Paris in the Present Tense Read online

Writing a Jingle in Saint-Germain-en-Laye

  AS THE SEINE COILS through lower elevations it is forced by the terrain to mimic a wave. That which it avoids and works around are the hills that rise above it. Some sites near Paris afford a better view than the heights of Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Mont Valérien to name just one. But although in Saint-Germain-en-Laye one cannot see the whole of Paris, nonetheless the tops of its towers old and new, Eiffel and La Défense, are visible to the east. At the bottom of the slope is the river. The trees bend right into it at high water, their leaves brushing the glassy surface as it slowly glides by. And at the top of the slope, looking over Le Pecq on the opposite bank, are the park, the long terrace, the gardens, and the great houses.

  The gardens – where part of the palace where Louis XIV was born still stands – are superior to those of Versailles. Here, Le Nôtre was not driven by the royal megalomania that in Versailles rises at every turn to compromise the genius of the design. Instead, what he accomplished in Saint-Germain-en-Laye is the perfect marriage of man’s skill and nature’s glory. Simple, almost minimalist planes that mate with the horizon, long allées of soldier-like trees standing at attention, and in the fecund gardens flowers as healthy and bright in October – blooming in red, yellow, and a hundred other shades – as in May. In the sheltered market square at the center of town, palms in huge boxes remain well into autumn, as if, on its little mountain just a few minutes from Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye thinks it’s Taormina.

  Sometimes it seems that all the children of France have come to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, with parents fleeing the dangers and disorders of Paris, or as students in the pléiade of the many schools located there. On the streets and in the squares, adolescents flock like birds, their movements and exclamations sudden and explosive as their energies overflow and ignite. Jules didn’t think that when he was an ado he was anything but quiet and contemplative, and though he wasn’t sure, he was right.

  Younger children are not only quiet but less predictable and more interesting, in that they are fascinated by the world rather than straining to make the world fascinated by them. In the winding shopping streets laden with fairy-tale rows of luxury-good purveyors, there are always little children, morning and afternoon. Jules once counted the number of times a small boy turned in a complete circle as he walked a short block – twelve, and as many jumps and skips. But the most wonderful were the infants, their angelic beauty reminding him of Cathérine when she was wheeled around in a carriage or a stroller. He imagined that to see these children every time he went out was worth a hundred days in a Swiss health spa. Saint-Germain-en-Laye will never be fashionable or dazzling, but there is no end to the praise of a good and peaceful place high on a hill.

  Shymanski had bought the greatest house on the crest of this hill and added to it with better taste and judgment than he had exercised in picking his second wife. A dowdy and inconspicuous gate in ill-repair, its squares of sheet metal almost as rusted as if it led to a junkyard, opened onto a two-hectare private compound completely invisible to neighboring streets, a lovely island floating high above the river and partitioned off from everything on every side, its high, long, eastern retaining wall creating an elevated terrace resting upon a secure battlement. The view east was open and stunning, almost an ocean view when the trees were in leaf and the wind moved through them.

  In the compound were the main house and a guesthouse one-fifth its size, a small pond, gardens, a tennis court, an enormous swimming pool, and expansive lawns. The main house was as big and as elegantly furnished as a ministry or a museum. A huge, cobbled courtyard at the end of the driveway afforded enough room for the comfortable repose of a dozen automobiles if necessary, but it was usually empty, for a garage disappeared beneath the house. On the lower floor of its eastern side – five meters over the lawn, overlooking the river and out toward Paris and the sunrise, Jules had lived for many years.

  On this side of the house, the architect had provided, as Shymanski was fond of saying, enough terraces to grow the rice for Taipei. The Lacour living room, behind an expansive wall of portes-fenêtres, opened onto a terrace almost as big as a tennis court, with a stone balustrade, a view toward Paris, chaises, potted pines, a dining table, an herb and flower garden, even a metal fireplace for chill evenings. Every Lacour that had ever lived loved the smell of wood smoke. Especially after Jacqueline died, Jules would sit by a fire there for hours. He had a fireplace inside as well, but a fire en plein air was best.

