 |
| Au coin |
Forgive the poor quality of
this first image, cropped and blown up from a full-size print, itself of
unexceptional quality. It was on the rue de Vaugirard (the longest street in
Paris, my taxi driver warned when I gave him the street number, he trying to
ascertain that I really did know where I was going), in the sixth
arrondissement, that I encountered my first Paris kitchen. It was the kitchen
of the first apartment I ever saw in Paris, the first Paris building I’d ever
been in other than the train station, le gare du Nord.
For years I had been hoarding
a few days a year of vacation time, never spending all I had available, until
at last I had enough vacation time to go to Paris – for the first time! – for
an entire month. All alone! I was going to have, at last, an adventure I had
dreamed of all my life. “Where are you staying?” one friend asked. Airily I
dismissed the question. I would find a hotel when I got there. The friend was
aghast. Most of my friends were aghast, truth be told. One person, I was told
years later, predicted that the city would “eat her alive.” “Her” being me, of
course. Others told me I would hate Paris because Parisians were rude and hated
Americans. I dismissed that silliness out of hand, sure that Parisians would
love me, because I would be so happy to be there.
I did not take Paris by
storm, but on that first visit I formed a friendship with a woman of my
parents’ generation, a friendship that endured to the death.
Back home, the friend who had
asked where I would be staying had been in Paris the previous year, and he
contacted a woman from whom he had rented a room, although I already had plane
tickets and would be arriving on the last day of April (2007), to stay through
the month of May, whether or not that particular room might be available.
Madame replied that she had only one month still available for the entire year
– the month of May. I was in!
It was an exhausting flight
on Icelandair, from Chicago via Keflavik to Luxemburg, where there was a long
layover in a train station with waiting room seating accommodations only for
first-class passengers. I hunkered down on the floor with my bag, willing the
hands of the clock to move. Hours later the train to Paris began boarding, but
I still had nowhere to sit: I had a ticket to ride but no “reservation,” a
separate expense that would have guaranteed me a seat. Without a reservation I
had to stand up, exhausted, swaying, almost until my destination was reached.
Midnight. Back in Michigan it
was 7 a.m. I had been awake for two nights already. Yes, I assured the taxi
driver, I was certain of the house number. And I had the all-important code that would get me into the building.
 |
| Un escargot |
A beautiful
stairway led up to the apartment of Madame Hélène P. Up and up and up I
went with what now felt like a bag of cement. On her door was a little
handwritten note, saying she was downstairs on the first floor, visiting a friend! I staggered back down, taking the
bag along, unfamiliar with the city and the building and its inhabitants and
customs. Mme. P. and her friend, Mme. L., tried to urge on me a cup of tea, a
bite of something to eat, but all I had strength to do was to fall on a bed,
and so, back upstairs and into – my room!
The room she rented out by
the month – under the table, bien sûr, since the apartment was rent-controlled
but because only with the income from the room could she manage to survive –
was much larger and more generously furnished than her own bedroom. I had what
seemed an enormous bed with small tables on each side, a fireplace surmounted
by a mirror, a large table for writing, and a closet. The bathroom, c’est-à-dire,
la salle de bain (not la toilette, which was in a separate, small, windowless room on
the other side of the kitchen), with large tub and shower and bidet and window
and rack for drying hand-laundered items, was between the two bedrooms, but my
landlady seemed to regard it as mine, for some reason. Because I was a paying
guest. When she asked me once, apologetically, if she might have a bath, I was
shocked. “Mais vous êtes chez vous!”
I told her. It was her home! And yet, dependent on her sub
rosa rental income, she wanted her
renter to be happy.
 |
| Hélène et Sirius, son chat |
How could I not be happy?
That first morning, hearing French voices through the open windows, the
thrilling, chinking sound of spoon
against coffee cup, the cooing and purling of pigeons and occasional flutter of
their wings!
