Our Lady of Paris. Esmeralda’s Tears

Our first journeys on our own dime were always to Paris. First flea-pit room, secured with the combined scrapings of last week’s unemployment giro; then bread, cheese, wine to bring up to it. A garret at the Esmeralda; every surface swagged in floral wallpaper, the Oxfam desk reborn in baby-blue, each single mattress a horse’s stomach stuffed with cobbles. And a head-high mansard window onto Notre Dame. I couldn’t believe it. Like a secret someone whispered in your ear; ‘Come, see this.’ So close you could touch it. We climbed up on a chair, six stories high in the Paris air on our elbows, turned away, turned back and it was still there. We walked because the Metro cost money.  Everything was foreign, exotic, unnerving, transporting. A plunge-pool of the possible, navigated blindfold and by fingertips, without the insulation of money. Fifty-centime cognac with coffee before dawn at the tabac on Île Saint-Louis; we swore we’d do it every day when we got home. Setting out by evening to hunt down cheap dinner, we walked all night without eating a thing. All under the benign gaze of this dinosaur sentinel, dozing on her Medieval haunches. Notre-Dame. Inspiring awe in star-struck neophytes, lost in laughter and the gothic poetry of their own adolescence, playing at Beckett, Orwell, Bowles. Today’s events crawl backwards up the ganglia of memory, cauterize our story at the heart, breaking it. We weep for her, but also for ourselves.

And now, driving back over the mountain from the pool in horizontal snow, forty-five minutes staring at a black line in water, gulping air, processing Paris even as she burns. Chris, Bruce, Richard, Taylor, Winnie, Ian, Emma, Sara, Dusty, Juliette. And the diaspora of forgotten names. Who were those sweet people with the apartment overlooking Père Lachaise who gave us afternoon wine and put on the Chopin Concerto while I lay there on the rug and others played backgammon? And I closed my eyes and thought ‘it doesn’t get any better than this’. Paris made us believe our dreams were possible; the poetic, penniless, tear-stained ones. So many cod Hemingways baptized, burped and smiled upon by this luminous, phantasmagorical matriarch. So much aching love. I order bratwurst at the Shire, only fly at the bar, and a glass of cheap cognac: for Paris, for Notre-Dame, and for this velvet rattle-bag of memories.

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”

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