A Letter from Paris Page 20

  Sitting in the little Paris flat with Clém on the phone talking about the highs and lows of her acting life and all the creative risks we took that we had in common, and soon explaining how she was going to take me on the train to visit Gisèle in the morning, how she’d organised all of it and had the whole day for us to spend together, I felt something come over me, a sense memory.

  It was 2009, a month after I’d signed the contract for my first book. That book, which had taken everything out of me, stretching me further than I’d dared to dream I could go. To complete it meant I sacrificed time, energy, humility.

  To risk failing, to write and rewrite, to get it to a state where I could even think of showing a publisher. The book I’d written and rewritten in over forty different houses over the course of a year as I looked after cats, dogs, fish, and plants, intent on this huge gamble that mattered to no one but me.

  When it was accepted, and I was given an editor all my own, she sent me the huge document back, marked-up, re-arranged, with two pages of her thoughts on what moved her and what she thought could be changed. The carefully written notes and marked-up symbols across my text implied all the care of someone taking ownership of a story I’d carried alone for such a long time.

  This was Clém, with my story. Clém understood why I was in Paris, and I wasn’t alone in the journey anymore. A relative stranger from a foreign country understood all that this meant, and I didn’t even need to explain. I could hand over the manuscript now, and we would make it beautiful together.

  And not only was she intensely interested and personally invested, but also she had the intellectual and creative skills to handle such a task as visiting Gisèle in a nursing home when we didn’t even know if Gisèle would remember how to speak English.

  We talked of writing and acting, travel and contrasts. My rags-to-riches tale of dinner in London after twenty-four hours in economy and a toilet cubicle outside a bus stop was met with a similar Cinderella tale involving a designer dress worn to a film premiere left in a toilet cubicle at Los Angeles International Airport. We talked about my first book, about the need for creative companionship and how Clém had once lived on a boat docked by the Bastille with no hot water and how I’d once lived in a car touring outback Australia and how both experiences made us really appreciate washing machines. She made me laugh, despite my delirious jetlag.

  My head spun as I swung between the comfort of Clém and the resurgent anxiety of my impending trip to Gisèle. Would she remember me? Would she even remember how to speak English? What physical state would she be in? At ninety-one, did she still have her eyesight, her hearing?

  Before we hung up, Clém checked again that I had food, that everything in the apartment was okay.

  ‘Actually, Clém, my tea is confusing me. It doesn’t smell like peppermint. It says tilleul on the box.’

  ‘Oh, you bought lime tea. No worries, we’ll get you some menthe. I’ll come to your apartment at midday tomorrow. We can have lunch before we go to Gisèle, okay?’

  Tomorrow. I couldn’t even comprehend tomorrow. I couldn’t comprehend anything except needing to sleep. Yet there was deep relief that someone with a heart like Clém’s was there to help me on my journey.

  ‘Thank you so much, Clém, I can’t wait to meet you. I know you’re busy …’

  ‘We don’t really have very long,’ she replied, sounding a bit worried. ‘We have to make the most of every day you’re in Paris.’

  Like a sister.

  Chapter Eighteen

  La fille de Denison

  I slept fitfully, waking at nine in the morning to French children singing nursery rhymes from a kindergarten downstairs. I fixed coffee and boiled un oeuf on my little stove to have with une pomme that I’d bought the night before, trying to concentrate long enough to write in my journal. With Paris around me, pulling my attention, I could barely stay still enough to write.

  I set out to find my first park.

  Walking was a balm, as I was so deeply anxious about seeing Gisèle. Would she know who I was? Would she be lucid? Would she even remember dad?

  But then I somehow stumbled across a mathematically symmetrical park, and it all felt okay. There’s something so visually soothing about the symmetry of Paris, the parks so self-contained and civilised. The organisation of the city and its green spaces is so opposite to the rambling, rowdy, parched-yellow or green fields of Australia, where you’re just as likely to have a football kicked in your face or be bitten by one of sixteen possible bugs, spiders, or bees.

