Read Cathedrals of the Flesh Online
Authors: Alexia Brue
Cathedrals of the Flesh
cathedrals of the flesh
cathedrals of the flesh
my search for the perfect bath
alexia brue
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2003 by Alexia Brue
Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Lynda Mclntyre
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from
the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Published by Bloomsbury, New York and London
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
eISBN: 978-1-59691-732-3
First published by Bloomsbury in hardcover in 2003
This paperback edition published in 2004
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the United States of America
by R R Donnelley & Sons, Harrisonburg
To Suzanne and Nord
contents
Turkey: Taking the Measurements
Ancient Korinth: The Emperor's New Baths
By night we danced in Les Bains Douches, a steamy Parisian nightclub in a converted Turkish bath where Marina, complaining
of the heat, would strip to her camisole. All around me clothes flew off and the energy of the club pulsed with orgy potential.
Violet spotlights cut through the cigarette haze and the sweat evaporating off the half-naked bodies. Fishnetted legs and
bangled arms vibrated to MC Solaar's 'Gangster Moderne.' Three girls and a boy in a cowboy hat jiggled on a marble octagonal
platform. It was deliriously hot, but my camisole was more Lands' End than La Perla, so I sweated through the night, trying
to imagine this space crowded with bathers instead of dancers.
After exhausting ourselves in hamams remodeled as chic nightclubs, we craved still-functioning baths. Everyone has a special
Paris agenda, whether it be a complete tour of the Louvre or eating every napoleon they meet. Marina and I were in Paris simply
to bathe. It was a genuine cultural mission - to visit Paris's hamams, elaborate and ornate Turkish steam baths, delicious
havens from the modern world. We dreamed of all the fairy-tale ingredients of a Turkish bath experience: marble rooms filled
with steam (not cigarette smoke), nude bodies luxuriating on couches, zaftig Arab women scrubbing our bodies, and endless
cups of mint tea. All the delights that Les Bains Douches would have offered before Philippe Starck transfigured it into a
legendary nightclub over twenty years ago.
Marina, who knows where to find all sorts of things that might not be termed 'necessities,' knew exactly where to find hamams
that still served up real steam. This trait impressed me when we met as freshmen (our camaraderie instantly established by
our being the only two girls on our midwestern campus to wear heels). In Marina's dorm room, the gray institutional furniture
had somehow been swapped for an off-white, near spotless secondhand sofa. On the walls, instead of the typical college posters,
was her already growing collection of
suzanis,
thick embroidered tribal wall hangings used in the
yurts
of her native Central Asia.
I should mention that Marina is a Kazakhstani princess, or would have been if her grandfather hadn't helped Lenin overthrow
the family monarchy in 1918, a regrettable fact in Marina's mind. Her deposed princess status explains a few of her eccentricities:
the regal bearing that at first makes her seem aloof, the unself-conscious way she held a handbag and attached fox fur collars
to her coats at eighteen, and her packing philosophy (tiny bag, five pairs of shoes). Yet through her self-parodied materialism
shines a finely honed sense of the absurd and the sweetest, most loyal soul.
Once I asked Marina where she was going for spring break. 'Somewhere where native boys will serve me coconut drinks on the
beach,' she replied, only half joking. Marina gives hedonism a good name because she's not riddled with the American compunction
of justifying physical indulgences. To her more European sensibility, there is nothing profane or undeserved about pleasure.
As her friend, I would tag along without the guilt of having hatched the decadent plan myself. Pleasure was an end in itself
worth pursuing. Shocking. Especially to my strict New England code of punishment and reward. But as an innocent bystander
I reveled in her decadence, and during that January trip to Paris, I followed her, a libertine in the making, through days
spent in functioning hamams and nights spent in hamams reincarnated as nightclubs.
France might not seem the obvious destination to discover the pleasures of the Turkish bath. But I soon learned otherwise.
France's four million Muslims from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Turkey have made sure that the hamam, aka Turkish bath in
the West, tradition continues in their adopted country. Hamams - their architecture as well as the social life and services
that surrounded them — were, and in some areas still are, a way of life in Muslim countries. But like so many native customs,
hamams flourish on foreign soil where maintaining native institutions takes on greater urgency for uprooted Arabs. Hamams
also satisfy the Muslim code of hygiene detailed in the Koran: mandatory baths after sex and before prayer, deeper ablutions
periodically.
