CHAPTER 14: Sweet Honey on the Roof

Melody and I have seen each other several times since we first met outside the Pompidiou Center.  I like her. She has a compassionate heart. Her life has been filled with struggle yet she finds joy in the smallest things.

Have you ever noticed that some colors of nasturtiums aren't solid colors but inside the petals are deep burgundy flames bursting from the center? And if you eat the flower petals, they taste both sweet and peppery? Melody has.

Have you ever noticed the smell of coffee and the smell of a skunk are at first sniff almost the same but coffee remains at the same level of intensity and the smell of skunk continues to explode until your eyes are burning and your nose is wrinkling and the lovely initial smell of coffee is long gone? Melody has.

Have you ever noticed that the bugs children call rollie pollies -- pill bugs that roll into a ball if you touch them -- have eight legs and would therefore need four pairs of tap shoes? Melody has.

I often treat her to a bite of lunch at a cheap bistro and then we sit on a garden bench and just observe life together. I've seen many new parts of Paris with Melody -- hidden parks and areas where the homeless gather, tucked away from prying eyes of the public and more importantly, the authorities.

She tells me she has a daughter somewhere, a lovely girl named Natasha, who ran off with a boy named Igor. They were headed for Marrakesh, which is this year's favorite destination for young people. She hasn't heard from them for a long time and she wonders if she ever will again. I assure her that of course she will -- when Natasha needs something. Everyone calls their mothers first.

She misses her child but she doesn't seem to feel the pain and worry that most of us would. She has the nearly child-like trait of always believing the best will happen, even when faced with unusually grim realities.

She isn't homeless as I first thought, though she lived for months before I met her at Extended Hand of Tara, a Buddhist shelter for homeless women. Now she and her cat have managed to find a room in a run-down residence hotel in Les Halles, much like the single residence occupancies (SROs) in the U.S.

She invites me there for coffee and I am curious to see where she lives. The room is essentially bare. I'm not surprised, since all of her money must certainly go for rent. She sleeps on a small cot mattress on the  linoleum floor. Two straight wooden chairs and a narrow bench create a dining space. The small bench is covered with an unraveling blue towel that is draped over it like a table cloth. Scotch taped all over the walls are pictures cut out of magazines, almost all of cats and cat food ads.

With all the grace of a queen serving tea in a castle, she serves me instant coffee in a flea market mug. Her old gray cat sits on her bed and gloats over his glamorous new nest in his own place, while keeping his one and only eye pinned on Bernie.  I guess I didn't realize until now that the eye infection was in the only eye he has! Melody assures me again that he is healed and well now.

His color is almost exactly the same color as the blanket on the bed, which is the same one Melody had wrapped around her shoulders when we first met.

As we drink our coffee, she confides that she was once a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. Always in the corps de ballet, she hastens to add, and it was long ago of course. She tells me she still goes to the Paris Garnier Opera House to buy honey. It is the very best in Paris, she insists.

Jean Poucton, the now retired Prop Master got the idea to put his hives there many years ago after talking to a member of the Opera House fire brigade, who was raising fish in the basement. His five hives on the ornate roof of the building produce 100 kilos of honey each per year. It is packaged and sold in the lobby. She shows me a jar -- pale yellow, an irridescent jewel in a small glass container. The oval paper label has Poucton's signature and a sketch of the Opera House.

"The honeybee flies from flower to flower almost a million times to make just a pint of this," she tells me proudly. Then she pulls out an old worn copy of The Christian Science Monitor and reads to me:

"Paucton remembers the call from the 'Societie General,' one of Frances's biggest banks. The CEO's conference room was buzzing. One of his hives had swarmed, he realized, and he had to smoke the trespassers out of the bank's chimney. Only when a swarm goes into attack mode are bees dangerous...and when that happened in the Luxembourg Gardens they had to close the whole park."

Melody looks up from the paper and smiles that endearing missing both front teeth smile. "Oh yes," she says. "It's a challenge to keep bees. You have to overcome your fear."

CHAPTER 13: Love Locks Vanish From Paris Bridge

Dateline: Paris
Telegraph.co.uk


Almost 2,000 padlocks affixed to the Pont des Arts, the bridge linking the Left Bank to the Louvre Museum, mysteriously disappeared overnight. They were replaced with a multitude of single cut flowers and vines woven through the fence linkage. Local speculation was the flowers were trimmed from nearby gardens.


Paris' town hall had previously declared the locks an eyesore, but denied any involvement in their removal.


The love lock craze seemed triggered by pranksters who padlocked them to the fence then threw the keys into the river Seine.

#   #   #

CHAPTER 12: What Am I Allowed to Hope For?

Ques m'est-il permis d'esperer/What am I allowed to hope for? -- from the bathroom wall of Les Philsophes, rue Vielle du Temple

I can't sleep tonight. I feel restless and moody and the bed is too soft, too hard, too hot, too cold. My pillow is too large and too small. The blanket is too scratchy and too heavy and not heavy enough.

After tossing for as long as I can possibly bear it, I get up with a sigh, turn on the little light on my desk, put on my trench coat over my pajamas and wind my bright red scarf around my neck. Bernie tilts his head and looks at me with a question mark as I put on his leash.

In our neighborhood at least, Montmartre settles down fairly early at night. April in Paris tourists have come, shivered and gone, and the summer hordes have not yet descended on us. Our whole building seems to be sleeping. I can almost hear them snoring in unison, Pierre, BiBi, Heloise, the ghost of Msr. Snuff, may his sad furry soul rest in peace. Bernie and I nearly tiptoe down the stairs, through the lobby and out the front door.

It's misting slightly and a wet fog rolls in slow motion over the ornate old buildings and swirls around the empty squares. Cafe tables and chairs have been stacked for the night, umbrellas folded and put away.

