Flowers and candles

Paris is hurting again.

A sharp breeze is blowing; it has an edge to it. The sky is clear blue, and the trees full of pink magnolia and trailing wisteria, but the Champs-Elysées is blooming too, following in the flower-strewn wake of Bataclan, La Belle Equipe, Le Petit Cambodge and the Charlie Hebdo offices as outraged, pained, numbed people come to light more candles and lay more bouquets. On its online edition, Le Monde has a picture of a pretty girl and a rose, as if there is some strange need to make this moment less ugly. Links with Sunday’s first round of the presidential election are unavoidable.

I couldn’t bring myself to go there today. In the Marais, a favourite café has finally replaced its folding glass doors after the shopfront was destroyed months ago by joyriders. Normalcy returned in some small corner.

Time collapses into itself. Friday night is a twilight zone.

All is quiet as I scroll through results of a cursory Google search. Last November the Guardian ran an online questionnaire to find out how Paris had changed in the year since the 2015 attacks that killed scores. “How do you feel France has changed?” “How has your daily life changed?” The quick answer now seems to be a sour disillusionment with the Parti Socialiste government, effectively forcing François Hollande into hiding in order to boost PS candidate Benoît Hamon through disassociation. It’s not working – the April 21 survey in L’Express has him in fifth place on seven per cent. Centrist independent Emmanuel Macron is leading on 24 per cent. At the same time, Libération’s front page is screaming of second- and fourth-runners Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, “Anyone but them.” Perhaps the disillusionment is total. (Sunday will show how deep this rot has dug in its weedy roots.)

Bag searches are a necessary tedium. The flow of life has developed a weird staccato of suspect packages, screenings, scans, sirens and station closures. Some of these shutdowns are planned works, progress not interruptions. Move it along, move it along.

It’s economics, too. Not just violence.

And yet, what change, really? The daily grind continues. Métro, boulot, dodo. It’s surreal. A loud bang rings out over the wall behind the garden behind my apartment and I search my memory for evidence that I understand what a gunshot sounds like. I don’t. A person sings to themselves on the RER and I tune in to find out a hidden meaning. There is no sinister message. I wonder if this insidious paranoia infuses the lives of others.

Tonight, my downstairs neighbours are taking advantage of balmy night to start up a loud conversation on their terrace. The hubbub is comforting.

Last night, travelling home, I listened to the list of stations where my line one Métro would not be stopping – Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau, Franklin Roosevelt, George V, Charles de Gaulle Etoile – and wondered what demonstration or protest could be happening late on a Thursday. I put the other possibility out of my mind. I forced it out. Barred it with the brutality of denial. I had that luxury for the short span of a subway trip.

My skin is rubbed raw. It’s the dry air of this strange climate.

I struggle to call Paris my city, but it is my bubble, my gleaming, illusory, fragile bubble. If I push my nose to it, it’s sticky and distorted. But it floats and shines and reflects rainbows that have nothing to do with reality.

 

Song lines

Music is a wormhole. On Tuesday night, I slid back through time from Bercy Arena, rising monolithic from the banks of an inky Seine, to a lounge room in a tiny wheatbelt town in Western Australia. In both scenes, the Cure was playing Primary. That relentless riff, so 1981 and yet so at home in the 21^st century, moved through the minutes, hours, years. Of course, the eleven-year-old watching the video clip on Countdown, dumbfounded and fascinated by the young Robert Smith singing about sleeping children, dreams, red and yellow, had no idea that she would revisit that feeling over and over, in so many clubs, bars, concert halls and lounge rooms for the next thirty-odd years, leading to that moment, in this city. Please don’t change. Turns out we don’t. Or at least it didn’t seem like I had, in the black auditorium, jumping up and down and singing along with 20,000 others freefalling in the time tunnel with me.

The more we go, the older we grow, the more we know.

Indeed.

At times, it feels as if there’s a total disconnect between my life before Paris and my life after the uprooting. But, time and again, music provides the through line, the anchor, the salve.

Another night, another bliss point. This time, M and I were at La Cigale, its 19^th century, red-velvet grandeur filled with 20^th-century rock, letting the music transport us. Suede were in fine form, New Generation a fitting finale to a set split literally – intermission and all – between their ’90s catalogue and newly minted album. More than the film that accompanied Night Thoughts, the whole shebang seemed cinematic, somehow. I too had a foot in two time zones. The mini movie in my head involved a grotty share house in Surry Hills, Sydney, with Dog Man Star in high rotation, yet here was its soundtrack pouring out of speakers in Pigalle.

