Travelers' Tales Paris (42 page)

During the long war years, when I was living far from Paris, I often used to wonder how so large a city found room inside a tiny compartment of the human brain. Paris, for me, had become a kind of inner world through which I roamed on those difficult dawn hours when despair lies in wait for the waking sleeper. I needed time, though, to take a conscious step over the threshold of this secret city that I was carrying around inside me; first there were the black weeks during which the mere mention of the name Paris broke the hearts of all who heard it. So I barred the gates of my city against myself; I banished its avenues as far away as possible. At night, however, flouting my own orders, I would slink along its streets like a spy or a thief, restlessly going from house to house. Suddenly I would appear in a room where friends were hiding. “What—
you
here? It
is
you!” And one of those interminable conversations would start up and not stop until daybreak. Things we could not tell one another with the width of the Atlantic between us we communicated from heart to heart in those imaginary conversations. Gone was all the water that separated us; I had abolished space; I was there. I wanted to know everything. As I left I used to touch the stones of the houses and the trunks of the trees with my hands, and I would wake with a curious feeling of having been both fulfilled and frustrated.

Thinking about the capital all the time, I rebuilt it inside myself. I replaced its physical presence with something else, something almost supernatural; I don't know what to call it. A map of Paris pinned to the wall would hold my gaze for long periods, teaching me things almost subliminally. I made the discovery that Paris was shaped like a human brain.

—Julian Green,
Paris
, translated by J. A. Underwood

THÉRÈSE LUNG

I
RECENTLY SAW AN ARCHITECTURAL ARTICLE ON
M
ITTERRAND
'
S
final grand project, the new national library,
Bibliothèque Nationale
, and the memories returned in a flood.

I had been living in Paris for many years, but every excursion still held the promise of discovery and the unexpected; being innocently mistaken for a camera-wielding Japanese tourist who could speak French would turn into a front-seat ride with a Métro driver on an interesting aerial stretch of the #2 line.

It was a sunny day of July, 1991, the first good day for my black and white film. I took the Métro out towards the encampment of 30 or so homeless West Africans at the Quai de la Gare. The encampment was on the edge of the site of the much-heralded national library, for whose design prominent architects had competed. At that time the site was an immense vacant lot criss-crossed by narrow, ghostly streets. An entire neighborhood had been razed, as in a war except the process was surgically precise, dislocating thousands. These people came to symbolize the City of Light's disenfranchised.

Although most held jobs and could pay some rent, they could not find decent lodging in this increasingly gentrified city, whose
very charm and identity had originated in the many villages which had come to constitute greater Paris's quartiers.

I was there with the urge to “bear witness.”

At the entrance a large white banner proclaimed, “
Un toit, un droit
.” (A roof, a right.) It was hot and dusty from the nearby construction and the traffic rushing by. Inside the sheet metal fence, a table, makeshift like the tents, for petitions and information. Had I a right to intrude on these people who tried to live with dignity? How much support and visibility of this sort did they really need? Certainly little from me, who am neither journalist nor politician nor Abbé Pierre, their champion, France's conscience.

Barely arrived, and already in doubt, I told myself to stick to inert matter, such as the beautifully textured old walls of the Marais, updated with poetry and protests, or the peeling layers of old maps and advertisements on the Métro walls; in the meantime, two well-equipped photographers before me were refused the right to photograph the site; so much for my plans and nascent activism.

Disappointed yet relieved, I was about to walk away when one of them approached me with a curious invitation—he would be taking photographs of children he'd been visiting in Belleville later in the afternoon, would I be interested in accompanying him?

This seemed intriguing enough, in spite of oft-repeated warnings about French males, and I love children, so I accepted. Belleville, at the confluence of the 10th, 11th, 19th, and 20th
arrondissements
, is known for its lively cultural mix of North and West Africans, Vietnamese and Chinese or both, holdouts of the French Communist Party (whose headquarters were in the area) and their obligatory leftist intellectual sympathizers, and elderly working-class French, in the best tradition of French solidarity. Blue-collar Belleville is far from the mind and eyes of tourists. Small, unpretentious corner cafés and bistros still teem with the locals. It is one of my favorite haunts to rediscover the Paris of my childhood, and its diversity makes it always interesting and friendly.

But first, I went on to the rue Watt, one or two large blocks away, whose images did not pose moral dilemmas. It had been
rendered famous by Robert Doisneau, the photographer of quintessential Parisian life, when couples still danced the Java and kissed on the street.

This short, wide underpass of a road ran below the Austerlitz train line heading southeast from Paris. In the right light, the metal grating shielding it from the trains creates an intricate interplay of light and dark upon the dotted lane divider, a flickering pattern which moves with the sun's path in the sky, and undulates upon humans and speeding vehicles alike. Elaborate, traditional iron banisters and streetlight globes separate pedestrians from the street on a raised sidewalk, turning it into a promenade. The warmth and lightness of the metal cast a new nostalgic glow on New York's elevated train tracks and fire escapes, the urban eye-sores of my adolescence in Queens.

