Perhaps, I thought, in a few days it would help to look back on this very moment, when I was still enjoying myself in Paris and was still unaware of the sorrow that inevitably comes from looking back at this fountain. Perhaps, by rehearsing all this in advance, I might even, in some strange way, dull the pain. The fountain would stay, I would be gone. (“The days pass on, still I stay.”) But at least I had anticipated it; at least I knew.
At the Gare de Lyon, my father boarded the train to say goodbye. He urged me not to be sad: there would be many more chances to visit. I looked out the window. I had no way of knowing that this was only the first time I would think I was seeing Paris for the last time.
For the next three years, following my Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations, I would find myself on the same exact platform on a Saturday evening, saying goodbye to Paris, worrying lest my father not get off the train in time, trying to convince myself this had indeed been our last visit, so as to ward off the hope and the disappointment when, later in Rome, I would catch myself longing to be in Paris, with nothing to turn to but my French books. In the days leading up to that parting moment at the Gare de Lyon, I would ask for very little of Paris—just a replay of my original heady two weeks. Like Stendhal, who would drop a little twig in a spring in Salzburg and return months later to find it covered with speckling crystals, I too would return to Paris to find that the memory of my first visit had been thoroughly crystallized in Square Lamartine.
Not a day went by that I failed to log my impressions there, the better to remember them in Rome, knowing that, by cheating Paris of its magic, by numbing the pleasure of the moment with constant reminders of the unavoidable trip back, I was mitigating, if not averting, the shock of departure. It was my way of preempting tomorrow’s worries by making tomorrow seem yesterday, of warding off adversity by warding off happiness as well. In the end, I learned not to enjoy going to Paris, or even to enjoy being there—because I enjoyed it too much.
What drove my brother insane were precisely these in-a-week-from-now-we’ll-be-in-Rome-remembering-everything-we-said-and-did-in-Paris antics of mine. I was like a dying man taking detailed mental notes of sunlight, faces, foods, places, emotions, not only to remember them better when he reaches the hereafter, but to give himself the impression that he is still rooted in the present, still able to leave a patch, an afterimage, like one of those shadows imprinted on the bridges of Hiroshima. To this day my brother knows Paris better than I ever will, although I know one tiny corner better than most Parisians. The Paris I cultivated was a Paris one need not stay too long in. It was a Paris made to be yearned for and remembered, a Paris for the mind, a Paris which stood for the true life, the life done over, the better life, the one flooded in limelight, with tinsel, soundtrack, and costume. The life perhaps we don’t think we deserve and aren’t quite ready for and therefore never learn to want badly enough and put off grasping in the hope that, when we’re not looking, when we’ve stopped hoping and thinking and dreaming, driven out of its hiding place, it might finally decide to tap us on the shoulder and beckon to us with a promise of bliss. We call it the romance of Paris.
My passage to France is no longer easy I can go to France. But I can no longer be in France. To be in France is to think of all the times I came so close and failed, of near-misses and close calls. Emily Dickinson’s “Except the heaven had come so near” rings in my ears each time I forget that perhaps I shouldn’t try.
As soon as I arrive in Paris, I perform what I like to call my errands in time: I go back to all my private shrines and touch them as though to make sure they’re still there, to placate them as one might a relative who is in a catatonic state but who you suspect is grateful you bothered to come at all. You touch, knowing there will be no response from them—or sensation on your part. As far as the city is concerned, you don’t exist.
Once. revisiting Paris many years later, one evening, on the way to my Paris hotel, I heard a voice behind me and turned to see a girl no older than nineteen come out of the dark and ask the question I would have given anything to hear a woman say. I shrank back, as one does with a beggar who has come too close and to whom one hands a coin without touching hands. I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter, to the thing itself.
Now, whenever I say goodbye to Paris, I do so without making trouble. At the airport I do not think this is the last time I’ll ever return. I am, I tell myself, happy to be going home. I open a book, talk to my fellow passengers, watch the news. I never, ever look back. Am I aware that the loves we decline to look back upon are those we are not certain we have overcome? In that sense, Lot was far guiltier than his wife: fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah, she simply turned her head; he made it a point not to
A few years ago I called a close friend in France to let her know that my wife and I would be coming to Paris that Christmas.
After she picked up the receiver, I asked her how Paris was. Her answer did not come as a surprise: “Gray. Paris is always gray these days. It never changes.” That of course is exactly how I remember Paris. “And how is New York?” she asked. She missed New York. “Sunny,” I said, “as on any winter day.” She missed winter in New York, said she missed coming out of the subway at West Fourth. Balducci’s, Bleecker Street, and finally Horatio Street, where, years ago, she’d looked out of her windows facing West Street and liked to imagine … well, Paris. We laughed. And suddenly, as I was listening to her, I caught myself missing Horatio Street as well, as if it, too, had been taken from me, though it was a subway ride away.