Paris is full of such portals. You might call them music venues. It has to be said that live music was not uppermost among the charms I imagined I would find here. Museums, art, architecture, obviously. I anticipated smoky jazz clubs and world-class symphonies, opera and ballet. I did not expect to discover such riches of rock, pop, electro and indie within the city’s historic neighbourhoods. Discovering how off-base I was has been a relief, a joy and a source of bone-rattling excitement. Better, many of its elegant buildings have been converted into havens of screaming guitars and house beats. As well as La Cigale, there are Le Trianon, L’Olympia, Le Casino de Paris and the Elysée-Montmartre (reopened in September after five years’ closure), all with origins stretching back two centuries to the belle époque.

It’s surreal to ascend a curling marble staircase, to enter a concert hall replete with royal box, gilt, chandeliers and bas-relief, to order a pint amid the ghosts of Mistinguett and Jacques Brel, and wait for Rudimental or Dave Gahan to tear up the stage.

 

Happily (for me), my arrival here coincided with a time when streaming and its attendant drop in music sales have pushed more artists back out on the road. So, as well as discovering new acts, I’ve caught many longtime favourites; I’ve revelled in the genius of Johnny Marr, barely more than an arm’s length away, at the intimate Le Trabendo, swayed with the masses as Muse blasted Supermassive Black Hole across the Champs de Mars under the Eiffel Tower during Euro 2016.

The wealth hits close to home, too. The 20^th has its temples to the musical arts. At La Flèche d’Or, a converted railway station suspended over a disused line, the program tends towards emerging artists, with occasional big-name incursions such as Kaiser Chiefs. I love it because it’s small, grungy, shadowy and the perfect place to feign cool to Melanie Paine, throw yourself around to Hospitality or get chatting to folks from the Paris Opera over the blues licks of JD McPherson. It has grills on the windows and excellent pizza over the road at Mama Shelter.

Closer to Gambetta, the retro-inclined La Bellevilloise is next door to La Maroquinerie, a former leather workshop whose program provides a preview of what-you’ll-be-listening-to-next-year. The cavernous basement hosts everything from hip-hop, metal and post hardcore to folk and electro. Further up the hill, over rue de Ménilmontant, the biscuit factory-turned-music hub Le Studio de l’Ermitage has a program of contemporary jazz and world. Darker and dirtier, La Féline mixes DJ and open-mic nights with rockabilly, punk and hard rock – an absolute favourite even if the tattooed bar staff laugh at you for ordering red wine.

Whether I’m at a gig for pure pleasure or with notebook in hand and reviewer hat on, it’s always the same. I am connected. The territory, both my internal landscape and the exterior, swirling under a light show around me, is familiar. I am uplifted. I recognise myself.

At Bercy, true to form, I felt less lost and lonely. Just Like Heaven made me as happy as it ever has. Encore after encore.

*

Of course, the attacks of last November have complicated and weighed on my feelings about live music in Paris. Especially this week, with the anniversary and the reopening of Bataclan, it’s impossible not to be ripped backwards to that night. We remember. And the music goes on, as it must.

Photos: Amanda Gibbons

Aftermath

we are changed

changed inside

those of us who were there

who were nearly there

who were nowhere near at all

who only learnt later, at a distance

from the newspaper

from the newsfeed

but we were all there

and now we are changed

as we walk the streets

sit on the terraces

sit in the cinema

we know

we could have been there

Politics of polite

The footpaths of Paris can be narrow, in places barely wide enough to accommodate one person, let alone two abreast. Two-way traffic requires constant negotiation – do I give way, wait, squeeze past? In walking in tandem, you and your co-traveller must engage in similar trade-offs – who goes first, how fast, who decides when to pass the slow-walker in front of you? And forget loved-up strolls. It’s exhausting and pretty much the polar opposite of what newbies and tourists expect of a ramble around “the most romantic city in the world”. God knows how Kristen Stewart and Soko managed to pull it off, especially with a bank of paps no doubt running backwards in front of them.

Luckily, most of my wandering is done toute seule, head down, bent on maximising speed and efficiency.

At first, the codes of conduct on the streets drove me crazy. It seemed as if I was always the one to cede right of way, and no one ever thanked me for my trouble. I became quite good at the pointed, Merci, Madame! Non, allez-y, Monsieur!

Later, I came to suspect that the Anglo habit of deference – “After you”, “No, please, you go first” – was seen as a sign a weakness. I would need to toughen up. Forget my manners. I often wondered what would happen if I didn’t get out of the way of an oncoming fellow pedestrian on rue de Rivoli or boulevard Haussmann. One Saturday, I found out. I collided shoulder-to-shoulder with another shopper moving faster than I was – and I was sent flying. My assailant didn’t even break stride. I was picked up and dusted off by a trio of lovely young men who were concerned that one of them had accidentally knocked me to the pavement. I assured them they had not and, my faith in humanity somewhat restored, continued on my way.

