Today I walked home from Chatelet on the other bank... a beast of a trip.
It was a great walk home, though... I just love being here, I love feeling like a native and feeling like I don’t know what I am doing and feeling like every single moment has so much adventure and so much power to change the rest of my life, because here in Paris... it somehow does. The movies got this one right. I once told a close friend that my life is cinematic, and he ended up making the best present for me based on that one statement.
I still say my life is cinematic– not in a cocky way, but it just so happens that I was born with this innate inability to do anything the simple way, I always have to complicate the bejeebees out of it, which, really, is the essence of any good chickflick/indie/artsy/fill-in-the-blank film.
So put me, the cinematic girl who plans the soundtrack to every moment as it is happening, in the most romantic, touristed city in the world, and what do you get?
Every film cliche come true.
But they only become cliches because they are true, right?
I mean, honestly, at one point I was crossing from Left Bank (the South one) to Right Bank (the North one), and I am standing on the Pont des Arts in front of the Assemblee Nationale, with the tricolor waving in front it, and the wind whipping through my hair so hard I finally put on my hat because I couldn’t see anything. So I am standing on the bridge with my hat on, and some of my hair has come loose and is still in my eyes, and it is cloudy, just the way Paris ought to be, and I look to the left, the East, and there is Notre-Dame. And Sainte-Chapelle. And the Ile-de-la-Cite. Keep turning... Assemblee Nationale. Keep turning... Eglise Americaine. And now I am facing right, to the West, and there is the Eiffel Tower, and the looming steeple of the Cathedral de Saint Pierre, and the golden angels guarding the Pont d’Alexandre III, and the Seine winding into the distance. And I stop walking for a long minute, trying not to look like a tourist, but thinking about how beautiful this city is and how everything here really is like in the movies– foggy grayish days with this soft light that makes everyone look good, and nights bathed in gold light from the lampposts that are electric now, but the same gas posts that have been there for 100 years, with cast-iron ivy latticing up them, or fat cherubs chasing each other toward the light on top. The kind of light that makes you think the men should be in fedoras (is that what they are called? Dick Tracy hats, I mean.) and the women should be in elbow length gloves.
And, just then, as I am thinking all this and relishing the overcast Paris February day, as if on cue, just like all my stories end... it started to rain. Only not a drizzling foggish rain like usually happens in Paris, because it was wicked windy, remember? And I am walking against the wind. And suddenly the cinematic moment is over, and I am just a 21-year-old poser, on a bridge about to get splashed by a red double-decker bus driving through the mud puddles past me. And the tiny drops of rain are being flung into my face with bitter intensity, to the point that, even with my head bowed, collar up (sailor-style, not Yankee-esque), and hands in my pockets, it feels like I am being pelted all over with this needling mist. I keep walking– what choice do I have? But before the rain stops I am offered shelter by one maitre-d and two janitors standing in a doorway for a smoke break.
But I turned them down and kept on walking, singing in the rain...
Saturday night I went to the Opera. My program got us all tickets, and this semester I went to the Opera Bastille, the new modern opera house, not the ancient historic and beautiful Opera Garnier where I went last semester. Garnier is better. The Opera Bastille, from the outside, looks like one of the works of post-modern architecture of Paris. From the inside, it looks exactly like the auditorium I graduated from high school in: completely non-descript. Absolutely nothing remarkable about it. No great chandelier, no fancy ceiling painted by Chagall, no post-modern sculpture, nothing. But the weird part is that at the Opera Garnier last semester, the opera I saw had absolutely no scenery except for the back wall of the stage, which was painted gray like cement and had "VIETATO FUMARE" painted in red block letters high above the heads of the singers. Which means "No Smoking" in Italian. But the singers for that one were in period costume. So much artsyness I can hardly handle it.
THIS one was the "Contes d’Hoffmann," a legit French opera. All the characters were in period costume, and the scenery was amazing, complete with a fully-stocked bar in one scene and a reverse-stage in another, so that we as the audience were looking at a stage made to look like a stage facing another audience on the other side. That doesn’t make any sense. But suffice it to say it was amazing. Scenery-wise, anyway. But I would love to read the original script or whatever you call the manuscript of an opera, because I guarantee it was not nearly this sketchy when it was written in 1881. I realize that operas are meant to be scandalous and whatever... and I am ok with that. (I am the girl that spent last weekend at a concert where the band emerged wearing solid black and ninja masks, remember?) Weirdness is ok with me. But this? It was still good, but I think perhaps there was [excessive] directorial license taken.
Included in the main storyline were a coke-snorting devil (who obviously was not using the real stuff, as the guy was huge. They could have at least made him LOOK like a crackhead if he was going to play the part, right? Requiem for a Dream-style, that’s all I ask), a pimp-looking man clothed in a purple crushed velvet leisure suit, and, my personal favorite, Olympia.
The name Olympia, in French culture, has all kinds of significance, as it used to be (and perhaps still is, though I don’t know for sure) the generic term for all prostitutes, especially upper-class ones. Hence the rejection of Manet’s Olympia from the Salon when he painted it– Shakespeare was wrong: had he called it by any other name, it would have just been a nude, but since it was Olympia, the French took it to be a prostitute, which it was, and wouldn’t let him display it. Luckily they got over that eventually and now it’s in the Orsay or Louvre or something. That, however, is a grand sidenote and further proof that I find it completely impossible to stay on track.