I was, not where she was, but where she wanted to be, though where I thought I wanted to be was precisely where she was—and perhaps that’s also what I wanted: to be where she was, longing for Horatio Street so that I could suddenly turn around and tell myself: But I am near Horatio Street, I like being in New York. I distance myself from things by alleging they’re unreachable, only so as to allow them to think I’ve given up on them and that they should let their guard down, and then, when they least expect it, I pounce …
In my usual manner I said I did not like traveling, I never found Paris relaxing, I would much rather stay in New York and imagine having wonderful dinners in Paris. “Yes, of course,” she agreed, already annoyed. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor.” Exasperation bristled in her voice. “When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”
And that is precisely what I did. My wife and I walked around, went to the stores, visited this or that place. But the one thing I wanted to do—namely, return to the Paris of my adolescence—I kept delaying, because I could not rest until I had done it but did not want to do it too soon. I knew that once I had revisited my sites, Paris would hold no further interest for me.
My wife was far from unfamiliar with this Paris of mine. I had brought her there ten years earlier on our honeymoon, and again three years later with our then-ten-month-old son. I had wanted to show her the house where my great-aunt lived, and the walks we sometimes took together, and the fountain where I would go with empty bottles to watch the girls.
I still remember how, on the first day of our honeymoon in Paris, walking along the grand avenues of the 16th arrondissement, staring at the lit-up buildings with their promise of intimate gatherings, I had begun to tell my wife about my first sojourn in Paris and of my thwarted love for the city to which I would return so often during my years in Rome, each time summoning up the memory of my prior visit or anticipating my next, leaving almost no room for the visit itself. We walked to the place de Barcelone, stood and faced Pont de Grenelle, not far from Pont Mirabeau, and I pointed out the small-scale Statue of Liberty that is a reverse imitation of the one in New York, thinking to myself how things get boxed into each other and how cities and bridges and parks, like far-flung co
usins, become mirror images of their replicas.
When we reached La Muette, one of my favorite spots, I told my wife about the royal falcon house after which the neighborhood is named—from the verb muer, to molt—and of how, centuries ago, this was where the king’s birds were brought each year to shed their feathers. As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go of anything but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams of and remembers. I already knew that in years to come I would turn back to this very evening at La Muette and remember how I had come there with my wife on our honeymoon and how, with her, I had remembered the young man who had walked these same sidewalks trying to find a Paris he did not know he had invented.
And now, here we are on the same spot, no longer newlyweds, thinking to ourselves how much and how very little things have changed since our last visit. We are having a late lunch, in the exact same café on the Place du Trocadéro where we lunched a decade ago, and without thinking we have ended up ordering the same meal. I suspect my wife knows where we are headed, though I have not told her yet, as I haven’t told her that we are to visit not just the old building where my great-aunt lived but the tiny park as well.
The sky as always is a silver gray, and the city is in full ferment as we leave the café down the unavoidable route toward the old apartment. I recognize the silence that descends over that wonderful corner of the 16th arrondissement late on a weekday afternoon as children come home from school, bookbags and all, accompanied by a cluster of babysitters who trail behind as their charges scamper quietly ahead. And there—I do it each time—I look up to the fifth floor, where my great-aunt and my grandmother used to live. I can still remember the last time I visited this building with my wife.
Of course, as my wife and I both know, I have already recorded that selfsame visit in a memoir. What makes the present situation all the more uncanny is that earlier today, wandering into one of my favorite foreign-language bookshops on the rue de Rivoli, I had asked for the book—with studied nonchalance, as authors do. I wanted to find out whether they had the British paperback edition, which I had never seen. The salesclerk, who had no idea who I was, turned out to be familiar with the title but reported she could not locate the book on the shelves. I was browsing in another section entirely when suddenly she came rushing up. “Monsieur, I’ve found it!” Damn! Now I had to purchase my own book, or give away the fact that I had been “testing” the store.
So here I am, two hours later, walking with my own book in my hand in front of a building described in that very same book, feeling like Don Quixote in the second part of his novel, or like Saint-Simon holding in his hand the vile character portrait he had penned of the person on whom he was now lavishing compliment after compliment. I feel nothing. My wife, who in my book asks, “Didn’t you ever want to go upstairs to visit?” does not speak her lines, and I cannot remember mine and clearly do not want to be caught looking them up now. So we leave the scene quite unsatisfied, knowing we will probably never do this again.
I ask my wife if she minds taking a walk around the vest-pocket park stuck in between the grand turn-of-the-century buildings. I feel like a child asking his harried parents to stop at the window of yet another toy store. But I am taking too long, I do not know what I am looking for, we are both jet-lagged and tired, and any moment now it may start raining. And still no epiphany, nothing, just this rushed, desultory prowling around what seems to be a little fountain in a petit square that long ago was named Place Victor-Hugo and then became Square Lamartine. What was I looking for, anyway? Crestfallen, I accompany my wife to the nearest metro station. I had thought the park would remind me of a similar one in New York.
Four days after our perfunctory visit, on the eve of our departure, I decide to come back alone. I make my rounds again, scouring the scene, trying to squeeze out a droplet of sensation. Nothing. All I remember is coming here four days earlier. It is five o’clock. I could—and the thought races through my mind before I can check it in time—call ahead and then go upstairs for tea.
