Travelers' Tales Paris (38 page)

To understand Paris today, one has to be willing to suspend many of the cliches that nonetheless continue to drive the city's international reputation, and venture out beyond the sacrosanct 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th
arrondissements
. This is hard for visitors, tourists, and much of Paris's mass of migratory addicts who aren't so willing to update their fix or readjust their sights. Psychic resistence is powerful. Francophiles and general tourists alike need a certain gilded Paris as their symbolic capital of love, art, and style. They need this “let them eat cake” place in the world where things are beautiful, women are slim, and poodles are welcomed in chi-chi restaurants. Touching these icons is a bit taboo because writers and readers alike need a celestial French capital—a real and imaginary place outside of the confining ropes of anglo-saxon puritanism, American mall culture, historically-void notions of the past and contemporary functional aesthetics. As one aging American literary publisher who had spent lots of glorious weeks in Paris in the fifties and sixties crudely whispered to me at a book fair recently, “It's always been easier getting laid in Paris.” Others would put it differently: “In Paris you feel more alive.”

For those of us who continue to live in Paris, it's at times painful to observe how the city continues journalistically to be painted more in memories and dreams than in truth. The story of the expat American writer in the Paris garret is one of the great cliches of the century. And one that just won't go away. It's hard to forget that afternoon in the late 80s when I got my 90-second on-camera chance at stardom: for a 4-minute segment on American Writers in Paris,
CNN
completely rearranged my apartment to fit the decor of a pre-determined thesis statement. And in the great young tradition of sound-bite editing, I went on record as affirming exactly what I'd been trying to dispel: the cliches no longer applied.

The fact is that most people who write about this city don't live here and write for others who also don't live here, many of whose only travel need is to imagine Paris. One guidebook editor once
explained to me that 25 percent of the Paris guides sold in the United States are purchased by people who'll never make the trip. Nonetheless, some five million do actually arrive each year, and the terms in which they visit Paris and return periodically are the ones I'd like to help freshen-up. First, we have to get beyond the Marais and St. Germain-de-Prés and wander out into the outer districts and
banlieu proche
in search of what remains of a
Paris populaire
, the Paris that President Jacques Chirac as former mayor sacrificed to the delight of private developers. Moving to Montreuil at first was painful in that somehow an American in Paris who is not within eyeshot of the Seine tends to wonder what he or she is doing here. But the move from the bourgeois rue Monge in the 5th
arrondissement
to the
banlieu rouge
was a pertinent step into being part of Parisian life as opposed to remaining just an admiring spectator.

Bringing you to Montreuil helps reveal much about the Paris that travelers and visitors don't see and rarely come to know. And telling its story becomes a vehicle for slashing back much of this sappy, albeit pleasurable, fairy tale and enhancing perhaps a new urban serendipity.

Montreuil, industrial and delivery-truck studded, is not particularly pretty, it has no outstanding monuments, and brags of nothing exactly quaint. Once upon a time it was France's leading manufacturer of
bonbons
and porcelain-headed dolls. Today, the town makes knock-off
prêt-a-porter
, and is loaded with noisy print shops and binderies. The sharp steel sculpture in honor of the Resistance movement which towers over the Place Duclos at the Croix-de-Chavaux, although admirable for its message, is reminiscent of the hideous eastern bloc aesthetics of the fifties and sixties. No, it's not beauty that drives Montreuil. In fact, in the late winter when the municipal Christmas lights are belatedly swinging in the breeze over the shabby rue de Paris beyond the Porte de Montreuil, I think more of East Orange, New Jersey than Paris, France.

But don't be mistaken; Montreuil is not East Orange.

