Four bags.
Fair hair.
Frown-riddled features …
she was there throwing away some occasional ‘BONJOUR’s without any ounce of joy. My Parisian pavements looked heavy, her slippers filthy, her socks like a bunch of 6x4 shift bed-renters inside a 10m2 chamber arrested by the harshness of mankind, pushed into a permanent flee-full posture. I looked up.
Days… weeks or lives had passed by after another 21st of April* … The French flag was hanging down from a window above some supermarket, like a worn out tablecloth. I closed my eyes thinking “Dolce Vita” was just a few streets away.
I kept walking back and forth every day trying to hold myself inside an imaginary cocoon, making myself ‘unreachable’ to the surrounding rumblings. She and I were merely a chunk of a sidewalk, flat and faceless who needed no greetings. But that day, her “Bonsoir” stopped me, made me imagine her with a crescent moon on her face. I went on a trip of a full 360° pulling down those invisible walls outside which I had learnt to keep the world away from myself. I caught him, in a glimpse, sitting by her ‘pillow’ bag. “Lovers”-- nothing else came to my mind. Carax had emerged inside my head and my heart was pulling my legs towards the Pont-Neuf.
I was not looking for any other ‘lovers’ there. My eyes were begging me to teleport those two to the bridge, watch them dance along with Binoche and Levant-- imagine the firework. But Paris felt like a pyre to me -- physically, psychologically, politically… another 5th of May was approaching. Shadows, with a faint fragrance of a déjà vu, were marching right towards our head, threatening to haunt down our leftover hopes till its ashes.
This time, the day of their new Lord was going to be the 7th. I tried to remember Juliette Binoche’s soothing smile. She could have been my Buddha. But streams kept flowing, of tremors and perspiration, wiping away every probable picture of peace. I stood there facing the apocalyptic wind blowing over my face. I looked away. I had to. A sailboat somewhere… ?
An illusion, my mirage -- deep and dark reminding the blue of an ocean-- stood right in front of me. A rectangular sea bearing a white X over it… as if somebody was teasing me. I belonged to that endangered chromosome type. I watched a few waves of vehicles passing by, felt schizophrenic as images of a country exclusively filled with XYs ran over me... I took a few reluctant steps then ran across the street and hailed inside as if I had no other option.
Some halted, a bit melted, hormone-loaded - overall malted, people looked high at the Highlander. High dreams, high hopes, the hollowness of life overflooded by the city lights… there, he starts with his high deep voice calling Dylan, from the desert of Algeria, among those deserted hearts - “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”!
People drink his words. A pint tastes so meaningful with his voice. Some stare, in oblivion, at the television screen. Standing right underneath, he continues: “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain… I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend but I always thought that I’d see you again…” Loners pour their blood into their glasses and try to trade it for the shadows of their city of light. Couples avoid each-other’s eyes. It’s a silver city! You better not care about who is being a part of whose sadistic experiments. He throws hopes, hurls you down, tells tales about singers and their ups and downs.
“Now singing a sad song by Paul Simon. Sad probably as he was divorcing at that time…” Soothingly he shoots an arrow with “Graceland”. We follow him down the Mississippi River “through the cradle of the civil war”. His guitar strokes make your pain vibrant. The silvery bland life leaves the flat screen, gets down to you, your veins dance as your suppressed torment finds its way up to the surface when you hear his “she comes back to tell me she’s gone”... For a moment, the callous cold metro turns into a graceful, soulful, tearful city.
Happy Hour - I had to read the card on my table. “Drinks are soft?!” I was ready to laugh. I left the pub, crossed the bridge with a lingering hope-beat in a soft corner of my heart to see my ‘Lovers’ of Rue Du Louvre again.
Unconsolable... I kept rambling, inside my head, trying to forget the taste of the arid air on my skin. Peeping through the layers of my window veils, I could only feel the stagnant blue outside. It altered my purple sores into unfailingly alluring Kieslowskian glimmerings making me follow the colours of my bruises.
I, travelled back... to the Gregorian 2002, to its 21st of April… and found myself gazing at a marbellous monument with a Juliette smile. It was inevitable… for me, not to think of her ‘Blue’ smile whenever I was bound to watch an ongoing gambling without anything left to lose. Their 5th of May was merely a few days away. Erected by the Town Council in memory of Aliens who had honoured the locals by landing their space-ship on that spot -- the cenotaph had the warmth and the colour of red wine somewhere near Dune du Pilat.
Things... had a different aura this time… more appealing, less squamous - as glamorous as Gong Li in her Mao-cut dresses. I remember, Mao’s mark looked so gorgeous, incomparably enticing and so genuinely delicate on Gong Li that anyone would easily pass over the carnages that had grown out of the gun barrel story.
The entire nation had become like those kettle-chambers where even the walls would sweat and shiver. Still, people kept looking up, naively asking their stars on the Eiffel Tower to fulfill their dreams or rather help them get rid of their nightmares. Under the halo casted from that unreachable above, everyone seemed absolutely certain that they had found the real face of his or her enemy. The quagmires -- very few seemed to care -- appeared wearing silky sleeky harmless faces with a soft pastel complexion of a womb.
It was a season of John Hamons’ in my nearabouts, blooming here and there, rootlessly, on your side-walls, in a perfect posture of a looser, with a toothless smile. At a far end of my sky, the Eiffel Tower stood vertiginously high and lustrous, throwing twinkling hopes at the world altering its earthly realities into a shame or a sin. I felt weary watching the same sole view offered through my window screen. It was gradually making me shortsighted. I fled down, from my 7th floor shelf, to the street where I had seen the four bagged fair haired woman and her lover. They were not there. It had been days. Curiously, their absence was slowly giving me strange colours. I kept wandering soullessly, with a picture of those two in my head.
The double-faced pocket mirrors are so temptingly dressed up along the Seine with Monet’s ‘Sunrise’. A desire, intempestiv, rises surprisingly from somewhere inside me. I buy one. Imagine Monet’s sun illuminating my existence. I saw myself facing a virtual glass holding Monet-ful world in my hand… right/left? The sacredness of one hemisphere had gone since accidents had forced me to become ambivalent. I went around, towards the Pont-Neuf, nonchalantly taking the mirror out to the world. I did have a pang when I thought of the reflection… It didn’t matter. I tried to gain some courage. It was better to see some vividness before looking at your colourless face – paler than a dried radish. With that radish colour my day dreaming faded away. I greeted the shop tenant with a smile and let myself flow with the river.
My Rue du Louvre became a sand-castle through which I had to struggle to reach any Parisian cellar and find refuge inside a glass of red wine.
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