Montmartre

Perhaps it's the memory I return to the most. I'm 16 years old, the summer heat is stifling – it's 2003, a year of record heat over much of the region. The elderly are dying, forests are on fire. And yet here, above Paris on the heights of Montmartre, on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, I can breathe, and a gentle breeze is blowing over a cityscape bristling with steeples and chimneys, a light smell of jasmine on the wind. The sun is slowly setting over the Champs-Élysées, guitarists play, couples hold each other, and I'm away from home, with the money I've squirreled away from summer farm jobs, and I read the line from Italo Calvino that makes me gasp:

“An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects – the oracle replied – has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.”

The bells clang as the sun disappears, a collective sigh, and the awkward American teenage boy knows he will be thinking of this forever.

The name “Montmartre” had always held some magic for me. As a young child, I saw reproduced images of the paintings of Maurice Utrillo, showing the haunted-looking streets of the neighborhood, in a light that could be either dusk or dawn. And not long after, I remember being at some pâtisserie in some American city – and seeing an elegant-looking pastry called a Montmartre, next to the little Sachertortes and Réligieuses and other things that I'd never heard of.

The name retained its cachet, something about its association with various -isms of the artistic and philosophical worlds, even in the way some kind of vague notion of Parisian bohemianism was presented to us in the moronic textbook sidebars in high school French class (you know the kind – “C'est Patrick. Il est un élève. Il aime aller au café”).

But it wasn't until I climbed those steps, saw the city laid out before me, and just as important, sat down with the book that would probably inform my life and thinking more than any other, that the name truly meant something to me.

So it was preserved in amber for me for so many years, another sepia-toned memory of another place, another time.

I come up the stairs at the Pigalle station in October 2018, into a light rain after a long journey.

Part of me was somehow expecting the worst, and the din of voices of 20 year olds from my homeland wasn't helping. Nor was the Steak 'n Shake that had popped up on the Boulevard de Clichy. Nor was the self-conscious supposed naughtiness of Pigalle, nor the crowds of mouthbreather tourists coming out of the Moulin Rouge, expecting whatever ooh-la-la bullshit the came to Paris for.

I walked around town all of the next couple of days. A lovely meal of rabbit in mustard sauce and escargots à la gascogne, balanced with the motherfucker who caught my jeans on a metal bar, ripping the knee open. Curling up with a book at Shakespeare & Co., knowing full well that James Joyce almost certainly had sat there, balanced out with the braying crowds at the Musée d'Orsay of what I termed the 5Ms (that's Minnesotan Moms on a Mission for Monet and Merlot). The delight in the fact that the Panthéon was carefully restoring extensive murals of French victories over Moors and in the Crusades (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of casual racism and Islamophobia) and venerating the body of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of sexual deviants with grand and unworkable theories of human nature who wrote like whiny high school sophomores).

And at the end of the day, I walked back to the top of Montmartre.

I followed each street up, up, up, the chill of the fall evening setting in between the fairy-lit streets, the air of the neighborhood taking on that of a street carnival more and more. Groups of unbelievably attractive young people sitting on the steps drinking wine, a brass band, all in fezzes, playing a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's “Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus” (which Bangkokians may know as one of my 2:00 a.m. shitfaced-at-a-Japanese-karaoke-bar standards). And lastly, at the very crown of the hill, pop-up stands selling wine and regional foods, singers and guitarists, a beardy hypeman in a striped Breton shirt (Mr. Too Damn French over here) getting in some crowdwork.

What shocked me the most was that these didn't seem to be tourists. None of the conversation was in English. This wasn't the image of the city, it was the city itself.

The next day, I climbed the steps again, to say my goodbye to the place. It was a different Montmartre, the Montmartre of quiet, swept streets and the smell of morning baguettes, the Velvet Underground's “Sunday Morning” drifting from a cafe. On the steps made famous by Brassaï's photos, the assorted detritus of the previous night littered the stairs, broken glasses and wine bottles, a few revelers still up, a XXXtentacion (of all people) song playing from an open window, disembodied voices.

That week, Paris had decided it was in mourning for Charles Aznavour, the father of French chanson, and a singer whom I never quite understood the appeal of. But his 1965 hit about life in Montmartre, “La Bohème” was a hit because the bohemia he sang about was the nostalgic one everyone had thought/wished they had had, once, even if the ending line was a bit of a screw-you.

La bohème, la bohème
Ça ne veut plus rien dire du tout

“It means nothing at all,” he sings, the closer to line after simpering line about lilacs and café au lait.

I don't think anyone can say much of anything new about Paris. It's like New York. Most of the time someone tries, it comes across like a voiceover from Gossip Girl.

My feelings are the same, as rapturous as they might be.

The unfailingly arrogant and tiresome Ernest Hemingway famously called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it has always struck me more as a Xanadu, a place always beyond the horizon for us homely, try-hard self-loathing Americans.

And yet up on the now-deserted steps in the morning sunlight, I didn't want to leave. Sighing, I walked back down the hill, gathered my bags, and took the Métro to the Gare du Nord, looked at my ticket. Bruxelles-Midi. A new country. I took my seat and set off north.