Travelers' Tales Paris (35 page)

It is not intended that you should be able to stand much of this sly thermic sadism and so it is that before long you desire to change direction and mood and—why not?—temperature. On either side of the door from the showers are the sauna and the steam bath. We would sincerely recommend you not to waste time in the sauna, which is naturally indistinguishable from all other saunas, and whose dry heat we find unbearable: direct yourself to the left-hand door and plunge into the inferno of the herbal steam room, where the moans of the dying are Dantean and where you can sit on any one of the ascending steps that recede back into invisibility: behind the wall of vapour, each one getting hotter as it gets nearer the ceiling. The heat here is abusive, the burning combustion that can be imagined on the surface of a wretched moon of Jupiter, except that here the steam is scented with eucalyptus and a piercing and tonic freshness quickly fills the lungs. The only criticism that can be levelled against this exemplary steam room, which is properly sealed at the correct temperature, is that far from our much-awaited ideal of repose and abstraction we find here fat businessmen discussing their sad little scandals in voices only half hushed and farting at regular intervals.

Needless to say, such vulgar interruptions are highly distressing to our refined and aristocratic peasant and you too may well find yourselves leaving prematurely and searching out the cold bath in order to attain your Sufic ecstasies. But you would be well advised to wait until you are on the verge of unconsciousness before making a move, and then you should move quickly, stride with closed eyes through the reading area, push through the aluminum doors
into the atrium (which is cool and distinguished) and, ignoring the notices in 1930s demotic advising you not to hurl yourself about, hurl yourself into the small pool, at the bottom of which a multitude of tiny blue and white checked tiles dazzles the eye. You should be aware, of course, that this brusque but exquisite gesture, given the size of the pool and the room, will drench every occupant of every chair around you, but unlike the true
hammam
a certain egoism is permissible here. In any case, the atrium (for want of a better word) will now allow you to dry off in relative anonymity, being equipped with foam mats ranged along a raised dais on either side of the pool and here you can contemplate the hexagonal cupola cut into the ceiling in clear reference to its Andalusian model, the Roman clock presiding over the pool, the unfortunate and completely inappropriate photo-murals of Hawaiian beaches and the plethora of yellowing notices on the walls arguing for silence, respect and cleanliness. Here, the same businessmen who irritated you in the steam bath come out gasping for air, brutally naked and half-boiled, and lower themselves quietly swearing into the icy water. You can see that they have difficulty breathing. They have the appearance of flabby consuls of the late empire, addled with erysipelas, or St. Anthony's Fire. So they wheeze and disport themselves like wounded dolphins in the blue and white shimmer of the pool and the clock ticks slowly while you sleep in the shadow of the arcade on your foam bed and hours pass by in the continual migration from steam to water, from heat to cold, from moaning to gasping, from sickness to health. After a while you notice that you have begun to smell differently, a smell of foul yogurt that comes with the exposure of your inner filth. It is time for that modern necessity, soap, and you can only regret that the masseurs available here, and who cost an additional 40 francs to the 90 you have already paid, are not authentic despite the fact that they soap you down as they should. You will have to go into the shower and do it yourself.

The truth is, we are not convinced that for 90 francs we are experiencing the
hammam
at its most disconcerting and gratifying. In fact, our peasant rarely consents to part with 90 francs at the St-Paul
unless he feels the need for the cold swimming pool—admittedly a luxury at most
hammams
. Depending on the area he finds himself in, there are numerous alternatives that remind him more of the
hammams
he has crawled through in the cities of North Africa, and more particularly of the exquisite massages he has enjoyed in the cheap unmarked bathhouses of Meknes and Fez, where the hot flagstones touched in the dark, the powerful hands of masseurs, the overpowering heat of underground vaults, produced in his mind the most powerful memories of all his various travels across the globe. His passion for these places was born in these distant cities and has mostly been prosecuted ever since on the margins of deserts, where the poignance of the public bath—the most potent and rich symbol of urban civility and utility—is at its greatest faced with the puritanism of the nomad. It was here that he discovered his distrust for the nomad, the scorner of bathhouses and therefore of libraries.

