thought about retraining as a nurse, or as a teacher, moving to a Third World country to live a more useful life, helping children construct an existence without want, to live working lives capable of incorporating pauses. What made a good life? Was it worth striving to live a life punctuated by pauses? She wondered if the quality of life might be measured in leisure hours.
The Suspicious Wanderer walked the streets of Paris from morning till dusk, looking and looking. She wasn't on holiday, she was pausing in the midst of existence, considering her next move, knowing how fortunate she was to be able to do so. She had the luxury of considering herself a recovering romantic, flushing romance from her blood, as if killing an addiction or infection.
She was also running out of what little money she had. Since there was nothing romantic about running out of money, the Suspicious Wanderer turned her mind to making some.
HOW I LOVE LYING BACK
upon the sand, spread-eagled, running hot sand through my fingers. How I love floating free and defenceless on oceans, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, my body spilling out into the vast arms of the comforting, cruel sea.
I love crashing into the mighty force of waves pulled by the moon. Up! Pushing up from the floor of the sea to jump over white rushing foam or diving down just in time, my happy feet tickled by the froth.
The taste of the sea, the roar of it! Having to shout across the ferocious waves, noisier than traffic, louder than a plane taking off.
Don't go out too far!
I shouted to my son when he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, still believing his body to be the equal of the ocean. He could never hear me over the crash and tumult of the waves, no matter how loud I shouted, no matter how I could already picture the rip which would carry him away.
Once my new French lover and I went to stay in Horatia's house on Corsica, that house I loved. It was late in the season, chilly by sunset, but at midday we floated on our backs in the calm warm sea. The ocean held us up and the sun stroked our faces and one day I swear I fell asleep in the arms of the sea. Either that or I entered a strange, dreamlike state, hypnotised by the gentle rock of the water holding me up. Everything in me armed and upright against the strains of life slowly unclenched, until at last I felt myself to be without edges, indistinguishable from the vast, apparently boundless sea. I floated into it, right inside it, so that there was no beginning to me, no end. I was going down, in, becoming water, salt, when I awoke with a shock, screamed, and stood up. â
Ãa va?
' my new lover asked, standing up too.
âI think I was turning into a fish,' I said, and laughed.
Strangely, I was not frightened.
Oh, the thick, coarse sand of a wet beach on the Côte Sauvage in early spring, the wind snapping, whipping our hair into our faces!
The silky white sand along the coast of Queensland, miles and miles of unpeopled sand, devoid of footprints. Once I climbed an enormous sand dune on Stradbroke Island and Ro took a photograph of me naked and unbroken, the white sand all around, showing only the smallest border of blue, cloudless sky above my head.
The strange blackish sand of Sweetwater Beach near Loutro, Crete, where I once spent the days observing two old men, Athenians, who travelled there every summer. From sunrise to sunset the two friends spent the day up to their necks in the sand, periodically emerging like two giant turtles to walk slowly to the water, where they rinsed themselves before crawling back up the beach.
The glorious summer I lived with my son across the road from Rainbow Beach after I lost my husband. A broken-down fibro beach shack with lumpy, sweat-covered sofas of indeterminate fabric and a kitchen unchanged since it was built in 1950.
The local Aborigines believed the coloured sands were caused by a spirit falling into the cliffs, infusing the sand with all the colours of the rainbow.
We loved it there, my son and me, falling into bed when we grew tired, getting up when we awoke and running across the grass to the coloured sand, then throwing ourselves into the slapping ocean. We grew lean and tanned, the tips of my boy's hair growing fairer, his bare feet rough and horny. We were at home in our skins, and hardly ever wore clothes.
âWhy doesn't everybody live at the beach?' he asked me.
âI'm sure I don't know, sweetheart,' I replied.
My son thought every beach had sand with the colours of a rainbow.
Once we spent the day walking at least sixteen kilometres up the beach, collecting gold, yellow, orange, pink and blue sands, so that at the end of the day we had a glass jar which held a captured rainbow.
I still have that glass jar.
It sits upon my windowsill here in my house in Fanjeaux, a slice of Australia; memory rendered visible.
Ro never loved the beach. She preferred the mountains. Her skin was fair, for she was meant for the mists and the rain of a town in Yorkshire or Pembrokeshire.
Ro did not like the sand or the heat or the wind and only accompanied me to Stradbroke Island that bright day as an act of kindness. She kept her large bottom swathed in a sarong from Bali and I told her she looked like one of Gauguin's Tahitian wives but for her pale skin, which was already sunburnt.
That burning sun! That sea! Those sands! So many of my numbered days have been spent as happy as a clam, rinsed by the water, baked by the sun, unspooled on the earth's beaches.
RO CAME TO PARIS TO
visit me, staying in another of Horatia's spare rooms. I was giving English conversation classes, running them out of Horatia's flat, mainly to her wealthy friends and many acquaintances. Most did not have a hope of mastering a stroke of English but appeared to enjoy coming, possibly because of the English tea and exquisite macaroons accompanying the lessons. In the mornings I worked on proofreading jobs and editing work.
Ro had broken up with Mick, after many years of an on-off relationship, because she had decided she wanted a baby and Mick did not.
âWhy don't you have a child by yourself if you want one?' Horatia asked.
âDo you know how hard it is to be a single mother?' Ro said. âI've got too many friends who are single mothers to have any idealistic notions about it.'
Horatia sniffed. âPersonally I can never understand why any woman would want to have a child. It compromises one's life too much.'
âI want my life compromised,' said Ro.
âMadness,' said Horatia.
Later, Horatia took me aside and suggested I advise my friend that generally men did not like women to carry too much fat around the rear end. âIf she wants to attract a man in order to have a baby, she should start with that bottom.'