Gillian Grassie

Bread and Roses

// September 5th, 2009 // Travel

The thing about fresh bread that you don’t realize in America, when all you have at your disposal are pre-sliced bags of “seven grain wholesomeness” preserved to within an inch of its perpetually spongy life, is that fresh bread goes stale – quickly. Overnight, in fact. That’s okay though, because one of my favorite breakfasts in France involves dipping crusty chunks of leftover baguette, smothered in demi-sel butter and jam, into a steaming bowl of chocolate milk. The staleness of the bread becomes important here, because it softens as it sops up the hot milk and chocolate and becomes the most delicious, slightly chewy, juicy bite to start the day.

If I were more mature or had an earlier wake-up call or an actual desk job to get to, I might mix the milk with Ricoré, the chicory-blended instant coffee they sell right next to the powdered chocolate. As it happens, I’m on my own schedule and generally don’t wake up until around 9 AM, when the construction workers start banging holes into dry-wall and jack-hammering cement mercilessly. They seem to be converting several rooms between the sixth and seventh floors into a single, enormous apartment that will no doubt be magnificent when they’re finished. At the moment it’s mostly just dusty, and the stairwell and hallways fill with chalky clouds from the plaster demolition.

I made friends with some of the workers, to be polite, and also because I know approximately 3.5 people in Paris, and those not very well, so it’s nice to have the human interaction. One of the men is from Portugal originally and when he asks me out on dates I pretend that I can’t understand his heavily accented French, which is partially true. Still, I gave him one of my CDs and sort of sweet-talked him into fixing the lights in the hallway. Now, when I come home from concerts at 2 AM, I don’t have to rally quite so much courage to round the corners of the narrow, Tim Burton corridors with my shaky, LED flashlight and pocket-knife. The pocket-knife part of the all-in-one Handy Tool used to lend me that extra bit of confidence I needed to brave late-night bathroom excursions, when I would walk with measured steps, every nerve on edge, calming myself by imagining exactly which jiu-jitsu moves I would explode into when faced by the serial killer or vampire who was surely lurking in the shadows just ahead. I consider the Portuguese’ copy of Serpentine one of the best-placed CDs I’ve ever given away.

The garret I’m living in is strange, because it would be a lot like living in a student dormitory, if only there were anyone else here. There’s a collage covering the North wall of one of the bathrooms – torn off pieces of newspaper and magazine advertisements, heads of Obama and Sarkozy and Michael Jackson and kittens. It’s the sort of thing that seems like it was a collective, unspoken effort; when you’d wander to the bathroom at night you’d bring some tape and the latest quirky find from your favorite periodical. I wonder who did make it, and where they are now. I can imagine the little numbered doors clanging open and shut all night, Sorbonne kids sitting cross-legged in the hallways with flashlights, studying before exams, music from crappy stereo speakers spilling through the thin walls, cigarette smoke curling out open windows, someone knocking on a neighbor’s door for a condom. We’d laugh about the stairs, and the broken lights, and the Tim Burton aesthetic. Maybe we’d plan a group outing to see Number 9. But there’s no one. At first, I thought there might be someone else – a noisy someone else – until I realized that if I didn’t shut the bathroom door properly, it would blow open and bang shut with the wind all night.

Of course, the seventh floor could never be a student dormitory, for the simple reason that in this neighborhood, it’s illegal to rent out the chambres de bonne, since the good, upstanding residents of the Septième wouldn’t want rooms in their building sublet to untrustworthy, low-income, young, noisy strangers (quelle horreur!). As the name implies, these rooms were originally reserved for live-in servants, and the back staircase with separate entrance passes by the external laundry closets on each landing, and the backdoors of the main apartments, which open directly into the kitchen. My impression is that the rooms on the seventh floor are mostly used for storage now, since it’s a ghost town up here, but theoretically it’s still acceptable for each main apartment in the building to house, say, a nanny, in their chambre de bonne, or use it as a guest bedroom. This latter scenario is the case with the dear family friends who have been kind enough to let me stay here while I’m in Paris. It bears noting that they are a decidedly hip couple with an adorable five-year-old daughter and share none of the stuffiness that seems to afflict their neighbors.

