On The 5½ Floor

Cara Andréa,

The front of your postcard there is a very stern looking formally dressed French policeman. The photo was taken in 1929 the year of the stock market crash the policeman stands guard to a broken street lamp, I guess lights out! I saw the same thing in Morocco last year except with a post box. Paris these days seems to resemble Morocco more and more.

Here in Paris, on my street, Rue Marcadet opposite the Préfecture de Police, I have seen the burnt out remains of cars. Further away on rue Clignancourt which is the very limit of Montmartre, opposite La Commiserate de Police I saw the brazened carcases’ of motorcycles. The people held responsible call themselves Les Révolutionnaires, quite a handsome title. They dream of anarchy and the destruction of this old Republique.

I recall what Sébastien from the brasserie La Triomphe told me, after I had flown into a rage about the despicable and loathsome nature of policeman. He calmly stated without the police there would be no law and order and without order there is chaos and with chaos there would be no Republique! Alors Vive La Republique, the catch cry of the French politician to this day.

The apartment I am staying in is very comfortable except for the shower which has a large window that isn’t frosted. I am high up here on the 6^th floor and the first time I took a shower I found it shocking. However now I have l’habitude that half of Paris will see my naked breasts each and every morning as I take my ablution.

There is a lift that starts on floor O½ and I get off the lift on the 5½ floor that opens on the stairwell. Like living life in a John Malcolvich film. I watched a film of his, Thé au Sahara of course being here in Paris with French doublage. The film set in the French colonialist period in Morocco, easily recreated as nothing much has changed there since that period.

Here in Paris things have changed it is starting to feel more like Morocco. Some streets still look ravishing, like they are dipped in gold, demonstrations of ‘la gloire de l’empire’ and shout, ‘Viva La République! Viva La France!’ However now is the époque of austerity when cities, when societies become too complex with the self perpetuating greed only offering extreme lifestyles of rich and poor. It is the end the sounding out of the death knell of the middle class. I think of our hometown of Sydney, each city has its own problems and there is still the looming volcanic bubble with all its paper millionaires waiting dormant ready to explode like Pompeii. I know you cannot wait for the day of reckoning to come. When there are rows of office buildings and shop fronts vacant, a ghost town of its former self. I recall you saying that it would be spectacular.

The cost of living here in Paris has increased however the minimum wage has not increased with it in a decade, so people spend less, so businesses close, so people lose their jobs, so it continues, so it turns, and so it goes round ‘n round.

Il n’y a rien dans la caisse ici! The coffers are empty. La Misère is pulsating in the streets. I become quite nervous sometimes especially carrying my old 1920’s black leather vintage swing clutch, which I cling to like an old lady with both hands around the strap. There is a nervous energy, an ambiance dans la rue. I sense it is the dark days of Les Misérables once again.

I fear that people are getting desperate and may do something they themselves never thought they were capable of before. Everyone is hustling trying to make a dollar out of 50 centimes.

I see images that remind me of the Great Depression, the ‘Hoovervilles’ of New York and so I think of today and tomorrow. Paris’ wedding cake façades crumbling with its sour rotting innards holds me for these few weeks I am here maybe more.

In front of the Metro Barbes-Rochechoart men had laid down white sheets trying to sell piles of old clothes in the rain. I guess the rich just stay cocooned in the other life which is St Germaine. Or the assured escape hatch of the well to do. Europe and here in France they play out the end of empires. It does not feel like chaos more like the halls of Château Rouge – Barbes are all around.

You told me once the leader, the once great Chairman Mao had said, ‘There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent’. I wonder if this whole circus is unravelling. Oh how I hope to lead a life of freedom not to just think of it or dream about it but to live it all out not just the limits this society imposes.

I want to lead a life of my choosing not to have a mortgage imprisoned by debt a slave to the office, chained to my desk for the next few decades. Cut down in the prime of my adult life, left to turn into the hunchback of town planning as my individual liberty is circumscribed by debt. I want to lead a more fulfilling life. I do not want to work to feed the bottomless pit of cravings attending to our society’s circumscribed edict of counterfeit desires.

Has the time of la vie de bohème passed? I still search for it. I try to live it out here however it is the life of the bourgeoise bohémien (bobos) now. Oh how I detest those Parisien bobos! Has Paris just become a carnival of attractions of the past of la vie de bohème. I still hope it is not all truly over, hoping for the heyday to return, reminiscing about an époque I never lived through, now long gone.

Oh dear me,

Fayroze

Postcard from Renaud

Salut Fayroze,

how are you?
I wanted to know if you had a good time in Morocco with your lover?

...and if you are still in Paris? Why did you come back? For a holiday? To see your lover?

Where I am I think often of you.... Do you want to know why?

A few streets from my apartment, there is a mosquée....and five times per day, they bother me singing in their microphone (I don't know what they say, and I don't want to know) ...and guess what...they start at 5am something like that....

