My french is coming along, or at least Eren and I can talk more easily. We've started spending time with another classmate, Greg, after class. Yesterday we all went out to get food and we sat around and practiced our French very slowly. Greg is American, and it's nice to break away from French periodically (though not long so as not to ostracize Eren) and speak plainly, or express myself exactly as I mean to. Greg moved to France with his mother, sister, and cousin and plans to stay here for three years until his mother's contract is up. She works for a bank in the US that's owned by BNP Parabis (a french bank) and they hired her to come over to Paris to help with set up some new location or work on some project of that kind. They packed up right after he graduated high school and he's here studying French at the Sorbonne, after which, he says, he plans to transfer over to the Paris school of economics and study business. He lives now in the 7th.
Eren asked him to join us a few days ago just before my bleeding adventure. We went to a cafe and spoke for some time with English-French and Turkish-French dictionaries splayed open on the table, sipping espresso and commenting mostly on the past while speaking in the present tense. A tense, I've finally managed to escape from into the future. I cannot properly express my joy of being able to say with confidence what I'm going to do as opposed to what I'm doing. It brings hope in many ways not just metaphorically. After we parted ways I headed off alone to Chatelet as usual, bandages hidden beneath my socks.
For as you see, the day before I had thought it was time (I had run out of long-necked socks you see) to try out Grandpa's shoes and answer the question once and for all if he had ever worn them outside the store. He had not. I made it to Nation, four stops south on the blue line (Metro 2), on my way to class that morning before I noticed anything was wrong. I was running a bit late as usual and so when I stepped from the train, moving my feet casual and unknowing, I had no option but to continue on to class as I felt the leather, never broken in, cut into the back of my heel. By the time I made it to class my knee was shaking slightly and it was only through rigorous determination that I arrived at all, focusing as much as I could on bending my knees and walking forward like I hadn't crippled myself for the sake of appearance. I sat down to class just starting and didn't dare look at the damage done, but only managed to convey to Eren sitting next to me that I would be going home straight after class. No coffee today. This was Friday I believe, because I was supposed to attend one last session of Phonetics before the week was out, but not before I wobbled home and switched back into my boots. A stroke of luck coupled all of this with a wicked allergy attack of some kind undetermined or maybe a product of too much or too little sleep. Either way Eren thought I was just sick and so he didn't ask why I wasn't planning on sticking around. Which was good, I hadn't learned how to say I've rubbed the skin off my feet so badly because I thought it would be safe to walk in these shoes and now I need to go home and curl into a ball, yet. Once class was over I stood up, feeling the sores still fresh and begging for reprieve, and slowly (no, quickly to keep in stride with Eren who seemed that day determined to half-run to the Metro) made my way home. Riding north to Chatelet - Les Halles, transferring east to Nation, heading up and down stairs that seem to stretch off into infinity with a whole parade of impatient Parisians in train behind heading home to slather up a baguette or two, transferring north again to Phillipe Auguste and then walking the block from there back to my apartment.
When I sat down on my bed and carefully peeled off my shoes and socks I saw the damage done. A total of four blisters burst and bleeding, a whole heel caked in red, three more blisters not undone but bloating, and not a band-aid in sight. Some wet paper towel to clean the wound and then a jimmy rigged bandage of more paper towel and masking tap wrapped around my heel. I slipped on a pair of dirty socks, because they were thicker, and slipped my boots back on over that. And I got to blow my nose. Success in its own way.
I looked at the time and saw that my Phonetics class would be starting in about thirty minutes and it would take me almost an hour to get there. On top of that the class only lasts an hour at best so I decided it wasn't worth showing up in the middle of. Hope I didn't miss anything too important. They like to drop tests into your lap on Fridays here. No matter because it wasn't happening and I was recovering from a self induced trauma. No, instead (determined not to use this as some excuse to lie up) I got back on my feet and headed back downtown to see if I could gather something useful from the shelves of Gilbert Jeune, the massive bookstore where I'd earlier purchased my textbooks.
A train ride back and a much more pleasant walk, I found myself in the poetry section, fourth floor. I was looking for the work of Yves Bonnefoy who I'd recently discovered online through some searching of French poets. A work in particular called In the Threshold's Lure or Dans le leurre du seuil. Luckily I found it, they have nothing in translation, and only a section of English language novels on the fifth, so I bought myself a copy in French and then found a new more comprehensive dictionary. That in itself was a treasure to find. Try looking for an English-French dictionary in France, ha. No, but plenty of French-English, which is not the same thing. Luckily I found a rather comprehensive one (some 70,000 entries) that was impartially bilingual and picked that up as well. So far I've translated five pages of a fourteen page poem, but it's difficult and I wasn't completely confident of my results.
So Sunday (I seem to sleep through my Saturdays) I decided to do some research on English language bookstores in the city and see if I could pick up the work in translation (something I maybe should have done from the get go). There are tons of English language bookstores. They're all secondhand stores, buy and sell, and privately owned. It's not surprising really, not even considering the amount of ex-pats, but just by shear volume of bookstores in Paris alone there are bound to be several in other languages. It seems like every street has a bookstore, and most are of the secondhand, musty, sporadically shelved variety that I adore. I quick internet search gave me the location of about twenty or so English language stores in the 1st-5th arrondissements, so I took up my bag, bandaged up my feet (yes I finally bought band-aids), and was off.
