Profound South: Invincible Summer

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un été invincible."

-Albert Camus

About a month into my summer stay in Paris, I bought a little purse-sized bottle of Tabasco and began carrying it with me like a fiery flask.  I loved the thought of it tucked into my bag, a potion from home.

Is this the culinary equivalent of packing heat? I wondered.  And if so, what was I armed against?  A spiceless life? 

I pepper my morning smoothies with cayenne, sprinkle Tony’s on my popcorn, shake sauce onto pizza.  Moving to Louisiana has only encouraged this practice.  Two Tabasco bottles sit, side-by-side like salt-and-pepper, on nearly every restaurant table in the state.  There’s classic crimson and a lighter green version for those who like it less hot.  

I purchased my heat at a place called Thanksgiving on rue Saint Paul.  My friend Annie was the first person to tell me about the store.  “It’s one of the places you can buy peanut butter,” she’d said, imparting a piece of information valued among newly-transplanted Americans. 

So, one day I’m walking home and see it: the big glass window painted with a cornucopia, scrolly cursive words announcing underneath: cuisine de la Louisiane.

Inside, I find a section stocked with Zatarain’s Red Beans and Rice, Louisiana Hot Sauce, Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, just-add-water gumbo in little plastic packages. 

But this cornucopia isn’t all oysters and crawfish.  There are baked beans and marmite for the English, paper packages of maple-leaf cookies for the Canadians.  Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff for the Americans.  Then, tubs of fudgy icing and box mixes for yellow cake for anyone with a cupcake craving.  Prices aside, it’s every Anglophone expatriate’s dream.  So, in a move of (ex)patriotism, I splurged on grits, cornmeal, and hot sauce. 

While I was browsing, “Me and Bobby McGee” came on, and Janis Joplin told me a southern comforting story about kindness.  Even if you had a flat tire, you shouldn’t worry because a trucker would pick you and your boyfriend up and drive you to a city an hour and fifteen minutes away as it rained and the three of you sang, safe and sheltered in the cab.  The first line from the song was the only real association I had with Baton Rouge before moving here.  It was the place where Janis busted flat. 

During my move south, I had busted flat, too, in a U-Haul, in Mississippi, also with a boyfriend, but nobody offered to drive us to New Orleans.  And by then we really could have used a daiquiri.  So, instead of riding all the way to New Orleans as someone strummed her harpoon, we sat in the diner section of the gas station and tried to re-tranquilize my cat.

It about the time that I bought the Tabasco that I began saying I was from Louisiana.  I’m from Tennessee by birth, from North Carolina by virtue of having lived there for most of my life, and from Montpellier simply because I love it more than any place.  But now, in some ways, I am also from Louisiana.     

Hot sauce: wet heat.  A climatic clue you’re in the South. 

In Paris, people kept fanning themselves, bemoaning la chaleur, and I kept thinking, a little indignantly, you call THIS heat?  A sunny little seventy-five and no humidity?  On one of the first nights, I remember sitting in my apartment in jeans and a scarf, sipping tea and feeling desolate that it was late June and in the low 50s.  Fast forward to now: we’re in the home stretch of September and my roommate said yesterday, “It’s starting to cool off.  It might get down to 86 tomorrow.”

Louisiana’s all swamp and sweat, and so am I.

A few nights ago, I watched Steel Magnolias, which was filmed in Nachitoches, LA.  Viewing a movie set in the South has always been uncomfortable for me.  Things that seem natural in real life become affected, put on: the exaggerated accents, the waitresses calling you darlin,’ the languid pace.  It’s all drawl and dawdle that feels false played out on a screen.    

But beyond all the little signals of southerness, the mention of sweet tea, the words like “tacky,” and “grandbaby,” the hell-raising husband at the wedding who shoots firecrackers into the trees to scare off the birds, the Bible-brandishing beautician . . . beyond all the triteness, the tropes, there’s one part that gets me.  One part that feel real.  Southern. 

It’s the mother’s monologue in the cemetery, about her daughter Shelby’s death. (If you remember, she went into a coma after complications from a kidney transplant.)  It begins calmly then builds to rage.  There’s grace and resilience in it, even if M’Lynne believes she’s been done wrong.  I think of Louisiana.  Of Katrina.  Of Deepwater Horizon.  Of the steady strength of rebuilding. 

