this image hurt us both. They made their way from the entry port to the capital. And so my father was born to his young Canadian mother in a suburb of London, and so I visited this city nearly fifty years later to make claims to my identity, by means of various paper documents proving my father’s birth, my parents’ marriage, and my own legitimate, fully breach birth in Toronto during the crisis of the Bay of Pigs. I make the point regarding legitimacy since that was the purpose of the paperwork I presented to a woman in a cubicle of the passport office late one afternoon – to show the administrative traces of a patrilineal thread of blood linking me to this inhospitable island. When asked during the perfunctory interview, I had explained that I was applying for my British citizenship in order to live in France, and that I urgently wished to leave Britain. She didn’t seem to mind. I received my new identity.
It was at Paris on the first of November; I had embarked on the tour mandatory in the subtler education of any worthy young man, two centuries previous. But I was a girl in 1984. Always I was to be askew, belated. I arrived by train very early in the morning and the hotels were not yet open in the Latin Quarter. Madonna was on all the kiosk posters. I preferred Gena Rowlands, or Fanny Ardant. The aproned waiter poured the little jug of hot milk into the coffee cup with a flourish, at the table. In the parks and squares the chestnuts were splitting their green cases. The air was sharp and tannic. This was the city I had invented for myself by reading. I had an address scribbled on the last page of my journal: 52 rue Gay-Lussac – Hotel Avenir.
How will I explain the taste and aroma of slightly overripe Mirabelle plums? I am eating a chilled dish of them now beneath the linden as I recollect that first room in Paris. I was a girl because I had not yet decided on my destiny. But I had recognized something about its setting. Now I understand that I was haunted by the problematic ratios of sex and art, of anger and sadness. I’ve never solved them. My researches then lacked consistency and were too literal. I would sit on trains and write in my hardback journal about the mythologization of maternity in relation to the frustrated inner feeling of calling or ambition (intuitively, I’d rather have had a calling than an ambition; ambitious girls were cruelly judged) as I permitted my ankle to brush and linger next the caressing ankle of the sullen boy sitting across from me in the second-class compartment. I would seek cheap city rooms in order to look out from their windows at unfamiliar surface effects and the shade the angles made. Having a soul, I thought, is about looking out. I would look out, and then write again in my diary. I exoticized Old World neglect. I was looking for a neutral place where my ambition might ripen, unhampered by scorn. Such a room could be found in the Hotel Avenir for seventy francs a night, or twelve dollars Canadian, in the currency of the time, which had the satisfying merit of being payable entirely in thick, brassy ten-franc coins.
Steve Lacy’s horn cuts lingeringly across a tannic landscape. I’m listening to Monk’s Dream. The cold sweet plums carry the smallest possible hint of musky leather. The toughened skin gives a little beneath the teeth before it bursts to a boozy exuberance. I’ve reopened the old journals.
Baudelaire said art must be stupid. I know what he means. Art must be as stupid as a plum. As stupid as an ankle.
In that first hotel in Paris, a previously respectable but by then faded establishment near the Luxembourg Gardens and the boulevard Saint-Michel, a place I would later recognize in a documentary photograph of the burnt-out cars near the boulevard in the month of May 1968, the narrow room on the fifth floor was reached by a frail elevator used only by guests, never by the tired hostess. Each morning she would descend the steep staircase entirely obscured by a rumpled mound of used sheets. Mine was the cheapest, smallest room, which in Paris would always be on the top floor. The cotlike bed presented a challenging topography; I would shift my skinny hips to seek the sweet place between the wadded mattress lumps. At the foot of the bed was a narrow table, and above the table a window looked into the dim inner court. Street views were more expensive. This shady window communicated with a facing window of the hotel or apartment house that shared a shaded inner ventilation well used by the concierges to air their mops and rags. In keeping with the hotel’s convention, I call it a court, but with no grandeur. It was more properly speaking a chute, or a more spacious than usual vent. The air of this inner court was sealike.
Through this window, across the humid court, I saw a boy sitting also at his own table, a dark-haired boy in a white shirt turned turquoise by the dim light, bent a little at his typewriter.
Of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid, a nearly imperceptible flick of the mop just beneath the surface of the water, an idle flutter of the hand. Very stupid; outside all good sense and discretion, because the poem must be indiscreet or not at all. It should just trail aimlessly in the hospitable water. Floating on the sea or swimming. It must be the sea, no other water. Waves, but not stormy waves, the slight rocking movement. This floating is like a hotel. Nothing interrupts sensation; the body is supported and welcomed by a gentle neutrality. Especially the sea on an overcast morning of light rain, the encompassing pleasure enveloping the skin, salt water and soft water, I will take a bath, I will write all morning in a hotel, I will lack nothing, the soft coarse sheets wind around me, I float in the possibility of drifting unattended, the freedom of floating, no weight, no companion, just the hospitality of the encompassing element. A slight coolness is enough to bring the attention to the sensation of water on skin, of worn cotton on skin. Or perhaps in a café in the village in summer, the bells ringing, the irregular waves of conversation, occasional scraping of chairs on stone pavement, but mostly floating, in the sea or in a hotel. The superior hospitality of the threadbare hotel, the minimal frisson of slight discomfort, as in cool water, which augments the feeling of the skin, the feeling of being only skin, punctuates the sensation of being in the minimum calmly, as in an element. The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of any exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.
In the communicating window close across the dim court, adrift also in the hospitable element, not glancing upward from his heavy black book, his serious typewriter mirroring my own, the image of the studious youth seated at his writing composed itself in my self-image. Only this morning, eating plums, consulting that old diary, which by a peculiar fate I have preserved all these decades since, do I rediscover that the first hotel was called the Future. I know that he also looked outwards across the court to notice me sitting at the foot of the bed to work at my own table, frowning over my Penguin Classic, writing in the brown leather-bound and marbled volume, too heavy, too formal, too contrived for my cheap nylon travelling satchel: belated, nineteenth-century. I know this because I received his gaze and returned it. This exchange would slowly ripen in me, tenacious, voluble, through all the travels that were to follow, the movements between and within cities, from hotels to museums and libraries, from table to bath. Eventually, through a clandestine but thorough metamorphosis of my sentiments, the mutual gaze of the inner court at the Hotel Avenir would transmute within me to become the concussive authorship.
Time in water is pliable. The greenish mop scent drifting upwards weedlike, the boatlike creaking of the wooden shutters, the liquidity of the smoke of the Baudelairean boy with his sharp, aquiline nose and close-cropped dark hair across the court in the communicating window, the quivering shadow and refracted light: in fact, the inside court was a sea in the way it combined so many separate things in a subtly swirling, rocking motion to make of them a single encompassing element. The shared gaze through the humid court inaugurated in me a series of concepts I could not at that time fully recognize, with my lazy habits, my vague tendency to drift only on the substance of another’s desire, desire found in the lazily skimmed pages of books, the desire of a boy in gardens or on boulevards or on stairwells or in seminars as I clasped my Penguin Nietzsche, worn soft by incomprehension.
I had received the image of the Baudelairean boy through the medium of the moppish air of the hotel of the future’s inner court. Such is a girl’s destiny, this scant enclosure of fumy potential that later will reveal itself as the elemental core of her life. She will sit at tables eating overripe plums and burning incense, frowning a little, her sleeves rolled – no, her jacket unbuttoned at the top to show the saffron-coloured neckscarf. The narrow grey inner