My theory now is that Paris requires a level of assertiveness and sense of purpose I never needed in Sydney. It’s crowded, people are busy. Ducking and weaving wastes time and hesitation is not polite but confusing. If you pick a line and commit to it, other pedestrians will move around you, like a river flows around a stone, and the whole system functions more or less efficiently. (One trick to holding your ground is to avoid eye contact, although, in truth, this is more survival tactic than politesse.)

That said, Parisians take courtesy very seriously. Yes, they have a reputation for being aloof, arrogant and rude, but that’s because they expect you to follow the rules. In the street, stick to the right. In the Métro system and at busy thoroughfares (the entrance at Galeries Lafayette, for example), hold the door for the person behind you. Always say “Bonjour” when entering a shop, addressing a ticket seller or approaching a person for directions. The English speaker’s habit of beginning with, “Excuse me, but…” is simply too direct. Don’t use the fold-down seats in the Métro vestibule if it is crowded (so, pretty much never on line 13 or line 4 or line 9 during the oh-so-pleasant peak-hour crush).

Don’t cancel appointments without an ironclad excuse, and apologise profusely if such treason is unavoidable. A few bridges were burnt in the course of my learning this one. Being a touch late is socially acceptable but business self-sabotage.

Other rules, according to a few websites I consulted, talk about such complications as the number of flowers to offer as a gift, whether or not to take wine to a dinner party, and if so, what type (chilled Champagne or grand cru, apparently, says Connexion France). Shaking hands v air kissing. How to cut cheese. Where to put your hands when you’re not eating.

I’m sure I commit daily faux pas (above and beyond mangling the tu/vous thing, often in the same breath). Thankfully, many of the conversational taboos are universal – sex, politics, religion and money.

Like the Code du Travail, currently undergoing fraught debate before the reform bill is presented to the National Assembly next month, the French codes of social behaviour are long-evolved and deeply ingrained. And, perhaps, as with the traffic code, the strictures of etiquette invoke the spirit of revolution that seems, to this rank outsider, to underpin the national psyche. The more rigid the rules, the more fun they are to break.

Over the past week or so, as I’ve tinkered with this post, I have been looking for signs that the recent attacks had melted any of the Parisian reserve. I can’t say I’ve seen much change, but I’m oddly reassured by the physical closeness of the whole exercise of moving around the city. Perhaps for a brief moment last November the tiny distance that exists between bodies here shrank a little further. Certainly at the huge march in January 2015 after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the sense of community and unified defiance were palpable. Now, in the wake of yet more violence, daily life seems subdued yet largely the same. Wandering these lovely streets on the weekend with a friend, navigating the throngs at the market near Nation or shuffling through the Marais, it was the same game of duck-and-weave. In times of hideous division, and divisive public discourse, perhaps there is some comfort in the rules that allow us to live cheek-by-jowl in terse harmony.

 

 

 

Paris, interrupted

The pause button has been hit. More than the usual winter slowdown, the city seems to be in slow motion. But it is not still. Or rather it is still – still moving, still celebrating, still defying, lining up shoes in Place de la République in lieu of climate-change protest marches. Christmas is still coming. Work is still piling up. COP21 is still in progress. Candidates are still campaigning ahead of the first round of regional elections. The Métro is still packed for the daily commute. The flowers are still piled in the mourning streets of the 11^th.

But, still, it feels as if the brakes are on.

On the fancy side of town, the Champs-Elysées is lit up with sparkles, chill evenings ring with carols, the spicy fragrance of vin chaud and roasting chestnuts lures the snack-susceptible to hand over their euros at the Christmas village that stretches from the Grand Palais to Place de la Concorde. Down rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, oversized angels’ trumpets and chandeliers hang over the street, glittering above thinned-out crowds toting carrier bags from Chanel, Louboutin and Bluemarine. I can never help but linger outside Hermès and Prada, the windows are so beautiful, even if their contents are beyond me. I treat the displays like museum exhibits – ever-changing treasures of a very particular moment in time. Next season, the colours, cuts and textures will be totally different, and I’ll sigh anew.

The New York Times reported last week that tourism is more resilient to terrorism than it is to natural disasters, bouncing back to previous levels after thirteen months as opposed to twenty-four in the wake of an environmental catastrophe. That’s good news for a fragile France. No one doubts that Paris and its tourist industry will weather last month’s horror, but right now both are bruised and battered. A scowl plays about the beautiful lady’s lips even as she puts on her party finery.

In the meantime, the city offers her multitude of reasons to be grateful, reasons to still residual worry and press on. This morning, taking advantage of an early cancelled class in St-Germain-des-Près to promenade in sleepy Paris, I took myself over the Île de la Cité and past Nôtre Dame. The breeze was soft, carrying the mineral scent of traffic forging towards rush hour.

