Travelers' Tales Paris (11 page)

Instead, gently and politely he had made it clear to her that he had no intention of doing any such thing, telling her that he was incapable of love in her sense, and that he would always be her friend, as he was with many other women. But no more. Antonella was heart-broken. She was now 25, and had built a whole emotional edifice on very little, certainly no pledge. She lived for the rare occasions when she saw him—taking up acting was one of the ways in which she sought to remain in his life.

She confided in me, and wept profusely, and I was sad not to be able to do anything about it. Despite being so influenced by his thought, I resented Camus for being the cause of her suffering. Then Tania, my drama teacher, cast me as Olga, the revolutionary heroine of his play
The Just
, and later when he came to see
The House of Bernarda Alba
I was introduced. He was courteous and charming, paid me the usual compliments, adding some specific remarks that made me believe them. He hoped to set up his own company, he said, and suggested I audition for him. To be part of a group of actors under his direction was to acquire a family security in doing worthwhile work while earning a modest living—it was a dream! But because of my feelings about what he had done to Antonella I never took up his offer to audition, and eventually left Paris a few days before he died. It was one of those “missed appointments” with which life is pock-marked, part of that mass of regrets that we accumulate.

Not that we did not meet again—once. One day I bumped into him on the Boulevard St-Germain, coming out of a café near his publishers' offices, and we stopped for a chat. He said he had an appointment, but would see me the next evening at six o'clock in the same place.

I believed that we would talk about the theatre, his plans, ideas and books, but when I told Pierre he laughed: “How can you survive with such naïveté? Is it not possible that he might like you as an actress and an adventure?” and he gave me a lecture about Camus's philosophy and how it tallied with his way of life—
joie de vivre
, multiplicity of experience, Mediterranean equilibrium and clarity—all as remedies against the angst and feeling of the absurd. So I did not go to my appointment, and never saw Camus again, but instead wrote and told him honestly that I was afraid of him, and had been warned against him. He sent me a gentle, kind letter, and we exchanged a couple more. I threw away most of my letters, diaries and notes when I left Paris, but his are among the few I have kept.

I was told that when he died, apart from his widow and the actress who was his acknowledged companion, many other unknown
“widows” appeared in Paris, all claiming to have been great loves of his. Antonella was one of them.

As Marie-Sylvie took the microphone at the Café des Phares in Paris one recent Sunday, an angry murmur ran around the room. There was one chair left and several people wanted it.

How would the protagonists decide who should sit? Would existentialism help? Or utilitarianism? Or religion perhaps? Not exactly.

“Get lost,” said a middle-aged man with curly gray hair. “I was here first and I'm keeping this place for my girlfriend. Find somewhere else.”

His intervention may have lacked courtesy but at least it settled the issue beyond doubt—a rare achievement for a follower of the popular philosophy movement that started here in the Café des Phares on the Place de la Bastille.

Its founder, Marc Sautet, opened France's first philosophy practice, where patients can shed their metaphysical angst rather as they might try to shed more mundane forms of angst at the psychiatrist's.

What is the purpose of human existence? What is existence? Does existence exist? For a fee, Sautet will discuss all this and more in a one-to-one conversation in his office at the end of a dark corridor in the Marais district.

—Adam Sage, “French Revolutionaries Chew the Fat in Cafés,”

The London Observer

EDMUND WHITE

T
HE CONCIERGE IS A DISAPPEARING INSTITUTION, THOUGH THE
memory of this domestic Cerberus and spy remains potent for most Parisians. If someone becomes really detailed, spiteful, and petty in his gossip, he's likely to be upbraided with the rhetorical question “What are you, a concierge?” For the French protect their privacy with a sacred fury and prefer the permissiveness of sophisticated silence to the pleasure of spicy gossip (or “crusty,” as they say—
croustillant
).

We have a concierge, Madame Denise, who is sweet, funny, and, above all, discreet. She lives in her little
loge
at the rear of the courtyard. Her windows are bedecked with impeccably white lace curtains in which swans and swains are picked out in eyelets.

Everyone in the neighborhood likes her. The Indian restaurant a block away gives her curries too strong for her stomach—but not for Fred's [the author's dog]. The nearby funeral parlor gives her slightly faded flower arrangements; on some days our narrow, rainy courtyard is carpeted with anthuriums or gladioli or mountains of chrysanthemums denuded of their satin sashes spelling out the name of the deceased. At Christmas time she receives a prematurely browning and shedding pine tree, which she decorates with
a string of lights she runs on a cord out from under her door into the part of the courtyard sheltered from the rain.

