Cross Country / A Memoir of France by Paul Ben-Itzak: La Gamine de Montmartre

Cross Country / A Memoir of France
9: La Gamine de Montmartre

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2011 Paul Ben-Itzak

I'm hallucinating!

If you really want to experience the authentic Montmartre, the Montmartre of phantoms and not the Montmartre of charlatans, avoid at all cost "La Butte," the tip-top of the village encircling Sacre Coeur which is mined with tourist traps and has about as much to do with art any more as San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf has to do with fish. Start at the Metro Barbes, whose nocturnal closure opened "Les Portes de la Nuit" (the Gates of the Night) to the lanky Yves Montand in Marcel Carne's 1946 semi-surreal fairy tale of post-war Paris, or, if your legs are feeling sturdy, begin at the base of the rue des Martyrs at the Metro Notre Dame de Lorette -- named for the church of the same name before whose doors Van Gogh once stood praying before heading down to the Boulevard Montmartre to sell his paintings at the Galerie Goupil -- and head up-hill. At the top of Martyrs, turn left down the Boulevard Rochechouart - Clichy and continue past the Moulin Rouge, then traverse the bridge over the Montmartre cemetery, tracing the foot-steps of Truffaut's teenaged truant carrying a typewriter stolen from his step-father's office in the 1959 "400 Blows," and remembering to doff your beret to Sacha and the rest of the Guitrys, France's royal family of theater, reposing below in the cemetery. Then head up the winding, chestnut tree-lined rue Caulaincourt, imagining what a struggle the nightly climb from the Moulin Rouge to his studio just off Caulaincourt must have been for the stunted Toulouse-Lautrec. The street broadens out at the Square Constantin Pecqueur, where Isadora once taught her charges, a plaque reminds you, and Steinlin fed and painted his cats in a Hausmanian building towering above the square (their calico offspring still scramble for food left on the high railing bordering Sacre Coeur on the Butte). Buy a thick triangular slice of warmed-up tuna-tomato quiche at the boulangerie near the square and eat it on a bench across from the statue Paul Vannier built in homage to the artist, above a bronze frieze of what could be the 12 apostles dressed as mendicants lined up in a soup kitchen, except that some wag has chalked in libidinous thought balloons for each, hovering over a basin of dead water.

Descend the steps over the Metro Lamarck-Caulaincourt to Lamarck. Up the street in the direction of Sacre Coeur, just below a blue and white "Philips" sign, is a shop with old comic books and post-war memorabilia in the vitrine, including, the late afternoon I found myself standing in front of it, an appropriately black four-record boxed set, "St. Germain des Pres, l'age d'Or" with songs and interviews of Boris Vian, Juliette Greco (and her lover Miles Davis), Jacques Prevert, and other children of the Occupation. Greco fled to Paris as a 16-year-old Montpellier girl living in Bergerac -- after her mother was imprisoned by the Germans for sheltering British serviceman -- and was taken in by Sartre and coterie. With her cohort Boris Vian, the short-lived trumpet-playing, noir-writing butterfly of post-war Paris running against the time-clock of a delicate heart that would expire at the age of 39, and who introduced the Duke to France, Greco went on to make of famished post-War Paris a musical feast, providing a score of American Jazz and French Chanson for the headier political and philosophical discourse of Camus and Sartre and de Beauvoir, centered around the Club Taboo in a basement on the rue Christine. But back to Montmartre that late afternoon half a century later, where a descendent of Greco from Montpellier awaited me on the terrace of Le Refuge, a bar facing the Larmarck-Caulaincourt Metro station and stairs and atop another set of stairs.

I'd finally given in and bought the boxed set, and was ogling a full-length photo in the booklet that came with it of the 20-year-old Greco, svelte in an ankle-length black dress, when the olive-skinned gamine next to me with the oval face and large Greco-like dark eyes and bronzed curved legs hung up her cell phone in a huff, turned to me out of the blue and said, "Some people, their psychology is so complicated!"

Parisians and particularly Parisiennes are notoriously cold, but there is sometimes a grace period of open-ness on the part of those freshly arrived from 'the provences,' their cheeks still rosy and dispositions still warm. Maureen, the gamine of 22 who'd instantly made of me a confident, had just arrived in Paris to seek work as an actress; at the moment she was doing telemarketing at night to pay her rent. And on this late August afternoon under a mellow Sun that made her luminous on the terrace of Le Refuge and heated up my heart, she was complaining, "He thinks because I slept at his house, suddenly I am his girlfriend. And then there is the other one, who even though I shared his bed doesn't notice me and shares with me his problems with other girls." (It turned out that being from Montpellier, Maureen knew my new friends who ran the underground performance space la Chapelle. "They are very snobby. They act very nice, but it is superficial. After a while, unless you are with the cool crowd, they don't have time for you.")