Montreuil-sous-Bois today, when mentioned in the guidebooks, is noted for its bustling
Marché aux puces
, where great piles
of used dress shirts and slacks, neckties and lacey blouses at ten francs an item await being picked over. This can be seen as a metaphor. Montreuil is also known for its colorful patchwork of multicultural residents, a fact the town advertises as an asset with its plastered slogan
Vive la difference
! More Malians, for example, live in Montreuil than anywhere else in the world, except, of course, Mali. The Malians of Montreuil, mostly from the Kaye/Yelimane region of Mali, subsidize many of the local development projects back home with the active support of Mayor Brard, who is a local hero in this sub-Saharan nation. Sixty-three languages are spoken by the kids in the town's public schools—languages that most anglo-saxons haven't even heard of, like Bambara or Pull or Mori or Kabile. Along the rue de Paris, one finds felafels, pilpil, nems, gyros, crepes, roasted sheep heads, spicy olives... Around the Robespierre Métro station, stunning, coalblack women in brightly patterned batiks walk past with multiple babies bundled on their backs. My ten-year-old son's best friend, Mamadou, lives a few hundred meters away from us in a family cluster that includes his polygamous father and a dozen siblings and half siblings. Mamadou calls my son his “
frère
” and me “
papa
.” On the Moslim
fête de la mouton
, Mamadou's father slaughters a healthy sheep with a sharp knife in front of the house and divvies up the meat for friends and neighbors. On the tiny rue Bara over 1000 African workers live in a packed residence filled with laborers, students, tailors, barbers, and merchants of bananas, wild yams, grilled corn, and imported cassettes from Abidjan, Dakar, and Douala. Meters away a cello maker carves wood for his instruments, labor unionists distribute flyers announcing a strike in protest to factory closings, the National Conservatory of Music and Dance is conducting ballet classes, platters of couscous are being served for lunch, an exhibition on Albatros, the Russian school of cinema in Montreuil in the twenties is opening, and the Portuguese owner of the Italian restaurant Jardin de Florence is prepping his
bacalhau
. This is Montreuil on any day.

Montreuil also has one of the highest per capita rates of artists per square meter anywhere in France. The availability of affordable
work space, the community of like-minded people, and the progressive cultural politics of the town, make Montreuil a logical choice to make art. What's remarkable about Montreuil is the cultural life that lies within the dailiness of its residents and the political biases of its traditionally communist city government. Montreuil is a mainstay in the cluster of towns circling Paris to the north, east, and south popularly called the
Banlieus Rouges
, the Red Suburbs, a score of municipalities that have continually voted-in communist city governments—towns like Bagnolet, St. Denis, Malakoff, Montrouge, Creteil, and La Courneuve, which sponsors the exciting Fête de la Humanite each September with the communist daily newspaper,
l'Humanité
. The word alone, communist, even years after the fall of the eastern bloc, shocks most Americans. And in the eighties some of us joked with the absurdity that Montreuil would hang on longer than extremist Albania. Who would have guessed that that presupposed absurdity would become a prophesy?

By communism in France, we only mean a more egalitarian distribution of local taxes and services. Culture, for one, is seen as a necessity for enriching the daily life of a community and its citizens—not a luxury or a privilege that comes last on the priority list. Culture is the core of a civilized and intelligent society. In Montreuil, the Office of Cultural Affairs employs 22 full-time people and spends over five million francs each year on the performing and plastic arts, cinema, literature, and music. Several years ago I had the bright idea of inviting the Culture Director for the
town, Jean-Michel Morel, and the former Cultural Attache of the U.S. Embassy in Paris for a local lunch to brainstorm on some potential projects. I nearly choked on my
steak frites
when the American diplomat asked Morel in complete seriousness if “he had a budget.” Morel squinted at me with cynicism and disbelief. He answered, “Why? Don't you?” The reply was “no.” And the lunch meeting died on the spot. The fact is the town of Montreuil spends more on culture than most large American cities and nearly as much as the entire National Endowment for the Arts budget for literature! Montreuil and other French towns don't believe in being reliant on large corporate gifts from Mobil or Philip Morris to get a dance company to perform or a painter's works on the walls of a gallery. Culture isn't a PR stunt.