As in Alexandria, the
hammam
is the pivotal point of urbanity. It is the place where accumulated surplus time is spent and where the equivalent excess of eroticism is displayed and dissipated without action or violence. How significant that it is at the heart of the Islamic world that the
hammam
has imposed itself, as much at the centre as the much-vaunted mosque: that heart which is contested by, on the one hand, the classical urban tradition of intellect, leisure, tolerance and development and, on the other, the nomad pastoral tradition of disruption, perpetual violence, ascetic scorn, military rigour and social fluidity...the whole gamut of desert puritan values so glorified by Ibn Khaldun for the sake of its austerity and moral purity, but which can only destroy the precious fabric of the
hammam
, refusing to recognize as it does anything but the sterility of the moving man. In this way, invisibly seduced by our own desert jeremiads, our whining nomadism in the form of a thirst for the purity of the primitive, we see the Turkish bath as a locus for unparalleled sybaritic corruption, for discreet copulations and the begetting of illegitimate children. The fate of the bath in the life of the European city reflects this prejudice. Contrary to our myths of the Middle Ages, public bathing was
popular in the European cities of the 14th century. The Church's edicts against “washing,” so beloved of those desiring to prove in the most irrefutable way the pitiful backwardness and barbarism of this otherwise irritatingly arrogant continent, turn out on closer historical inspection to be tirades against the bi-sexual public baths of which the German city of Augsburg contained dozens, eventually closed down on orders from the bishop and in which—men and women being entitled to rent private cubicles—a vast number of bastards were reported to have been sired. The Church did not care whether people were clean or not, it cared about their legitimacy. And yet the Church also, beyond its sense of spiritual responsibility, perpetuated the sneer of the original nomads, the greatest of whom is Moses. The urban mind of the Mediterranean, with its own fascination for the human body, only relinquished its bathroom habits under intense pressure from the outside, from the spiritual guerrillas of the desert. It seems to us, lying in the arcaded courtyards of the world's
hammams
, subdued by the bubbling of fountains and drowsily aware of the naked bodies propped against classical pillars and scraping oil from their arms, willingly immersed in the only form of collective masculinity devoid of aggression, in a calm enjoyment of architectural details, self-enclosing fraternity, absence of loud throats and locker-room wit, borne along by the immemorial forms of a relaxation that is eminently horizontal and silent, that we have returned to our Greco-Roman roots, however uproariously funny this may seem to fellow hyperboreans. Even the smallest Parisian
hammam
gives us this nostalgia—the “pain of returning.”

There is, for example, the small place on the corner of the rue de Tombouctou and the Boulevard de la Chapelle in the Goutte
d'Or, called El-Baraka but ominously missing from the telephone books. Situated between the railway lines fanning out behind the Gare du Nord which sprawl under the boulevard and a gaping hole at the angle with the rue de Chartres formed by the destruction of a block of tenements and which is now like a chalk quarry covered with gargantuan figures of street art, cubic skeletons and running gangsters depicted falling into the hole, the El-Baraka is announced by its delicate blue tiles and Moorish lancets rising unexpectedly out of the hurly-burly of the boulevard. A small neon sign is all that tells you there is not the usual Moroccan restaurant with whining lutes underneath. Instead, the vestibule is cramped, dark and hot and above all it is grave as all true
hammams
are. There is no joking and elbow-nudging here. The bath is a serious enterprise. For 50 francs you have a straightforward sweat and for a further 20 you can hire one of the two or three white-haired masseurs at the top of the stairs and take him down with you into the depths. The baths themselves are simple in the extreme: a shower and spotless defecation area, a long hot-room in dark blue tiles with basins set at regular intervals into the wall with a continuous bench running between them and, at the far end, properly screened by heavy plastic ribbons, the steam bath itself, a small triangular room in the same blue tiles. Despite the absence of extra luxuries the El-Baraka is a place of asylum. It is used only by the local Moslems, sandalled loan sharks, grocers scarred with smallpox, oily clerics, students, train drivers, small-time landlords. It is an advantage of the familiarity that reigns in the El-Baraka that the attendants personally tie the knot in your bathrobe and in general speak to you with a certain outlandish deference. The drying and rest room, where the wet clients stretch out on their mattresses, has high mirhab-shaped windows giving on to the rue de Tombouctou and the boulevard—where the Métro trains crash along the overhead track—and lying between the walls of tiles in the heat of a burning afternoon while the myriad voices babbling in Arabic and Turkish on the suffocating boulevard seep into the silence of the baths, you know that you are no longer in the Paris of the glass towers and Napoleonic relics, you are in the Nilotic
Paris, the Paris of Mesopotamia, the Flower of the Desert. And all this, at the Baraka, for 50 francs!