I listened, enraptured, Montmartre's romantic past resurrected before me, and secured a dinner date for sushi on the rue des Abbesses, the main drag in lower Montmartre, for later in the week. She was 22, I was 40, and from her continuing to unburden herself about her two boyfriends, particularly the one who didn't seem to notice her even when she lay beside him, I assumed I was hors de question and had been consigned to 'friend,' and thus didn't offer to pay for her. This selfishness -- I wasn't going to 'get anything out of it' so why pay for her? -- was also obtuse to the fact that she had no money, later confirmed by her jumping the subway turnstile on her way home after we'd scaled the steep stairways of Montmartre to the Butte. And was probably why -- I'd later figure out -- she refused to eat on our last date. Before that we made a date to see a movie on the rue Christine, at an art house cinema across from the former site of the Taboo, after I'd answered her "Will it afraid me?" with assurances that the film would not.... Maureen stood me up. When I called her she said she'd fallen asleep. Remaining obdurate -- it didn't even occur to me that she might be exhausted from working the telephone every night from 4 to midnight, no doubt on commission -- I wouldn't let it go. "I told you, I fell asleep!! What more do you want me to say??!! Oh que t'es bete!" But I was in effect seeing past burns and not the innocent if mercurial girl in front of me. That last date was laborious. I get cranky and indecisive when I'm hungry, she must have been the same from refusing to eat as we wandered the entire Right Bank of Paris, from the Canal St. Martin to the Pompidou Museum, me obstinately not finding a restaurant that pleased me and her getting more and more impatient. In the Marais, after explaining that it was the gay neighborhood, she teased me with being gay and I sulked. Finally we settled on a touristic resto where I downed a gummy steak au roquefort and a cheap Stella while she sulked with her chin in her hands. In the courtyard of Beaubourg (as Parisians call the Pompidou), as we sat on the edge of the Stravinsky fountain with Niki de Saint Phalle's voluptuous mermaid spouting water at us from its naked breasts, Maureen taught me a phrase I would often have use for in the coming decade, "J'ai hallucine," literally, "I am hallucinating," a fitting response to both an exorbitant check and a beautiful woman. I put it into immediate service, "J'ai hallucine"ing incessantly while looking at her face to get across how smitten I was with her until she finally erupted, "It's not fair, we speak French all the time, and I need to learn English! You have to teach me."

We exchanged apologies before she hopped her turnstile and I headed the other direction; "I'm sorry, I get cranky when I'm hungry," I said. "Moi aussi, I'm very fatigued from working every night to midnight." Still, as I stood on the Pont St. Michel in the shadow of Notre Dame smoking a Cuban, the fumes mingling with the mist above the Seine, I decided not to call Maureen again. She resembled too much the morass of melancholy into which I'd plunged with another gamine more than a decade earlier. Prisoner of my past, I'd set up my own Bastille to fortify my heart. The next time I heard from Maureen was on September 11, 2001. I'd moved to another sublet in the Cite Falguiere next to the Pasteur Institute where AIDS had been discovered, and where my seventh-floor apartment looked out on an Eiffel Tower that seemed one block away. I'd just received a startling e-mail from one of our magazine's writers in New York informing me, "We are under attack." So I was distracted when Maureen called. "I just heard what happened and I wanted to call to say that I hope your friends and family are all right." Forever obtuse, I didn't see that Maureen was reaching out to re-connect -- not easy for a French person -- so when she said, "Well, I don't want to keep you, I'm sure you have things to do to see that everyone is all right, I just wanted to tell you that I am thinking good thoughts for you," I let her go non-mindfully, preferring to deal with instant, concrete terrorism to unfathomable terrors of the heart. I called her once a few months later but didn't hear back. For years afterward -- usually at Christmas -- I would think of Maureen as I passed Le Refuge on a midnight ramble in Montmartre, where I'd stop to sit on the steps near the former home of Erik Satie behind Sacre Coeur, imagining the melancholy strains of "Les Gymopedies," a would-be acrobat of love -- had I not come to Paris to find that, after all? -- grounded by his fear of flying.