Marina, with the true soul of a collector, said we must try two hamams: the French version, a decadent pleasure dome with
no allegiance to Allah; and a traditional hamam catering to expatriate Arabs. For the first, we made our way down rue des
Blancs Manteaux, one of the more ignored streets in the fashionable Marais, past centuries-old Jewish bakeries and freshly
painted art galleries and costume jewelry boutiques. The minute you walk into Les Bains du Marais, you feel you've arrived
at a point in history that never happened - it's what a hamam would have looked like in a French-conquered Turkey. Les Bains
du Marais is a glimpse back to the Ottoman Empire with a softer, slightly more delicate French touch. The honey-colored walls,
the Middle Eastern café in the rear where red-faced patrons in robes nibble on baklava, the spiral staircase leading down
to the baths — all fit for a sultan vacationing in Paris.
Marina and I signed the guest book (noticing that Bruce Willis had signed in the day before) and headed for the changing room.
It was mixed bathing day, men and women luxuriating together in the steam and reliving the sybaritic glories of pagan Rome.
Bathing in the ancient world was, depending on the emperor's tolerance and personal predilections, a coed affair. Then the
killjoy church fathers, hardly ardent bathers themselves (Saint Anthony, who never so much as washed his feet, was held up
as a paradigm of good hygiene), entered the picture and made mixed bathing a confession-worthy activity. Muslims never wavered
on the issue of coed bathing. Given that many Muslims consider it risque for a woman to parade around without a veil, it follows
that mixed bathing falls into the same category as Salman Rushdie.
But we were far from fatwas in the passageways of this underground bath. Now changed into complimentary white, fluffy robes
and bath sandals, we walked past Euro-chic men sitting underneath potted palms in the hallway's wicker chairs. They looked
up and nodded hello in a nonleering, genuinely friendly manner. Marina winked at me.
I couldn't see through the steamed-up glass door, but I expected a typical American steamroom: a small, white-tiled box with
evanescent steam that gusted up and then fell quickly to the ground, only to gust up again with an abrasive sound like a 747
taking off. Once I stepped inside, however, a delicate steam washed over me. The central room wasn't as enormous as the room
we'd danced in the previous night, but it had all the same features. I recognized the raised octagonal platform in the middle,
which Marina called the 'bellystone,' glistening with humidity. Lanterns on the walls illuminated the room in shadows, giving
it a grandeur beyond its dimensions. Anxiously, I looked at Marina. For a first-timer there is confusion. What are all these
people doing? Where do I sit? How do. I sit? For how long? Marina smiled back at me. She was radiant. She was positively in
her element, like the sultan's favorite in the harem.
I reminded myself, There is nothing to feel uncomfortable about. This was no different from a country club without clothes.
It was just like a spa, only instead of partitioning people in different cubicles to await the individual attention of a doctorly
aesthetician, everyone was together, slathering stuff onto their bodies. Cleansing had been turned into a ritual, a shared
social activity.
All around us people were sitting on benches cropping out from the wall: a couple in matching silver metallic bathing suits
looking very St Tropez, two Mediterranean men with cultivated stubble, three women discussing an upcoming wedding, a lone
older woman looking intoxicated with the heat, her eyes closed and her head bent back and resting on the wall. While I was
having déjà vus from Fellini's
Satyricon,
Marina had already walked over to one of the recessed shower stalls and, with her body arched into a crescent, washed her
hair. I followed. I learned rule one of bath etiquette: Always shower before the bathing commences. The bath's steam opens
the body's pores, and if the skin is dirty or clogged with gloopy products, the sweating and detoxifying process is inhibited.
After drying off and enjoying my new lavender smell, I followed Marina over to the bellystone, the town square of a hamam.
I mimicked her every move. In a strange way, this felt like an initiation. And I could tell already that it was the start
of a serious habit. I was reveling in the sensation of doing something so private in such a public place and having no one
act as though it were the least bit out of the ordinary.