That makes me think of our hard polémique conversations at home..... but that makes me think of you.....

Enjoy your time

Renaud the Horrible

Gaële

 

Translation Postcard

Chère Ziwen,

Ma chéré amie...Tu vas bien? Je suis à Paris. I should not be here... I should be in Italy, however as you know I am loves fool. I am so mixed up over here mixed up over him. When I am with him nothing else matters like lovers on the run Bonnie and Clyde. Paris is as edgy as ever and just as gritty. I could say it is rather clean and care free where I am staying however a few hundred metres in the wrong direction and it is the ghetto. There is a real air of poverty and ever impending disaster. The Metro Château Rouge a notorious endroit as my friend Gaële the sommelier was telling me.

We instantly connected it was his day off from working at the famous Café de Flore still dressed well in a shirt and vest, me in my coat-dress and stockings. He received me well instantly warming to me and offering me his American cigarettes at Le Royale Custine brasserie. He told me something I found shocking that when he catches the Metro at Château-Rouge in the morning he sees women selling themselves for €30- si grave and the men that pay are as he described, "le porc". In a Capitalist society money turns everything around me and as it has done so since time immemorial it turns sex into a cheap commodity. Sex of course just another tradeable service. To be reduced to resort to that is frightening just for filthy lucre. There are plenty of homeless and clochards I pass on street corners older men that could not make the rent anymore.

I do not like a world where we are all trying to maximise our bank balance, we are all Capitalists and everything else comes after paying the rent. I hate the thought that money is always a factor in most decisions we make. At this moment in time I am grateful to be an Australienne in the midst of a long deep recession that is putting a spectre over this world, the spectre that is haunting Europe. Where is ‘la gloire de l’empire’ now! As my friend Renaud put it, ‘la suicide collectif de une civilisation.’ The tourists do not see it they just smile at the view of the Eifel Tower. Massive upheaval is brewing in the air.

FAYROZE

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.

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.

Mr. Harry Morgan

Cara Andréa,

I am abroad thinking of my home town of Sydney, to see you again at Bar Milazzo and to take a macchiato together made by that other expat paysano Claudio. I miss you my dear Italian friend. I miss you like I miss my city made up of all my old haunts, my family, my dear friends, and all those much loved and renowned of Sydney's inner city street urchins.

The day before departing I came across a man that I have seen about town from time to time for many years. He calls himself Harry Morgan however I have never been certain if this is his real name as he may have appropriated it from the longest serving WWII veteran of the same name. He roams the inner city much like the man on his maroon moped on high speed, on all the footpaths who blasts Elvis songs from speakers secured firmly to the back for everyone’s pleasure.

I met Harry all those years ago on the corner of Oxford and Brisbane Streets when Surry Hills had not yet been completely annihilated and unravelled by gentrifiers. The White Horse Hotel lay as a vacant shell, rumours of Mafioso biker gangs letting it decay and lay to waste away—I believe they call it demolition by neglect. It was still adorned and crowning with the original crumbling statue horse—hooves proud in the air—wild and unbridled—the building boarded up.

Harry is known to most shop keepers around Oxford Street and the art school students that tramp up and down that street, too impoverished to catch the bus to the train station. He is a darling of the inner city, one of Sydney’s much loved sons. I believe it is because Harry is tuned into life in such a way he doesn't miss a moment of it.

By day he wanders the inner city perhaps unknowingly in search of dérive—an unconscious-altruistic-flâneur-par-hasard-by-chance. To me Harry is a reassuring face in the endless hoards of faceless insincere crowds that march in one direction or the other. What is his story? I have often wondered what was the sudden change or the moment of impact that let voices speak aloud inside his mind. He has his ways I am sure, his idiosyncrasies-a-plenty, less able to disguise them as the rest of us who attempt to present ourselves as normal-well-adjusted-beings. A friend of mine told me once that the world is just one big open asylum. He looks better these days, less distressed than those days of my younger self walking up and down Oxford Street, on my way to-ing and fro-ing from art school, saving the bus fare to buy a cup of coffee. He seems more self assured these days as we all get with age.

I always took a deep breath when exiting at Town Hall Station. The cool air always a stark contrast from the stale-stuffy –putrid-bowels below hot with human-humidity. I felt then and now still how the train delivered me into the mouth of the monster of the world, for me to go into battle with the big bad city. Then making my way to or from art school, I would usually catch Harry standing on Oxford Street wearing his fatigues. He was clean shaven then, but he had the wild look of disturbed thoughts that marched through his head. He would carry on and rant, lost in his schizophrenic scatting, angry at the world. I felt the same, raging against it and yet trying to find my place in it.