  The wood was consumed, and in the morning would be ash, but its burning was a miracle of surprising and insistent animation in the creation of light and heat; in the ballet of rising smoke; in the sound of cracks and reports as in a battle. And before it died it became a glowing, red city pulsing at the end of life like a failing heart. A neighbor newly rich from doing something tiny and invisible with smartphones had complained about the smoke, but Shymanski had put off the authorities with a bribe. The neighbor then came to speak to Jules, who agreed to have fewer fires, but not to do without them.

  “The smoke is carcinogenic,” the man had insisted.

  “So is your telephone: brain cancer. And you don’t have to worry about the smoke unless you inhale,” Jules had replied.

  “It’s not like smoking a cigarette. Just the remnants in the air are harmful.”

  “That’s also true of cigarettes,” Jules told him, “but I’d give years of life just to have the company of a fire now and then.” It was almost true. At least he would have wanted it to be so.

  Off the terrace was a room equal in size to the outdoor space. The Lacours had lived mostly in this room. One side was an enormous bookshelf. In the center were a grand piano and space for a string quartet. A dining area and kitchen were on the north side, and a hall led to tiny bedrooms to the south. Cathérine’s was now a playroom for Luc, the object being to lure him to his grandfather’s with a paradise of toys, just as Jules had wanted to make the house a paradise when his family was young and it seemed that nothing would ever change.

  But it did change. Jacqueline was gone; Cathérine visited, but lived out to the northwest, in Cergy; Luc now slept when his mother brought him, and didn’t have the energy to play with the toys. Living alone, Jules, like most widows and widowers, talked to himself. But it wasn’t quite so. Never once, ever, did he speak to himself, but always to Jacqueline, to his mother, to his father, and to none other. His affectionate reports were even in tone and unemotional. He didn’t think that anyone would actually hear them, although he allowed that somehow, by hope and through mystery, they might. It wasn’t that he thought they were listening, but rather that, whether they were listening or not, he wanted to speak to them. His loyalty had not in passing time been diminished by the slightest fraction, and he loved to summarize for them all that had happened since they had left. Although he wanted their opinion, and never got it, he spoke as if expecting it. For in their complete silence and immobility, and with the patience of eternity, the compassionate dead looking on were infinitely wiser than the living, so many of whom never stopped for an instant as they thrashed through life like fish in a net.

  BY THE TIME JULES returned from the George V, the rain had stopped. He pulled up to the garage, pressed a button in the car, and the door was swallowed by the ceiling as if the house were inhaling a scarf. He drove in as the door closed behind him, and left the car, not bothering to lock it. In the spacious garage were a Rolls-Royce, a Maybach, and two lizard-like Italian motorcycles as black and swept back as the hair of their atrocious owners. Those self-idolizing idiots loved the dreadful sound of their expensive engines. The whine, like that of a huge blade encountering exceedingly hard wood, was their music. When, encased in leather and helmeted like bugs, they rode these machines, they gunned them as they came out of the garage and roared up the drive. You could hear them a little later racing across the Seine at Le Vésinet-Le Pecq, the sound they made like that of Stukas subduing Poland. The lizard boys seemed not to care about waking a thousa
nd babies from their afternoon naps, or, at night, whole populations formerly asleep in what they had thought were quiet villages.

  In good weather, the Rolls and Maybach were taken out twice a week for exercise. The family chauffeur would arrive in uniform to spend eight hours attending to them, which is why they were as clean and polished as the day they were born. The smell of their wood-and-leather interiors was worth paying for, especially as it was accompanied, if faintly, by the lingering perfumes of the elegant women Shymanski would often have ferried to his house for business meetings. He was in a wheelchair, unable to dash around the way he did when constructing his empire, which had sprouted with electric vigor from a little pharmacy in Passy. Now the modest shop had become a multinational combine with factories all around the world, producing not only drugs but jet engines, perfume, elevators, telephones, naval vessels, and Champagne.