The funiculaire is closed and we start down the steps which lead all the way down to the bottom of the hill. Someone is playing a trumpet in a flat high above us. Lonely single notes float up and down the scale and hang above us in the dark.

Our footsteps -- mine and Bernie's -- are muffled on the fog-wet stairs as we wander down the hill. I'm safe when Bernie is with me. His size and obvious protectiveness makes strangers leery of getting too close.

It's a totally different experience for a woman being out at night with a big dog versus walking alone. I wonder if men they have that basic freedom that we don't. Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, women spend our lives ever on the alert.

People point to Bernie and call out during the day "What is he?!" I usually shrug my shoulders and smile, pantomiming "Who knows?" Sometimes I answer, "Siberian Moose Herder." At night he can look especially menacing and people just cross the street.

Several blocks from home the silence is broken when someone up the dark street behind us calls my name. Bernie starts to wag his little stump of a tail. It is Nathan, half-jogging towards us, a happy smile on his face. "I knew it was you," he calls out. "I recognized Bernie!"

"What are you doing out so late!" I demand in surprise.

"I couldn't sleep. Just like the two of you, my friends," Nathan answers. I'm suddenly overcome with thankfulness that Nathan is still here. The first of May has come and gone, the songs have been sung, the flags have waved, the people have marched and Nathan is still here.

Just at the bottom of the stairs, we hear a small child crying. In the building near the Metro, a little boy pulls back the white window curtains and stands crying and staring at us. Nathan gives him a little wave and points to Bernie. He watches us go by, but the sounds of crying follow us down the street.

The three of us continue together down the hill, heading in the direction of the Seine. To me, the river is the beating heart of Paris, dividing the Left Bank from the Right Bank, as it carries the history of the city in the water along the quays and over the bridges.

After she was burned at the stake north of Paris in Rouen, Normandy, Joan of Arc's ashes were thrown in the Seine. Have those ashes drifted south in the current and settled peacefully in the river's bottom sediment, forever a permanent part of the city? I'm sure of it. It's ironic. Joan of Arc was sentenced to an unspeakbable death because she wore men's clothes. It was just within the past month that the French law forbidding women to wear pants was removed. It took a long time, Joan.

Bernie and I automatically slow our steps a bit so Nathan can easily keep pace with us. Walking past a cellar bar, we hear a male voice shouting, followed by a sudden outburst of laughter and the clinking of glasses. At the sound, something scurries along the edge of the sidewalk. Something with a long black tail.

Off in the distance, a small dog barks. It sounds like a white toy poodle with a lace-edged ribbon around its neck and a matching bow over one little ear. Bernie's ears perk up and his head snaps in that direction. He gives one loud rumbling woof from deep in his chest in response then looks at me with an expression of perfect satisfaction.

A bit of a breeze swirls a patch of fog and rustles the tops of the chestnut trees. Then it is perfectly still again. I get a chill on the back of my neck, even wrapped warmly in the scarf my old friend in California knit for me.
Again, a rustle. Are those footsteps behind us? I sneak a peek back. So does Bernie. He lets out a low growl.

As we work our way into the center of the city, Bernie, Nathan and I have stopped talking as if on cue. Nathan knows shortcuts, zigging here, zagging there, finding the most direct path through the empty historical center until we make a diagnonal route directly to the tip of the Ile de la Cite and Henry IV's 1607 Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris.

On corbels that decorate the arches are 384 carvings of mascarons, masks of human faces, no two alike, each with distorted features or horns or beards made of grapes. The dim streetlight shrouded in fog highlights their shadows, making them more gargoyle than whimsical.

"There was a time," Nathan says, breaking our silence, "that so many people died in the Seine that viewing their bodies was a Sunday outing for the people of  Paris."

"Why so many deaths," I ask.

"Oh, accidents, murders,  mostly suicides, the usual, I guess..." Nathan muses.

Then he tells  me the story of the ecadavre feminie inconnu (unknown female body).  Now there were, of course, many unknowns, but this one caught the fancy of the public and she became the epitomy of beauty.

It started about 1900 when the body of a lovely young woman in her late teens was pulled from the Seine. On her face was a mysterious smile. She had no injuries so the mortuary ruled her death a suicide. They displayed her body for as long as possible and it became quite the fashion to go to the norgue and ooh and aah over her comeliness. Thousands of people filed past, but no one ever identified her.

In death she became not only the rage of Paris, but one of the most recognized faces in all of Europe. Before she was buried in an unmarked grave a death mask was created of her face -- and copied and sold thousands of times, becoming a staple on the walls of grand parlours and artist garrets and humble cottages across The Continent.

"Oh! But I just remembered. You know what she looks like!" Nathan says, with a sudden snap of his fingers. "Her face was used for that doll who teaches you how to bring people back to life."

"Who?" I'm confused.

"Oh, you know." He is excited. "Susie Annie, I think they call her."

"Nathan, do you mean Resusci-Anne, the one used for CPR training?"

"Yes! That's her!" he says. "That's our Annie from the River."

We fall quiet again. The fog is thicker as we walk onto the stone bridge and cautiously peek over the side. In the middle of the night, there is no one here but us. And whoever may be floating in the Seine.

I lean close to the water and whisper, "Annie?" Deep in the still water, I think I see the shadow of a face. It it Annie or is it me?

"I just wanted to see Fanny, " Nathan says quietly. It takes me a minute to realize he's talking about the Last Supper fiasco.

"I know you did. It's OK."

"Come on." He motions to the other side of the bridge. "Let's go across to St. Germaine and see if we can find an all night bar. Let's get sloppy drunk and walk home when the sun comes up. I may be old but I'm not dead yet."

And we both burst out laughing.