Lettre Sous La Pluie (Under the Rain)

Cher amie Roxy Gröebelle,

You would be happy to know that I am smoking again Le Gauloises Brunes Blanc avec filtre. Sans filtre would mean I would be typing from inside gaol! I should bring you back a pack we can go to Sweeney’s rooftop bar on the corner of Druit & Clarence Streets in the dark hole of central Sydney’s armpit and light them up on my return. Not sure when that will be...

I feel shipwrecked here in Paris...

I have stopped getting stinking drunk with the proliterati in the 18iéme arrondisment bumbing cigarettes off hapless-hopeless men out on the prowl. My drunken rampages came to an abrupt end when a new acquaintance spotted me passing his local drinking hole the brasserie Le Voltigeur. They boast being a bistro à vins. My casual acquaintance invited me inside for a drink. Then he and one of his enemies started fighting for some reason and I was the cause. I would like to say I started a war that night like the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra however I left before I spilt my drink or le bégard spilt onto the street.

The brasserie is located near rue Clignancourt the very limit of Montmartre and near the Metro Château Rouge where Barbes well and truly begins, it is not a place a reputable women would stroll alone at night however I have no reputation to keep me from trawling the streets after midnight.

I am always walking after midnight in the moonlight searching for a muse, searching for Orion maybe he is crying for me as lonesome as I can be out in the starlight. I find myself always walking after midnight searching and waiting for the night winds to whisper to me a Patsy Cline song.

I have been here a few weeks and do not know what I am doing here. I came to Paris to see ma mec! Oh how my French professor Alexis would rue the day for me using this peasant form of the French language. Alexis as all lecturers is far removed from the real world and day to day nuances of real French life and language stifled in the rarefied air that comes with her position. Oh ma mec! Oh how he has a world wind of troubles, no in fact a tornado of worries. That is life I guess.

I came here not to warm my heart with his touch but set it ablaze. I am burnt out like the row of motorcycles in front of the Préfecture de Police further down my street. I want life to blaze through my blood. Set this iron lung town on fire with my spirit. I want everyone to see my passion soaring high like an aeroplane that draws words in the clear blue sky.

In French you say, ‘sous la pluie’ which translated literally means under the rain. My heart which I wish to reignite is ‘sous la pluie.’ However ma mec, gave me the most exquisite umbrella. It is made of wood, metal and a dusty maroon fabric and inside there is a little sweet pattern which only I can see, a little subtle detail. Maybe this kind offering is to protect my big red shining heart from la pluie.

Here the grand sky is open and I shelter my heart against it with my unfolded umbrella a threadbare protective second skin against the broad heaving sky.

When I am with him nothing else matters. After we have made love I am in a rapture of contentment.

It is 3am where the fuck is my lover and more importantly where is my drink! Fatigue des mensonges. That long black cloud coming down.

The candles I lit while we had dinner together are snuffed out...

He made dinner for the two of us seafood spaghetti again which we drank with a Chablis.

He shucked the oysters! A true French man can shuck an oyster with any improvised sharp implement to reveal the raw meaty jelly within. Much like a true Australian man will come to the aid of any woman in distress, caught out without a bottle opener to open her beer or cider with anything at hand, a set of car keys, a ledge or visceral with his teeth a true measure of an Australian man as we know it.

En tous cas, so far from home in this charming Haussmannien apartment, the clock is loud especially in the early AM all the sounds resonate. I wish it was me calling out in the throws and thrusts not the tap of the typewriter or eternal clock. Someone said on the radio to either fuck the system or fuck somebody. I would rather get fucked.

fayroze

Lettre à Mon Amant

Ooh mon cher Driss ooh,

 Comment vas-tu ? Je suis à Paris et c’est la même l’histoire comme à Sydney. Alors you have passed by my apartment late last night after I arrived, sadly I was apparently dead asleep and did not hear you knock. You left a piece of paper under my door that you would come by this morning I will see which hour that will be. I have stayed awake in these early hours.

J'attends, I wait, I heard everyone in the building waking up and leaving for work. J'attends, I wait, the birds started to sing there morning song. I saw from the window a man on a bicycle on his way to work. There was another man smoking a cigarette walking towards the office. The police sirens are starting to whirl; their noise starts to fill the air. The sound of the traffic starting up then to starting to halt and the sound of their horns as the circulation congests in the peak hour traffic. I turn on the jazz radio to drown out the time, to drown out the sounds of a city waking up.

