Adrift in Paris , 1979: the quest for authenticity and a place to sleep

 

By Robert Mendoza

 

Last month, our correspondent related the circumstances that led to his eviction from a sordid Paris hostelry in 2001. The ignominy of such an experience is on par with being fired from a dishwashing job (a fate which he has also suffered, but that was in another country and we won't go there). This month's episode will dwell on earlier, merrier days in Montparnasse -- a halcyon time when Paris ' moveable feasts were less likely to elude his grasp.

Perhaps auspiciously, the first night I ever spent in Paris was in the Fourteenth arrondissement. I had heedlessly arrived at the Gare du Nord late on a Friday afternoon and begun a fruitless search for a room in the Latin Quarter . Reservations? We don't need no stinking reservations. Happily, I was rescued by a trio of my countrywomen in front of Notre Dame. They informed that there were lots of rooms available at their place.

The Foyer Internationale de Accueil de Paris Jean Monnet turned out to be a doppelganger for an American university dorm. The newly constructed Foyer featured 500 crisp beds, hot showers, and all the watery café americaine you cared to down with your breakfast. The staff magnanimously waved away my halting French and glibly answered my needs in British English. While the Foyer was not officially a youth hostel, having recently regained my status as a single male, I could not help but notice that most of the residents were nubile American, German, and Scandinavian females.

The Foyer, as is often the case with such institutions, was situated in a particularly dreary zone of southern Montparnasse dominated by factories and vast hospitals. I soon resented the indirect and protracted metro rides required to travel to the center of Paris . After less than a week of the Foyer's aseptic accommodations and outings with its comely, if somewhat milk-fed, guests, I grew restless. I was even plagued with restiveness in the midst of de riguer smooching atop the Eiffel Tower or during wine-sodden picnics with Berkeley grad students more beauteous than any I'd managed to meet in California .

Like Don Quixote, I had read too much. But in lieu of "detestable books of chivalry," I had been corrupted by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, who set me on a quest for "authenticity." Theroux had famously sneered at tourists and touted the virtue of travelers with, "Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going." In 1978, I was damned if I knew where I was going.

Theroux had also anathematized "non-places" and declared them off-limits. Non-places were characterless, soulless constructs that the ignorant mistook for locales. ( Las Vegas , Branson , Missouri , the Mall of America, and many other popular tourist destinations qualify.)

I had, of course, instantly identified the Foyer as a non-place unfit for habitation. But my arrival in Paris had been ill-timed; I was exhausted after a series of misadventures in all too "real" places in northern France . And let's just say that many a 33-year-old man has been distracted from a quest for authenticity by a trio of cute 20-somethings.

With the acuity of hindsight, I now must admit that the Latin Quarter to which I fled daily in search of realness was also a non-place. However, 20 years ago, the Rue de la Huchette and its surrounding streets with cobblestones and crumbling walls seemed like the genuine article. After all, it was still the neighborhood where Chatwin purchased his talismanic moleskin notebooks, prior to setting off for Patagonia , Benin , and Afghanistan .

In addition to Theroux's cavils, I was also burdened by my own unreasonable expectations of Paris . I had taught myself French during the preceding years by reading novels. These were predominantly "modern classics" written and set in the 1920s and 30s. I emerged from my home schooling with an extensive, if somewhat quaint, vocabulary. Later in Paris , whenever I opened my mouth, I inspired puzzlement or mirth.

I was also fustily anachronistic in my visual perceptions of what Paris should be. I had been fortunate to live in Austin during the campus art-film screenings of the late 1960s and early 70s. In that now improbably distant, pre-VCR era, it was possible to view most of the avant garde and classic films for less than a dollar.

Although the work of Godard and his contemporaries was ubiquitous, I preferred the pre-World War II films of Jean Cocteau, Renoir, Jean Vigo, Henri Georges Clouzot, and the greatest of atmospheric auteurs, Marcel Carné. Alexander Trauner's sets for Carné's Children of Paradise (filmed in 1945 but set in the 19th century) became indelibly imprinted, in my mind, as Paris .

Henceforth, when I walked the streets of Paris , I pretended not to notice the chromed and mirrored surfaces, or vulgar color schemes that marred cafes and shopfronts. Rather, I was drawn to mildewed walls, dank arcades, and serried ranks of tall stone buildings with flaking gray shutters.

My qualms about remaining at the Foyer were rudely vaporized upon the arrival of two busloads of Bavarian students who evicted all of us who had not previously committed for longer stays. While shouldering my full and suddenly ungainly rucksack at the storage locker, I ran into Takis, a Greek backpacker with whom I'd shared several beer-blurred afternoons in Montmartre , who'd also been kicked out. We decided to combine forces in searching for lodging in central Paris . By late afternoon, we'd both managed to get indoors, but at separate residences.