Just after eight, the light was glorious, turning the taupe river burnished pale and brushing the undersides of the clouds with fuchsia and orange. In the almost-empty square in front of the cathedral, Japanese tourists were taking photos with their phones, while a couple meticulously set up a large-format camera on a tall tripod. They smiled at me as I perched, notebook and pen in hand, to scribble down the loveliness. The topiary is immaculate in its wooden boxes, and the solders with automatic rifles have become a constant feature.

Back in less ritzy climes, it remains more or less business as usual, today as always, with the added presence of regular army patrols. Life goes on in the cafés and supermarkets, squares and markets. At Liberté, in the heights of Ménilmontant, all was quiet and delicious. The barista asked how much milk I wanted in my noisette and free wi-fi reconnected me to the wider world. (After more than a week, I still have no internet at home. The problem is with the external connection, according to the nice blokes from SFR.)

Thus far, no Christmas decorations have gone up in my local streets. The town hall overlooking the glass shards of the fountain at the centre of Gambetta has a couple of garlanded trees out front, and I’m beginning to suspect that might be it this year. Budget cuts or eco-awareness? Does it matter? Perhaps the wreaths and lights on the shops are exuberance enough for now. Perhaps new paste-ups from Fred Le Chevalier are enough. They’re certainly lovely. I’m not holding my breath for anything more. There’s no need. Why wait for something that may never come when all around are reasons to be thankful?

 

Black Friday

We didn’t realise what was happening. My friend M was helping herself to one of my fries, and we were contemplating another Côtes du Rhône, when five or six police ran past the window of Centreville, a restaurant on rue de Charonne, where we were having dinner. The Americans at the table next to us continued their conversation but something in the air shifted. As regular diners on this corner, where armed guards are always stationed to protect, I believe, the home of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, we were initially unconcerned by the police presence. But then, the wait staff began to move diners inside from the terrace, and those at the restaurants opposite did the same. The barman was glued to his phone and, all around us, people were checking their smartphones.

When the gendarmes outside took up protected positions and raised their rifles, M and I gathered our things and moved away from the wall-length windows that overlook the intersection with rue Keller, then retreated further into the stairwell towards the toilets. It seemed impossible to believe that such a measure was necessary, but we were not alone in our nervousness. Outside, the tables were filled with half-eaten burgers and half-filled glasses.

We stood, listening to the sirens outside, waiting and wondering. After an hour or so, a waiter printed out our bill and apologetically told us we had to leave. I asked him which route home would be most expedient, but he said he had no idea.

Outside, the street was quieter, but people were moving with apprehension, paused at traffic lights or bunched in restaurant doors, looking furtively up the road, at each other. I spoke to a friend in Sydney, then to my brother in London to get extra details but they knew little more than I did. M decided to walk towards Bastille, so we parted with a double kiss and a promise to text as soon as each got home.

My plan to head east up rue de Charonne was scotched by a roadblock, the street lit up with the strobing blue lights of emergency vehicles. I turned back, unsure of which way to go. At the main intersection, a police officer yelled at us, stray pedestrians, to get off the street. I crossed the road and waited in a recess. Calm again. Heading left down avenue Ledru Rollin, I reached the Métro, which was alive with announcements that République and Filles du Calvaire stations were closed on line eight. A woman asked me if I knew what was happening. On the opposing platform, a knot of twenty-somethings, the usual crowd in the 11^th arrondissement on a Friday night, were huddled together. The train came, and my journey passed without incident and without delay.

It wasn’t until I was back on the couch at home, after speaking to my parents, that I realized how close we had been. (Over the course of today, more details have been reported. About six blocks from Centreville, according to a witness in Le Monde, a gunman bearing a high-calibre rifle got out of a car and opened fire on the capacity-filled terrace of La Belle Equipe, killing a reported 19 people, before leaving the scene in the same car. More orchestrated attacks across the city resulted in the shocking toll of 128 dead and 257 wounded.) Suddenly the furrowed expression on the face of the young gendarme outside the restaurant made sense. Suddenly, the police crouched with fingers on rifle triggers made sense. The running. The instructions. The lockdown. The roadblock. I checked social media, reassured my friends and tried to work out what had happened. Delayed shock and gratitude. We had been close. But close is mercifully distanced.

*

This morning, I talked for the first time to the woman who panhandles daily by the Métro station. She asked what had happened, so I offered, in my basic French, the version I had of events. Later, after my usual Saturday language exchange, I talked to the friendly guys at the halal butcher where I buy roast chicken. If I allow last night’s events to change the way I see my neighbourhood, it will only be to appreciate more acutely how so many nationalities, cultures and religions can peacefully coexist. My sympathy is with all those lost and who have lost loved ones in these appalling events.

Illustration by Jean Jullien