Walker DeVille: Looking Down on Paris

PersonalHistory

‘What Happened ~ by Walker DeVille’ is an ongoing WestVirginiaVille tale
and experiment in long-form narrative writing on the web.
Chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |7 | 8 | 9 | 10

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There’s a scene in the Martin Scorcese movie, “Hugo,” where Hugo looks out from a high clock tower in the Paris train station where he lives a secret life. The nighttime landscape of Paris spreads out before his eyes to the horizon. Traffic swirls about the Arc de Triomphe as the illuminations in the City of Light begin to swirl and transition into a clockwork mechanism. It’s a fantastical scene. Only, it’s a scene — minus the transition into the workings of a clock — that one is able to see for oneself. There’s a place you must stand, though, and it’s not inside a clock tower.

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The plains of Paris lay below my feet. A conqueror’s view. Or perhaps an eagle’s or maybe that of a zeppelin pilot. As for me, I was just an unemployed newspaperman about to turn 30 the May of the following year. What year was this? Now that I no longer met deadlines, writing up excruciating accounts of County Commission haggles over sewer line projects and county fair funding, I had lost intimacy with particulars. Like the day’s date and sometimes the year. Looking back from this vantage point of so many years, I have to do the math in my head.

There it was now: 1986. Christmastime. Abdullah. The two of us, recently arrived at the Marcadet-Poissonniers Metro station. We’d earlier that evening snuck into our secret flat where I’d left him to sleep as I headed back out into the December night. Climbed a steep stone staircase to get here. I needed to see it up high.

Paris. There she was. By God.

The white walls and soaring triple domes of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris rose at my back this Christmas Eve. From Sacre Coeur’s perch on the butte Montmarte, the highest vantage point in town, I gazed down upon the City of Light. Or, rather, a million coruscating lights.

Town. It was a funny word to call Paris. But it had certainly been that once. I’d done my reporter’s research on the place before leaving America. The Parisii, the tribe from which the city would eventually cull its name, had a different name for the land I looked down upon when they first settled here along the river Seine three centuries before Christ.

Lutetia.

Even then the place was mellifluous: Lutetia Parisiorum, “Lutetia of the Parisii.”

The city stretched to the horizon, low to the ground. No skyscrapers allowed here, except for a cluster of glass and steel towers to the west in the business district, La Defense. They rose like a lone stand of cornstalks from a rolling field.

Across the flat Parisien plain the eye leapt toward a few other exceptions. There was the jutting index finger of the Eiffel Tower, bathed bottom to top in bronze light. Over there were the stout, bulldog shoulders of the Arc de Triomphe in the Place Charles de Gaulle. The arch’s mouth was big and wide, just wide enough for an exuberant, ballsy French pilot to steer his biplane though the arch a couple of weeks after World War I ended in 1919. There’s newsreel of it somewhere.

I shivered from the bone-cold chill. What was I doing here? What did it matter this night? I was here. I was not there, back in my same-old same-old life I had jettisoned far off in West Virginia, one ocean, one continent away. I answered the pocket-size version of the question: What am I doing here? I’m going to check in on midnight mass this Christmas Eve in Paris. That was enough for the moment.

I turned from the postcard view, entered Sacre Coeur. The basilica was packed. There was hardly an opening in the pews throughout the vast interior. France was mostly Catholic, after all. This was the place to be on the evening of the day that marked the entry of the faith’s Messiah into humankind’s grubby midst.

But look at me talk. I was raised Catholic, too. I did my turn for years as a cassocked altar boy. I always looked forward to rousting the couple of  bony nuns in the forward pews at the 6 a.m. Mass at Holy Spirit in Columbus with the boisterous ‘Clang-a-lang!-clang-a-lang!’ of the handbells. Meanwhile, the priest swapped the water into wine and the blood of Christ was in the house.

The bells, they were the favorite part of the job.

But things happen. We sat together as a family at Mass when I was 6. Dad drifted to the back of the church by the time I was 9, so he could leave when restless. Then, he stopped coming altogether when I was about 12. Mom began her rising chorus of beefs with what she was expected to believe as Vatican II and the ‘60s steam-rollered Catholic America. Then, she stopped coming herself every Sunday by the time I was 16 or so, no longer rattled by the threat of mortal sin and eternal damnation for just missing a damn Mass.

Then the day came – I think it was that first year or two I was a cub reporter in West Virginia. I had to fill out some official form. Religious affiliation, it asked? ‘Roman Catholic,” I wrote.

“Retired,” I added.

From my peripheral vision, I noticed a bearded man with glasses in black shirt and black pants staring my way, it seemed. When I looked at him, he looked ahead, down the cross-shaped interior to the far-off altar. We stared over a sea of shoulders as a priest and what looked like 20 altar boys performed the ballet of the Mass.

