Paris: Diary of a memory forgotten

Today is my last full day in Paris. I’m still not sure what I’m doing here, but I notice my shoulders less hunched, my head less heavy. The stress has lifted, albeit temporarily, yet posing myself the questions I need to answer, I have no interest in pursuing a solution. The mind just wants to be left alone so for now, I give it its desired peace.

The trip began before I left, and as Mel said, it was already over before it started. Perhaps that is why I have endeavoured to do nothing, to avoid constructive thought and planned trajectories. The one point of reference was a small studio flat in the 3ieme across from le Musee Picasso, in Le Marais, Jewish ghetto / gay scene / trendy up-and-coming designer spaces. Gentrification is a fact of urban life. It reminds me of the uber-specialised dress and accessory boutiques that were sprouting up around Artillery Passage and Commercial Road as I moved out of Spitalfields, east London, home to the Bangladeshi immigrant community and the old haunt of Jack the Ripper and co.

Here and now, I follow impulse. I go out whenever I feel the urge, impervious to inclement weather and the late hours, and I stay in, despite gorgeous sunlight that makes laying on the covers of the fold out sofa bed all the more glorious, the voices of children and tourists ebbing and flowing along the Rue de Thorigny. I try to write, but it does not flow, the words on the page are forced, and I am distracted by the reflection of the sky through the windows that plays on my screen. I take pictures of the reflections instead.

Paris can be a difficult city, a challenge that is both alluring and repulsive at once. We all make gross generalizations about people, places, things (i.e. nouns) based on ephemeral experience and little in the way of factual evidence, and generally speaking, few people I know actually like Paris. Perhaps it is the Parisians. Or perhaps, it is the tourists. How annoying is it to have hordes of people traipsing around your city, stopping and staring at everything of any sort of historical or architectural value, and then to have your streets co-opted by rows upon rows of tourist shops selling the exact same things that authenticate the buyer’s passage through Paris? Exoticisation is not limited to minority or non-Western cultures, nor is it any less annoying that it should occur in one of the major world cities. Could this explain the sang-froid of Parisians? Peut-etre.

But I digress. What I meant to say is that like many experiences, no experience of mine in Paris has ever been the same, and only the first evening seems to stick. I stopped at the organic grocer for vegetables, he gave me some cherries for free, at la fromagerie for tomme de savoie, a hangover from my days in Annecy, at la poisonnerie for filets de rouget, with the result that the flat has the scent of fish oil, and to the grocery store for a package of le Petit Ecolier. After dinner, I took a long walk into the night, through the narrow boutique and café-lined streets of Le Marais, past the Mairie of the 4ieme and the Hotel de Ville, along the Seine and down the bridge of the Palais Royal to see the Notre Dame for the first time ever without a scaffolding and bathed in light, a beacon of white gothic stonemasonry in the cold winter night. Meandering through the edge of the Quartier Latin, I crossed back toward Chatelet and Les Halles, a ‘dodgy’ area but full of tourists even at night, and found myself on the Rue Montorgueil, passing restaurants and cafes and reminding me of the streets of Lisboa where Raquel, Sandra and I ate snails and seafood. Slightly lost (but not, ‘lost’ implying a specific destination) I found myself in the red light district, flanked by XXX signs, shop fronts of bold colours and glitter advertising peep shows, massages and dances, entrances masked by mirrors or curtains, fluorescent lights blinking. I smiled, watching tourists with children and elderly women quickening their pace, staring straight ahead in the hopes that no one would think they were ‘looking’. Because god forbid they look. I smile, practically ogle, both at the shop fronts, trying to peak behind the curtains, and at the people avoiding everyone else’s gaze. I pass rue Quincampoix – can calm pwa? Reminds me of Amelie. Turn again, onto rue Beaubourg, Beaubourg the nickname for the Centre Pompidou, and I vaguely remember where I am and finally, finally I pass through the square with a sort of rectangular shaped pond with surreal sculptures shooting water and yet I’m distracted by a wall, yes the wall of the flats behind this water sculpture because of its odd outline and how it complements the water sculpture so well yet breaks up the sky in an interesting way, but only if you look up because naturally one looks down at the big red lips perched on the water’s surface.

But now I’m somewhere else, you see, on the Eurostar speeding back to London. Is it already over? I’ve forgotten most of it, it’s beyond me already, in another space and time. Bits float to the surface, but I have to part and stretch the folds of grey matter to reconstruct a linear progression of events that would make sense to a reader. But memories don’t work like that. They skip and skim the reel of time, fractured and fragmented, held in common only by an impression of uniqueness.