The first place I looked was the Red Wheelbarrow (a William Carlos Williams reference I'm guessing) but couldn't find anything by Bonnefoy. Not all a miss, the place was darling and the woman working the counter was very kind, climbing up on a radiator to see if there were any books by Bonnefoy up and away from sight at the top of the shelf. I picked up a copy of collected poems by Neruda just to own something by the man and was off again. That day was beautiful (not unlike today in fact) blue skies, warm sun, and people were lined up along the banks of the Seine (or the northern bank exclusively which was drenched in sunlight) reading, eating, napping, smoking, talking and the streets were filled to the brim. It seemed to be the day Paris discovered spring. I walked along the water myself for a time, then passed Notre Dame, crossed south, and weaved through the narrow streets of the 5th until I found the Abbey Bookstore, but found it closed for the day. Not surprising, most things shut down on Sunday and most Sundays are not as pleasant as that one.
It took me some time before I found my next stop, east down Saint Germain then south off of Odean where the street forks twice and you have to keep all the way to the left in order to get where I was going. The San Francisco Bookstore. The place was no larger than the Wheelbarrow had been, one room smaller than my last apartment, jammed to the trimming with used books, the glue in the bindings gone yellow and stickless with age. I asked the man at the desk where the poetry section was and he pointed it out for me. What should I find? One single copy of Bonnefoy in translation, selected early works including In the Threshold's Lure with the French on the facing page, old and the pages bent but only a couple of euro. I went up to the counter without a moment's hesitation and bought it, striking up a brief conversation with the shop owner. We talked about his store, France, San Francisco of course, and Gertrude Stein. I asked him what brought him to Paris and he said he had read Stein's work, all her prose and some poetry, though it was her prose that attracted him. That seemed to be answer enough. Why move to Paris and open a bookstore? Because I read Gertrude Stein.
We talked about her life and her writing for a while and he told me where the old Shakespeare and Company had been, just around the corner in fact, where Stein, Hemingway, and others would exchange books, pick up their mail, etc. He said he felt fortunate to own an English language store so close to the original site of that oh so famous librarie. I wished him a good day and I headed off to a sandwich shop on Saint Michel where I bought a salmon panini that I took with me across the quai to join in the throngs of people shored up along the Seine. I sat there eating and reading for about an hour as the sun began to cool, and then I walked back intending to walk the whole way back to my apartment, but unable to because of my feet.
I spent the next day reading and checking my translation (finding it surprisingly accurate for the most part) and writing. If you get a chance and enjoy poetry at all (though I'm not sure anyone reading this actually does) find yourself a copy of Bonnefoy's work. It really is amazing. He's done a lot of prose work as well, critical writing on poetry, sculpture, and painting - art in general typically, and I want to pick up a copy when I get home. In the short time I've been here I've now purchased about eight or so books, so I think I should leave all other purchases for when I return. Mom, expect a package of books at some point because there is no way these are all fitting into my suitcase.
Today when I got to class Eren was not there waiting at the door like he always is. I'm not sure when the man gets up in the morning, but he always seems to be the first one outside the door. I figured I had simply beat him today because I had gotten up around nine in order to make it to my cinema lecture which turned out not to be my cinema lecture but an art history lecture instead. Very confusing. I checked the schedule and made sure I hadn't made a mistake, but no it said that the lecture was supposed to be cinema and art history was in the afternoon. I'm not sure what the mixup was about or if the times were switched or what is really ever going on with the French higher education system, but I sat through it for about an hour and a half as the woman at the front jabbered away about some nonsense rolling her cursor over the oeuvre of Courbet noting this or that or maybe talking about her personal life, her husband leaving her for a twenty year old woman named Ginger, her favorite cats, the way she best prefers her tea for all I know. Needless to say I left early and grabbed an espresso while I finished my homework before my practical course.
When class finally started Eren showed up looking grim and explained that he had just come from his Phonetics class and couldn't find his phone. He had looked around for it, but it wasn't anywhere, and it contained all the numbers of his friends and family here in France and back home in Turkey. He was appropriately upset. I asked him what he was going to do, and he said he didn't know. Even if he got a new phone he wasn't sure of anyone's number (the downside of any contact list).
After class, in order to cheer him up slightly, I paid for his coffee at a cafe over near Forum des Halles, and we people watched and talked about life back in the US and his plans for the future as far as journalism goes. That future tense coming so nicely into hand already. We parted ways, him in search of a new phone and me off to reheat some vegetable curry I'd thrown together last night.
Pop on the hot plate, clean out a bowl, and voila - lunch. I should have enough for dinner tonight as well, but I picked up a baguette and two pain au chocolat (those for breakfast) just in case. I went to the local cafe after that, got another coffee, read some poetry, wrote, and went for a walk around Pere Lachaise as the sun began to set. Now I'm here.
So Eren lost his phone today and my wounds are healing nicely, and you, well you're all caught up.
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