  Noting a sign on the gate with the park’s opening and closing hours, I remembered Ayala saying how she remembered returning to Australia because she could finally take her shoes off in a park. Boundaries seem strange to Australians, used to wide-open spaces unencumbered by paths, let alone gates and rules like having to wear shoes outside.

  But it was calming, almost luxurious, to have all the order around me enforced, as though someone else would take care of maintenance; all I needed to do was turn up and look at it. To appreciate that something as wild as nature could be planted in rows, kept to a line, made to look ever-so-beautiful in a circle.

  I sat on a little bench and stared at one of the stone sculptures, a naked woman facing a naked man laid out like balanced scales in their evenness. The beauty in all the details in Paris filled me — little shutter windows, sculptured fountains, carvings of stone.

  I took a photo of the square and posted it to Instagram: My first Paris park.

  Coralie immediately sent me a message. Of 400-and-something parks in Paris, the first one I’d stumbled into was Square Émile-Chautemps. Named after Michelle’s great-uncle.

  By quarter-to-twelve, I was back outside my apartment, pacing around the Le Défenseur du Temps mechanical artwork of a man wrestling with the elements of time. I took turns fighting the urge to scream in excitement or cry in terror, and I must have appeared confused, because two separate Frenchwomen walking tiny dogs through the square asked me I was lost.

  Finally, a brunette rounded the corner to the Quartier, galloping towards me. Pin-thin, like my favourite woman from the train the day earlier, she was the epitome of a Parisienne. Clém grinned.

  ‘LOUISA!’ she shouted, fluttering apologies for being ten minutes late and something about the Métro. We kissed and hugged, and I noticed she was wearing exactly what I expected her to wear: black pants, boots, jacket, and a scarf tied just so. Her eyes danced as we repeated our ludicrous story, shaking our heads in wonder. We kept talking over each other.

  ‘I mean, my God, it’s just crazy … Gisèle … Gisèle is alive …’

  Clém steered me back through the lane, and I hastened to keep up alongside her pace, relieved to be with a local so that I wouldn’t have to remember what street went where. Returning from the park that morning, I’d walked the same block four times until I eventually spotted the outer pipes of Centre Pompidou and found my way back to the Passage de l’Horloge.

  From midday that Friday, Clém’s month-long role as my guide, translator, emotional cheer squad, and supportive and amusing friend had begun. I felt as protective of Clém as soldiers must feel about their non-combatant allies on the battlefield. She was my on-the-ground intelligence; without her, I would not have found Gisèle.

  As we walked up Rue Rambuteau to the Haut Marais neighbourhood, I told Clém how beautiful it was to be in Paris, how much history seemed preserved on every corner. ‘The oldest building in Australia would be maybe 200 years old, if that,’ I explained, the shock of European architecture reminding me how far I’d come.

  She tut-tutted, a little huffy. ‘But Paris is like a museum! Everything is stuck, stuck, stuck. France is very much in the past.’

  ‘But — all the buildings dad described in his diaries, from sixty years ago — they’re still here! It’s exactly why I’m so happy to be here! In Australia, we don’t have history l
ike this on the streets. Everything is so new.’

  ‘Maybe I’m a bit Australian, then. Also, I really love Vegemite on toast with avocado,’ she said and we laughed.

  We lunched at Café Pinson, ordering twin bowls of salad and juice, surrounded by the singsong of a chattering crowd. Clém’s phone kept buzzing with messages, and she held her phone up, to explain. She had a WhatsApp message group called Famille, and various members were urging her for photos of me and an update.

  I had barely registered this when she handed me a gift, hidden from view until we’d settled into our table. ‘This is from Coralie and I.’ The bag was from a French boutique called Soeur — ‘French for sister,’ she explained.

  With Clém smiling in front of me, I unwrapped the delicate tissue paper, uncovering a beautiful scarf. I dabbed away a tear.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lou. I know jetlag makes you sad. Let’s have a photo so we can send it to the family!’

