HALLOWEEN IN PARIS

HALLOWEEN IN PARIS

                             by

                    Marda Burton

The perfect bookstore stands, or leans, on the Left Bank in Paris on the rue de la Bucherie.  Writers and bookaholics all know about the place and make pilgrimages to it as Moslems do to Mecca.

For a literary landmark, the name is perfect:  Shakespeare & Company.  For walking, the location is perfect:  a pedestrian lane a few steps from the Seine.  For taking photos, it looks perfect: bright window boxes; small, cloudy window panes; big old carved wooden door (plus two more doors, one green and one red); inside, low, beamed ceilings and untidy stacks of books, books, books everywhere.  All of them in English.

Inside sits the perfect bookstore owner: stooped, grumpy, older than Allah, but courtly and voluble when a writer appears.  His name is George Whitman.  After I tell him I’m writing a story on Napoleon and after he sells me a book -- a self-published history of the bookstore, complete with poetry -- he invites me to stay anytime at no cost.

"I have a place upstairs I make available for writers," he says.  "There's an Underwood up there just for them.  Many a great book was written on that typewriter.  Just let me know when you want to stay.  It's the perfect place to write."

It seems that many unspecified writers have taken him up on his offer, but nobody is up there now.  He grabs the arm of an assistant appropriately named Ann and tells her to take me upstairs to check out the accommodations.  She's not the least bit enthusiastic, this fresh-faced English girl dressed like a Dickensian housemaid, but off we go up the rickety little staircase.  Have I given offense by asking if her last name is Hathaway?  Or is she just bored by hearing the lame joke for the millionth time?

I am beside myself just to get a chance to see the owner's quarters.  Excitement overrides the blase pseudo-sophistication I instinctively adopt in Paris, hoping in vain to outclass a French accent so awful that even cab drivers are nonplussed over simple words like "monsieur" and "s'il vous plait," which happen to be almost my entire French vocabulary.  I chatter away and peer into every room we pass.  Things look and smell old and musty and none too clean.  "Is this the writer’s room?" I keep asking.

          But, no, my guide leads me into a cubbyhole that could never measure up to the definition of room.  Maybe alcove.  Maybe nook.  Maybe cranny.  A decrepit daybed sags against the wall, the faded quilt and bedding tossed aside as though someone just arose with a start from a long winter's nap.  A skeletal floor lamp looks as though you could be electrocuted by touching it.  Could this be the room for famous writers?  "La Boheme" has better garrets.  God knows how far the bathroom is, if there is one.  I later hear there is not – only a closet on the stairs equipped with a toilet.  They say you have to hold your breath in there and guest writers must find another place to shower.

Maybe this surly girl wants to discourage me from moving in by showing me the wrong room.  But sure enough, there in an adjacent cubicle I see the typewriter -- surely the first one ever made by Underwood -- sitting on a rickety little table.  And then the thrilling surprise!  To the left, absolutely perfect for looking out of while writing great literature, is a big, wide-open, unscreened window with an Ile de la Cite view across the Seine that brings the gargoyles on Notre Dame Cathedral close enough to touch.  Now this is Paris.  And this is any writer’s dream room.

With visions of Quasimodo dancing in my head, I am smitten.  I must write here.  I must stay here forever.  I must give up my Montparnasse apartment this afternoon anyway.

My roommate's boyfriend is flying in a day early, a fact she neglected to mention until an hour ago, and I can't move into my pre-booked hotel room until tomorrow.  Outdone at her thoughtlessness, for the moment I'm using my tried-and-true "Scarlett Solution" to deal with the problem.  I'll think about that tomorrow, however, still leaves me in limbo for tonight.

The Shakespearian invitation is Parisian serendipity; I rush downstairs to accept.

"As it happens," I tell the old gentleman in my most endearing southern drawl, "I actually need a place to stay tonight."

"Excellent, my dear, come by before closing to pick up a key."

The silent Ann ushers me out.  As we get to the door, she finally talks.

"He's old, you know, and forgets.  Somebody nicked the extra key.  His sister stays with him at night.  Just knock her up and she'll let you in."

Beg pardon?  For a moment I'm startled, but then I remember the British use "to knock up" in a completely different context than we do in America.

 Jubilant over the perfect unexpected travel adventure, I return to the 14th Arrondissement to pack an overnight kit.  I leave a note for traitor roommate that I'll pick up the rest of my things tomorrow.  Then, donning one of the Mardi Gras masks I brought from New Orleans, I jump on the metro bound for the Halloween party at Harry's Bar.

Fellow passengers stare at the mask, a festive concoction of sequins and peacock feathers.  It's an instant ice-breaker.  I'm told somewhat wistfully by a young couple that Halloween is not a French custom.  "C'est une tradition americaine; pas francaise." 

