You could just have been another tourist staying on the edge of the Marais, that edge that is a bit cleaned up, a bit not yet gentrified, you could look out of your window for identifying marks like whisps of smoke or a smell in the air, but there was nothing. Just the normal, car honking, motorbike engine, chatting in the street backroad, somewhere around the Marais. But then the church bells started ringing.
We’d landed at Charles de Gaulle airport at just after 4, we’d never travelled here by plane before, and we had way more things to be nervous about than fear of flying. The plane taxied around the airport for ages, and I kept thinking what a huge area of land it covers, what a massive space, so close to the city. And then again inside the terminal, miles to walk, walkways and a small train, escalators, more walkways, more escalators. Until you finally get to the huge downstairs lobby with a million people stuffed into it, the queues for metro tickets that seem to move every two seconds, being directed by officials from one queue to another. We end up at a dark row of machines, not much light, no one to ask for help. Eventually it all works. Maybe the Eurostar would have been easier.
The RER train stops at every single station. Drancy, a place I’d read about in a novel, other places beyond Paris. Then my phone buzzes, and my husband tells me there is a massive fire at Notre Dame. My body prickles – they’ll get it under control, I think, they have to. I remember the last time I was there, the priest ostentatiously lighting the huge bowl of incense on the front of the altar, that billowed smoke like a magnificent, well rehearsed stage act. How, when I’d gone there when I was 15 and it seemed as if it was lit only by candles, the blackness disappearing into itself, the smell of smoke and incense that hadn’t changed since Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, or Charlemagne had knelt there. It couldn’t burn down, they couldn’t let it. I didn’t know then that the spire was already ablaze, already to collapse in a shower of flames and sparks that would have thrilled Victor Hugo.
The Air B n B that is so small you wonder how you will both fit in. The constant harping from me to ‘just try and do a bit more Fench,’ to an already stressed out teenage daughter. I open the window, and the car horn, the motorbike weaving down the road, the people chatting, it’s all there, just like normal. There are no billows of smoke in the sky, no more tinny sirens than usual, people aren’t looking helplessly towards the cathedral and looking lost. Everything is normal. Until the church bells start ringing. I start crying, because it reminds me of funerals, of finality. Much later I realise this must be when the spire finally gave way.
Every minute of our time had been planned out – all in preparation for the best college interview in the world the next day. Now God or someone else has thrown the largest spanner at us, and I feel lost, as though someone is slowly cutting my arm off and I can’t stop it, but from looking out the window it looks like I am the only one that can feel it. We go shopping and then go over, as far as we can, to look at the fire. All around the Île de la Cité the metro stations are closed, ‘pour aider les pompiers’ – I’d be happy if every station in the whole city was shut to aid them – and eventually we end up in the Rue de Rivoli, looking across the river in the darkness. Crowds of people fill the square, so many, all looking at the one spot in Paris that everyone else is. You can see the smoldering, million degree bonfire of history, the scaffolding from the building works, your eyes and brain desperately trying to align north and south, memory and vision, to work out what you’re seeing in the dark. The towers are there, but everything else is just a ball of red, yellow and orange that isn’t really flames, just a mass of colour. Every now and again a lick of flame bubbles up, and as your eyes get used to it you can see the water from giant hoses shooting helplessly, like trying to put out the flames of hell. You feel completely bewildered, standing in a mass of a city of similarly bewildered people, and there is absolutely nothing you or any of you can do.
And then you realise that everyone around you – a crowd of thousands, all along the quays – are almost completely silent. There’s no wind, no rain, no massive heat from the fire, nothing, like everything else on earth has stopped, and everything in the city is watching this one thing. The silence, because there is nothing you can say, the silence because nothing can adequately comment or comprehend this. The silence, because even if it were put out right now, it’s over, it’s the end of that history, and that very centre of Paris.