  ‘I have a huge DVD collection, Lou, do you want to borrow some to watch in your apartment tonight?’ Clém said, as we passed a DVD shop on the way to catch the train.

  ‘Ah, they have my favourite film ever, by Krzysztof Kieslowski,’ I said as she flicked through the cases. She turned to look at me, and we both said at the same time, ‘That film is a masterpiece.’

  I had this surreal feeling of dropping down a portal with Clém by my side, just as I had in the library. The Double Life of Veronique is about two unrelated girls with the same name — one in France, the other from Poland. In the film, French Veronica mysteriously quits her singing career at the moment of Polish Veronica’s death. The whole movie is a meditation on art, beauty, the nature of death and existence, parallel lives. The intimacy of strangers, the strangeness of friends, the poetry of the smallest movements in the everyday. Every time I’d watched the film, I’d yearned for Paris.

  The feeling of meeting Clém that day, of walking through the streets of Paris and talking like sisters, spooked me in a beautiful kind of way as we walked towards the oldest train system in the world to make the long journey to my godmother Gisèle.

  When we got to Les Halles station, Clém turned to me. It was as though she already knew everything that might upset me; she was deeply concerned for my emotional welfare while I stayed in her city.

  ‘Just so you know, things are going to get quite intense in here,’ she said, before a security guard asked us to open our handbags, while other armed guards moved around the packed station, reminding me that Paris was still in a state of emergency after a recent terrorist attack.

  Down we went to the lower levels of the underground station, and with a determined ‘Non!’ she fought off my attempt to pay for the train ticket, punching buttons on a screen with the speed of a local.

  ‘We need to catch the RER,’ said Clém, pronouncing it with a roll of the tongue that made it sound like an exotic song, not a train line I’d heard the French mention with a dismissive snicker. We waited at the platform and Clém got me to read the screens to show her I wouldn’t get lost when I went back to Gisèle on my own.

  ‘Coralie called the home yesterday to tell them we were coming,’ she reminded me, and I put my hand back in my handbag, touching the small box of photos I’d brought on Coralie’s advice. The ones I’d found in the library. I’d blown up the matchbox-sized passport picture of dad and printed it out. Perhaps, like Coralie suggested, Gisèle would find it easier to remember the 1950s than the present day. She said that’s how it had been with Michelle.

  We sat near the door on the train to Orsay. We passed the outskirts of Paris, the streets got wider, and eventually I saw some mountains. After the tenth or twelfth station, the train emptied out. We sat huddled together, and Clém kept protectively moving my bag, which I’d forget and let flop on the seat beside me, having to remind myself I was no longer in Australia.

  We talked of everything, in detail. The story of researching dad, of my journey over the past year, found compassionate ears in Clém, who took it all very seriously — neither intrusively probing nor casually dismissive, Clém was genuinely curious and kind. There was a sense that my quest was not a hassle, that complicated stories were okay. Her generosity of spirit was extraordinary.

  It was midafternoon when we arrived, after half an hour or more on the train, in Orsay. It looked like a semi-rural village, with only a small tabac and a scattering of shops that appeared to be closed, and I was more grateful than ever that Clém had insisted on taking me there.

  It felt like a pilgrimage to a gravesite. On some level, I didn’t really believe Gisèle was still alive.

  Terror struck me as we rounded a corner and I saw the Residence, but Clém marched ahead, catching the door to the entranceway just as a woman walked out.

  A letterbox in the foyer held Gisèle’s full name. A letterbox. I could have been sending her letters all this time! I felt so guilty about all the lost years, so apprehensive.

  Clém coaxed me into the lift.

  ‘I’m going to talk to her in French, and then we can see if she understands English. I’ll tell her you’re Denison’s daughter.’

  I nodded, feeling sick with anxiety.

  We knocked at the door and stared at each other nervously, listening for footsteps. Eventually, a creak, and the door opened a crack. A little woman appeared: small, dark, and very French.

