Paris not through rose-colored glasses

Paris, not New York, was my preferred place of exile.

On September 22, 1972,  when it dawned on me that going home to the Philippines would be out of the question for many years, I instinctively thought of heading straight for Paris. For me and the rebels of the day and the generations before us, the French capital was indisputably the most romantic city on earth.

That fateful night, I was downing margaritas and piña coladas with my friend Daky Fonacier in one of those Geneva watering holes with a grand view of the Jet d’Eau along Lac Leman. Old friends from the Republic of  Diliman, we had chanced upon each other over lunch earlier in the day, each doing time with some ponderous and extended conference or another that’s the reason for the lovely Swiss city’s very existence.

Breaking news on television interrupted our drunken banter. It took sometime to get a sense of what the muted French announcer was blabbering about: that Ferdinand Marcos had imposed martial law in Manila and rounded up his enemies.

Why Paris? But really, why not Paris?

I guess it was my American-conditioned reflex acting up at a crucial turn in my wild and impressionable youth.  My education and upbringing held up Paris, not London or New York, as the destination of choice for people running away from the law or dodging some unspeakable fate.

From as far back as the 18th century with Jefferson and Franklin, and especially in the decadent 1920s and 1930s, America’s intellectuals and artists regarded Paris as the very fountainhead of freedom and enlightenment. How could a Filipino of my generation not be contaminated by this Yankee adoration of  Paris and everything French? Never mind if we did not speak the language of Voltaire and brazenly depended on English translations and sub-titles to indulge our me-too francophilia.

In college, I read American authors hopelessly enamored with Paris: Hemingway, Fitzgerald and a bit of Stein and Baldwin. Hollywood introduced me to Chevalier, Bardot, Montand and Signoret. Picasso’s cubist art and the free-spirited Impressionists turned me on. So did Rodin’s heroic bronze sculpture. Piaf’s and Brel’s haunting ballads of lost loves and broken dreams I couldn’t tune out of my mind.

And how could I fail to hero worship Napoleon and not be reduced to awe and intimidation by Louis XIV?

To clinch all arguments, there was the then-raging abomination of  the war in Vietnam. There was the stirring call to arms of  Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  America was the world’s No. 1 enemy. Everybody hated Nixon.

In contrast, France stood tall as the good and forgiven imperialist power. It took up the cudgels for Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, ironically its irreconcilable colony lost not too long ago at Dienbienphu. De Gaulle tweaked and bullied American presidents.

 It was not only civilized for revolutionaries to seek refuge in Paris, it was the most  politically correct thing to do. If I was to cool my heels waiting for Marcos to croak or hang in the gallows, whichever came first, I’d rather spend long days brooding along the Seine of poetry and song, not the dreary Hudson River of crumbling waterfronts on one side and the New Jersey wastelands on the other.

Like many francophiles, I thought of America as one vast cultural Sahara Desert, and  New York, well, the world capital of greed, excess, and desperation. The city was synonymous with muggings in broad daylight, slums beyond Dickensian horror, and paranoid citizens barricaded behind iron doors and double locks.

I would shortly be disabused of my hand-me-down worship of Paris, the one I was primed to always view through rose-colored glasses. I had to swallow my pride and throw myself to the tender mercies of  American friends to save myself from the wrath of Marcos, LBJ’s right hand in Asia.  In New York, contrary to my arrogant putdowns,  I was to spend the best and most creative 17 years of my life.

Arriving on the overnight Geneva train into Gare de Lyon on a gray and cold November morning, I was jolted by a grim and cheerless city that denied me the warm welcome with open arms I expected as a matter of right.

My travel companions from the church-sponsored conference just ended included a foxy Afro-American lady from California,  a roly-poly white feminist from North Carolina, and an angry Chicano alpha- male activist from East Los Angeles.

Getting to the Latin Quarter on the Metro meant going up and down steep staircases and getting lost in dark labyrinthine tunnels.

The cheap student hostel we found was like a pigsty scrubbed antiseptic-clean each morning by tough-talking street sweepers, the stench of Lysol wafting in the air all day and night. The loo or what the Brits call W.C. (Water Closet) you had to avail of  before the hordes despoiled it at daybreak or hold your nose long after you’d discharged your load of toxic carbon dioxide.

Washing up you needed to queue down the frigid-cold hallway. Tokens or coins were needed to operate the shower. Two or three were needed to finish your bath; having only one meant the water running out with soap suds all over your dripping-wet body and getting into your eyes.

This was in 1972 when the pre-modern French phone system harked back to the Vichy regime of World War II. Again, tokens were required, but phone tokens came in different sizes and couldn’t be used in every pay phone. It was like playing Russian roulette just to make a simple call. But the ordeal came down to the basic test of getting a dial tone. In disgust, you often you came close to ripping the phone off the wall.     

We were an odd-foursome on a tight budget, first-timers in a city where Americans brought up as rugged individuals had to practice security in numbers. We walked till our feet got sore, forever crossing the Seine from the Right to the Left Bank and back again.

