Cross Country / A Memoir of France by Paul Ben-Itzak: The Ghosts of the Square Albin Cachot

Cross Country / A Memoir of France
3: The Ghosts of the Square Albin Cachot

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2011 Paul Ben-Itzak

Menaced by Melancholy

"And I'm walking with Erik Satie."

-- Malcolm McLaren, "Paris."

In the fall of 2000, the Lyon Dance Festival was supposed to bring me to France to cover the event. I was to spend three weeks in Lyon, and I'd set up an apartment exchange with an English teacher in Paris for a fourth week, my W. 8th Street, NY apartment for hers on the Square Albin Cachot in the 13th arrondisement, not far from the 5th arr., home to the Latin Quarter. When the dance festival's press office botched the airline tickets, I first threw a fit, then decided that I'd be damned if I was going to let some French bureaucrats ruin my plans and douse my French dream; I arranged with the Parisian teacher to extend the exchange to a whole month. It was my first voyage outside of the United States in 20 years, since an ill-fated attempt when I was 19 to immigrate to an Israel which turned out to be not what it promised, but my Francophilia by this point was so intense that it over-ruled my fear of flying.

What I remember most about my first view of Paris outside the Charles De Gaulle airport was the brilliant morning light. For Paris itself, my entry point was the Metro Glaciere, from which it was a short walk to the rue Nordmann and the Square Albin Cachot, where Beatrice lived on the 7th floor of one of a circle of buildings constructed, like many of those in the 13th, in the 1930s. (If you stood on the threshold of her balcony, you could see the top of the Eiffel Tower as it lit up in sparkles at 1 a.m..) I remember thinking that if I had been there in the 1940s I wouldn't be here, meaning I likely would have been deported to the death camps after being collected by French policemen zealously doing the bidding of the occupiers.

All the buildings on the square overlooked a blue mosaic fountain in the courtyard. Years later, meandering around an exhibition on the Deportation at the Hotel du Ville, I would learn that like many corners of Paris, this fountain had its phantoms who lingered still, perhaps explaining why it compelled me. During the Occupation, a group of teenagers used to met there and shoot the breeze and play. When one of their 'gang,' a 15-year-old named Kolya, who was already writing for a clandestine newspaper, was picked up and deported, the other boys kept him alive by continuing to refer to him in their journals. (E.g., "I saw Kolya today at the fountain on the square Albin Cachot.")

This is what overwhelmed me most on my first stay in Paris, the parallel lives one lived, present and past, and the history one walked in and soaked up every day on every street. In San Francisco, our history went back 150 years at most, and there weren't many signs of it. In Paris, it wasn't just the ghosts that lingered, but the eternal spirit of Paris which inspired them to dream and to record their dreams, be they the city-scapes of Pissarro or the music of Satie. With this, though, came a certain seductive melancholy, which menaced to swallow you up just as it had swallowed up Toulouse-Lautrec and Piaf.