Madame Denise takes in packages for us but also shipments for the bookstore on the street level, cleverly named Mona Lisait (“Mona was reading,” not a bad name for a store selling art books); the boys who work there in return trundle out the garbage can for her every night. But Madame Denise's greatest admirer is the
coiffeuse
in the shop next to Mona Lisait, a stunning young
beur
(a French-born Arab) who tries out all the latest hairstyles on Madame Denise. One day our concierge will look like a Roman matron, the next like a Neapolitan tart, then a week later she'll become a Tonkinese princess or a cabaret singer of the 1940s, startlingly resembling the imposing, throaty, lesbian chanteuse Suzy Solidor. Of course constant variety is the very source of the
parisienne's
power to bewitch us, but it's somewhat disconcerting to see your motherly (and normally brunette) concierge coiffed with a bright red punk's coxcomb at eight in the morning (or—to be more honest—at ten).

Madame Denise lives with her son, who looks so solid, so ageless that at first I mistook him for her husband. In fact he looks a bit like the cowardly criminal in a Jean Gabin gangster film, with his pencil-thin mustache, sleeveless yoke-necked t-shirt and surprisingly silent way of walking (or rolling by), as if on casters. To be sure, he's not at all a gangster; on the contrary, he has a medal for 25 years of faithful service sweeping up at the town hall, the gleaming white Hôtel de Ville just two blocks away, and his mother showed it to me proudly. We've never seen him with another human being except his mother. “I've tried to persuade him to marry,” she says with the cooing regret and feigned annoyance of the Triumphant Mom, “but he's a quiet boy, a real loner, and he's comfortable here.”

One of his
relations
, or “contacts,” at the Hôtel de Ville is a strange little burn victim with a molting wig and a crablike gait, an old
monsieur
who works as a bookkeeper for the mayor; he comes once a year to the
loge
to sort out Madame Denise's taxes, and she in turn prepares for him skate and capers in black butter.

Loge
is the word not only for a concierge's apartment but also for an actor's dressing room, and Madame Denise, in her modest, smiling way, has a flair for the theatrical. An excitable French photographer, sent over by British
Vogue
, wanted to set up a shot in which Madame Denise would open her door slightly and with a smile hand me my morning mail while Fred looked on approvingly. We had to repeat this little scene twenty times but each time Madame Denise was just as natural, unaffected, gay—a born star. One day she showed me a glossy German photographic study of the concierges of Paris in which she figures prominently as the genuine French article (most of the few remaining concierges are Portuguese, which means their entryways smell of salted cod, their national dish, instead of
raie au beurre noir
).

Even better, Madame Denise is from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, considered the best breeding ground for conscientious, hardworking concierges. She was born in Lille and brought up there, in a boisterous, sentimental, accordion-playing café, and she “descended on” Paris 28 years ago with her husband, who promptly died. Luckily she found her position as a concierge and has held on to it tenaciously ever since. She has never traveled and doesn't seem to approve of it; she shakes her head tragically whenever we take off for Italy or Nice or London or the States. “Never a moment of repose,” she laments. Of course she does her own traveling, through stamp-collecting, and she has my permission to cut out with a big pair of scissors the canceled stamps on my mail from Greece, Austria, Thailand, and other exotic places (she loves the
Porgy and Bess
commemorative stamps from the States).

In the afternoon she begins to socialize. She'll stand at the bar of Les Piétons just next door with the whores, all of whom she knows by name. If she's not at Piétons, she's at the other corner bar, the Royal St-Martin. Sometimes, when we catch her coming back from the bar, she tells us of the famous movie star who used to live in our apartment, and of her many loves. We exchange stories about some of the gallant adventures of our handsome landlord and new “crusty” details about his cheapness; like all French he fancies himself a
bricoleur
, a weekend Mr. Fix-it, and would rather
attempt five times in a row to repair our leaking hot-water heater than call in a proper plumber.

She knows we're gay and says nothing, but does not resort to the polite fiction used by the restaurateur on the corner of referring to Hubert as my “son” (
votre fiston
), a particularly difficult lie to sustain given my American accent. She also knows Hubert is ill, and when he's in a bad way she'll offer to shop or cook for us; she asked only once what was wrong with him, and I, in my best French way, became evasive, giving her her cue to retreat into her usual discretion.

She has seen everything in her work and has a name for most of her observations. One day she was washing up some human
merde
left in the entryway, by one of the local bums no doubt. Bright-eyed and uncomprehending, I said, “What's that you're cleaning up, Madame Denise?”

“
Une sentinelle, Monsieur
” (a sentry).

“What's a
sentinelle
, Madame Denise? I don't know that word.”