Every generation thinks it discovers sex and Paris.
My 1970s discovery occurred with a Greek anti-hero in an intimate, inexpensive, crumbling Île Saint-Louis hotel. Paris clerked there. When he wasn’t dawdling with female guests, he dabbled in university courses. For a month, he gave up both and played with the city and me. That I was also a guest never entered my consciousness.
When I returned the following year, the hotel had become dust—with an excavation site greeting me at its old address. Picking up and pocketing a handful of debris, I imagined the fragments as place and time markers that were already museum-quality powder. A hole in the ground mustn’t stop literary romance’s evolution. However, for the moment, it created a sizeable lacuna in my trip plans. Before leaving home, I’d expected Paris to be a package deal. Even though Paris had wandering ways with women, I knew with the certainty of a first city and foreigner romance he’d beeline back in my direction. That was the story I was telling myself anyway, although temporarily. I now needed another place to stay, regroup, and develop a new travel scenario.
Paris, the city named for a tribe, provides rites of passage for post-tribal people.
He’d been mine.
Now alone, I went to Shakespeare’s bookstore to seek solace and inspiration in others’ stories. I was also hopeful that I could land a spot in their communal accommodation above the rows of books. The disappointment of the hotel was soon replaced by relief as Shakespeare’s was able to offer me a place to stay. It felt like a public intimacy as I’d escape with a book every time I couldn’t walk into a room and shut a door. The rest of time was spent talking. Inevitably, words led to Paris the man, especially when former hotel guests kept turning up to shop or flop. Their reminiscing sent me scurrying back to café haunts and bistros from the prior year to try to find him. Perhaps they could put me on a trail with their heady ambience of memories, scents, and literary history. The missing Paris became my personal search.
Paris had returned home from his wanderings. On this, everyone seemed to agree. He’d left few traces except rumours and jilted girls. He’d roomed at the dismantled hotel, so his lodgings could provide no clues.
I’d never asked Paris realistic questions such as whether he had a wife and children, ensconced in his island hometown. He was barely out of his teens. My mental set lacked feminine guile such as unplanned pregnancies, a shotgun wedding, or sleuthing for Paris’s background. Besides, a stroll down marital lane was not in the offing. Ours was a literary romance, though I wasn’t even up-to-date on his mythic namesake. That he was Trojan was irrelevant. That his name’s etymology didn’t pertain to the city’s tribe, so what? Why be concerned about his past and future? The grandest city in the world dazzled us and begged us to be explored. The city of lights took precedence as god, backdrop, and narrative. We were another chapter in the storied city’s worshippers and lovers. That was heady and plenty.
Paris provides romance and elegance as a frame.
We’d spend hours on the Seine’s bridges and quays. Pre-dawn, sunrise, sunsets and everything in between created a gallery of Seine paintings we never tired of wandering. We meandered in the Marais before gentrification reigned. Flea markets, flower stalls, and vegetable and fruit stands were our outdoor homes, sticking mostly to food kiosks, immigrant restaurants, and liquid diets in cafés for meagre sustenance. Yet, we never felt impoverished or deprived. The city’s history, literature, and charms were our wealth—creative and authentic. We walked in the tracks of Baudelaire, Hemingway, Baldwin, Miller, and Bogie.
We walked, and then wandered some more. Paused in doorways to kiss and fondle. Stopped in parks and gardens for more. Our rambles were one long foreplay as we seduced each other, and the city ravished us both. Once in a while, we returned to the hotel and went to bed. After a week, I moved into Paris’s room. With the cost savings, we added some culinary treats to our pastimes. When Paris worked the desk, I slept. During his slowest shift hours, he napped in fits and starts with his head on a table. We were young. We needed dreams more than sleep. Paris always promised waking dreams.
Alone, still at Shakespeare’s, I considered the rumours: Paris’s ailing mother had called for his return. His wife was pregnant again. He’d been betrothed as a child and had to marry. He needed to settle his dead father’s affairs, manage a family vineyard or olive trees. Paris had to flee the vengeful brother of one of his old conquests. He ran from debt.
There were enough stories, scripts to write a soap opera. Most of them seemed false or partial. Still, they prompted thoughts about the personality of Paris. A dark spot or a secret. He’d slept with many women and confided in none. He was a loner when it came to male friends. Paris wasn’t suited to fixed states and facts. He flowed like the river we’d shared. He was creation incarnate. It was what attracted me to him.
The claim to Parisian sexual discovery underlines the emancipation from conventions and repression.
With Paris’s departure motive and destination uncertain, I could only choose my own path. Keep reading at Shakespeare’s. Take up with one of the men who eyed me there or with strangers in the streets. Forge a new, different relationship with the city. Forget the missing Paris, and resume my own wanderings elsewhere. Follow Paris to Greece, if that’s indeed where he went.
