Travelers' Tales Paris (5 page)

My wife and I didn't talk very much on the way back to our hotel. When we got there, we tried to make love in the clammy bed and failed hopelessly. When I finally shut my eyes she was still crying. The next day we went out to Orly and I put her on her plane for London. We promised that we would try again, knowing that we never would, and we never did.

I waited until her plane had left and then I went back into Paris, feeling a black sense of failure, of things not done, of paths not taken. That which I did, I should not have done. That which I should have done, I did not do. I thought of our twelve-year-old in her boarding school in England, of how much she wanted her family back, and of how I had failed her yet again. I didn't know where to go or what to do, and I didn't care. I just gave myself over to my misery and let it lead me where it would.

I remember ordering lunch in a bistro somewhere and leaving it on the table. I remember going to see the Impressionists again and finding the usually vibrant paintings as bleak and as grey as the day outside—and as the man who viewed them. Then I went back to the empty room in the sad little hotel and laid on the bed and tried to weep. I couldn't do that either.

I didn't want to see any of the people I knew in Paris that evening so I ate alone in a
brasserie
near St-Germain. A notice pinned to the wall advertised someone singing Argentine folk songs that evening at a café somewhere, so I wrote down the address and went to hear him. I lived in South America for a while and I know and like Argentine folk music, much of which has a rough, bittersweet feeling that I thought might fit that particular evening.

The café was in a dingy street on the wrong side of the Boulevard St-Michel and stank of brown tobacco. A handful of men in working clothes were drinking silently at the bar. When I asked about the Argentine folk concert the bartender shrugged, pointed to a closed door, and said that it was supposed to be in the back room there. He also supposed that it would start whenever the singer showed up. I ordered a drink and sat down at a table to wait. No one else came into the place.

Then a shabby old man carrying a wet guitar case came in from the street. He went to the bar, drank a cognac in one gulp and said something to the bartender who pointed at me. The old man shook his head sadly and walked over to the closed door.

“We will get started,” he said. “Please come in.” None of the other men at the bar moved.

“Am I the only one?” I asked the bartender as I paid for my drink.

“The other one is already in there.”

A woman in a dark dress was sitting alone in the inner room, which had chairs for perhaps 80 people. Except for a small bulb hanging from a cord over the little stage the place was in gloom. The old man fiddled with his guitar case for a moment, then he said: “My friends, it seems there are only the three of us. Why don't you bring chairs down here and we will sit around this table while I sing. We will make a little party.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Perhaps someone could find a bottle of cognac for us?”

I went out for a bottle and a pitcher of water. Then the woman and I moved our chairs down to the little table on the stage where the old man sat. He poured the drinks and raised his glass in salute.

“To Argentina,” he said and emptied his glass.

He began with a lovely old song from Cajamarca. His voice was worn and lived in, and fitted the song well. While he sang I had a chance to study the woman next to me. In the dim light she looked to be in her late twenties, slender, and expensively dressed. She sat with a hand held against her cheek, hiding much of her face. What I could see looked lovely. She spoke Spanish like an Argentinean in a soft and cultivated voice.

After a while the old man began to sing some of Jorge Cafrune's songs. Cafrune was a middle-aged, black-bearded, whiskey-voiced drunk who used to sing songs that he wrote himself for drinks and tips in some of the roughest cantinas in the country towns of northern Argentina. Then someone discovered him and brought him on tour to Paris where he became rich and
famous overnight. Then he went back to Argentina and fell off a horse while drunk and was killed by a passing car. He left behind some of the most haunting music in South America.

I knew the song the old man was singing, so I joined in. Then the woman, who had scarcely spoken until then, began to sing along in a soft throaty voice. She sang very well.

Her name was Susanna. She told about meeting Cafrune at a party in Buenos Aires and that he was nice until he got drunk, which he did as quickly as possible.

“He was a rough man,” she said in her soft voice. “But the songs he wrote—the words, the music—they are pure poetry.”

After that Susanna and the old man sang together—she seemed to know all of the old songs—and I joined in when I could. It turned out to be a good party, the three of us, the guitar and the bottle of brandy in the grubby back room.

It was still early when the old man got too drunk to sing any more. The rain had stopped and Susanna and I walked back to the Boulevard St-Michel and up the Avenue St-Germain.

“Let's go somewhere else,” I said. “This evening is too nice to stop now.”

“You have seen my face?” It was more of a statement than a question.

“Yes.”

“I am not pretty any more.”

“Yes you are.”