I do not know if I am asleep or awake. J'attends, I wait for you as always. J'attends, I wait caught in a dream of waiting. I walk the wooden floor boards towards the window. At the window I take a sip of coffee and I have the hope that I will see you in the street crossing the street to my apartment. J'attends, I wait and the wind groans and I do not see you in the street.

Si tu pouvais juste aimais-moi. I want to believe that tu m’aimes.

It’s funny how love can become a cold rainy day like an autumn day in Paris much like today. Dit-moi que ce n’est pas vrai. My tears will dry before you are here. Je t’aime mais si tu pouvais trouver la sensibilité de juste aimais-moi. You are French, Parisien you do not understand the distance like an Australienne like me. I am not certain that you understand the secret wishes in my heart. You are my low down dirty shame... You are my heart ache made better, comforted in the bed. Come toward me...Come to be against of me...Come to my door...Come to be by my side... Come to be opposite me... Come to be in front of me... Come to be on top of me. Kiss me! Give me a slap as I demand! Baisse-moi! Put mouth on my mouth. Pull my hair. Choke me.

The sky moves slowly moving further away edging closer to eternity. I am here in Paris and you cannot make a plan to be by my beside a plan nowhere near my heart. Somewhere in Paris tonight you were sleeping but not by my side in this 6th floor apartment with a lift that start on floor 0½ come to the top where you will find me on the 5½ floor where you will find the door to my apartment where you will find me.

F.

La Chausse (The Hunt)

Cara Giovanni!

Comme-va? I think your card is fitting your postcard has a photographed scene from 'La Chausse', The Hunt, a French loved pastime and institution. We all run after someone on the chase at sometime and hold on to them captive in our embrace but as all things it ends.

I look out over the rooftops of Montmartre from the 6^th floor apartment the chimneys in terracotta the arrow shaped antennas and tin and copper roofs, balconies with flowers overhanging with geraniums spilling. The smell of fresh bread from the boulangerie that bakes every half hour on the corner and the hinted scents of Cigarillos wafting up here, high up in rarefied air of the apartment. The muted mutter of cars turning the block ten times to find a park. Men whistling as they go on their merry way, a claxon, a moto rumbles, the ring of a bicycle bell. In here it is just the sound of me tapping of the keys on the typewriter and the buzz of the jazz radio. I have no country no homeland just my thoughts my typewriter and the need for a quiet place to tap the keys.

I found my man alone in Paris with all of Europe’s problems and challenges weighing him down. My heart grows heavy, the hour sounds and the bells from the Sacré Cœur chime. We were together when the siren on the 1^st Wednesday of the month rang out all over Paris, France and Europe a reminder of WWII this place weighed down heavy by the past. I feel high up in this apartment like I can see the clouds in profile. I guess I should be without a care while I am here.

Driss is preparing Moules Marinier with a Muscatel wine and les huites (oysters) that are unopened, fat with the oily jewels hidden within and a big wheel of brie for dessert. If we were not tied to anything lassoed down by our obligations and responsibilities where would we all be? What would we all really do and make with our lives? However now we face problems like La Crise in the age of austerity.

... Fayroze ...

My Siren Song

Cara Andréa,

I am lost at sea here! No shipwrecked! A refugee! I lost my passport! PUTAIN!

I dream of the Indian summer in Firenze, my café doppio made for me by a real paysano, served to me in a white ceramic coffee cup. Not set adrift here in an apartment with a view of the Eifel Tower. However the apartment is comfortable but there are no tea cups so I took my coffee in a Bonne Maman jam jar this morning. When will I leave? Do I want to leave this place? I am lolling here entranced in the limbo of no-man’s-land. Presently I have no country, no papers no proof of my identity, as if I were a clandestine so for now I call this home.

