Paris to the Moon (12 page)

A while ago I was on a panel broadcast for France-Culture, the radio station, at the Sciences Po, the great political science school, along with Philippe Sollers and other French worthies, and we talked about the influence of American culture on France. Everyone took it for granted that the American dominance in culture was a distant error or, rather, a distant conspiracy organized by the CIA and the Disney corporation. (I was there, the sole American on the panel, to be condescended to as the representative of both Michael Eisner and William Colby, with mouse ears on my head and a listening device presumably implanted inside them.) The cliches get trotted out— that Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists got put over by the CIA, etc.—with a complacent certitude, and it was taken for granted that the relative decline of the prestige of French writing and painting has nothing to do with the actual decline of the quality of French writing and painting. (And yet when we got down to particulars, much of these prejudices vanished: Sellers and I actually had a reasonable debate about Roth and Updike. No American Sellers would have been able to
name
two French novelists, much less debate their value.)

What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Asterix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the lack of vigilant curiosity, the incapacity for critical self-reflection, the readiness to
affiche erreur distante
and wait for somebody else to change the paper.

A wise man, an old emigre artist, when I told him, gaily, that we were going to move to Paris, said soberly, even darkly: "Ah. So you have at last decided not to forgo the essential Jewish experience of emigration and expatriation." I thought it was a joke, a highly complicated, ironic joke, but still a joke, since what could be less traumatic, in the old-fashioned emigre's sense, less Cioran and Benjamin and Celan, than moving to Paris with a baby? But of course, what he said was true, or contained a truth. The reality is that after a year here everything about moving to Paris has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult. An immigrant is an immigrant, poor fellow: Pity him! The errors arrive, and they tell me I brought them with me.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped. Martha, the other day, spent the morning watching Luke open and shut the little gates that lead into the interior gardens at the Palais Royal. He would open the gate, she explained, walk through, watch it shut, and then walk back through again, with the rows of violet flowers in the background. She felt, she said, as if she had died and gone to heaven—but with the strange feeling that dying and going to heaven mean parting, leaving, and missing the people you left behind on earth. No wonder ghosts at seances are so blandly encouraging; they miss you, but they are busy watching someone else.

There is the feeling of being apart and the feeling of being a
universe
apart—the immigrant's strange knowledge that the language and lore that carry on in your own living space are so unlike the ones right outside. (This is particularly true of our odd Canadian-American-Jewish-Sri Lankan-Franco-American menage, with the two-year-old at its center.) There is also the odd knowledge, at once comforting and scary, that whatever is going on outside, you are without a predisposed opinion on it, that you have had a kind of operation, removing your instant reflexive sides-taking instinct. When French politicians debate, I think, well, everybody has a point. After a year the feeling that everything was amusing, though, bombs and strikes an act in the Winter Circus, does begin to fade, to seem less amusing in itself. When
Le Canard Enchatne,
the satiric paper, comes out on Wednesday mornings, I buy it and generally enjoy, am even beginning to understand, most of the jokes and digs; what was largely incomprehensible to me at first is now self-evident: who is being mocked for what and why.

But I don't actually care about who is being mocked. I am simply pleased to register that what I am reading is mockery. And the slightly amused, removed feeling always breaks down as you realize that you really don't
want
to be so lofty and Olympian— or rather, that being lofty and Olympian carries within it, by tradition and precedent, the habit of wishing you could be down there in the plain, taking sides. Even the gods, actually looking down from Olympus in amusement, kept hurtling down to get laid or slug somebody.

After a first winter in Paris, when the lure of the chimney and cigar smell holds you in thrall, you become accustomed to them, and then all you notice is the dark. From November to April, hardly a single day when you see the sun. The light itself is beautiful, violet and gray, but it always looks as if it were planning to snow, and then it never does.

We had the seasonal pleasure of buying a (by Canadian standards, insanely overpriced) Christmas tree. We bought it from a Greek tree-and-plant dealer on the Ile de la Cite. It's a nice tree, a big fir, green and lush, but, at our insistence, without that crazy wooden cross that the French insist on nailing to the bottoms of their Christmas trees, so that you can't give them water. Ours is open, with a fresh cut, and sits in its watery pedestal, a red-and-open tripod, which we brought all the way over from Farm and Garden nursery down on Franklin Street in TriBeCa.

The logic (or fantasy) of the wooden cross on the bottoms of the trunks of the French Christmas trees, as the bemused dealer explained it to me, is that it "seals" off the tree's trunk and keeps the sap inside, keeps it from drying out. The opposed American logic, our logic, of course (or is it our fantasy too?), is that an open cut will keep a dead and derooted tree "fresh" for as long as you need it, for as long as you give it water and the season lasts.

Or is the cut cross, after all, really a kind of covert, symbolic, half-hidden reminder on the part of a once entirely Catholic country of the cross-that-is-to-come, of the knowledge that even Christmas trees can't be resurrected without a miracle? Americans persuade themselves that a dead tree is still fresh if you keep pouring water on it; here there is a small guilty stirring of Catholic conscience that says, "It's dead, you know, the way everything will be. You can seal it up, but you can't keep it going. Only a miracle will bring it back to life."

Naturally none of the Christmas tree garlands I bought last year works this year. Though Martha packed them away neatly when we took the tree down, they have managed to work themselves into hideous tangles, the way Christmas lights always do. If the continued existence of the Christmas tree light garlands, even though they're obviously impractical compared with strings, is proof of the strength of cultural difference, their ability to get themselves tangled is just as strong proof of cultural universality. The strands did it in New York, the garlands do it here, and there is no explaining how they do. The permanent cultural differences are language, the rituals of eating, and the habits of education; the permanent cultural universals are love of children and the capacity of Christmas lights left in a box in a closet to get themselves hopelessly tangled in knots.