A summer later I returned to Square Lamartine, this time with my seven-year-old son. I showed him where I had lived when I was seven years older than he, trying to explain to myself that, though he was far closer to how old I was then, I had, contrary to all appearances, scarcely turned a new leaf since. I took pictures of him in front of my great-aunt’s building, just as I had done with my wife on our honeymoon, then walked around a bit, snapping the park, the adjoining buildings, him playing in the tiny enclosure by the sandbox, knowing that one day, his passage here, like my wife’s, my brother’s, my father’s, my great-aunt’s, and mine would find a place in this concentric planisphere named Square Lamartine.
My son is playing in the park. There is, of course, no way for him to know what I am thinking. But I am standing there the way my father did when he would take me as a child to his father’s grave in Alexandria because there was no one he would rather be with at that moment. Except that, in my case, I have accompanied my son not so much to a gravesite as to the resting place of a part of my life that was never even lived, a chapter written in invisible ink. In Lamartine’s garden I am still combing the scene, looking for ancient relics and clues, not just memories but generations of memories, deep, artesian memories, the way police inspectors in the movies pick up hair, nails, and lint and drop them with tweezers into a plastic bag, the way people scour the beaches on summer evenings looking for jewelry that was lost not just that day but many summers before.
As I stare at this tiny park, I think to myself of all I have logged away and why I always feel as though nothing, even when written, remains fixed for too long before it starts to rise from the page, as if it had been but figuratively buried in paper and now aches for life again.
And while thinking of all this, I suddenly remember a literary character I have not brought to mind since leaving Italy three decades ago. It is a character named Astolph from Orlando Furioso, the sixteenth-century epic poem by Ariosto. This Astolph lands on the moon—in the poem, a giant lost-and-found, bric-a-brac landscape containing everything that was ever lost or ever wished for but never granted. Mankind’s unrealized artifacts litter the lunar surface, and you must thread your way cautiously through the rubble, for vials containing stolen goods and unhatched schemes crackle underfoot, and wasted years and abandoned hopes are strewn about everywhere.
Like Astolph wandering in search of the flask that contains the sanity misplaced by Ariosto’s hero Orlando, what I knew I would find here in this quiet landscape was my whole Paris: the crowded Citroën with my cousins—it was there—the hunt for Bach’s double concerto—it, too, was there—my love for the metro, Apollinaire’s poem, the Bogart revival, the smell of cigarettes and damp wool coats, the girls whose gaze was unlike any I had met before, the woman who finally came out of the dark only to be shooed away, the plays, the brasseries, the books, down to the late-afternoon tea I had conjured the day I came without my wife and thought I was a phone call away from people who had died so long ago, the light drizzle on silver-gray days when Paris is awash in traffic lights, my first walk down by the royal falcon house, the day it finally dawned on me that my life had not even started, or that life, like Paris, was little else than a collection of close calls and near-misses, and that the objects I loved and would never outgrow and wished to take with me would always litter this landscape, because they were lost or had never existed, because even the life I had yearned to live when looking out the window with my great-aunt in Alexandria and dreaming of a Seine scarcely seven minutes away was also cast upon this landscape, a past life, a pluperfect life, a conditional life, a life made, like Paris, for the mind. Or for paper.
Letter from Illiers-Combray: In Search of Proust
It was by train that I had always imagined arriving in Illiers-Combray—not just any train, but one of those drafty, pre—World War I, rattling
wagons which I like to think still leave Paris early every morning and, after hours of swaying through the countryside, squeak their way into a station that is as old and weather-beaten as all of yesteryear’s provincial stops in France. The picture in my mind was always the same: the train would come to a wheezing halt and release a sudden loud chuff of steam; a door would slam open; someone would call out Illiers-Combray; and, finally, like the young Marcel Proust arriving for his Easter vacation just over a century ago, I would step down nervously into the small, turn-of-the-century town in Eure-et-Loir which he described so lovingly in A la recherche du temps perdu.
Instead, when I finally made my way to Illiers-Combray, I arrived by car with Anne Borrel, the curator of the Proust Museum there, who had offered to pick me up at my Paris hotel that morning. In my pocket was a cheap and tattered Livre de Poche edition of Du côté de chez Swann which I had brought in the hope that I’d find, a moment to read some of my favorite passages on holy ground. That was to be my way of closing the loop, of coming home to a book I had first opened more than thirty years earlier.
I had bought it with my father, when I was fifteen, one summer evening in Paris. We were taking a long walk, and as we passed a small restaurant I told him that the overpowering smell of refried food reminded me of the tanneries along the coast road outside Alexandria, in Egypt. He said he hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, I was right, the restaurant did smell like a tannery. And as we began working our way back through strands of shared memories—the tanneries, the beaches, the ruined Roman temple west of Alexandria, our summer beach house—all this suddenly made him think of Proust. Had I read Proust? he asked. No, I hadn’t. Well, perhaps I should. My father said this with a sense of urgency, so unlike him that he immediately tempered it, for fear I’d resist the suggestion simply because it was a parent’s.