 Paris was (is) a city of bridges, some more ornate and  monumental than others. If you stayed close to the river that sinuously cut the city into two halves, the Paris you saw — little green book stalls, baroque and Belle Epoque architecture on all sides, legions of lovers engaged in timeless rituals of desire — could not but be convinced  that you’ve come upon paradise on earth, bar none.

This despite the fact that in the 1970s and as late as the early 1990s, century-old layers of grime and pollution shrouded La Ville Lumiere, or the city of gaslight and assignations, with a gray patina of  seedy and funereal decay. 

Only after years of restoration and billions of francs in budgetary outlays would the gleaming marble or steel lacework of the Opera, Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower reveal the Paris of  beauty and elegance which Verdi so achingly immortalized in La Traviata

Still, the air of terminal decline evoking France’s fall from power and grace after the two world wars hung over the place that blustery and unmemorable autumn. The season’s movie sensation was Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, a dark tale of suicide and anonymous sex played to morbid perfection by a shabby, corpulent and middle-aged Brando.

On our last day before heading back to Geneva and on to New York, we were running near-empty or low on cash as we trudged along the Champs Elysee to case the chi-chi shop-windows and Michelin three-star restaurants we couldn’t afford.

Suddenly came our Eureka moment: a small signage outside a palatial turn-of-the-century mall that meant there was a MacDonald’s buried somewhere deep inside the building.

For months, we’d read in the papers of the French indignantly refusing to allow yet another American barbarism, this time culinary, to pollute sublime French culture. Could this mean the proud French had just lost another battle to foreign invaders?

We were soon to find out. Pulling together our remaining francs down to the  last coin, we could afford and partake of two Big Macs split four ways plus Cokes and fries to drown our sorrows. It was our timely American revenge on La Cuisine Francaise we neither had the conformist tastebuds or deep pockets for

Giving my toast to Paris, I had to grudgingly concede that it couldn’t possibly be my home  in exile. I couldn’t possibly belong where Americans are despised and Filipinos are regarded as second-class Americans or, worse, mere colonial appendages. Perhaps, if  I were Vietnamese and spoke at least pidgin French to fend off  routine rudeness and prejudice on the streets, it would be another story.

But it wasn’t to be goodbye forever to Paris.  I was to keep coming back as a besotted journalist in the years ahead, each time more unconditionally in love with the city that had first repulsed me as a caricature of mighty empire laid low by  arrogance born out of shame and defeat.

France, I kept being reminded, defaulted on honor, surrendered to the Nazis and passed off cowardice for resistance at the expense of  the few and silent freedom-fighters. It was called “The Sorrow and the Pity” of a great nation stripped of  its  moral compass and living off a dubious past.

I am no expert on France. But the little I have learned about life I have somehow imbibed, best of all, from endless walks through the streets of Paris over many private visits of  significance only to me and nobody else.

There was one cathartic afternoon I spent in Pere Lachaise cemetery, the city of the French dead and lonely exiles like Chopin, Wilde, and the divine Isadora Duncan who chose to rest in peace on French soil. The vast silence and the rows of tombs with forgotten names could not but summon humility from the proudest hearts. You realize that, yes, your time, too, will come and you will disappear into the void. Each year you are given is but a prelude to the nothingness at the end of the road. 

But the gift of growing older is to develop a forgiving heart. You learn to overlook the little betrayals of youth and, in due time, the grand illusions of the powerful who also must face the awful truth that they can’t forever hold off decrepitude and dying. The fate of humanity is one and indivisible. Everybody and everything turns to dust whence we all come.

Ah, the French have known magnificence and humble pie in equal measure. But they’ve come back over and over again, not always wiser but more defiantly French than ever. They’ve turned the cliche  “been-there-done-that” into a code of survival  regardless of whatever comes next.

Why worry? Sit down and have coffee, watch the world go by. Smell the flowers. Think of old loves at their sweetest. Cheer yourself up, well, with the dream that you will again walk along the Seine and have high tea and macaroons at Laduree.

 If you’re caught in war and the bombs fall and the bullets whizz by, duck or run for cover, if you can. But if you’re hit, don’t cry and don’t curse your fate. It won’t make any difference. Just close your eyes and ask the good Lord to take you into His keeping. Never ever doubt that He will.  

How else can poor souls triumph over the finality of death? It’s unfair, but, as the French shrug off all annoyances big and small, C‘est la vie. That’s life.

 I’m not sure that’s stoic enough to be Buddhist, but that’s far as you can get managing pain without giving up too soon the pleasure of  being alive. You savor to the last drop and last gasp and only then go gently into the night.

Well, I am most mesmerized by the French ability to defy barbarism or the uncouthness of others with nothing more than the supreme belief that they are the most civilized people on the planet. The magic of it all is that the illusion seems to always hold enough power to stand as reality. Or the French simply refuse to be convinced otherwise.

If that’s being French, I’d like to be French and, in their fashion, prevail over the pitiless indifference of time and history.