  Jules could have placed a hundred photographs of Jacqueline in the house, but he knew that she would disapprove. So he had only five. It was a big apartment, and five photographs were not overwhelming. He could’ve had a thousand pictures of Cathérine, but she was alive and young, so he had only two, and there was one of his parents, their sole surviving image. These photographs had become as much his world as the world itself, perhaps more so, for in them he found comfort and invulnerability. Like certain music, were it done right, they could be a window beyond life.

  With a revulsion that had cost him dearly, Jules had shied away from a theoretical approach to music. Never could he rise in the faculty, because he preferred neither to analyze the miracles within music nor to question its natural flow. He had taught a small corps of great musicians, even if as the classical music audience disappeared none of them had had either the inclination to hire a publicist or the personality to appeal naturally to the public – and thus break through to fame and riches. They labored in obscurity. He was capable of expertly teaching the technicalities. With his long experience these came easily, and as a Maître he was unchallenged. That was not however the essence of what he provided to his students. First he made sure that they played flawlessly, and when he was assured that they did, he bid them disengage. That is, analogously, to close their eyes and take their hands from the wheel or let go of the reins.

  “Music,” he told them, countering their education and the ethos of his country, his continent, and the century, “is not made by man. If you know this and surrender to it you’ll allow its deeper powers to run through you. It’s all a question of opening the gates. Of risking your disappearance and accepting it. If you arrive at that state you’ll be effortlessly propelled, seized, and possessed by the music. Paradoxically, your timing will be perfect as time ceases to exist. All matter, and even we, are a construction of energy, and all energy is pulse and proportion. Within the most stolid block of granite, electrons have never ceased to circle and speed. Perhaps if you could see them they’d look like stars. Whether or not they pulse with light, they are animate. In us, animation is body and soul. We move, we sense, we see, all by the organization of irrepressible primal pulses. When music is great, it’s coordinate with those. You can’t engineer this: it’s too fine. You just have to accept it.”

  “How,” they would ask, in their expressions.

  “Give it everything, work ‘til exhaustion, exceed yourself, risk, and it will come to you. And then, if you’ve done your homework, it will be beautiful.”

  Delphine – tall, fine featured, with brown hair pulled back and beautifully braided – was like so many musicians of her sex highly intelligent and always quietly judging. Her violin and bow had been resting on her lap but secure in her hands. Then she straightened, and held out violin and bow slightly to each side, lifting them as in a question. “And what is beautiful?” she challenged.

  “I realize,” Jules answered, “that anyone your age has had a relativistic education. I realize as well that Croce produced a thick volume attempting, even if sideways, to arrive at a definition of beauty, and couldn’t. Just because you can’t catch and stuff it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that you can’t see it. And it isn’t in the eye of the beholder but rather that people see differently and some are entirely blind. The keen, the myopic, the color blind, and the blind looking at a mountain range from different angles and in different light would see or not see many different things, but the mountain range would be the same.

  “For me, beauty is a hint, a flash, a glimpse of the divine and a promise that the world is good. And in music that spark can be elongated long enough to be a steady light.”

  Often they heard what he was saying but couldn’t allow themselves to know it, such was their education. Furthermore, they didn’t think he would actually say what they feared he would say, and what some of them longed for, unless he were pressed and cornered. But they didn’t know him. They didn’t know that he was only the latest of untold generations that had not failed to assert what current generations denied, and that those to whom Jules was heir had done so for thousands of years and at immediate pain of death, which often followed. At the age of four this ancient, stubborn confession had been thrust into his child’s heart as if by cauterizing steel, and neither force nor fashion could turn him from it.

  They would think that, out of fear, he would go no further, for in university faculties there is a kind of terror to which they were highly attuned because they were young and still had far to go. But then he would shock and surprise them as much by what would appear to be his tranquility as by what he would say. “Quite simply, and make of it what you will: music is the voice of God.”