The priest had a microphone strapped to the bib of his robe. He uttered the liturgy in French, words that boomed and echoed in the high, dark reaches of Sacre Coeur. Great amoeba-like clouds of grey incense with an aroma like sweet wood smoke swam above the heads of the congregants. I was instantly transported back into the sanctuary of Holy Spirit. Back in the day, the church could sometimes feel like a cozy great room where a bright warming blaze burned as a blizzard howled outside the walls.

My second favorite altar boy job was clinking the metal censor — the incense burner hung from a chain that was brought out only for special holy days like Good Friday. As a collector of exotic words, it was only decades later I’d learn the delightful name for this device: a thurible.

The massed Parisian altar boys clinked and clanked their many thuribles, the only sound now in the basilica but for the scraping of shoes and clearing of throats by the assembled.

I glanced again to my left. The bearded man in black stared up at the fingery wisps of incense, probing the higher darkness. He turned my way again. I looked away. It was time to go. I had to find a phone booth, then get back to the apartment. My Muslim friend had far more interest in the depths of  his sleeping bag than in thuribles and holy hosts. You could be sure Abdullah snored in delight in our little den, rubbing his odorous socks together as he always did in repose, chafing the charred cuffs of his pant legs.

He’d be secure in the comfortable knowledge that his pants would not be catching fire this night.

Down in Montmarte, the streets were quiet. Frigid. I found a phone booth but it was occupied. Was someone else calling out of the country to family on Christmas Eve? Which country, I wondered? Brazil? Russia? Algeria? Who else would be in a Paris telephone booth past midnight on Christmas Eve? Even urban terrorists should have the night off.

I found another phone booth on another corner. It ate my change and clicked off. Yikes, I had francs for only one more try. I’d be toast — I’d be persona non grata — if I didn’t call home this night of nights, ringing up the family gathered at my parent’s house in a time zone five hours distant.

What time would it be there? About 7 p.m. The festivities would be in full swing, a crowded house, much wine. Maybe everyone would be holding their numbered printout with a few lines each from Clement Clark Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.”  Years ago, my mother had had each sheet laminated and numbered. Under her no-nonsense supervision of the tradition, each person would have to recite their page in sequence. Who would get the final call-out, one of my brothers, one of my sisters?

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

And which grandchild would earn the high honor of cracking open the small jewelry box taken down from the mantle. It was usually the youngest that could walk without tipping over. They’d unwrap the porcelain figurine of Baby Jesus from its toilet paper coverlet. Then, elven feet approaching the crèche, they’d be hoisted up into the air to deposit the Christ child in his porcelain bed of brown straw in the nativity scene on the mantel.

This was a nativity scene whose cows, donkeys, wise men, Mother Mary, Joseph and holy angel we’d all been rearranging in various, often quite un-holy configurations since we ourselves had come to earth.

This would not be an unalloyed holiday hello. My mother had expected me back from Europe by this night. My parents wished me back in America, searching diligently for a new job after my three-month adventure abroad, fitting my wagon wheels back into the ruts of a secure, sensible career. Time to bring to a close this open-ended wandering across borders!

The phone swallowed my last coins: Clink!

Ring-Ring-Ring-Ring …

“Hello?”
It was my mother.
“Hey, there. It’s me.”

“Where ARE you?” she demanded.

I filled in the details. She was glad to hear from me. Sad I was an ocean away. I was the first of her offspring ever to miss a family Christmas. She sounded like she was crying a bit on the other side of the Atlantic. Mothers. I was passed on to my father, brothers, sisters. I wished I could travel down the phone line, hop off in that Ohio living room. Open presents, give them. Wiggle Baby Jesus in his bed of straw. Then, after a dinner of my father’s spaghetti, of sea foam salad for desert, I’d dial up Paris. Hightail it back to the City of Light.

As it was, we all wished each other love, wished each other well.

“Merry Christmas!”
“Joyeaux Noel!” I replied.

I hung up and headed back to the flat. Along the way, I passed the spot where earlier in our arrival that day Abdullah and I had passed a small, waist-high Charlie Brown Christmas tree discarded on a corner. It now lay tipped on its side on the sidewalk. I adopted it.

I hefted it by its small trunk, hoisted it on my shoulder and struck off through the empty streets of Paris. It was no fun hauling it up those seven flights of stairs to our secret flat. But it looked just fine in the apartment. It needed ornaments, though. Which is why Abdullah awoke the following morning on a sunny Christmas Day to find a surprise Christmas tree beside his head.

I’d decorated it with my white plastic comb, a brightly colored Metro map, a panel from the comic strip “Nancy” in French torn from a newspaper, a couple of Polish teabags from the room’s tiny pantry and assorted doodads scrounged from around the flat.

The star at the top of the tree was the keys to the flat.

“Joyeaux Noel, mon ami!” I said.
“Joyeaux Noel!” he said.

He gazed out the window at the sunny streets and the glimpse available of Sacre Couer’s white walls up on the Butte Montmarte. Abdullah grinned, showing his white teeth.

“Par-Eese,” he added.

“What Happened” by Walker DeVille
Chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |7 | 8 | 9 | 10