The train had reached the Gare du Nord.
TWELVE
I WASN’T COMPLETELY SURE why I was in Paris. Zaynab was a pretext, since she was returning to London. I was too old to brush up my French. The time for j’aime, tu aimes, il aime, nous aimons was long gone. And an old and close friend here, Mathurin, a gifted composer, was no longer alive. Usually Matho was the first person I rang. We would meet within hours, debrief each other on the state of the world and the world of our personal lives, retire to a café near St-Germain, and there he would detail the latest atrocities of certain Parisian intellectuals, far gone in vanity and conceit, that we had both come to loathe. They were the ‘ultras’ of the new order: social, economic, political liberals, they hated their own radical pasts and now even opposed traditional conservative Gaullism and republicanism for being too gauchiste and étatiste. Their carpings, far from costing the intended targets any sleepless nights, simply provoked mirth.
Matho would provide me with rich gossip, complete accounts of what was really going on underneath the surface. Political and sexual affairs were effortlessly combined in his narrative. What angered him greatly was that even some of the French extreme left had become partially infected with the neoliberal ideology; Liberation acted as the principal conduit of these ideas and was often less interesting than the traditional conservative journals. The paladins of the financial markets were seen as bold crusaders, opening new paths for the subalterns of consumerist excess. It was not envy that had soured Mathurin. It was a mixture of contempt and anger with the new order. He would speak of some colleagues in the world of music as having become so tense that they stifled the music they were being paid to play. He would name names from the past, friends we had in common, women we both knew, and describe their current activities. He often spoke of one woman in particular, a particularly dogmatic ouvrieriste for whom he had kept a permanent space in his heart, a bit like the irritating reserved signs in public car-parks, who was now an enormously successful arms dealer and had bought herself a farm where she reared pedigreed horses and rode them as a leisure activity. We laughed. He was firmly convinced it would end badly for the turncoats.
‘And yet’, Matho would say in his gravelly voice, ‘I still miss her sometimes. There was something beautiful and soft underneath the hard exterior that she wore both then and now. Sadness can sometimes last for years. I composed a symphony to bid her farewell. She came to the premiere with one of her clients from the Gulf. They left after fifteen minutes. None of the critics liked the work. I think they were right. It was too sentimental, but it sold well. Too well in Paris and not at all well elsewhere. Later I discovered that a PR firm she used was buying the CDs in bulk from all the shops here. Strange gesture, but my bank was happy.’
On one occasion, as we were sitting at his table in the Café de Flore, a former acquaintance sauntered over towards us. Matho warned me: ‘He’s completely gone over to the ultras but for some unknown reason likes to pretend he’s still on our side, wallows in rubbishy nostalgia and has nothing to say. Please don’t encourage him to stay. I can’t stand his spindly legs walking in our direction.’
As long as Matho was alive, I would come often to Paris. I was stuck in deepest Fatherland without access to a computer or cell phone when he died fifteen years ago, and as a consequence I could not attend his funeral. After that I virtually stopped coming to this city. I missed him. I missed his sharp tongue, his energy, his vicious sense of humour and his refusal to surrender to the world in which we all lived.
Once, after an overlong New Year’s Eve supper — waiting for 1976—at his lover’s apartment, where too many bottles of red wine had already been consumed before the bubbles that greeted the New Year, I thought Matho was fast asleep and not listening to our conversation, knowing that he had the capacity to drop off whenever he felt intellectually exhausted. I’d forgotten that it was foolish to put too much faith in these naps, because as soon as he disagreed, which he did on hearing me discussing the events in Lisbon with his mistress, he would immediately wake up and resume the thread of the discourse taking place around him. That same evening, Matho opened his eyes and became genuinely irate when I confessed to the assembled party that I had never read any Stendhal. To make up for the faux pas I named the French novelists I had read and enjoyed, only to be brushed aside by him.
‘No need to flaunt your ignorance, my dear. Read him and I guarantee that you will love him. I don’t know the best English translations, but in French he’s without an equal. Zola is essentially a journalist; Proust is a self-indulgent genius; Balzac is, of course, brilliantly predictable; but Stendhal, he is something else. The way he unveils a struggle of ideas and the resulting emotions is masterful. An unwitting reader not fully able to grasp the writer’s mind suddenly begins to sympathize with a character whose radical beliefs are far removed from his own. Before he knows it he’s trapped. Happiness and misery are often related to the rise and fall of revolutionary politics. Read him, Dara. This is an instruction from the Committee of Public Safety.’
Thanks to Matho, I did exactly that and have never stopped. His books became the equivalent of an indispensable lover. They accompany me on all my travels. What is so wonderful about them is the way in which he breaks the rules, political and literary. He writes at an enviable pace and explains somewhere in one of his novels that ‘I write much better as soon as I begin a sentence without knowing how I should end it.’
Once I had read him he became regular fodder in my discussions with Matho, and new questions arose. Had Stendhal ever lain with a woman outside a brothel? I did not think so. His biographers failed to convince me of the opposite, but Matho became indignant at such a thought, even though he had no proof whatsoever. I was quite pleased to discover that the great novelist shared this lack of facility with my painter friend Plato.
As I dragged my suitcase in the direction of the taxi queue, I wondered what Stendhal’s refined intellect would have made of contemporary France, where the ultras he hated so much had recaptured official politics. The unrequited love that dominated his life and fictions was twined to memories of political passions and betrayed hopes. The sight of Paris, if you don’t live there, brings back all these memories.
Stendhal and Balzac had strolled along these streets, the latter puzzled as to how there could be not a single reference to money in La Chartreuse de Parme. Before them others had walked here, too, Voltaire and Diderot, Saint Just, Robespierre, and later Blanqui and the Communards, followed by Nizan, Sartre and de Beauvoir. It was the intellectual workshop of the world. Here the individual enterprises of philosophers and revolutionaries became part of a continuum that was certainly one side of the intellectual history of France. That is what makes the city precious for outsiders and exiles, even when times are bad. Those who love history must love Paris. Wander the streets late at night in the Quarter and linger over their nameplates; it’s a refreshing antidote to prevalent fashions.
Matho is no more, but his circle of friends still exists, a valiant minority of dissident publishers, intellectuals and workers who regularly and courageously challenge the established order and its mediacracy — men and women who live in a huge bubble, who are unable to account for themselves, and do not regard this in any way as a problem, who rarely question the sociohistorical realities that have produced them, not even when those realities erupt and threaten to bury their future in the lava.