I would go out every morning,
having studied my map and bus schedules and chosen a direction and one or more destinations for
the day, but I only took a camera with me two or three times, near the end of
my time there, because more than anything else I wanted to be where I was, immersed in the sensations of the moment and not
viewing objectively through a mechanical lens. In the evenings, Mme. P. and I
would sit together at her dining table, which also held her small television
set, and she would watch tennis matches or work crossword puzzles, and I would
write letters home, but our conversations gradually became more important to
both of us. Hélène spoke no English, which was ideal from my perspective, as it
forced me to rely on and improve the high school French I had been struggling
to retain for so many years. We generally had a dictionary or two on the table
between us, as well as a pad of “bloc-notes,” that peculiar paper the French
seem to favor which instead of being simply lined for writing is broken up into
a blue grid of small squares. If either of us could not make out what the other
was trying to say, we would resort to pen and paper.
I saw myself in that era of
my life as remarkably independent and self-sufficient. Hadn’t I gotten myself
across the Atlantic Ocean, and wasn’t I making my way around a cosmopolitan
world city day after day, all alone, in an acquired second language? Mme. P.
saw me, I later learned, as “fragile,” and in a number of small ways she took
me under her wing. When I brought home a bottle of red wine one evening, wine I
thought incredibly cheap, she told me not to waste my money so extravagantly,
that she would keep a bottle filled for me from her supply of bulk wine. She
cleared a shelf in the refrigerator for me and kept a bottle filled with wine
for me on that shelf. Next she offered to take me to the nearest neighborhood
produce market, her favorite, one alas! now replaced by modern apartments. And
after carefully noting my generally frugal (apart from that first bottle of
wine) and tidy ways, she extended kitchen privileges to me. Cooking in Hélène’s
kitchen did not come automatically with room rental. It was a privilege that
had to be earned.
Another “alas!” is that I
have no photographs of the kitchen, nor did I keep any kind of record of what I
cooked in it. I remember an artichoke one evening. Another time I returned
alone to the market Hélène had introduced me to and requested an avocado of a
Vietnamese vendor. “Pour manger quand?”
he asked. When I intended to eat the avocado determined the one he would choose
for me. I also had a little beguin
(a weakness) for all kinds of French sausages and related products. The variety
dazzled me.
Later I would come to know
the wonderful market street of the ninth arrondissement, la rue des Martyrs,
and when to pronounce or not
pronounce the final ‘s’ of the word
plus when buying a tranche of
cheese, the difference being more
or no more.
 |
| Fromages!!! |
About halfway through May,
Hélène and I had progressed to addressing one another by the familiar tu, and it’s hard to say which of us was more touched by
the conversational intimacy. For me it marked a first; for her, it might have
been one of the last. When I returned to Michigan, we began an exchange of
letters. And earlier this year, when I plucked I Know How to Cook, the English translation of the basic French
cookbook, Je sais cuisiner, off my
shelf, out fell letters from Paris.
I was transported. My friend,
who died at the age of 90 about a decade ago, was alive again as I re-read the
letters. The last one, I realized more than I had when first I received it, was
one she knew would probably be the last she would write to me. It expressed how
deeply she valued our friendship, how much I meant to her, but she also
admitted that she had little desire any more for her own life, that she had
become “a bit of a spectator of the end of [her] life” (un peu spectateur de
ma fin de vie), though she retained
her love of nature – the sky, clouds, cats, and “animals in general.” Always
she closed sending kisses to my dog, a dog she knew only from snapshots.
I saw her last in September
2000, but Hélène is with me still, in my little Paris kitchen in my old
Michigan farmhouse. It was Hélène who encouraged me to eat asparagus with my
fingers, peasant-style (Hélène was artistic, well read, politically and
socially well informed, and the same year I met her I began graduate studies in
philosophy, but both of us came from peasant stock and were proud of that
heritage), and even now, in spring, when Michigan asparagus is so tender and
green, I wish I could have introduced my Parisian friend to the way we know the
vegetable here Up North.
Ma chère amie, Hélène, tu
es encore dans mon coeur et vraiment dans ma vie quotidienne. Quand je faire du
pain, quand je bois du vin, je pense à toi.
The kitchen in my Michigan
farmhouse, small as it is, overflows with dear, ghostly presences, and for that
I am grateful. I would not have it any less crowded for the world. Here is the
pasta maker given to me by another friend back in the 1970s. I think of her
every time I use it. She died this year, but she also is alive in my Paris kitchen.
 |
| Pasta maker from Linda |
 |
| Homemade noodles |
 |
| Noodles and gravy |
