Rooms in Paris: a city in memory
Sometimes, often even, when the mood is low and a little too melancholic, we think back to the slate roofs, the grey avenues, this mineral world, austere and majestic at once, these dark, narrow tunnels of the subway, dampness and smells sticking to the skin, and through which we make our way each morning into the heart of the city, before emerging a little further on beneath a light rain.
First, there was the smell of diesel and the sound of engines from the petrol station below the window of my room, then the shopping centre under construction and the library where we would spend our afternoons. Then the blocks of flats that loomed sadly over the old industrial area, from which a melancholic song seemed to rise every evening. Still, we could climb and catch sight of the bridge and the river, which, as we followed it upstream, slowly revealed the treasures of the city that people came from all over the world to visit. Palaces, arcades, elegant squares, then small winding and crowded streets, a crush of people along those sloping beige stone walls. We jostled one another, we could hardly breathe, but deep down, we were proud to live there.
A small room under the rooftops, not far from the Gare du Nord. An iron bed, a hot plate and a sink, a small table and a shower head fixed to the wall. The toilet on the landing, a wooden staircase covered with its beautiful red velvet carpet, vacuumed that very morning. Through the window, the city stretching out beneath the dark silhouettes of its roofs, beautiful reflections after the rain.
In the darkened corridor, we could hear the muffled conversations of the neighbours behind their doors, a sudden laugh, the occasional creak of a floorboard. We would stand still for a while, listening to these familiar sounds made by strangers we passed every day without knowing them. We imagined that if the walls were to disappear, we would all find ourselves sitting a few metres apart, curious and embarrassed, a small grotesque scene that could be replayed in every building.
And yet, this could feel very romantic. We think of those writers and artists shut away in their miserable little rooms, straining their eyes over their drafts. We like to think about these fantasised stories, though we are neither geniuses nor anyone of importance, and never spend our evenings working by candlelight until our eyes ache.
A slightly run-down apartment not far from the department stores, too cold in winter, too hot in summer, but whenever we leaned out of the window, we admire the Haussmann buildings and the small row of trees timidly accompanying them, a welcome touch of colour in an otherwise grey world. Every morning, we would walk up a slightly steep street leading to one of those dull office buildings, with neighbourhood bars all around where we became regulars. A little higher up, we are thrown into a whirl of colours and sounds, the heart of extravagance and excess: cigarette and hashish sellers, outlets, concerts and cabarets down below, then the steps and neatly aligned bushes guiding tourists towards the top of the capital.
And we almost forget that room we rented in an apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement, and the daily journey, by bus or on foot, through those quiet, airy streets towards the university and the hospital, then the river. Then the room on the ground floor of that elegant building, with its double wooden and wrought-iron door and wide marble entrance hall. Or those few months spent further east, the broad avenues, the wide open spaces separated by small squares of streets, always lively in the evening.
In fact, once we open the box of these memories, we never seem to stop pulling things out: big moments and small things of everyday life, all those rooms where we lived and had almost forgotten, those streets we walked so often, which would lead us sooner or later to the water. We would watch it flowing with the river, its dark, viscous surface drawing a long line of ink through the middle of the city. We watched it without ever really seeing it, absorbed by its movement, while fragments of the past would surface now and then before disappearing again into the current. We were watching our own lives flowing away.
We rarely return there, to that city that watched us grow up and which, in the end, has not changed as much as we think, except that you can no longer live there, or almost. We can still recognise everything, walk around without a map, and even find, after all these years, places that have somehow survived. But what a strange feeling to realise that, in the blink of an eye, we have already grown ten years older, while the city itself has barely aged a day. There is a certain bitterness in realising that we can now only speak of it in the past tense, and that, in all likelihood, we will never return.
Ah, Paris… We have to stop here, for an entire book could be written.
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