The cemetery monologue reminds me of another scene from an epic southern film, Gone with the Wind.  Scarlett’s “I’ll never be hungry again,” speech.  Famished, her hair all frizzy, Scarlett claws at the ground for a stray radish, then collapses, chest heaving against the earth.  If you’re from the South, you know the ground matches the sun-smeared sky.  “Red as birth land’s dirt,” to cite a line from a friend’s poem.

As God is my witness.  They’re not going to lick me.  I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again.  No, nor any of my folk.  If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.

Scarlett’s standing.  The score swells.  

Camus wrote, "Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un été invincible."

"In the middle of winter, I discovered in myself an invincible summer.”

He grew up in a sunny place, too.  Algeria.  His story, like Scarlett’s, assumes a certain nostalgia for a way of life that became indefensible.  French Algeria fell like the Confederacy.

In French, the Deep South is called le sud profond.  The Profound South.  The more I live here, the more I realize I am profoundly southern.  The land and I lay claim to one other.  Like Scarlett, called back to her birth land’s dirt, I am also called back to my terre, and carry it with me when I go.

Vagabondes: Women, Walking

-What do you like about living in Paris?

-That it’s feminine.

-Feminine?

-It has curves. It’s slow. Buildings are close to the ground. You can wander. You can’t wander in Manhattan.

-Conversation with Cyndi, who moved to Paris last year from New York

The French language offers a wealth of words for walking, a dictionary list, long and imagistic, of ways of moving through the space. While we stride and amble along the glittery cement of American cities with “skyscraper wallpaper,” to use Jim Carroll’s description in The Basketball Diaries, the French are apt to se promener or errer, along the cracks and crevices of cobblestone, amidst marble façades that stretch up only a few stories.

I contemplate cobblestone: maybe that is what slows them, eases the pace of “walking” into “wandering.” Its uneven edges, its dips and drop-offs, remind you to slacken your step for fear of stumbling, to look around as the land shifts endlessly beneath your feet and you realign your stride.

Of all the words for Parisian peregrinations, vagabonder is my favorite, perhaps because it calls to mind Cosette. As a writer, divorcée, and cabaret performer, she often matches her character Renée in La Vagabonde, a self-described dame seule, re-envisioning her existence after parting ways with her partner. Both women seem shared between the desire to settle into stability with someone else and an equal longing to revel in the terrifying freedom of singularity.

People say Paris is a great city for couples, but I think Paris is a great place to be alone.

It was a statement made by one of my first friends here, each of us in some ways like Renée, each of us realigning our strides as the land shifted. As she suggested, when you are alone, you look both outward and inward. You notice more. When coupled, you look at one another. John Donne had said it best in “The Good Morrow”:

For love all love of other sights controls

And makes one little room an everywhere

Cyndi had commented on the curves. A popular saying, quoted on Parisian post cards reads: Ajouter deux lettres à Paris, c’est le paradis. (Add two letters to Paris and it’s paradise.), but the city’s concentric circles might remind the errant traveler of Dante’s rings of hell. Descend to his innermost circle, the ninth ring reserved for traitors, and you will rub shoulders with Mordred, Cain, Judas Iscariot, and Satan, himself, frozen in a lake called Cocytus. But if you spiral into the center of Paris, you’ll find the first circle, point zéro, a copper-colored stud on the parvis in front of Notre Dame from which all distances are measured. It’s as if Paris is a pinwheel of an art project, expanded, glittered and glued, cut and crafted, by 2,000 years’ worth of city dwellers, and the creation is all held together by a tiny golden brad.

Dante’s inner ring promises perpetual punishment; Paris’s, perpetual pleasure.

Point zéro is a wishing stone, but no two wishes are the same, nor are the ways of wishing. Some days, as I’ve watched, people toss coins onto it, a price paid, even if a pittance, for what’s wanted. Other days, they touch their toes to the middle, close their eyes. Still other times, they tiptoe over it. Once, I saw several people, one after another, step into point zéro and spin around, as if you really had to spiral into the center of something in order to know which direction to take, which one would one would wind you outwards toward your wish.

Many walking tours begin in the center. Many times, even if I begin on this outskirts, I walk almost subconsciously towards it, submitting to the city’s centripetal pull.