I managed to lock in a week's berth at the Maison des Clubs UNESCO on Rue Monsieur le Prince, almost directly opposite Richard Wright's former apartment house. The Maison, although haphazardly cut up into cubicles and communal bunkrooms, occupied two floors of a once-stately building constructed in the mid-19th century. The elegantly sinuous stair-railings of cast iron and well-patinaed red oak had been retained, along with the discret toilettes built into the corner of each landing. No elevator. At last, a real building; a real place that might have echoed Baudelaire's footsteps.

The staff was as friendly as that of the Foyer, but it was often necessary to have brought along some knowledge of French. There were less than 30 beds, so breakfasts were more convivial and featured real coffee and freshly baked bread.

The next day, I met up with Takis to compare notes on lodging. I described my funky but clean dormitory bezeled amidst the vestiges of a grand old building. He snorted at my enthusiasm. "You and your old buildings. In Greece , everything is old and I'm sick of it." (His dream was to join an uncle in Fresno who owned a small chain of supermarkets.) Takis had found a room in an old building a few blocks away. When I asked what the rooms offered by the Jeunes Etudiants Protestants a Paris were like, he retorted, "Dark. Very dirty. I could not sleep last night. Many feets were smelling."

It was now mid-October. As the days darkened earlier and earlier and the drizzle was replaced by fine, powdery snow, the Germans took my room. I always thought Oktoberfest was some sausage festival in New Braunfels. I understood now that it was a vast offensive of Huns, crowded into enormous Mercedes tour buses, who celebrated their fall school vacation by occupying every budget room in Paris. By then, Takis was back in Naxos, his father having discovered that he had not enrolled at Nanterre, but was pursuing a life of dissipation. I took over his berth at the Young Protestants.

Takis' description of the place was right-on; no German or Northern European would stay here. This was the Paris sordide of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer without the sex. The Jeaunes Protestants was an all-male hostel and the place was perpetually dark due to the management's decision to lock down all the shutters. We were directly above the St. Germaine des Pres market. (This was the neighborhood Lee Radziwill and her widowed Kennedy sister alighted upon when they stayed in Paris. Heaven forbid they glanced upward and sighted a Speedo-clad protestant scrubbing his socks.)

The Huguenot hostel's staff was miniscule -- this was appropriate since the amenities offered were presque nil. Maurice, a dyspeptic Cote d'Ivoirian, presided over the front desk, accepted our wrinkled franc notes, and handed out keys to the ramshackle lockers. I dimly recalled that Ivory Coast had been a French colony, but had no idea that it was even marginally populated by Protestants.

Portuguese-speaking Angolans occupied the majority of the 40-odd beds. They were warm and outgoing, as were all the Africans I would encounter in Paris. In addition, I could easily understand their French (which was rarely the case when native Parisians spoke to me). The told me they were part of an Angolan diaspora that had fled a protracted civil war between the Portuguese army and expeditionary forces from Castro's Cuba. They had lived at the hostel for six months and were all employed in sweatshops in the Sentier (Paris' garment district).

Early each frigid morning, the Angolans would descend en masse to the street for coffee. (The Protestants did not provide breakfast.) Quite late in the evening, they'd all return to their cots. I would fall asleep listening to them whispering in Portuguese.

They refused (as did I) to use the "lockers," and kept their few possessions carefully folded at the foot of their beds. Each pile was topped with a pair of intricately decorated leather sandals. When I admired them, the Angolans called out to their compatriots in the next room to demonstrate that each clan favored a distinctive pattern.

The first time I stepped into the flooded, slug-festooned showers (yes, slugs), I learned why sandals were so prominent a feature of this hostel. I determined to postpone any ablutions until I returned from the Monoprix provisioned with thick-soled sandals de plage (flip-flops). Having bathed, I was confronted with a dirty clothes crisis. Most hostels were heated with wall-mounted steam radiators that would, if skillfully draped, dry the thickest socks before breakfast. Predictably, the Huguenot hostel was warmed by anemic, vertically mounted units that would require a year to toast a gnat.

At this point, the craven tourists amongst you are muttering, "Why doesn't he just move to a nice hotel?" The short answer is that my favorite book that year was George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. To travel authentically was to accept transcendent suffering. Creature comforts were proscribed by a severe budget. I had $2,000 that had to support six months of a vague itinerary that had yet to traverse Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Morocco.

I managed to soldier through another two weeks at the Huguenot hostel. My days were occupied with long walks that took me to every quartier of Paris. I averaged 10 miles a day, stopping every two or three miles to drink a coffee and warm up in a bar. The city's endless variety continually charmed me. Invisible and solitary, I slipped into immigrant bars. Elbow to elbow with hugely mustachioed ruffians in scratchy sweaters, I ate what they ate -- fried sardines, slashed kidneys in red wine, enigmatic organs wrapped in pig guts, and my first bewitchingly scrumptious escargots. I read incessantly. I'd happened upon a French translation of Henry Miller-Lawrence Durrell: A Private Correspondence. It was perfectly congenial to my condition of pensive-vagrant.

