Travelers' Tales Paris (36 page)

The massages, by the axolotyl-like Hamid, are worth the 50 francs—but since you have only paid 55 francs to enter this stupendous
hammam
in the first place you will assume you have profited from a bargain. The massage is exactly as it would be anywhere in the Moslem world, since the movements are laid down according to physiologically tested ritual and are always executed with a methodical and patient exactitude. Contorting their bodies into bows, they stretch out the client from underneath by clasping his ankles and wrists, inflect his spine, pull the arms across the chest and move their hands along them as if squeezing a tube of toothpaste, displace each finger a millimetre from its joints, twist, thump, arch, distend, wrench, hiss, and cluck. The service involves maximal effort on their part, using every part of their own body. Those socalled masseurs who content themselves with slapping a supine pair of shoulder blades with the sides of their hands seem worse than absurd by comparison. At the end of this gruelling set of figures the client feels broken apart, unstuck and magically reassembled. No ligament, tendon, muscle or nerve seems to have escaped the treatment. The spine, in particular, suffers a realignment suggestive of blissful fracture. At the same time the masseur oils and soaps the entire surface of the body with scrupulous attention to detail—although unlike the masseurs of the Maghreb they do not hurl buckets of scalding then cold water over it, much to our regret. The washing of the extremities of the fingers, carried through with such thoroughness, expresses an inadvertent tenderness which is communicated through the square, flattened nature of Hamid's toes and the similar bluntness of his fingers: through long hours of immersion in the tropical heat of the
hammam
they have become vegetal. They have the fibrous strength of tendrils of liana. You might well spend days of ecstasy in the Hammam of the Mosque, never quite able to tear yourself away from it through whole afternoons, as our peasant does (not only because he is indolent by nature but also because he can think of no better way to
change identity). We might well suggest other
hammams
to you, the one next to the Chope des Artistes on the rue du Faubourg St-Martin, for example, ensconced at the bottom of its grimy little passageway next to the Buzy Body clothes store, or the incredibly simple and secretive baths at 126 Avenue d'Italie announced by an old fashioned black and gold sign—Bains et Hydrothérapie—and similarly hidden at the end of a run-down passage and courtyard which is truly in the middle of nowhere. But for the minimum price of around 50 francs it is impossible to improve upon the Mosque and nowhere else outside of the Goutte d'Or will the imperialism of the City be more easily disrupted. When will the day come when
hammams
are built on every street corner complete with muscly masseurs and carved
moucharabiehs
, polylobal arches and ceramic
zelliges?
When will the public bath drive out the fatuous private bathroom and regain the gigantism of Caracalla and Diocletian? When will the scent of scorched eucalyptus replace the obnoxious odours of shower gels and talcum powder? No doubt we are guilty once again of rash nostalgia of the past, but on this occasion we can claim the excuse that the
hammam
is not yet dead, that it thrives furtively under the City's skin and that one day it might just possibly erupt back into the national habits.
When that happens the Age of plenty will have returned to earth, the golden Age, the Innocent Age, the Oh How Much Better it was Age...the Age of the Turkish Bath.

But the
hammams
, as you slowly begin to realize, are only oases of peace in the livid organism of the City and like all oases they frame large tracts of desert between them. And one of these hostile Gobis of the Mind exists in all its terrifying largeness and imponderability inside the head of an ex-abattoir manager who lives on the third floor above the peasant's apartment at no. 37 rue André Antoine, who—as it happens—is right at this very minute having a ferocious dream about Genghis Kahn and the Golden Horde. For M. Soufflet has something of an obsession with the Golden Horde. You see, they're going to come back one day, that old bastard Genghis Khan will come back too and destroy our beloved Paris...for everything is at risk, the barbarians are coming—indeed, they're already among us!—and it is only a matter of time before they start eviscerating children on the boulevards from the saddles of their stinking little ponies. It'll be like the Boches, only worse. The Mongols aren't even Aryans! And as history shows, the only thing they know how to do is wipe out cities, whole metropolises. Remember Baghdad, remember Delhi, remember Kiev! Curious to say, the pugnacious little ex-meat man has a moving and thoroughly noble attachment to the values of urban civilization and we can only listen with the utmost gravity to the dire warnings of his dreams...it is only to be regretted that M. Soufflet, in his hatred for everything alien, throws the baby out with the bathwater by associating the Mongols with Turkish baths. In this way we see that curious nightmares inspired by the City leave no room for fine definitions. And M. Soufflet, fearing the contaminating breath of those ear-chopping goblins from the steppes, will never ever put a foot inside a
hammam
. There is nothing for him to do but suffer and dream.

