Orbits

I’ve felt a bit gloomy, the last few times I was in Paris, walking around on my own. Everything so familiar, un seul être vous manque, and all that. So I was avoiding the place, which is easily done, although not without the occasional pang when I saw that friends had been there, seen exhibitions and taken pictures of corners of streets that I know so well. There is also the consolation that things have changed, that it is no longer the Paris I grew up in – if you can count spending the first twenty years of my adult life as growing up, which I do – so that in fact it no longer exists.

All this has just changed, after a brief visit to celebrate a friend’s seventieth birthday. We met in our first year of studying Chinese in the glorious surroundings of the Porte Dauphine, at the end of the avenue Foch, in the old NATO building. Other departments of universities were also there, like Sciences Eco, whose students didn’t really fit with the ragged band of Maoists doing Chinese, and it felt very far away from everything. Many students were living at home, going to the university as if to an office, so there was no campus life. I had a room in someone’s house myself at the time, which was fine but not exactly cosy, and making friends with Hélène, who was living with her parents in Vincennes, was an amazing piece of luck, not only for herself but also because her parents were extremely hospitable. They often invited me to dinner, so there I would be, with my imperfect French, between her parents and three brothers, pitchforked into tremendous discussions – it was explained that there had been so many arguments that all the reference books, atlases, dictionaries, etc, had been moved into the dining room in order to settle them more easily – punctuated by gales of laughter. My family at home just ate, I suppose we must have laughed as well, but not like that. I was like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, or indeed Evelyn Waugh himself, falling in love with a whole family; this was a better family, and I wanted to be part of it. Knowing that I could not be was probably part of its attraction. 

Hélène and I reminisced about all the laughter; we always did it when we saw each other. I remember having an actual pain from laughing when we tried – why? after an argument, probably – to represent the orbits of the earth and the moon around the sun on the wide pavement of the Champs-Elysées. I have never been there since without thinking of that.

We had a birthday lunch with other old friends, and in the evening took the metro to the Seine, to see all the changes: no cars along the river, the Samaritaine all shiny and open at last, and Notre-Dame in its scaffolding. Everything was as if made new, and bright, which is not usually the case when you return somewhere. Paris renews itself, all the time. Hélène and I are sensible old women now, one divorced, one a widow, who hadn’t seen each other properly for several years, so we no longer pretend to be planets, but we can still laugh, and feel almost as we did fifty years ago. Her parents are dead now; the house in Vincennes is sold, the metal gate of the courtyard, where her father’s DS used to stand, is gone, and the dining room with the dictionaries too. But part of our youth is still there, and Paris too.