  They had to reject this, or at least they thought they did, to make their ways in the world. They had to make a living. They had to support families that, though they did not yet exist, would come. How could they own up to such a thing, something that could not be proved but only asserted or, according to Jules Lacour, experienced? So they kept their distance until – if they worked hard enough and were devoted enough, and could, without design, flow through a piece without effort – when they were at home alone or in some cold and drafty practice studio, or on a stage, blindingly lit, their selves would disappear, gravity and time would cease to exist, sound and light would combine, and they would know that their sacrifices had not been in vain, that their poverty had been riches, that the world was not only what it seemed, and that what Jules had said was true.

  THUS HE WOULD make clear to his students and to himself time and again that he preferred waves to wave theory, that, in his view, a porpoise understands wave theory better than a physicist. “Look,” he would say, “at home I have a stainless steel drain strainer, which when struck with a spoon produces a perfect, unclouded C with fifteen seconds of sustain. Were I younger I might be able to hear thirty seconds. The quality of beauty is implicit in my kitchen-sink strainer despite its uninspiring form and function – implicit in the steel, implicit in the form, and brought out by what? Accident? Perception? Illusion? Or perhaps by something greater, waiting to spring, that would sound, and sing, forever.”

  But then, contradicting himself, he did have a theory about the power of photographs. God knows, he spent enough time looking at photographs and paintings: that is, portraits. Landscapes could be exquisite, but in painting it was the human form that, like music, lent itself to transcendent powers. Facial expression, the way a body was positioned – these were language beyond language that could communicate an infinite variety of messages, coexisting even if contradictory, until their power was intensified beyond what intellect could describe.

  His theory of photographs was so simple as almost not to be a theory, which pleased him in that he didn’t want it to be. It stemmed from a movie he had seen. He couldn’t remember which, but in it a detective solved a crime by looking carefully at a photograph and noticing something or someone in the background, that, caught by a shutter speed of hundredths of a second, otherwise would have passed unnoticed.

  Like everything else, time is infinitely divisible. In th
e motion of things, therefore, we miss most of what is present. So might it not be that in freezing an interval we cannot otherwise perceive, a photograph allows a liberation of powers we do not know we have, a window into truth that exists at every moment and everywhere but that in our continual distraction we do not see? What else could explain the power and truth of expressions frozen long ago but in which the camera had captured an elusive truth that nonetheless is always present? Somehow, Jacqueline’s young eyes held complete knowledge of what was to come, and her smile held sadness.

  The photographs of his wife and child, his mother and father, would, with concentration, come alive. Jacqueline in a canoe in Canada, her head turned toward him as she sat in the bow, her flowing deep red hair, long magnificent back, and shockingly beautiful face, young and smiling. Jacqueline, age twenty-seven, the first, formal, faculty portrait of her, in a Chanel suit. Her youth, her openness, kindness, and willingness shone through as if she were really there. Cathérine, in a gorgeous portrait of her asleep as a baby, in complete innocence and flawless beauty, her deep red hair, like her mother’s, splayed magnificently on the pillow, or as a mischievous sprite that he would forever love, making a face, in a ridiculous Bolivian hat. And the tattered, cracked, sepia photograph of his parents at a beach in the thirties, when they were less than half his age now. Perhaps he read too much into it, but it was as if, despite their expressions, they knew, and as if they were looking at the child who was yet to be born and who was looking back at them from the future they understood then better than it would be possible for him to understand now. Such is the power of photographs, the power of music, and the power of love.

  THE NEXT MORNING, he arose naturally at six-thirty. There had been not a single note of music in his dreams. When he was young he would hear whole symphonies there, grand pieces, long cadenzas derived from Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. He never wrote them down, because though they were variations with many an original theme or phrase, they owed everything to what had inspired them. And rarely did he play his own music for anyone but himself, for it always brought him back to the same thing, and he often had to stop in mid-phrase.