I left the Huguenot to move into a tiny attic chamber de bonne (maid's room) with a woman I'd met in an art museum. Marjorie was a 29-year-old disenchanted nurse who'd decided to study literature at the Sorbonne. She was also a runner, and we soon exasperated her concierge by leaving the building before 6 a .m. to run in the Bois de Boulogne. We'd return with hot brioche and tablettes de chocolat, and go back to bed until time for her 11 a .m. class.

When I recently consulted a journal kept in those days, I was surprised that there was more verbiage dedicated to the convenience of the downstairs washing machine and her espresso maker than to lovemaking. Perhaps long-haul hitchhikers will understand the skewed reporting. Marjorie was yet another northern Californian (my third in six weeks) and, like the others, the relationship soon turned sour. I went on at some length in the journal about the frustrations of relating to women who travel with too much unresolved emotional baggage. But posthumous analysis is odious, and I'll tell no more tales out of school.

It was the first week of November; the plane trees along the boulevards had lost most of their leaves, and I was back on the street. However, I was buoyed by the cognizance that the rucksack on my back was filled with freshly laundered clothes. I resolved not to return to the Huguenot.

I had known for sometime that it was possible to crash for weeks at a time at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. I'd spent many an inclement hour inside the store's upstairs library perusing their reference works and just keeping warm. The elderly proprietor, George Whitman, was known to despise capitalist enterprise and to encourage vagabond scribblers. A vaguely hippy-beatnik ambiance prevailed (the store was "sistered" with San Francisco's City Lights Books). Shabby couches and improvised beds were scattered beneath the chaotic bookshelves.

The best and worst aspects of Shakespeare and Company resided in the person of its proprietor. As a visiting Irish authoress once confided to me, "George is the nicest man in the world. George is the meanest man in the world." I readily agreed. The man often gave the impression of being seriously deranged. Without the slightest warning, welcoming bonhomie could turn to paranoid querulousness, which could spiral into screeching invective.

Decisions about who would be hired to work the store or offered a place to stay were made according to George's whim of the moment. Earnest young fellows with library degrees or recommendations from Brentano's would be curtly dismissed. On the other hand, George would accost young and attractive female customers and offer them a place to stay upstairs. Seemingly, he was oblivious to physical clues that these lovelies were affluent guests of three-star hotels or comfortably ensconced in their parents' Paris apartments.

Despite these faux pas, it was possible to discern a method to George's madness. The male "booksellers" usually were Brits on their post-Oxbridge continental year abroad. The females were invariably stunningly attractive, prissy girls. The transient boarders were drawn from both of these types, but George often impulsively admitted northern European backpackers. These euro-louts were the most likeable of the residents. They were amused by George's tantrums, refused to read the required book a day, and whiled away the evenings strumming guitars and passing plastic liter bottles of red wine.

The unrepentantly inept "staff" and motley sprawl of transient "guests" never engaged in any discernable literary activity. The boys contrived to seduce the girls. The girls either acquiesced or ganged together to go shopping. George occasionally succeeded in browbeating an undergraduate girl to finish a book report or compose one of the shamelessly sycophantic accounts (displayed on the bulletin board) about how Shakespeare and Company had changed her life.

Having set down the foregoing, I can't imagine why I approached George Whitman and asked for a place to stay. His response was to shake his head and mutter accusingly, "You're from California." Then he signaled that our interchange was over by intently studying the label of his ever-present can of root beer.

I was nonplussed at the absurdity of what I had set myself up for. My mind raced over images of my recent California girlfriends -- had I acquired their accent? I certainly couldn't prove I wasn't from California -- my passport clearly stated my place of birth as Long Beach, California (no notation that I'd left at age five). George was now peering intently into the hole of his can.

I walked to the back of the store to relate all this to Geoff, one of the staff whom I'd befriended. "The old bastard hit me with the equivalent of a Zen koan." "Balls," he'd replied. "He's quite off his head. Today's one of his no-to-everything days. And you don't have a bloody California accent. Come around after seven and I'll let you in."

I returned after nightfall and spent the rest of the evening helping Geoff paint a large yellow and black sign that George wanted to hang in front of the store. (That sign was still there in 2001, 20 years later.)

The next morning, I opened my eyes to a view of Notre Dame aureoled by millions of snowflakes. Crazy or not, George had picked a hell of a location. I got up, gathering my stuff in the fusty room that reeked of damp, soiled clothes, moldy books, and cat pee. I adjusted the straps on my rucksack, went down the stairs, and headed for the nearest café.

The snow was beginning to accumulate on the mailbox outside and to shroud the green benches in the park. I was in the middle of my second café double when I impulsively decided to walk over to the Place de la Republique and board the overnight bus to Barcelona.

 

To be continued…