All the time I’m standing there, I’m looking at the flames, but I’m worrying about my daughter. Tomorrow she’s going to the best fashion college in Paris – i.e. the world – for an interview to do an apprenticeship to work in haute couture ateliers, and she would do her practical part of the course working at Dior, in the iconic Avenue Montaigne building. She’s been learning French night, noon and morning for months, and is like a piece of stretched elastic. I can feel her nerves as I stand next to her, watching the destruction of memory, and I want to remain, like some sort of useless guard, all night, until there is no more hope, but I am only here for one reason, for her, for the next generation of seamstresses in my family of seamstresses. I have to get her home, to sleep for tomorrow.
I tell her we’ll go home soon, and she nods. I think of my friend who is probably standing on the south bank of the river, opposite me, watching in horror and sorrow. He is a historian of France, and I can’t imagine what he is feeling. I think about a man I loved who lived here, writers I have adored, the memory of returning here after so many years to speak at a conference, coming out of the St Michel station with another frail daughter, looking out and seeing the towers of Notre Dame in the brilliant June sunshine. It’s like another planet now. It’s dark, and I don’t want to think about morning, the ashy streets, the scene of devastation that I can’t even imagine. The city without it’s beating heart, that is somehow going to have to cope. We turn round to go, and behind me is a priest, a young priest standing with a group of parishioners, watching, like everyone else. I used to work for the Catholic church, and I feel an overwhelming desire to hug him, but I know my French isn’t up to any explanation that might go with that.
We walk along the quay to find a station that is open, and until the early hours of the morning we are kept awake by the people in the next room, who are laughing and chattering without a care in the world.
She looks like a doll, make up perfect, black hair like Anna Karina and a dress Catherine Deneuve would be happy to wear. I wait in a café nearby, and after a while she messages me. She is crying, but I thought she probably would be. Her French wasn’t good enough, but all she has to do is get her language skills up together, she doesn’t need to apply again, they will remember her, she can just ring up and book another interview. After a while we are both really happy with this outcome, and we’d both privately thought it was the most likely outcome. ‘What do you want to do?’ I ask her, and we go to an exhibition at Yves St Laurent’s house that is now a museum, of his Mondrian dresses. Row after row of the most perfectly cut dresses that make you wonder how seams and fabric and thread could make something so exact, leaning in so close to see the detail that the alarm goes off. Looking at his messy workroom, the photos of him with his muses, his boyfriend and models. The house itself, in the middle of the 8th arrondisment, is like a wedding cake, icing piped on icing, the most beautiful detail and care, and this is the world she is so close to, so close to working in, to speaking French fluently in, to running up the flight of stairs with the toile she is working on waiting on the upper floor. I look out of the window at the quiet street outside, and I feel so proud of her, so proud and sad and tired and devastated and relieved it’s all over.
We’d planned our journey with military, Napoleonic precision, and apart from this slight deviation we go back to our plan. We travel as close as we can to Notre Dame and again have to walk, as they keep opening and closing different metro stations. Eventually we walk up to the cathedral from the south west, and there’s so much to take in immediately, the flood of trying, again, to align memory and vision. It’s a shell, a frail, weird shell of towers and scaffolding and emptiness. No smoke or ash or strange smell in the air, just the sense that this is over, that what has happened has happened, and we have to deal with it, like the vase has been knocked over and the space where it was is still there, but instead all there are are glassy shards on the carpet. Police, fire officers, tourists everywhere. Sirens everywhere. You can’t see much, just those stark buttresses that are now holding nothing up, because there is nothing there.
We eat our meal, our celebratory meal we had planned, that no matter what the outcome of our journey we were going to eat. The food isn’t quite so nice the second time you visit a restaurant, but it’s okay. An American woman explaining French history to her daughter by only saying how Americans were involved with it all. ‘Les Américains’ the waiter harrumps as he walks past them; Notre Dame might be in ashes, but Parisians aren’t. It’s too early to say things like ‘it’s just another part of history’ or ‘it’ll get rebuilt’ – like Macron is saying – but we go out into the darkness and stand around. Memory edges into the dark shadows again, what we remember and what could have been. Possible lives, hopes and things that you can’t see beyond the candlelight, where the frail guttering light from a tower of candles can’t make an impression anymore, and you’re in the dark.
All photos of Notre Dame are by Fidelma O'Riordan
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