There’s a literary archetype in French literature, le flâneur, that arose from another word for walking. Flâner is a verb that describes a leisurely, aimless stroll, defined as se promener sans but, au hasard, pour le plaisir de regarder or “to walk without aim, haphazardly, for the pleasure of looking” (Larousse’s online dictionary). I think of it as the exact opposite in time, aim, and gait, of a power walk. In the nineteenth century, as Baron Haussmann revised the city’s geography, expanded streets and cleaned up the infect sewage of boue, walking became easier and more pleasant. People, and personages took to the streets. Masculine ones, that is.

In a book review of Catherine Nesci’s academic work devoted to the subject of flânerie (Les Flâneurs et les flâneuses: Les femmes et la ville à l’époque romantique) Denise Davidson comments on the qualities of the flâneur:

“ . . . The classic flâneur of the early and mid nineteenth century symbolized the transformations of modern, urban life. In Baudelaire’s writings of the 1860s, [ . . . ] the flâneur is associated with bohemian Paris. He was an artist and an intellectual, an upper-class man of leisure, a dandy and a connoisseur of the pleasures of the city. In Le Flâneur et les flâneuses, Catherine Nesci focuses on an earlier period, when the flâneur took a slightly different form, and was more an observer and chronicler of all that he saw than an artist transforming it through his creative impulses.” (H France Review Vol. 8 September 2008 121)

In literature of the same period, women walking often translated to promiscuity, real or perceived. Women, who flânent unchaperoned, are seen as a softer version of street walkers. How funny that our euphemisms in English and in French still suggest a connection between women’s walking and loose morals. The term faire du trottoir or, literally, “to do some sidewalk” means to sell one’s body, offer it up to the public for more than viewing pleasure. Balzac’s novel Ferragus, le chef des dévorants commences with the premise that every Parisian street has a character, and certain streets are so notorious that simply being seen on them can ruin a woman’s reputation.

Oui donc, il est des rues, ou des fins de rue, il est certaines maisons, inconnues pour la plupart aux personnes du grand monde, dans lesquelles une femme appartenant à ce monde ne saurait aller sans faire penser d’elle les choses les plus cruellement blessantes

Yes, there are streets or ends of streets, there are certain houses unknown to the majority of people in the wider world in which a woman who belongs to this world would know to not go into without having people think the most cruelly injurious things of her.

Yet, women want to walk, to move about, uncorseted, to stretch and stroll and claim the space. Some of Dumas’s characters in The Queen’s Necklace, Oliva and Jeanne de la Motte, sneak out of their towers for witching hour walks. The author George Sand, who adopted a male pseudonym for the purposes of publication, cross-dressed to be able to circulate freely.

She writes in Histoire de ma vie, “La découverte jubilatoire du monde par la flâneuse travestie donne ainsi naissance à la creation artistique: la ville se fait paysage et espace de la rêverie.” (The cross-dressing flâneuse’s jubilatory discovery of the world gives birth to artistic creation: the city transforms into a landscape and space for reverie.)

Perhaps, because it was once denied us, we desire to vagabonder on broad avenues and cramped alleys. Maybe that is why people like Cyndi, like me, like so many other women I’ve met take such pleasure in the slow discovery of self and city that occurs on winding walks though Paris’s curves.

-What did you do on your last night in Paris? I asked Liz, who left this morning.

-I went on a walk.

Sometimes, as a woman, it is still dangerous to walk alone. I have encountered women who will never walk unaccompanied, who imagine danger waiting in every shadow. In college, my first-year roommate called a male chaperone for the three-block walk between the bookstore where she worked until nine and our dorm. She was always safe, but what sadness I saw in that safety. What willingness to relinquish freedom.

As I have written before, I have been attacked in my apartment, in broad daylight, on a Sunday afternoon, with all of the neighbors nearby, at a time and in a place where I felt perfectly safe. I have been scared into submission, physically overpowered. I have wondered briefly and powerfully if I was about to die and how. I still jump if someone startles me on the sidewalk. I still, on occasion, have nightmares.

And I still walk myself home.

Le Pont des Arts: An Intersection of Love Stories (un premier contact)

“Paris a mon coeur dès mon enfance.” -Montaigne

“Paris has had my heart since I was a child.”

As a seventeen-year-old, I sat in a cramped classroom pasted with the Johnny Hallyday-laden pages of Paris Match, Petit Prince posters reminding me that the essential was invisible to the eyes, and wondered if one day I would glimpse the Eiffel Tower in any form other than its cardboard incarnation on Madame Furr’s wall. Even though most of my world could be condensed into the rural radius of the one-stoplight town where I grew up, everything I loved seemed to be French.