You might wonder why so much love was put into the design of an essentially unseen, unknown street in a forgotten part of town—probably this was not always so. Paris's elegant and romantic façade belies centuries of transformation, often brutally sweeping, as under Baron Haussmann or in today's unrelenting, accelerating pursuit of modernity; all along rue Watt are sterile forms of concrete and glass not unlike the cold polished geometric stone slabs, unworn by time, now covering the renovated Champs-Elysées and Les Halles. The Library would be just one more brick in the master plan. If the rue Watt was the final expression of an entire quartier's
bygone way of living, it would not survive much longer, but I did not know this. After one roll of film, I went on to meet my new acquaintance.

It was four o'clock on this Sunday afternoon in Belleville, and streets were busy with conversation or the game of
boule
. The photographer paused to chat with an elderly stranger, in an easy yet detached manner.

The older man, like most people, but particularly those with memories of desolation of wars and celebrations of peace, gushed with so many stories to tell, and so few to tell them to. But the young man listened with a distracted ear.

Discretion and respect for privacy always got the better of my yearning to ask, and perhaps it should not have. Unexpressed empathy remains invisible, after all. Earlier that year, in the little town of Terrasson, in the valley of Dordogne, which still openly bears war's ravages, a woman cried as she told of the courageous lives lost during the Resistance, and of the terrible division between French and French. And not just the old, as it turned out, but many young lives as well who need to share theirs.

Down a narrow alley, about a dozen African children aged perhaps from two to ten passed away their time in a small, treeless inner courtyard surrounded by four stories of windows, presumably behind which some elder would keep a watchful eye. They greeted us gently, without wariness; the boys resumed playing soccer, and I kicked the ball a couple of times with them. The man started shooting away with his Nikon, and the girls rushed to me with curiosity and warmth.

In this society where each is still defined by his role, it didn't take long to realize that mine was to keep the children occupied. A role not only assigned by the photographer, but unintentionally as well by the children's parents, whom I never met. In no time I became their big sister, as we hugged and chatted, huddled on the ground, against a wall. Two of them eagerly rushed back to their ground floor homes and gave me their prized possessions, colorful paintings they had done in school.

Rarely in my travels to the ends of the world have I encountered such sensitive, spontaneously trusting, but affection-starved, tender young souls. The girls said their mothers were busy working, sharing the same husband who seemed to return often to Africa. They were thus pretty much left to their own devices. They were so many, yet so lonely.

As I debated whether to photograph them, the same doubts nagged at me, compounded by the additional sense of betraying a child's trust, in spite of their apparent obliviousness to the photographer. And there was also the question of the act of photography, by which I was backing away, consciously or not, instead of surrendering my heart to them as they had to me. Perhaps I unconsciously knew what would eventually transpire.

Photography by its very nature creates a distance, establishing the relationship of subject and object through the intermediary of the lens, a safe but disengaged sort of distance. Perhaps both through this detached yet faithful capturing and reflection of object, and subjective sentiment, true photography is nostalgic in essence.

But I refused the role of caretaker and companion which was assigned to me, all the more readily, it seemed, because of the Oriental stereotypes which preceded me. I saw shapes, texture; I sensed reflections of mood, theirs and mine.

There is a photograph of hands, theirs, one atop another. I reflect with a certain sadness that my hand could not have been one of them. There is another of the eldest beaming proudly with her painting, which almost overwhelms her.

In yet another, in the blinding sun, against dirty white-washed walls, a little boy who did not take to soccer to fill his void, sits with sad, expressive eyes, looking at nothing in particular. This vision transported me to a certain Africa where perhaps his dreams are not strangers.

In Paris, this apparent dislocation is not more or less unusual than that of the regal West African woman coifed with her brilliant headdress riding the Métro with the black-on-black Parisian sophisticate; or, on that same Métro, the long-robed Senegalese Muslim (much like the one who sold me an exquisite sculpture
from Mali), next to the dignified, humble gentleman wearing the same formal tweed jacket he has owned for the last 30 years, in a careful life without waste.

I hoped to redress the imbalance between subject and object by letting the children take a turn at the camera. But the sweetest, youngest, and the most sensitive girl finally asked me to put it away. So I did.

I did not fully grasp the meaning of this encounter until it was time to leave, after two hours. The same little one would simply not let go of me. Between her tearful pleadings and my attempts at reassurances, the only way I could leave without traumatizing her on the spot was to promise to return. It was then that the eldest explained that the man brought different female companions each time, and this was difficult for the younger children who would get attached—this time, they wished I would stay.

On the way home, I was very pensive and heartsick—not only about the means to obtain photographs of people, but also of the casual human contacts which may not be so “casual” to some. Usually particularly careful with children, I had not foreseen this. Or had I?