TWO LADIES

TWO LADIES

TWO LADIES

1.
Bijoux and Babs, two ladies of a kind
rarely seen in Chinon, are nevertheless
sitting in the square, having ordered drinks despite
the fact that all around them there are road works going on.
Babs has opted for aqua minerale as she is cautious and was
for a moment confused, thinking she was still in Perugia.
Bijoux, more the connoisseur, has once again gone for rickard,
as well as bread and cheese. She’s telling Babs about the trip they’ll take
tomorrow to Fontevraud, once a place for nuns, then criminals. Genet, she says,
was imprisoned there, and wrote Our Lady of the Flowers. Babs pretends not
to hear. She thinks there are too many homosexuals in literature. Across from her
there’s a man in a wheelchair, stranded in the middle of the road works.
He must have started out along his known way to the supermarket.
Now he cannot move. Babs is so moved she spills aqua minerale
down the scarf she wears around her neck because it makes her look
like a legend of the screen. By the time she wonders if she should
help, someone has pulled the chair out and taken him another way.
Relieved, Babs looks up and there, looking back at her
is Eleanor’s castle. They’d spent the afternoon discovering where
Joan of Arc had prayed, the royal dogs had slept, and the royals themselves
had eaten (Bijoux had bought a book of Eleanor’s own recipes). But all
Babs had really seen was stone and grass, as stubborn as each other, so she sat
under a tree (her feet were playing up) and thought how good
Katharine Hepburn was in The Lion in Winter.
                                                                                  Now she notices
the trees shading the square have the most remarkable leaves.
She’s trying to decide whether to compare them
to overweight moths or ceremonial fans:
very broad, almost lime green, turning brown
or heavy gold, but from the outside in,
as if autumn starts by nibbling all along the edge,
then moves in. If the French press is to be believed,
Katharine Hepburn died yesterday.
                                                                              But Bijoux is still on Fontevraud:
“Their bodies, of course, were dug up and
desecrated during the Revolution, but
you can still see the tombs,
Henry, Eleanor, Richard and his wife – I forget
her name. In the chapel. Beautiful if somewhat empty.
And nearby there’s a restaurant
where we can have a nice endive salad for lunch.”
                                                                              Suddenly Babs
begins to feel like a character from Patrick White, probably
Theodora Goodman since she starts to pat her moustache. And just
as suddenly knows by breathing what tomorrow will bring:
on the way to Fontevraud they’ll see
three boats idle on the river, in an opening of trees,
as if beckoning. Bijoux will take a photograph.


2.
The rain in Paris falls
exquisitely. Or so it seems to Babs:
water pencils everything to a lovely grey;
boulevards blossom suddenly with pert umbrellas
(Lindsay Kemp couldn’t stage a better show). Dry inside
Shakespeare and Company, where she’s to hear a poet read,
Babs is looking across the river, wondering if Bijoux made it
safely to the Châtelet or if she’ll have to listen later on to how
the sky “bucketed down, my dear, bucketed. Quite ruined
my appearance”. Bijoux has gone to Mahler’s Seventh, conducted by
none other than Barenboim. Babs, who never really recovered from
her Connie Francis phase, isn’t much into classical so decided on
the Performance Poet, which is why she’s now crawling up
a staircase made it seems of packing cases, just managing
to get a seat, a breath, a moment
to rearrange her scarf and check her purse, before the Poet is,
perhaps a bit too quickly, up and at it, arms swinging out
like a ferry on a wrinkled lake, words following:
I am a river, I cannot enter myself twice. Babs makes a note
not to read Heraclitus again. Do you think
I like carrying my heart in a basket? This belongs to what
the Poet calls her Song of the Homeless, and makes Babs
check her purse again in case a donation might be required.
I am the blue (here the Poet’s cupped hand
is held as high as it will go) in heaven’s pocket.
Hearing someone cry “Bravo!” at this,
Babs starts chanting under her breath:
Mahler. Barenboim. Staatskapelle Berlin. Châtelet. “As close
to perfect as you can get,” said Bijoux, who knows her Mahler.
There would be no packing cases in the Châtelet, just
those trumpets, those Mahler trumpets, pulling apart
the veil of mountains, lakes and the whole underworld
of tears, till everything is revealed, everything.
Bijoux will no doubt have pressed a tissue to her lips.

Now the Mahler’s well and truly started, the Performance Poet
is finishing, having turned into a finger on the trigger
of what might have been. Then pull it, honey, pull it, Babs is ready
to declare, but hears another voice, informing her the evening has
an open section. Time to go. Someone young, a little too excited
by words, stands and says she’d like to read her poem about people
who come to Paris, take photographs and miss the experience. She starts
to read and as she does the friend she’s brought along whips out
his camera and takes a photograph, catching in the background Babs
heading fast for a side door she’s just discovered that will get her out
onto the street, and into the rain.


3.
Bijoux, alone and quiet in the corner
of the breakfast room, is like her namesake
dressed and poised in case that photographer should
arrive. Instead she sees, spreading down the room,
a rash of students. Exchange Americans. She clamps her teeth
down hard on her baguette. They take
every last place. One of them, probably destined
for International Relations, declares a croissant
is just the same as bread, or so her mother says. Bijoux
isn’t all that fond of Americans in Paris. The things she’s heard
them say are things a woman of culture simply cannot
countenance. Only the other night, during interval
at a Mahler concert, she heard: “Isn’t it great the way
they’ve made that new apartment block look old!
They’ve even put some gargoyles on!!” The building
under question, wrapped and scaffolded for cleaning, was
the Tour St Jacques. Then there was the day in the Rodin: she’d paused
to marvel at the way water rippling under bronze made it seem
Ugolin really was being devoured by his children, only to hear
behind her: “Oh honey, come look over here, they’ve got this wonderful
sandpit.” And never to be forgotten, the day she and Babs had gone
to San Chapelle and found themselves eyed up and down by one
who had the air of having spread her table or her bed for presidents,
until she opened her mouth: “So, that was San Chapelle.
Let me think again, what does chapelle mean? Oh yes, that’s right: hat.”

And now, holy hat, they’re all through her favourite hotel,
and now their teacher is calling, “Everybody up.” And everybody is.
“And now we’ll sing happy birthday – in English, French, and German.”
And everybody does. Bijoux stirs a scum forming on the surface
of her coffee, stopping only when she sees the camera come out flashing.
This is it. No Brassai for her. She’ll pass time
as that funny woman in the corner with a baquette, backgrounded
in a photo sitting on a mantelpiece in Minnesotta.