So, I practiced my pirouettes in ballet, perused Camus in translation, trekked hours to see Rodin’s sculptures in museums, tried to reproduce the intricate grandeur of puff pastries, and exhausted the French film section at the local library.

I did see the Eiffel Tower, a year after I began taking French. After that, just as Gertrude Stein claimed that America was her country, and Paris, her hometown, I had two countries. The first time I saw the tower was at night. It is still my favorite way to see her, twinkling on the hour, a coquette of a clock.

This is probably my tenth time in Paris, but the first thing I wanted to do in my adopted hometown was run, see as much as I could, as fast. It is the way I discover a new place, or return to an old one.

Scenery slid by as I pounded pavé . . . Notre Dame’s spire, slender and coal-colored, emerging from among the marble. The glossy glass Pyramide juxstaposed against the Louvre, so stern, so enduring. The dusty stretches along the Tuilleries lined with garden-sitters paging through newspapers and paperbacks. The green-boxed bouquinistes, equipped with vintage cartes postales, posters, yellowed books. The cluster of cars and cycles weaving wildly around Place de la Concorde.

More bridges, more near-misses with motos.

I cross to the left bank. Arrive. En fer et forte, 1665 steps surging skyward. I touch the west leg, move under it, look up. Mouth merci. No one is trying to sell me a postcard or keychain. I live here, even if only for two months.

On the way home, I crossed back over to the left bank on one of the pedestrian bridges near the Louvre, le Pont des Arts. I slow to see a man, crouched, taking a close-up photo of something on the railing. I pause, curious. Glints of gold and silver sparkle from all over the bridge. Locks. Hundreds of locks hooked onto grated side railings.

He leaves. I approach. Every lock was marked with a combination of lovers’ names. Some scrawled in Sharpie, perhaps purchased also in haste from a hardware store on the Quai. Some engraved, the product of planning, perhaps packed with the couple on a honeymoon voyage. Others, more discreet, had initials. Some, no names at all. Most were key locks, others dial locks, still others with combinations, numbers lining up in a vertical stripe down the middle.

There was a kind of beauty in it that ached a little, all those people loving each other, wanting to offer proof of it to the passersby.

Thinking of the people I have loved, je me lève, realize I’m dizzy from standing still for a moment after running so long. I had been to Paris with each of my long-term loves. Each once. But have come many more times alone than attached. The backdrop of each story outlasted all of the characters.

Who were these lovers? Where were they? Fanny et Jérémy. Tim and Laura. Ana Luisa y Robert.

I want to get away. I want to fly awaaaaaaay. Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . a guitarist croons, mid-bridge as I jog off. What did Lenny love? Oh, right. He loved falafel. I know this because we’re rumored to live in the same neighborhood. There’s a big picture of him, Rue des Rosiers, falafel in hand, his arm around the owner whose restaurant he endorsed. “Best falafel in the world,” he had said, according to my Let’s Go guidebook.

I won’t mention the name of the place, out of respect for the other falafel joints, but you’ll be able to recognize it, if you visit. It’s the one with the line, preceded and followed by other desolate vendors pleading, “We have good falafel, too.” They don’t want to beg but they feel compelled to. It is the position of the lover who is left: “Don’t pass me by . . . I have something worth your time. I know you’re not convinced, but please stop walking away.”

How many of these couples were still together? It was a question I asked my friend Scott, a few weeks afterwards, once we and some other friends had become habitués of the bridge, frequenting it in the evenings when youngish people gather for improvised picnics, drinks, rencontres. “Doesn’t matter,” he said adamantly. “It only matters what they felt at the time.”

Who are they, these couples?

Are we not predictable in this? Loving the sunset, the kiss at the airport, the Eiffel Tower, the easy and obvious cliché? Was me being enamored with Paris, the most frequented tourist destination in the world, or the people I’d loved, each so charming, each beyond beautiful, another example of loving the obvious? Was I like all of those people on Rue des Rosiers lining up for falafel at Lenny’s favorite place, not looking past what might seem like the clear first choice?

Each couple had lived a love story, each unique. Yet, they had chosen to symbolize their love similarly. Was love always more alike than different? I must think more on this, or perhaps not think. I remember the words from one of my favorite love stories. It is the story of two kinds of love: a friendship and an unrequited adoration. It too, is obvious. As I leave the bridge, it stays with me: Adieu . . . Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.