Pursuing him could scarcely be called a decision; it was more like an obsession. But to trail him where? Greece was too large and spread out to islands beyond. My search needed an itinerary, preferably a map. Among the talkers, I learned Paris had sold his books before leaving. This sounded plausible, Paris-like, in a way other rumours hadn’t been.
A used bookstore near the old hotel site was my first choice. The cashier, a film-noir understudy, remembered being temporarily blinded by the glorious Greek man who’d returned a few times with shopping bags and backpacks filled with books. She recalled the tender strokes of long, shapely fingers as he reverently handed over each title, one by one, as if it were a solid piece of his Parisian experience. Clearly, he needed money for some desperate reason, she said, falling into her best role. Otherwise, he’d never have amputated his body like that.
Her hyperbole aside—though her imagination had clearly been smitten—I began to look through the shop jumble. While alone in Paris’s room, I’d browsed his shelves and piles of books. Some volumes were well worn and I felt certain I’d identify them from memories of his touch. His sweat, his oily fingers, a drift of cologne—a scent would surely reveal his paper-retained presence too. While searching, I wore the hotel dust remains in a royal purple, satin, drawstring bag for luck.
For two days, I stroked book covers and smelled books before looking at the colour, title, or jacket. For that interval, Paris the man became books. It was as if my random searches were a rehearsal for what would follow: a train ride, arrival in Greece without a shared language, local trips, journeys, and an ending still in stages of composition. Time in Shakespeare’s also gave me another prolonged period on the inside of the city, with the writers and artists who’d lived and loved in Paris—their responses to the city were all around the shop in texts and prints. I felt their presence too, as Paris and I assumed a place among them as one more city story. Should that be its conclusion or would I follow the route of Paris as a moveable feast and continue a sequel?
There is a hypnotic predictability to the theme.
Hanging on in the used bookstore, they reinforced an answer to continue. Late into the second day, I picked up one more book, and an envelope fell out. Paris’s name was on it with the hotel address. The envelope had probably served as a bookmark. I slipped it back into the page where my finger had temporarily replaced it and quickly bought the book.
Running to the first café I could find with sufficient reading light, I sat down, ordered a glass of red wine, and began to examine the book. It was Greek mythology. Paris had been browsing his own myth: his mother Hecuba’s burning torch dream, Oenone—his first and fatal love, the Judgment of Paris contest among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, the golden apple of discord, falling for the promise of beauty, the abduction of Helen, the Trojan War, and fatal jealousy. Prophecy, escaping death, beauty, love, war, destiny, suspicion, unavoidable death were all in the narratives.
Was Paris trying to decide how much of his self-definition was the city Paris? Or measuring his own life against the myth? Was he turning to it like the cue cards of an actor? Looking for inspiration and direction at a stuck-in-life moment? Absorbed in imaginings and questions, I nearly forgot the envelope. The letter was gone, but there was a legible postmark and a return address. It was dated just a month ago, so I hadn’t missed him or the hotel by as long as I had thought. The last name wasn’t his. It was preceded just by initials, so I couldn’t tell the sex of the sender. The return address was in Sitia, Crete.
Without thinking or recalling how I got there, I found myself at Gare du Nord—buying a train ticket for the next Athens train. I’d just missed the midnight departure. Would I have left without even retrieving luggage? Probably. I was on automatic mode and flowed in a frenzy of motion. If I returned to the mythology book and browsed further, there might be a myth to explain me. I didn’t look, just bought my ticket and moved forward. There were no seat reservations left for the three-day trip, but I purchased a ticket anyway and ploughed on.
The floor of a train is hard. I received every bump and jolt of the journey like a personal message to my body. It’s travel’s essence—the body exposed in mostly random and uncontrolled ways to sensation and experience. No gloss, no rules, no survival odds, no tourist concessions. I didn’t sleep. Nor did I eat much, since I’d brought little. I had expected dining cars and tables with a view.
I watched legs and packages and passenger faces. Some were students on holidays. Others were cutouts from old photographic albums and yellowed newspaper clippings. People with handkerchiefs and dazed eyes that stared without seeing. Guest workers. Migrants. Pilgrims. Refugees. Sometimes customs officers came on board. They were rough with the non-students, opened suitcases at random, and spilt out the contents. Souvenir Eiffel Towers toppled onto the floor. I touched mine, still in its satin bag, hidden away inside my money belt. It never occurred to me that a searching officer would think first of drugs. I continued, impervious to danger or learning from others’ experiences.