The long staircase and grim hallways are more than made-up for by how cheerful my little room is once you’re inside.* It’s tiny in a sweet, charming way, with a comfortable bed, a kitchenette, a miniature shower, and a truly fantastic little wooden writing desk by big bay windows that let in an unbelievable amount of light from the courtyard. There is a fabulous set of enormous, old-school iron keys for the door. I especially like being here during rainstorms, when I can hear an entire symphony of water spilling off the rooftop into the gutters, and the diffused light extends the feeling of early-morning into mid-afternoon.

It’s days like these that I do most of my writing (musical and otherwise) and reading. When I’m not doing research for my Watson project, I’ve tried to pair my pleasure-reading list with the places I’m visiting.** For Paris, that list has ranged from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, to Leila Sebbar’s Métros Instantanés, to Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity(totally different from the movie, by the way, and largely set in Paris circa 1980), to Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast (which I picked up at the same Shakespeare and Co. mentioned repeatedly in the book).

I’ve especially enjoyed Hemmingway’s memoir, not least of all because he also spent most of his time in Paris living in tiny garret apartments (granted, in vastly worst conditions than mine, in much less posh neighborhoods, without plumbing, oh, and with a wife and young child). His descriptions of this time in his life, as a young writer discovering his craft and living humbly but happily abroad, really strike a chord with my own experience right now. Even though I daresay Paris has lost much of the charm it had in Hemmingway’s time – a charm that has been converted into a sort of nostalgic kitsch rather conspicuously clung to in some of the brasseries and certainly in the postcards stands that clutter every corner – I think there’s something special about being 23 and living in a funky apartment in any big, strange new city, where you don’t know anyone, and everything is new and foreign and exciting. It’s doubly special when you have some kind of creative outlet to channel all that into.

There are several songs in the fire now, including one little tune that I wrote while in a terrible bout of homesickness, thinking of my sister. Mind you, it’s a very crappy little recording, done on my iPhone as I was writing it, and a long way from any final arrangement. It is also an instrumental, partially instigated by a recently rekindled love affair with the traditional world of harp at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient (blog about THAT forthcoming). I’m pretty sure “I Miss My Sister” is not going to be its working title. But still, I’m posting it here so that I can share with all of you a very genuine moment in this grand adventure I’ve embarked upon. Past experience tells me that the worst of the homesickness will pass over in a few more days. Then I should be good for about five months. After five months, I’m not sure what happens, but I’ll be sure to let you know.

I Miss My Sister

Bryn Mawr College came back to life for the fall semester this week and I can’t help thinking of all my dear, dear friends settling into those gorgeous gothic buildings that don’t look so unlike some of the older bâtiments here. I’ve been imagining the students gathering underneath the trees between Taylor’s bell tower and Thomas Great Hall for the first step-sing of the year, raising their colored lanterns each time the refrain, “hearts starve as well as bodies / give us bread but give us roses,” comes around. I remember sitting on a velvet, Queen Anne armchair in the blue room of the Wyndham Alumni house for my Watson interview, being asked what challenges I thought I might face during the year. I said that while I worried about many things – staying on budget, the logistics of traveling with a harp, language barriers and the limitations they might place on my interview subjects – I thought isolation might be one of the biggest hurtles to cross.

Loneliness is an inevitable part of any long-term traveling experience, and it’s not necessarily a bad part of it. Discovering the pleasure of my own company, learning how to forge new social networks, finding the courage and confidence to go out there and make a fool of myself in new languages – that’s all part of the Watson experience, and it’s important. But I’m finding the project aspect of the fellowship increasingly critical, since it lends a structure and purpose to days that would otherwise feel like an overwhelming, aimless void. There’s only so much wandering around city streets – even streets as pretty as those in Paris – you can do before you start to feel a hunger all the pain au chocolat in the world couldn’t fill. And it is at the edges of this place where I am most grateful for my work and for my music.

Footnotes:

*I wouldn’t moan and groan about the staircase so much, except that you have to remember that I’m traveling with a harp, which I carry generally on my back, and in the French system the first floor is the American second floor, so actually I’m on the eighth floor, and if you count the descent into the basement of the building upon the initial entry, then it’s a total of nine spiraling staircases I have to climb, with my harp. The good news is that my legs haven’t been in this great shape since I ran with the cross-country team in high school, and all that huffing and puffing definitely offsets the pain au chocolat and pâté I’ve fallen in love with.

**I also tried this approach with an iTunes movie rental one night, which resulted in the somewhat disastrous selection of “Taken.” In retrospect, I can see how insane that choice was, but at the time my train of thought wasn’t so much young-American-girls-in-peril as Liam Neeson kicking ass in Paris? Yum…