So in the Opera, this mad scientist type character makes the perfect woman– Olympia– who then comes out and sings a song and Hoffmann, the star, falls in love with her. But this particular Olympia was pregnant– in real life. SO pregnant, in fact, that I kind of worried she would go into labor right there on stage and they would have to call for a doctor in the house. So this woman who looks like she is about to topple forward because she is so front-heavy is standing there singing this ridiculous solo, and the audience knows she is a robot in the opera, but Hoffmann thinks she is real. And pretty soon, with her jerky robotic movements, she pushes Hoffmann into a haycart, climbs on top of him, and... well... you figure out the rest. Only I can’t seem to get past the fact that it is a REAL PREGNANT WOMAN on stage, which seems some kind of error in casting, I feel, because who falls in love with an 11-months-along automaton with an I-Dream-Of-Genie ponytail? Anyway, then, after that lovely scene, she, still singing, climbs out of the haycart, walks to the front of the stage, and the mad scientist guy pulls a Justin Timberlake, and, as it turns out, she’s wearing a tearaway dress, and the mad scientist rips her entire outfit off. On purpose, though. And underneath it, this heavily-with-child woman is wearing... well... nothing. Except a bodysuit, which looks like a fatsuit, because, again, she must be carrying quadruplets or something. So now there is a pregnant woman walking around the stage, for all intents and purposes nude, singing "Voila la chanson d’Olympia!" while Satan paces in the background, snorting coke through a rolled-up 100-Euro note.
And all I could think was "surely this is not what poor Offenbach had in mind when he wrote this." Still, it was a good experience. I didn’t wear my Opera dress– a brown flowered tea-length strapless thing I wore last semester– because I thought it might be too formal for a Saturday night opera. During the first intermission (there were two, because this particular Opera lasted THREE HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES), I was standing at a mirror in the bathroom fluffing my hair, and I looked behind me and caught the eye of an old woman giving me her best evil eye. She quickly whirled away when she saw me seeing her seeing me, but I almost burst into hysterics. She had Cruella DeVille hair, black with white streaks at the front, and her eyebrows were missing but she had painted silver ones on in their place. And dark lipstick on her tiny line of a mouth. But I guess french-emo hair is not really appropriate for the Opera Bastille. I couldn’t do anything about the hair, though. The outfit was fine, though– I had on a nice skirt and a fancy turtleneck and I even wore pantyhose and heels... come to think of it, the ankle straps of the heels were undone (because I couldn’t sit there with them on for the duration of the fourteen-hour-long opera) and that is probably what her disapproval was in reference to.
In other news, I think perhaps word got out about my complaints concerning the behavior of Frenchmen with regard to talking to me when I am wearing headphones, because today I was walking to the Metro, headphones on, poker face on, because when it is so cold, I find it hard sometimes to look happy. I am walking along, shoulders hunched in the wind, and there are two men coming toward me talking to each other, and just as I get within earshot, the one on my side makes this elaborate hand-kissing Italian-style gesture, you know, the terribly cliche thing Italians do when they kiss their fingertips and then do that thing in the air? So he does that, very elaborately, somehow involving both hands, and I am watching him puzzled, when he finishes and says, "Tu es magnifique, mon petit chou!" "You are magnificent, my lady!" and then finished with, "Please let me see you smile!" in French. And I couldn’t help it, because he wasn’t sketchy about it, he was just so ridiculously French that my face went from completely blank to completely aglow– the smile was so sudden I didn’t know it was coming, and it was one of those smiles that are not just a smile, not even just a grin, but like, the kind where you feel like any moment you are about to burst into laughter. And as I smiled hugely, his friend smiled shyly back and said, "Ahh, c’est encore plus belle, n’est-ce pas?" "She’s even prettier now, isn’t she?" I shook my head and kept walking, but it made me laugh all afternoon.
Also, it was the first time I’ve been called "petit chou," which is, literally, "little cabbage," but this great compliment in French. Their other main term of endearment? "Petit puce"– "My little flea."
Smiling Like I Mean It,
B
P.S. I got a care package from the US today– YES! This one had in it, I kid you not, a Spanish magazine called "Vanidades." Which probably means "Vanities" or something, but I wouldn’t lay money on it, as I am more than a little rusty with my español. I did study it for about a million years... but you know how they say that learning a new language makes it easier to learn another? It’s bogus. The more French I learn, the more my Spanish goes to pot. Well, not really– I can still speak it, and when I was in Spain last fall, I did. BUT I speak it now with this great FRENCH accent, to the point that the people in Spain kept asking, "Ahh, Señorita, tu parles français?" switching to French instead of English because they thought I was French. And occasionally a word comes into my head and I have no idea if it is French or Spanish, and then I try it with a French accent, which sometimes works and sometimes not, but you know, I take what I can get. Anyway, the thing is that I am almost out of books here (I’m on Tale Of Two Cities, and then I have none left), which means that after Dickens, I will probably revert to reading Vanidades because... well, what else am I going to do? Plus if my Spanish serves me right, there is an article therein about "the new man: ubersexual is in, metrosexual is out." And with hooks like that, it’s gotta have some life-changing advice inside, right?