Street Art

en route to Boulevard Haussman

A hepcat asked if I could kindly spare a cigarette. When he saw what I had to offer, he spat out, "Gitanes?" And for a second he became an animated, French version of Bartleby the Scrivener reincarnated some hundred years later here, on sweltering Rue d'Amsterdam.

I couldn't help but join a grinning game with him. We smiled so hard the sun was disarmed for a moment there. Then, as obligations caught me, I returned inside.

My daughter wanted to do some shopping, and somehow we drifted into Clichy. She wanted to see Moulin Rouge anyway, and I knew exactly how to get there... thanks to Jean Rhys.

From the balcony Marya could see one side of the Place Blanche. Opposite, the Rue Lepic mounted upwards to the rustic heights of Montmartre. It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.

We took the obligatory pictures, then continued climbing Rue Lepic. I showed my daughter the building the main character in Quartet had lived in with her husband. Always in trouble with the patronne of the hotel. Always the cause of one scandal or another, without even knowing what she had done. Until Ford Madox Ford and missus came to the rescue, and the scandal erupted for real. I didn't tell my daughter that. I told her van Gogh had lived on Rue Lepic as well, I just didn't know where.

We bought some brie and crackers and a jug of ice cream (a touch of genius, that ice cream was, not my idea of course), and sat to eat on a bench where I thought Rue Lepic terminated. We ate most of the cheese, some crackers and all of the ice cream, sitting on a bench in a clearing, and eavesdropped an American hipster making fun of the local hipsters. He called them bonbons [probably bohos] or something, describing how cool they felt, living in Paris, throwing the weight of their parents' bank account around.

The guide was in his twenties or thirties. He was slim, had a short-cropped beard of gold and/or copper, the usual H-attire of jeans and shirt. He let his listeners in on a secret: just around the corner, right over there, you found an excellent restaurant with quite reasonable prices, big portions, huge salads, so on. The business side being taken care of, he then came down heavy with the artsy.

He told a story of a female artist who started painting her self-portraits everywhere to get back to an ex-boyfriend. "I don't wanna see you ever again," he had said. Now, of course, he had to. His ex-girl got incredibly rich and famous. There was a work of hers on the outside door of a gallery:

http://parisdansmonoeilen.weebly.com/miss-tic.html

To cut a long story short, she had realized the American Dream. As street artists go, she was a perfect match for tourist groups.

Then the guide said, "Well, other artists have lived here as well, and next we are going to see where one the most famous of them all, ever, lived."

The group ran away. I watched them go. They disappeared from view. I shot up from the bench, the spoon in my hand, and into the middle of the street to see where the group had gone. There. I saw them all right.

"There's got to be a plaque or something," I told my daughter. "I've to go and see, once they're gone."

While we were waiting for the first group to get out of the way, another group stopped in the same spot their predecessors had occupied, and another guide recounted the same stories, in another language, as far as I bothered to listen. I wondered out loud, why to tell the same stuff to everyone. Didn't they have any imagination? Didn't they ever get bored? Am I the only one who is always getting bored, besides King Arthur?

After a beat, we followed the tracks of the first group. There was no sign on the wall where they had stood, watching the van Gogh wannabe wave his arms. There was a Asian café downstairs, that was all. It must have been here anyway, I thought, staring at the derelict building. My daughter tapped me on the shoulder. She pointed to the other side of the street. And indeed, there were our friends of Group #2, standing in front of a carefully preserved white house, under that great, liberating plaque which said,

You shall know the truth; and the truth shall make you free.

We climbed on. And Jean Rhys wrote on.

The lights winking up at a pallid moon, the slender painted ladies, the wings of the Moulin Rouge, the smell of petrol and perfume and cooking.

The Place Blanche, Paris, Life itself. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.

On the road to Sacré-Coeur, to the steps of Sacré-Coeur, we take another break. My daughter asks me if I would like to live in Paris. I don't think so. It would be like living in a museum. This substantial remark is preceded or followed by a sermon of mine on the subject of writers and artists and hangers-on and yes-men and tourists who swarm the place as soon as somebody has achieved something of their own. Something original. It's the same as with the rock stars. People are just out to exploit them! Rock stars have nothing to do with it, my daughter insists. I insist that they do.

"But you have followed those stars here," my daughter says, "haven't you?"

Yeah. It is nice to visit those places, I explain. I'm not staying, feeding on dead people like a hyena.

Because I cannot stay. That is the only reason why not. It was at this point that my daughter asked if I wouldn't like to live in Paris. She gave me an opportunity to safe face. She must have seen that the old man's logic "was incorrect even before it reached its 'ergo':

It is wrong to say, 'I think'. One ought to say, 'I am thought'. [...]

I is somebody else."

Coming down the stairs, the vendors pass us, running away from the cops or the soldiers with their Kevlar vests and machine guns. They almost fall to their faces, the vendors do, they are laughing so hard. The audacity of hope? Once again I know nothing. I don't even know that. We take a metro to the hotel in silence.

"Lady Gaga," one of the vendors called to my daughter earlier, as he was trying to close a deal. "No need to be afraid."

He offered his hand, we hurried past.

"Where are you from?"

"Finland," I shot back, stumbling into safety. And after that, the vendors stumbled past us. After that...

Soon:

Who the hell is Haussmann?
Doesn't matter, really:
we want to be his protégés!

I'm a healthy student.

Graham Robb, Rimbaud. Picador, London 2000.