On Paris 2024, part IX
I love the fact that there is a bookstore on just about every corner of this city. During both lockdowns in France, these librairies stayed open along with the supermarkets and pharmacies. It seemed the French government considered maintaining access to novels and stories to be an essential service during the grand misère.
I hear animated voices before I open the door. Two women and a man are standing by the entrance. I’m not sure if they’re arriving or leaving. I whisper pardon and squeeze past them. One of the women says that it has created a forever stain on her soul. I have a look at some books nearby to understand what this ‘it’ is about.She says, angrily, to the man that she lost her daughter in the attack, that the young woman was out for an apéro at La Belle Équipe. That she thinks about that evening every single day.
The man is retelling the testimony of the terrorist who failed to detonate his explosive vest, and told the court he’d learned about the intended targets only two days before. He didn't kill anyone, the man says, but this is too much for the ladies to take. One of them asks why he’s so drawn to a drama that isn’t his. He protests, saying this happened to everyone, to France. That it was the worst attack in peacetime. The women grow angrier. ‘Don’t you think I know this, one says, ’I don’t need your busy nose in it!’ She’s done, both with the man and the shop, and makes a quick exit with the other woman right behind her. The bookshop exhales.
I was looking for more books about Parisian artists. ‘I'm going to be somebody,' Paula M Becker wrote to her mother while she was painting in Paris. I go to a nearby cafe to watch the women's skateboard final, it is 34 degrees in the sun and I am happy not to be outside in the audience. The Australian teenager Arisa Trew wins the women's final and is definitely someone. A French sports website is very precise when it comes to her age: she is 14 and 86 days old. They go on to explain that she is not the youngest Olympic champion in history, although she was the youngest gold medallist at the Paris Olympics. American Marjorie Gestring won the diving event in 1936, aged just 13 years and 268 days.
The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, four years before the war, are very much on my mind today against the backdrop of what is happening in the world. A friend just re-posted a tweet comparing England to what is happening in Gaza, which, having seen the Arab community murdered with no one doing anything, has emboldened far-right racists to attack any Arab or Muslim they see. It has been ten months… These are not happy times I thought when Tim Walz thanked Harris on stage at the first rally in Philadelphia for 'bringing back the joy.’
I think of the Australian passenger I saw on the metro, puzzled by the message on the loudspeaker about the presence of pickpockets on the train, to whom two French women, one of them working for the RATP, tried to explain what was going on. ‘It is a regular and normal message, but even more so now during the Olympics,’ one of them said. The woman looked at me and said: 'Where I come from, we don't have this problem.’ After she got off at her stop, the three of us talked about how it might be that there is less of it in Australia and maybe we should consider moving there, away from all this.
But for now I am here. Tomorrow and Saturday are breakdancing days and I keep checking to see if tickets have magically appeared. It could happen, yesterday in a favorite coffee shop, an acquaintance got an extra ticket for the skateboard final, which he gave to his son, along with his mobile phone holding the ticket. He felt almost naked without it, and I think of a friend who regularly goes to a screen-free resort to escape her constant scrolling. I take my mind off the phone by looking at art, and yesterday I took my teenager to the Louis Vuitton Foundation to see the Matisse exhibition. We also admired the peacock, which usually keeps an eye on café guests from a small balcony-like structure above an entrance in the Frank Gehry-designed building. And we were mesmerised by the sound of waves from the waterfall steps leading to the reflecting pool in the building's grotto. This is a summer without much swimming, but with so much else.
These texts relating to Paris 2024 are a work in progress.