My thighs ached and I strained to breathe as I ground slowly up the hill, leaving the Seine River below. The cool Foret de Meudon was only a short distance away, if I could only keep running. With close to twelve thousand other runners, I was following the course from the Eiffel Tower to Versailles. Approximately eleven miles long, the run is one of the most popular races in Paris. Each year in September, thousands of Parisians and foreigners gather at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Groups of runners are started minute by minute, each contestant's number individually electronically scanned. By the time those of us near the end of the line begin running, the winners of the race have already been announced over the loudspeaker. But we are not running as competitors, rather for the pleasure of running from the Eiffel Tower along the banks of the Seine as far as Chaville, where the route leaves the river and takes us up the hill, through the Foret de Meudon and down the other side, to the grand boulevard leading to Louis the XIV's palace at Versailles. Local bands enthusiastically play popular songs, classical music, or rock at strategic points along the route. In September the weather is still warm—downright hot two of the three times I ran it—and the shade of the forest provides a welcome relief. Descending the hill towards Versailles, runners relax in the fern-filled woods, feeling as though they have left Paris and city streets a vast distance behind. Entering the town of Versailles, runners make their way up the tree-lined boulevard, approaching one of the most extravagant palaces ever built. We succumb to the illusion of grandeur, even tired and sweating as we are.

—Barbara J. Euser, “Running in Paris”

GEORGE VINCENT WRIGHT

I
T WAS LATE
N
OVEMBER AND
I
WAS IN
P
ARIS WITH MY FATHER
who was 93 years old. We had been in France for almost three weeks. It had been a delightful, elegiac and harrowing trip. Delightful in that people were charmed by this sturdy old man with frailty at the edges and a crinkly sense of humor. Elegiac in that there was more truth between us than ever before in our lives, and although his health was good, I think we both knew, somewhere, that this was the last trip, and everything came roaring out of the woodwork: high intelligence, perception, poetry, insight, and that which made it harrowing: deep green bile anger and under-handedness on both our parts, and envy and out-of-normal mental states: at times he thought I had brought him to France to kill him, that the hotel we were staying at was a mental hospital (he was right, some of them did look like mental hospitals) and that I was the doctor keeping him locked up. Other times he would see what he called “zombies”: groups of six figures dressed in black, with black veils over their faces; they would disappear when he got closer to them than twenty or thirty feet. He was to die seven weeks later, peacefully without illness, in his sleep.

It was a cold, damp, gray, grainy day. We had just had breakfast at our hotel in the Left Bank and we were in a taxi going to the Louvre. We got out in front of the Louvre and there was an unusually high granite curb, about ten inches from the cobblestone street to the sidewalk. As my father mounted the curb, he faltered and his left shin struck the hard granite.

He cried out in pain and I helped him sit down. I lifted up his pant leg and through the white support stocking I could see blood pouring into his shoe.

I was scared and light-headed with fear. I felt slow and sleepy, and it seemed as though I could not react and make things happen fast enough. There was a security guard 100 feet away, so I signaled him and he came over and called for help on his walkie-talkie. Very quickly two more security guards came over and gave my father a coat to put over his legs to keep him warm. He sat on the sidewalk shivering with the cold. I was holding a handkerchief over his wound; my father was drawn into his physical self, concentrating on enduring. I was making conversation with the security guards and help arrived with the typical French siren “aah-uuh, aah-uuh”—high sound on the “aah” and low sound on the “uuh.”

They were the Pompiers/Sapeurs—the combination of firemen and ambulance medics. They were take-charge, fast, efficient. And cute. I just don't know where to begin in describing these beings....They were shortish, mid-twenties, dark hair, beard-grain on the face and a jauntiness only the French have. Lithe and slender, they had the clean-limbed and intimate physicality that comes from a well-practiced team performing tasks together. And their uniforms! Navy blue with a clerical-type collar without the white, all of the same material, perfectly proportioned. The restraint and elegance in this envelope of clothing gave such contained power to the occupants, who had the bearing of those who are constrained from bursting into backflips. They had that Parisian fine bubble and spritz in everything they did, and although individuals, they had the simplicity of we-are-men-working-together, the gruff sweetness of toy soldiers. I could see them breaking into song
and dance but with more Schoenberg in it than music hall to mirror their boyish gravity. After weeks of sleeping in hot rooms with my father (his age required great warmth) and washing his dirty underwear, this energy before me was...I couldn't believe my eyes.... How did I wake up here?... I wanted to take it all in and pour it all over me but I couldn't find the method to do so.