By what was then still Yugoslavia, desperation for water and sleep set in. At a stop of indeterminate length, I walked alongside toward the front of the train and approached a well-dressed, ash-haired man with courtly bearing. Can one hitch to first class? He had a small compartment and let me come in. Was I trading favours? The body would just have to accept any new jolts. At least, I had a corner on a carpet and a kind of pillow. He ordered food for me. I think he bribed the conductor and the waiter instead of tipping. How I picked him out and why he befriended me, I’ll never know. Maybe Greek gods do come to earth disguised as men? We could only speak in expressions and body language. The rest was cinema slang and gestures. He showed me family photographs and instructed in the language of relationships before departing in Salonika.
By then, it didn’t matter if I had a protector or not. There were enough seats for everyone. Whoever remained had grown gregarious and convivial. Even dozers talked in their sleep. We all spoke at once in whatever languages we knew. Everyone seemed delighted with the linguistic stew that resulted. All seemed satisfied and nourished.
Greece arrives as light. Not the largely manmade lights of Paris, but as something that blares into sight, reigns autocratically, and has powers to bestow and take life. It suffuses everything. Colours ripen like grapes, turn into a range of gradations, deepening until they become essence and intensity like a perfect purple fruit popped into the mouth.
The senses follow a similar route. Philosophy lurked somewhere too, but not near me. I was the passionate side of Greece. On the floor, in the cabin, at a window seat, did I ever think about what I was expecting to find? Paris. But then what? It wasn’t romantic or erotic love propelling me forward. It was the partnership with the city Paris, the shared creation I could evoke and recreate from memory, but not continue alone. I wanted that evolution to continue, so I had to find him.
Paris supports liberties and provides communal artistic and expatriate ancestors to help with reconciling inner and outer life.
Athens was a blur. I left as quickly as possible before it came into focus. I tripped like obligation around the Acropolis and came back at night to see its sepulchral form in moonlight. This was just a fragmentary Athens poem among a bustling, more modern, and prosaic place. There was a city of misspelt English signs and tourist hawkers. Scented meat of street stands made me ravenous with a new form of appetite that wasn’t based on hunger and might never be satisfied. Most of my time was spent on a tiny balcony outside my room. The tassel-haired Aussie next door told me travel tales. He and his mates kept sleeping through their morning transfer to Istanbul. They outlasted me. I was ferry-bound on an infallible internal alarm clock.
Piraeus: The harbour was my only destination—a jumping-off point for the next. How I found the ticket office, the bus ride, and the waiting time continued the Athens blur. All sensory input was reserved for the Sitia push and news of Paris. I napped and dreamed on deck where retsina and ouzo bottles freely roamed among strangers and peers. The sea was wine-dark. Who could improve on that?
Sitia: A fellow ferry traveller, a returning local, guided me to a pension in a garden. Its proprietor was maternal and sensed my needs even if I thought I was just a bee in her garden stealing nectar. She gave me fruit and morning embraces. Eternity in a day. I found Paris’s correspondent quickly in a languid town. He was male and a friend. He advised me to slow my pace and quit the midday sun even before our formal introductions. All the Greeks were seeing things in me I couldn’t see.
“Iraklion—at the archaeological sites. Paris is there.”
More transport to another mythical city in fragments. Knossos. The Minotaur. A labyrinth. We were changing, fusing, rewriting myths. Around me, from cafés, martial music drifted out to the streets. If I paused to glance at a screen, there were medal-heavy generals waving corpulent arms and shouting bellicose slogans. I heard and saw the changing country tempo, but didn’t think about its meaning. Finally, I reached the place of Paris.
Half blinded by sunlight, I could pick out a slender, muscular figure, bronze and golden from the sun, moving like glittering metal among the ropes and scaffolding of the excavation site. It was off limits to me. I looked for a tent, tarp, or awning. Any shade where I could wait. There was none nearby. My head swirled and his figure turned to full armour. I saw chariots too before I fell. I came to in his arms.
He was mumbling in Greek, switched to French, and finally English.
“Chérie, what are you doing here?”
“I brought your book. My middle name is Helen. Is that enough?”
“Your name? We could rewrite a myth.”
“Is the beauty contest over yet?”
“Your inner loveliness is without compare.”
“Let’s go back to Paris.”
“I’m being called up. Maybe war with the Turks.”
“I’ll wait. We’ll visit Troy together.”
“That’s Anatolia, Turkey.”
“We’ll find ways.”
“And university study? Politics, frontiers, families will follow and complicate us now—form triangles.”
“It’s not like you to doubt.”
“I’ve come home.”
I placed his hand over my money belt that sheltered the hotel dust. He couldn’t recognise it yet, but I was certain it would sprout into something new for us both.