I pass out more masks to new and old acquaintances at Harry's, where the party heats up in direct proportion to the number of wine bottles emptied.  All evening I crow over my room with a view at the bookshop, where I'm bound to do some great writing.  All agree that surely Halloween night at Shakespeare & Company should attract some vintage literary ghosts.

By now the clutch of American and French journalists and who knows who else would agree to anything.  The minute someone suggests we abandon Harry's cozy, wood-paneled environs, everyone piles into cars and off we go to the Bastille area, where the sidewalks are crowded with merrymakers and more maskers.  For people who don't celebrate Halloween, the French are doing just fine.  Some try to climb light poles; some play toreador with traffic.  It's a great night, nobody wants it to end.  

Finally, I call a halt; it's past midnight and time to fulfill my literary destiny.  A carload of celebrants drops me off at the corner and waits for me to get safely inside.  Ah, there's the rub.  I knock up and knock up, and knock up again.  My friends get out of car and we all knock up.  We knock up the red door and the green door, too.  But the huge, thick, medieval door doesn't budge, nor do the others, and no lights show.  The old man and his sister are probably both deaf as posts.  Ann didn't warn me that closing time is midnight – and curfew.  Still, I should have knocked up much earlier.  My fault I fear.

          Isn't it rich?  Halloween in Paris and no place to lay my head.  My friends are laughing like fiends, but one of them has a solution.  Martine, formerly a French cultural attache in the United States, takes me home to her apartment near the Eiffel Tower.  It’s even tinier than my erstwhile studio in Montparnasse, in which beds and tables disappear into walls and closets so neatly I consider folding it up like an envelope and mailing it home to myself.  But here in the City of Light small has always suited me well.

          I’m reminded of my first hotel room in Paris, some ten years before tonight, when I stepped into the only hotel in Paris I could think of – on the chic and pricey rue de Rivoli alongside the Tuileries Gardens and a short stroll from the Louvre.  All the world was in the streets; it was springtime in Paris – an intoxicating time I had been reading about all my life.  Quai Voltaire, Place de Vosges, and the Pont-Neuf; the windmills on rue Lepic in Montmartre; the upper chapel of Sainte-Chapelle; Colette & Proust in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery; Scott and Zelda at the Deux Magots; Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir at Café Flore; Hemingway and Coco Chanel sipping martinis at the Ritz Bar.  Now it was my turn.

          Bedraggled from train travel and strewn about with luggage, I told the desk clerk that I knew I was in the wrong place because I was on a long odyssey without reservations or much money, but I was very tired and hoped he had a single room I could afford.

          He did.  A slim, silver-haired porter, Frenchly named Jacques, carried my bags up and up still higher as nicely as if I were one of the rich travelers down below.  Up almost to the top we went, to a floor that perhaps housed servants’ quarters during the days when this ancient townhouse had been a private residence.

 He stopped at a bend of the staircase and opened the door into a fairy-tale.  There was scarcely room for the pouffy, carved bed, a chair, side table, and alcove closet.  Swinging a cat in here, had I one, would not be possible.  With a proud smile, Jacques flung open the French doors that took up most of one wall and disclosed the piece de resistance -- a minuscule balcony from which all of Paris spread out before me, chimney pots and all.  It was perfect.  I felt like Rapunzel, without the long hair.  I spent some happy days and dreamy nights at this elegant address before moving on.   

Tonight, I wonder if I should have tried to book that tiny room again.  Here, in Martine's pretty pied-a-terre, two people are a multitude.  But her couch is soft, and I sleep with the incomparable typewriter/window image at Shakespeare & Company stop-framed in my aching head.   

In the morning, after cafe au lait and aspirin, Martine tells me not to be too disappointed about the fiasco at the old bookshop.

"I did not wish to tell you at Harry's last night because your heart is set," she says with the charming accent I wish I had when trying to speak my atrocious French.

"Tell me what?"

"That I know a writer who one time stay there."  She is hesitant.

"Well, go on.  What happened to him?  Don't keep me in suspense."

"When he wake in the morning, bedbug bites cover all his body."

I am not surprised.  You can't get much more Shakespearian than that.  The place did look grubby.  "Elizabethan England was full of bedbugs," I tell her. "Shakespeare & Company is even more authentic than I realized."

Relieved to be spared the bedbugs, I still regret losing the memories -- not to mention the writings -- a night in that shabby little room over the bookstore would have produced.

“And he say another thing," Martine calls, as I set off down the street toward the Eiffel Tower, which the early-morning mist has transformed into the world’s most recognizable ghost.

          I turn back.  “There's more?  Okay, let's hear it."

"That he did absolutely nothing of great writing."

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