Here in this city there are apartment buildings that have ornate bare-chested bronze and stone statues of beautiful larger than life size women, avec le monde au balcon. Sirens with their chiselled cloth swirling around them, engulfing the balconies as if they were holding up the building somehow like Atlas himself, the Titan. I sense them as if they watch over me as I pass by, as though these beauties were the sirens that hang like the figure head on the prow of ships in this land locked beige wilderness. They peer at me from across the street at this dizzying height of the 7^th floor. The sirens navigating this stone man-built terrain and let the buildings that they cling to rest anchored in this safe harbour. They give their blessings not from the Roman god of the sea Neptune but from Pluto, the god of earth or is it better put Hades, my unknown hell. Singing their siren song to me perhaps in words that I cannot hear a silent choir, I understand this as I cannot sing aloud so when I write it is me singing aloud on the page, this is my songbook, my silent chorus.

There is the most adored ornate old fashioned mirrored, wire and timber elevator to let me down from my perch high up here. It is cold here in Paris and I watched the hail bounce off the old lightening rod yesterday. It glows at night as if it were my lighthouse that has guided me to here, where I have set anchor for now... Oh memory bliss. I have suffered all the nightmares of being left destitute to be close to this man un Arabe en plus! So I stay no longer enamoured...

...with this city and with him, I am no longer certain. I slept alone last night. A man told me he would not leave me alone, not even for a second; he would ‘donnez les yeux,’ in effect give his eyes for a woman like me. Putain! Bientôt, je vais chercher une cigarette. However he is all things to me we are both creatures of the wind. The difference being that I blow towards him and he is set free, wild like the winds in between the sails of a ship. Or is all that billows and blows the indifferent winds of fate.

Perhaps I am just blowing smoke from French cigarettes that seem so very strong. I take a long deep draw. I sip my Bonne Maman coffee and I look out over the grey metal rooftops, dormer windows and endless terracotta chimneys that stretch out seemingly forever to form a distinctly Parisian skyline.

I think and wonder about these old vertical cities of people who dream on top of one another. In these austere times what happens to all those dreams, those hopes and prayers. Do they go unanswered? Left to float into the ether like the smoke from the stem of my cigarette, left to gather like the grey storm clouds above and fall back down onto the tin roofs as rain, the sky mourning with them solemnly.

It is Friday so I lit some candles as if it were Shabbat. The candles glow with the same coloured light as the old girl. I had a thought that she is one big candlestick for the people of this city and for me, it lights up a path in the sky, to let me navigate my way back home, my own land locked Robins & Crusoe tale. I want to live in a landscape, a wild manmade terrain where my stalwart heart is set free not left to lament over it as if love had turned cold like the weather on a winter's day.

It is raining now and the old lady is cloaked in heavy fog. I would prefer to think she is hidden behind a cloud or a haze of my cigarette smoke. It is heady, the smell of the Les Gauloises. When I exhale as I walk in the street it is my smokescreen, as I sit at cafés it is my camouflage.  As though when I breathe smoke there is a fire inside me that comes out when I exhale that no rain, no pompier (fireman) could put out. I am the keeper of my own flame it smoulders and burns inside me. The candles which I lit are burning low so I put on the radio, TSF Jazz and they burn higher - brighter.

The sun shows its elusive face for the first time today heureusement. I look out over the square and I think to Jacques Prévert who had his parc Montsouris and I have the Square de Carpeaux. As I look down on the heads of the tall proud slender poplar trees that are still clinging on to their green leaves, it does not look like an autumn day with the gleaming gold between the trees, a new day reborn on a winter’s afternoon.

Dear Andréa à la proxima.

F.

Killing Time

I think to myself I could do with another cigarette.

I thought I may be able to drink my way out of this mess. If I were in Paris I could mourn communally at a brasserie with those that piccole tout les soirs killing time and in that atmosphere all is excused with a drink in my hand the wine a substance delicate and subtle.

However here I am left to drink alone in this weekday room never knowing a Sunday. It is more dramatic to sip alone from une coupe de champagne the word much more flat in English a champagne saucer which I occasionally spill as I sway. The radio playing in the background another dreary jazz songs plays with only the blue notes. I dance alone my mind somewhere else nearing oblivion, a cigarette in my hand the smoke making coils in the air. It is with wine drunk slowly and alone that everything is excused and everything is forgotten. Tonight my mind is high in the air up above floating with the smoke from the stem of my cigarette.

Ella

I am listening to the radio as I always have. Dead jazz singers eyes on the world proof nothing much has changed, their ghostly singing ringing out in my apartment where time stands still. Ella gently whispering in my ear that help is on the way from the beyond.