There is one day in particular in 2001 all those years ago that I still recall to this day. I must have had bus fare that day as I saw Harry from the bus on the corner of Oxford and Pelican Streets. He was in his full army regalia with his matching metal army helmet, waving the front page of the newspaper, overwhelmingly distressed and distraught. Harry was screaming and the front page he was brandishing read ‘WAR!’

I felt Harry's distress and he was right all along. Why nobody else was screaming along with him I do not know. I wanted to wrap my arms around Harry and tell him the dismal truth. That it would be alright, that there in that far flung outpost we would be left untouched, and the world’s indifference would let life continue as normal there in that city of ours.

I then think to a bicycle courier, one of the many that race about town and gather at Martin Place and drink directly from their brown bottled long necks on Friday afternoons, on the steps to the GPO Building. However, this one bicycle courier is special to me and possibly many silent others I suspect whom traipse the State Street line. In between errands he plays his trumpet for the people of his city, his siren song to the city of the South. Yet his presence and his playing are only for the uptown-Hunter-State-Street-elite where he rides. His sounds catch me and the music resonating, hanging in the air, opening up my unknowing heart.

When he plays he speaks to all the tears that have filled up my paper heart—he echoes all the great sadness’s I have felt in my life in that city. He plays it all out on the streets of Market, King, Hunter and Elizabeth, killing me with his playing. He plays out all the darkest secrets of my woodwork heart and my metallic soul which cannot help but trip up on that trumpet of his, echoing all the solemn cries of the past, as I listen intently before having to break away. As I always do—I toss a coin—offer a polite smile and walk on— letting him and his song fade into the crowd—fade into the background—fade into the past—his songbook still ringing out to all the people of the southern skies.

On that last day before departure, seeing Harry on the steps of the Energy Australia Building, on the corner of Bathurst and George Streets, I shared my umbrella with him as it was raining. He told me that he lived in a house now, by himself in Redfern, and he was happy with that. He explained to me that he did not have any money until pay day. I gave him all of my coins—they mean nothing much to me but yet another cup of coffee. In return he gave me a kiss on the cheek, his razor sharp stubble prickling the side of my face as he moved his face away. As we stood under my umbrella I noticed that he was dressed warmly and he started smoking a cigarette, I smoked one with him.

I always thought of Harry as Sydney’s enfant terrible and me some sort of tortured ingénue. He is as much a part of the city in the way we all are, swallowed whole into the mouth of the monster, making the machine turn as we all do, and he is unable to escape.

Now I find myself here displaced, lost amongst the buildings in search of my own dérive, I am here in Paris to be exact and like that last day in Sydney there is the same sadness that surrounds me yet compounded by the crisis here. It is evident all around this city. I am staying haphazardly apart, yet removed in la belle quartier but I know there is always a homeless person somewhere just out of sight.

I was walking along the spiralling intersection on Avenue de Saint-Ouen across the street from the brasserie La Chope nearing the Periferique, late night—last night. I thought I saw a man slowly tumble out of a moving car. I rushed towards him not knowing if he had been thrown from a taxi and was crawling—weaving a path in between the traffic. As he worked his way up to the curb, he made himself comfortable as if he were sunbaking in the gutter, reclining, or daydreaming on a gravely-bitumen-beach at midnight. Strange? A drunken madman I thought being dismissive.

The man rested in my thoughts turning the corner making my way up Rue Marcadet to my apartment building after midnight. Something occurred to me, that the unknown man lying on the curb side, one arm bent holding up his head, gazing wild-eyed at the oncoming traffic was perhaps in effect watching as if the whole world, modern life itself was some sort of curiosity, a spectacle or slow-motion car crash. I felt as if he was lying there literally at the crossroads of living in the moment and eternity near the last exit ramp at Empires end. To reach this conclusion the transformation of my ideas often takes hold in the small hours of the morning—the perfect time when the moon shines, the squares are asleep, and dreamers share while wide awake and me walking underneath the darkened sky going nowhere.

What can any of us do against the failure of Capitalism, sit au café and take our café crème to just wash over the thoughts of today and tomorrow and think dearly of those who we care for, to think of you my dear friend Andréa.

Now looking out over the tin rooftops, terracotta chimneys and arrow-headed-pointed antennas, that stretch out seemingly endlessly to form a distinctive Parisian skyline, a thought overcomes me of how much these grey-topped beige buildings have seen—how many sunsets and bitter winters—the seemingly endless persistence of time and the passing days of old and new—of life here in this city. Like the geraniums that still flower in autumn from the balconies.

What to make of a world gone mad in this grand open asylum waking up from the hangover of Capitalisms glut. Or sit roadside letting it all unravel before us, as if it were some great spectacle made up of flashing lights and moving metal. Or stand road side on an inner city street corner screaming—calling out—imploring for others to take note!

And so I am writing from here, to be by your side and to see you once again Andréa, from your friend thinking of all of you back home,

Fayroze.