The town subsidizes and administers an
art et essai
cinema which takes its name from one of the founding fathers of the French film industry, Georges Melies, France's equivalent of Thomas Edison, the “Magician of Montreuil,” who set up his ground-breaking studios in town over a hundred years ago. Ticket prices are kept low for all those who live and work here, and all the public schools integrate the modern moviehouse into their curricula. In fact, Montreuil-sous-Bois is credited as the birthplace of Western cinema, having housed the studios of the Freres Lumiere, Leon Gaumont, and the Pathe brothers. Over 1200 silent films were made in the Croix-de-Chavaux area between 1896 and 1929! The town's commitment to this tradition is clear, and Morel, who writes for the cinema himself and edits an imprint at the prestigious literary publishing house Le Seuil, has done much to help young
cineastes
. Not only are numerous contemporary films shot in Montreuil, production and animation houses, including those affiliated with Disney, are known for their Montreuil design and illustration studios. In the last few years, some of France's most important high tech software and entertainment publishers, like UbiSoft, have helped affirm Montreuil's future, and the town's emerging Institute of High Technology inaugurated in the fall of 1996 the opening of one of France's most robust fiber optic
Internet cable networks.

Since the mid-'90s, however, economic pressures have forced the city government to take somewhat more capitalistic measures in attracting less cultural and more corporate residents. The high demand for loft space and townhouses (
pavillons
) has driven the once-controlled real estate prices way up, although they still remain much lower than those in either central Paris or the chic western suburbs.

As you enter the town from Paris's McDonald's-studded Porte de Montreuil, a large mural commemorating the centennial of cinema greets you on a massive wall that is part of the architecturallyimpressive national headquarters for the CGT, the largest and most provocative of the French trade unions. Initially attached to the Communist Party, the CGT no longer wears this ticket, but is still wholly known for its left-wing orientation.

Just a few hundred meters down the rue de Paris, on a small side street to the right there is a progressive jazz club called L'instant Chaviré, the only club of its kind in the Département Seine Saint Denis, known as the 93rd which corresponds to its postal code and is embossed on all the license plates in the state. Here on any given night you can hear anyone from the American transplant jazz innovator Steve Lacy to a battery of
Camerounais
percussionists or a hot Cuban or
antillais
salsa combo. On the walls of this converted garage are the paintings and photographs of local artists, and around the small tables the young and not-so-young Montreuillois culture-set talk loudly about art and life while downing quantities of reasonably-priced red wine. Although a private initiative, l'Instant Chaviré has been substantially supported by the town since its opening, mostly because the mayor's office recognizes that such public places contribute to the overall quality of daily social and cultural life of its citizens. A refreshing outlook for government.

Theater people have come to Montreuil too. A well-known clown called Hoppman left Paris in 1994 for a space near the Croixde-Chavaux. The popular singer Enzo Enzo calls Montreuil home. As does the film star Marie Rivière and the Olympic track stars
Michel Jazy and Serge Hélan. The French-American painter Daniel Kohn lives and works in Montreuil, and the megastar African jazzman Manu Dibango not only lives in town but donates gigs to Montreuil all the time. The American drummer, Kenny (Klook) Clarke, one of the founders of Bee-bop who played with Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker, lived in Montreuil in the sixties. And the poetic and tragic singer, sailor and actor Jacques Brel lived in Montreuil for much of the sixties and seventies.

Behind their renovated rue de Paris townhouse, stuck in between an Algerian bakery and a Cambodian vegetable shop in which incense is always burning as an offering to Buddha, Colorado-born painter Ralph Petty and his wife Lisa Davidson, who translates French articles for travel and art publishers, settled into Montreuil around ten years ago and built a stunning studio out back. As Lisa, who left Seattle nearly two decades ago, brags, “We're cultural refugees.” Now their kids, like ours, are native Montreuillois, polyglot, deeply exposed to people from around the world, and are a wholly new kind of American in the world. A typical roll call in the local primary school Jules Ferry includes first names like Bandiougou, Karim, Haïtem, Souphien, Kianouch, Thibaud, Hamed, Mhemet, Nasrine, Djadje.... Back in New Jersey in the sixties we all were Jeff, Mike, Steve, David, Jennifer, Lisa, Mary, Judy, Lori, Barb.