  It was Gisèle.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame.’ Clém spoke in a flurry of French. Her soft voice and unthreatening demeanour had Gisèle opening the door and waving us in.

  Gisèle. It was Gisèle. Tiny, little, fragile Gisèle. Those eyes.

  For a few moments, Clém kept speaking in French, with Gisèle saying what I gathered to be something like ‘Why have you come?’ It appeared we’d awoken her.

  ‘Je m’appelle Clémentine, et c’est Louisa … La fille de Denison …’

  Gisèle didn’t know who I was.

  ‘… d’Australie … La fille de Denison Deasey …’

  Something shifted and Gisèle moved towards me.

  ‘Deasey? … LOUISA?’

  Then that smile. Her beautiful smile.

  ‘Little Louisa!’ She shook her head in disbelief and embraced me.

  I hugged her tiny body and we both cried in a physical moment that took away the tyranny of decades. The woman who had loved dad, who had known him thirty-five years, who held all the keys to my heritage in the stories in her heart — stories that were just as meaningful to her as they were to me. No need for explanation as soon as his name was mentioned. We couldn’t let each other go. To touch her living, breathing body, so warm, so fragile, so strong … Actually alive.

  Gisèle was alive. She was really alive.

  To have that chance to hug her in human form, not just read words from a different time … it was like I had a parent back, one of my ancestors, woken from the dead. Gisèle was the connecting cord between France and dad, between dad and me, all the pieces of my history I’d thought were long gone. When Clém said the name Denison, it was as though a lock turned, and the way she looked at me was so healing, that immediate recognition that I was a direct connection to the man who mattered so much to her life, we both felt simpatico.

  Here she was, actually alive. Young and old and soft and strong and pleasure and pain and grief and relief were all inside her, and me, in that moment. Tucked away in a tiny room overlooking a mountain.

  It was very hard to let her go. When I eventually pulled back from our embrace, I saw that she was crying, too, searching my eyes with tears and recognition.

  ‘Den-i-son,’ she said the name slowly, repeating it with a cheeky smile and looking me up and down, pinching my cheek. ‘Mon mari … mon mari …’ She smiled her beautiful smile, pointing to the sky. ‘Mon mari est dans le ciel …’ She held both my hands and shook her head in tears of joy. ‘Little Louisa …’

  We sat down in chairs by
the window. She held my hand and started to talk about dad.

  Gisèle’s room in the Residence was really a little apartment, much the same size as her apartment in Paris must have been. I was relieved to see she had tokens of her life and treasured objects around her. A Buddha statue, a photo from a trip to Cambodia, different dictionaries for all the languages she spoke, evidence of her incredible and well-travelled life.

  Her living space, just a small square in the front half of the room that also held her bed, was a little like a library. Just as dad’s house had always smelled like a library.

  She had her own little kitchen and bathroom, much like a self-contained flat. The only difference was that staff could help with shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Someone even came to read to her, because of her failing eyesight, and her obvious love of books.

  The windows opened to a balcony, but there were no flowers there anymore, they had been knocked off in a storm in winter, she explained.

  ‘I thought you were coming tomorrow,’ she said, suddenly aware of her dressing gown and remembering the direct past.

  I noticed a stunning lemon-coloured suit laid out on one of the chairs, as though in preparation for our visit.

  ‘Little Louisa.’ She wiggled her index finger towards my face, as Clém pulled up a third chair from the kitchen to sit beside us. ‘I wanted to take you to lunch,’ she said slowly, annoyed with herself about something, perhaps for forgetting the date. She was so fragile, and walked so slowly, I couldn’t picture her going to a restaurant. But her face — exactly the same. Steely strong. Cheeky and stunning, with eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Gisèle.

  ‘I am ninety-one. My memory isn’t so good,’ she said, explaining her stroke the year earlier.

  I started to pull the photos out of my bag, one by one, and Gisèle asked Clém to pass her the magnifying glass, in French. She warmed to Clém in a way that soothed me.