We removed our towels and stretched out on the warm tiled platform so that the crowns of our heads touched. The bellystone
was raised several feet off the ground. In the old days, a furnace directly underneath would have kept the marble warm.
'Marina,' I whispered, 'are you sure this is what we're supposed to do?'
'Yes, you lie on your back to loosen up your shoulders until they call us.'
'Call us for what?'
'Be patient,' she said with a smile.
We lay silently on the bellystone and inhaled the damp vapor in the room. I felt my chest expanding with each inhalation.
I closed my eyes, raindrops forming on my eyelashes. I listened to the sound of running water, someone taking a shower in
the distance. A tall woman holding a thin black hose emerged from a nook and seemed to motion to us.
'Marina, does she mean us?'
'Yes. Are you ready for your gommage?'
'Gommage, that means eraser, like pencil eraser, in French, doesn't it?'
'Exactly.'
'What is she going to erase?'
'Your sins.'
'Have you brought me to a church?'
'Yes, a cathedral of the flesh.'
We followed the priestess of the baths into a small ancillary room with two foam-covered massage tables. Steam still surrounded
us. Everything looked gauzy, reality bettered by heat and low light. The tall Moroccan attendant wore a one-piece bathing
suit. I envied her; instead of worrying about running out of stockings for work, she has to worry about making sure she has
a dry bathing suit. She turned us over to two women also clad in bathing suits.
One, a statuesque, slender North African, was stunning, while the other, at least twenty years older, was shorter and wider.
We discarded our towels and bathing suits and lay naked on the matted tables. We looked across the room at each other and
burst out laughing. We were so far away, so far removed from where we'd met, from what our everyday lives were now. Enjoying
the pleasure of sharing pleasure. An across-the-room wink, a nudge, a telling smile. A memory in the making. No matter how
bad our jobs, no matter how capricious our boyfriends, we have times like these, when we're just girlfriends erasing our sins
at the bath.
The regal North African woman began scrubbing me with a horsehair mitt, or at least that's what Marina insisted it was. She
worked in small, swift, up-and-down motions. It felt like a sandpaper massage, reminding me of the way walls get smoothed
and primed before painting. After a couple of minutes, she tapped me on the shoulders.
'Regardez votre peau,
she said. (Look at your skin.) The rough mitt had scraped away the dingy top layer of skin, creating brown polka dots across
the entire landscape of my body. She hosed me off, the polka dots disappearing down the drain.
The glove now off, she came at me with a sudsy washcloth and proceeded to soap and scrub every corner of my body, including
areas generally addressed, at least in France, by a bidet. I was a huge soapy monster; the suds seemed to swell and expand
as I was overwhelmed by a volcanic flow of foam. Then she massaged my shoulder blades, my feet, and my calves. The smell of
lavender from the mountains of soap was permeating my chafed skin, and she again took the hose and, with the force bumped
up a notch, hosed me off. I heard a combination of a screech and a laugh from Marina and assumed she was at the same point
in her gommage. We sat up, as told, and they hosed the front of us, then washed around our breasts. Not in conscious memory
had anyone ever washed me so thoroughly. The pleasure of having someone else take care of a basic need and elevate it to an
art was a strange and reassuring sensation, like being spoon-fed chocolate ice cream as an adult, a delicious momentary regression
to childhood.
We bade the gommage ladies good-bye, and Marina pulled me back into the hamam. A glass door on the far side of the hamam led
into another room that was steamier and hotter. In a genuine hamam, this room would be called the
sicakhk.
The room for serious detoxification. Inside this fiercely hot and eucalyptus-scented room, there was a lot of conversation
about the climate. In a melange of French, Italian, and English, bathers compared theories on how much heat is a good thing.
A guy from Sienna suggested staying in as long as you can stand it. Marina lectured me on rule two of bathing: 'Don't sit
or you'll get dizzy. Lie down so your entire body is exposed to the same level of heat, allowing you to tolerate the climate
for the maximum amount of time.' We stayed until our pores had soaked up as much moisture as they seemed to demand. Then we
needed to recover from the heat.