“It is nice of you to say so, but I know better. The left side, the side towards you, that is how I used to look. The right side, well, I was in a car that crashed and afterwards a fire....” She looked down for a moment, obviously remembering. “It was much worse at first,” she went on. “My right cheek was gone and half of my mouth. I couldn't speak intelligibly. I had to be fed with a tube. Since then I have been to the plastic surgeon many times. I have come to Paris to see another one.”

“And what does he say?”

“He says that I will need two or three more reconstructive
surgeries. After that he can begin with the skin grafts. Maybe four more years. I will never look like I used to look, but at least I won't frighten children any more.”

“That's nonsense, Susanna. You are lovely. Everyone past 25 has scars. Yours just happen to be where they can be seen.”

She smiled. “All right, have it your way. We don't know each other well enough to bicker. Now let's go in the Rotonde and have café royal. I will buy because I sing better than you do.”

Sitting at the table, Susanna looked at me carefully. “Your scars are inside, are they not?”

“Yes.”

“And fairly new?”

“Yes.”

“
Pues entonces
. Now we will talk no more about scars.”

“I'll drink to that,” I said. And we did.

We left the Rotonde and went out into the cool night and the quiet street. Susanna's hotel was nearby and I offered to walk with her to the door. We turned off the St-Germain at the Café de Flore and went down the empty street. I don't know why I chose that particular street. There were several ways we could have walked to her hotel.

“Excuse me,” Susanna said. She had stopped and was staring at a building across the street. “Number seventeen. That is the house where my husband had a room when he was a student, and had run away from the killings in Argentina. How did we happen to come here?”

I had wondered if she was married and had begun to hope, very much, that she was not. “Where is he—your husband?” I ventured.

“He was in the car. He died in the crash.” She took a deep breath. “Our daughter too. Only she died in the hospital three days later. I was driving and it was my fault and yet I did not die. At least not entirely.” She put her hands to her face and began to weep silently. I put my arms around her, rather awkwardly.

“I'm sorry,” she said, not moving. “I had almost forgotten about it for a while this evening, which makes it worse somehow. Will you please stay out with me until I can stop behaving like this? I can't face an empty hotel room just yet.” She began to shiver. “I'm so cold. Can we go inside somewhere?”

Most of the cafés and the bars were closed for the night, but on the corner ahead the lights were on in a Russian restaurant and the door stood open. We went in. The place was empty except for about a dozen people seated around a long table at the back of the room. A man came out from behind the bar carrying a concertina.

“I am sorry,” he said, coming over to us, “but we are closed. This is a private party.” Then he looked at Susanna's tear-streaked, ravaged face and said, “But I do not think that we are so closed, pretty lady, that you and your friend cannot sit at this little table here while I bring you some hot borscht and some cold vodka.”

We sat at the table in the dimly lit restaurant and ate the borscht and drank the vodka, and after a while Susanna's tears stopped. The people at the long table were singing Russian songs accompanied by the owner on his concertina. The party must have been going on for quite a while, for they were all quite drunk.

We were just getting ready to leave when the door from the street opened and a young man came in alone. He was dressed in black trousers and an open-necked white shirt with a black overcoat slung over his shoulders. He had dark hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and was deathly pale. He was also very, very drunk.

Susanna stared at him as he walked by our table. “My god,” she whispered. “He's beautiful.” And he was.

The people at the party in the back called out to him and he walked carefully over to the long table, drank a proffered glass of vodka neat, draped his overcoat over the back of a chair, and sat. A hush fell over the party. Then he began to sing.

I don't know what it was that he sang. I had never heard such music before and I have never heard it since. Whatever it was—gypsy, Tatar, Cossack—it was the most beautiful music Susanna and I had ever heard. A cynic would say that it just fit the mood of the night, but I don't think so. The young man had a superb voice. He sat with his eyes closed and his head back and sang songs which told of longing and heartache and loss and loneliness and love and redemption. You didn't need to understand the words. He sang for nearly half an hour. Then he slumped back in his chair, motionless, his eyes still closed.

No one at the party spoke after that. The people stood up, quietly put on their coats, and began to leave. Susanna and I left too.

“I think those songs were meant for me, somehow,” she said as we walked through the quiet streets. “I was being egotistical with my sorrow, thinking no one else had ever suffered so. And they have, haven't they?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you can go on and find redemption and peace and beauty—and even love if you are lucky.”

“Maybe we are lucky,” I said, knowing that we were.

Then we turned together, there, in the middle of the empty street, and kissed. We kissed for a long time, feeling the loss and the loneliness and the hopelessness beginning to go.

Then we walked back to Susanna's hotel together.

L
E
P
ONT
M
IRABEAU

Under the Pont Mirabeau flows the Seine