The American Christmas came to Paris while I was away in New York; Halloween came this year for the first time, right while we were watching, right under our noses. Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin couldn't have been more shocked, more pleased than we were to see Halloween rising before us like a specter, an inflate raft. The shops were suddenly filled with pumpkins and rubber masks and witches and ghost costumes and bags of candy. Apparently the American Halloween has been sneaking up bit by bit for a little while, but everyone agrees that this year the whole thing has really happened, and for the most obvious of reasons: It is a way for small shopkeepers to sell stuff before Christmas comes.
Le Monde,
sensing this brisk commercial motive, published a piece about the coming of Halloween, predictably indignant.

The essentially creepy, necrophile nature of the holiday, invisible to Americans, was harder to hide from the French. Our friends Marie and Edouard, whose two children, Thomas and Alexandra, live across the courtyard, were dubious: The children dress up as the dead and the horrific and then demand sweets at the price of vandalism? The pleasure is located
where
exactly? Our friend Cassie says that her French mother-in-law, seeing the grandchildren dressed up as skeletons, let out a genuine shriek of distaste.

Of course, it is incumbent on Americans to reassure, gently, that it is not really a holiday of the dead at all, that like all American holidays, it is a ritual of materialism, or, to put it another way, of greed, a rite designed to teach our children that everything, even death, ends with candy. It is just
fun. Fun
is the magic American word (Our motto "Let's have fun!" is met by the French motto "Let's be amused.") Though Halloween arrived and caused parties and sales, the tradition of trick-or-treating has not really caught on here, and so Martha and several other mothers decided to have a Halloween party in her friend Cassie's apartment, where the mothers hid behind doors, so that the children could knock and get their candy. It was trick-or-treating made into an indoor sport. The French children in the party, she tells me, just didn't get it. What was the point, the French children, disconsolate as ghosts and skeletons and witches, seemed to wonder, waiting behind their doors, to be all dressed up, with nowhere to go?

Luke has mounted up onto the horses on the carousel this year, although he needs to be tied on, like a parcel. To my delight, though not really to my surprise, I discovered this year that the carousel has been turning in the same manner, offering the same game, and drawing the same bemused, fascinated attention of foreigners for at least seventy-five years. I found a passage in the travel writing of Joseph Roth, the German novelist, who visited the Luxembourg Gardens in 1925 and wrote about the
"maneges de chevaux de bois pour enfants."
He describes the rings and sticks, exactly as they are today: "The owner of the merry-go-round holds in his hand, at the end of a stick, little rings lightly hung and easy to detach. All the children on the horses and in the tiny cars are armed with wands. So that when they pass before the rings, they try to unhook them, which is to say slip them onto their wand. Whoever gets the most gets a prize. They learn quick action, the value of the instant, accelerated reflexes, and the trick of adjusting ones eye." "The value of the instant..." Doubtless Cartier-Bresson and the rest of the decisive moment" photographers rode on such horses, caught their rings, learned there's only one right moment in which to do it.

Roth admired the game endlessly, because it seemed so un-German, such a free and charming way to educate, without the military brutality of Teutonic schools. The funny thing is that there are now no more prizes—the same game, same carousel, but no more prizes. Nothing left to teach. You get the ring for the pleasure of having taken it. I wonder which child when won the last prize.

The differences are tiny and real. Cultures don't really encode things. They include things, and leave things out. There is, for instance, the exasperation of lunch. Lunch, as it exists in New York, doesn't exist here. Either lunch is a three-course meal— i.e., dinner, complete with two bottles of wine—or else it is to be had only at a brasserie, where the same menu—croque monsieur, omelet, salad Nicoise—is presented almost without any variation at all, as though the menu had been decreed by the state. A tuna sandwich, a bran muffin, a bowl of black bean soup—black bean soup! Yankee bean! Chicken vegetable! It is soup, beautiful soup, that I miss more than anything, not French soup, all pureed and homogenized, but American soup, with bits and things, beans and corn and even letters, in it. This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch. So on Sundays I have developed the habit of making soup for the week, from the good things we buy in the
marche biologique
on the boulevard Raspail. Soup and custard on Sunday nights, our salute to the land of the free.

My favorite bit of evidence of the French habit of pervasive, permanent abstraction lies in the difficulties of telling people about fact checking. (I use the English word usually; there doesn't seem to be a simple French equivalent.) "Thank you so much for your help," I will say after interviewing a man of letters or politician. "I'm going to write this up, and you'll probably be hearing from what we call
une fact checker
in a couple of weeks." (I make it feminine since the fact checker usually is.)

"What do you mean,
une fact checker
?"

"Oh, it's someone to make sure that I've got all the facts right, reported them correctly"

Annoyed: "No, no, I've told you everything I know."

I, soothing: "Oh, I know you have."

Suspicious: "You mean your editor double-checks?"

"No, no, it's just a way of making sure that we haven't made a mistake in facts."

More wary and curious: "This is a way of maintaining an ideological line?"

"No, no—well, in a sense I suppose . . ." (For positivism, of which New
Yorker
fact checking is the last redoubt, is an ideological line; I've lived long enough in France to see that move coming. . . .)

"But really," I go on, "it's just to make sure that your dates and what we have you quoted as saying are accurate. Just to be sure."

Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. On occasion I even get a helpful, warning call from the subject after the fact checker has called. "You know, someone, another reporter called me from the magazine. They were checking up on you." ("No, no, really checking on
you,"
I want to say, offended, but don't—and then think he's right: They
are
checking up on me too; never thought of it that way, though.) There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, fact checking," is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really
be
facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naive to think otherwise.