But whatever the advantages offered by the small baths of the Goutte d'Or and however much our peasant resorts to them because they are in his neighbourhood, it cannot be denied that no
hammam
in Paris, or in the West, can equal in vertiginous decor and graceful eroticism the baths of the Paris Mosque situated on the Place du Puits de l'Ermite. Although we have made a resolution not to stray into descriptions of the tourist dimensions of the New Disneyland, we cannot help descending into the much-frequented and familiar Hamman of the Mosque, which is in addition charmingly attached to the tearoom where blow-dried nymphets and pouting schoolgirls with their quaint little Maghrebian pastries, tiny one-mouthful “gazelle horns” and
keblahs
, oblivious to the fantastic world on the other side of the wall, where loin-clothed male bodies slump in an oleic dungeon of heat, where time moves slowly backward. As always, we have no idea what the female side of the baths is like, but here at least the ethos of the Ottomans ferments like yeast in the warmth. You wonder, in a moment of crass vulgarity, why there is not a mad Sultan spitting foam in one of its nooks and crannies or why at least there are
no eunuchs in evidence—the calmness and luxury of the rest area with its veined marble columns and quietly murmuring fountain should be the ideal terrain for a multitude of obedient and heavily armed eunuchs....

Of all the secluded retreats which the City offers this is by far our favourite: the proliferation of geometric figures, assorted polygons, lozenges and stars in the painted wooden panels, the octagonal cupola opening up above the fountain, the dark red that predominates in the woodwork, the filtered light and the columns of the raised dais that surrounds the fountain on three sides are offset in the realm of sound by the steady murmur of the water sliding over the upper lip of the fountain and into the basin below, where bottles of water lie cooling. The dais is heated from below so that the tiles are always warm and mint tea is served with oranges to the reclining clients. Beyond the narrow doors that lead to the baths the decor is more Spartan and cavernous: white vaults brimming with condensation, raised alcoves framed with classical pillars with basins and taps where the stone flags are hot to the touch, the massage room with its single slippery bench and, in the middle room, an elegant central platform surrounded by columns with simply carved capitals bathed in a single shaft of light. The rooms become hotter progressively until at the far end you enter the final steam bath, a small chamber with, on the left, a raised platform and, on the right, a large circular cistern filled with sediments of grey clay. On the far side of the uncertain crater are two ventilators belching forth an agonizing heat. It is a point of masculine bravura to walk slowly around the cistern passing within inches of the searing ventilators, with no gesture of disbelief except a casual wipe of the brow and it is an athletic achievement to do this even once without passing out and tumbling ignominiously into the cistern, from where you would be fished out covered in horrible and outlandish burns. Here the fat men do best, leaning on their thermostable guts and, for once, eyeing their thin rivals with contempt. They do not blush or quiver as the slim carcasses do; they absorb patiently like heat-seeking reptiles and the sweat that rolls off them is measured and wise. For those less endowed by nature with
subcutaneous armour it will be necessary to retire quickly to the lesser steam room, where the basins are thoughtfully equipped with hoses attached to the cold-water taps.