The job of the European weatherman (or -woman) seems to be pretty low on the CNN totem pole. They keep changing. One day it is a blow-dried midwesterner; the next a corn-fed, nicely Jane Pauleyish woman; the next a portly black guy. Each one points in turn to the big map of Europe, with the swirling satellite photo superimposed, and then, with the limitless cheeriness of an American announcer, calls out the temperature and tomorrow’s forecast for every site of the more intolerable tragedies of the twentieth century.
“If you’re headed to Warsaw tonight, you may just want to pack that extra sweater, but if business is pulling you over on that quick trip to St. Petersburg”—quick, impish, professional wink—“you’d better make sure that you’ve got the overcoat. Looking at snow there all night long.
“We’re looking at sunny weather throughout Italy, from Rome right up to Venice. Looks like another mild night in France, though of course there’ll be snow in the mountains around Savoy. In the Basque country, some really chilly temperatures. Nice skiing, though. More mild weather in Prague and Budapest, though looking up at Vienna…” All the old capitals of Old Europe, the sites of the ghettoes and the massacres and the opera houses, the border with Spain where they turned the refugees away and Walter Benjamin died in despair, all treated in the spirit, with the same sound, that I can recall from every night in my childhood in West Philadelphia, when “Dr.” Somebody or other—a “certified meteorologist”—gave the weather for the tristate area and threw in the highs and lows in Atlantic City “for all of you heading for the shore.”
We have won as large a victory as any country has ever won—no empire has ever stood in so much power, cultural, political, economic, military—and all we can do is smile and say that you might want to pack a sweater for the imperial parade.
When the cable television man came to hook us up on the first morning of the general strike, you could hear the demonstrators out on the boulevard, singing and marching. But the bland emissary from the age of global information worked on, stringing the wire and hooking up the decoder boxes. He finally handed us three different remotes and then ran through the thirty-odd channels like a priest reciting the catechism. “Here is CNN, news in America. Here is MTV. Here is French MTV,” the cable man explained. “Here is Euronews, in English. Here is Euro-sport.” A 49ers-Dolphins game was in progress. There it was, truly, the same familiar ribbon of information and entertainment that girdles the world now—literally (really, truly literally) encircling the atmosphere, electric rain. All you have to do is hold out a hand to catch it.
Luke, at least, has found a home, shelter from the electronic rain and global weather. He lives in the Luxembourg Gardens. We go there nearly every day, even in the chill November days among the fallen leaves. The design of the gardens is nearly perfect for a small child. There is a playground; there is a puppet theater, where he is too small to go yet, but outside the puppet theater there is a woman selling balloons, and every morning he points to his wrist and says his all-purpose word, bu-bel, which means balloon, ball, whatever it is meant to mean. But then, when we get to the gardens and the po-faced woman goes to tie the balloon to his wrist, he leaps back with fear and demands to have it taken off again. Approach and avoidance with older women.
He rides the carousel, the fallen leaves piled neatly all around it, and though bent-up it is a beauty. The animals are chipped, the paint is peeling, the giraffe and elephant are missing hooves and tusks, and the carousel is musicless and graceless. The older children ride the outside horses. A God-only-knows-how-old carousel motor complains and heaves and wheezes and finally picks up enough momentum to turn the platform around, while the carousel attendant hands a baton to each of the older children riding the outside horses. Then he unhooks a pear-shaped wooden egg from the roof of his little station, at the edge of the turning platform, and slips little metal rings with leather tags attached into the eggs. As the children race around, the little rings drop one after another into the egg and dangle from its base, the small leather tags acting as a kind of target, a sighting mechanism so that the children can see the rings. The older children try to catch the rings with the sticks.
It looks tricky; it looks hard. The kids have to hold the weather-beaten sticks up just so; there’s just one angle, one way to do it. As the carousel picks up speed, it gets going whirring fast and the hand-eye, or rather hand-eye-painted horse, coordination you need looks terrifyingly accomplished. To make things even harder, if two children are mounted one right behind the other, and the first child lances the ring, it means that the next ring, slipping down, only arrives at the base of the wooden egg as the next child arrives, making it just about impossible to aim. If the first child just knocks the ring, on the other hand, the ring starts trembling widely enough to make a good grab impossible. It is a tough game, and what makes it odder is that there is no reward for doing well at it. I have read about this game all my life: going for the Big Brass Ring! It’s an American metaphor. But here there are little tin rings, and no reward for getting them except the satisfaction of having done it. You don’t even get to keep the tin rings for a moment of triumph—Look, Mama!—to show the cluttered stick, rings on it like plums on the branch of a plum tree. The keeper takes back the batons before the carousel has even stopped.
It is hard for me to imagine Luke ever doing this: sitting up there, skewering his rings. For the moment, for a long moment, we sit together in the little chariots and just spin. He keeps his eyes locked on the big kids with the sticks, who come under the heading of Everything He Desires: a stick, a task, a seat on the outside horse. (For me, the sticks and rings game on the carousel looks more like a symbolic pageant. A Writer’s Life: hard job, done intently, for no reason. Cioran used to walk in these gardens. I wonder if he watched this.) The reward for the Parisian children is, perhaps, the simple continuity, the reality that the spinning will never get a prize, but that it will also never stop.
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn’t be carousels if it weren’t so.
On nice days, when we don’t have time to go all the way to the gardens, Luke and I go to the musical horse outside the Oiseau de Paradis (“Bird of Paradise”), a toy store on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and he solemnly rides up and down on it while it plays “Camptown Races.” On rainy days, we go to Deyrolle on the rue du Bac. It is an extraordinary place. It is on the second floor—almost all of the second story—of one of the old hotels particuliers. It is, I suppose, a taxidermists’ supply house and a supplier too of education charts. But it is also one of the great surrealist sites of Paris. Downstairs, at street level, there is the old-fashioned kind of come-hither wraparound window entrance, so that you enter a deep-set door between two vitrines, an architecture that must have been familiar once in Paris—it was the architecture of every South Street shoe store in my childhood—though it is fairly rare now. (Mostly the windows are one sheet of plate glass, with a kind of false front showing the goods and the store behind.) But here you walk past a “seasonal” window, filled with taxidermized animals and bare minimum decor: artificial fallen leaves for autumn, cotton ball “snow” for winter, a few silk flowers for spring. Sometimes the animals inside the windows change too—an ancient, yellowing polar bear right now represents the Spirit of Christmas—but mostly it is the same bunch all year: a fox, a raccoon, a moose. (The polar bear must have been brought down on the same expedition that is celebrated in the window of a lead soldier store on the rue des Ciseaux, which shows an otherwise unrecorded late-nineteenth-century French expedition to the North Pole, with the tricolor hanging over an igloo and reindeer entrecote in a chef’s sauteuse.)