Living By The Egde In Paris
Let’s call her Anna.
She was absolutely positively brimming with wanting to tell me all. And I was going
to let her. Pour out the happiness she had felt while the bottle of water
dispensed from the machine at the Departure Gate for the Aer Lingus flight home
from Paris.
It had been amazing,
life-affirming and beyond the beyonds.
Didn’t they get to
see the Mona Lisa and Donal, her husband who was sitting a tad lonely by the
by-side near the other Departure Gate, had gotten his photo taken and here she
was going to show it to me and there he was.
She had set up a
Facebook account just for the week, and put the photo on. Donal’s face in the foreground
and a tiny Mona Lisa in the background. It looked lovely.
Yes, I had also seen
it but not this time around, and yes it was small and you didn’t get to spend
much time loitering in front of it due to the queues and the amount of foreign
tourists who took snap shots of it and made the experience fraught with angst,
and not the enigmatic moment it should have been.
But all the same, it
was worth seeing.
I also told her, I’d
cut off all access to Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and the like for the duration of
the week and had really not missed a beat about it. Which made me wonder why I
was using them all in the first place. I had wanted to get out onto the edge.
But yes, I had also
been to the Musee D’Orsey with its collections of Monet, Renoir and the like
and it was a bit more civilised. What with my children and all, it was more
doable.
I omitted to tell
her, the children had been exhausted and the husband very tired with the
previous days walking up and down the right and left bank and so on.
So I just kept it
short and to the point. We had seen the main things. I of course, in my own
heart did not want to take it out and say how I was struck almost dumb and
rooted to the spot with The Dancer, and also Monet’s Blue Waterlillies and a
few other choice pieces. I also didn’t mention the trance I fell into shuffled
alongside a group of tourists, all geared up in the tourist head gear
for listening to the commentary in front of Renoir’s Dance At The Moulin De La
Galette.
I was watching their
tour guide an elderly lady with the largest perm I’d ever seen, sweeping her
arms in motions in front of the canvas – just inches away from a sunlit dappled
scene.
I also did not
mention the arrogant male tourist who stuck his head in front of me, leaned
into my space and began talking to a colleague tourist who was listening to his
loud whisper and then she said: “you gotta tell her what’s happening.”
Indicating – her – was the tour guide. The spell was broken. I slinked away and
rotated around the glass containing Degas’ The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer
– and wondered at the sadness of the little girl’s ballet dress material, never
having swoshed into a dance formation, and the large ribbon in her hair, almost
falling out, as if she had completed a pirouette and looked, what I thought,
was a bit smug at it all.
Anna began again –
with the tale of the Palace of Versailles. Didn’t it look amazing? It did, it
had and now it was consigned to memory. I began saying I’d thought we should
have been treated to a look a t the Opera Room and the other rooms that
contained Ministerial Documents and such like. But thought twice when Anna fluffed
up the gardens appeal and the lakes and the fountains.
I listened
forgetting to tell her how my little family had climbed the steep lintel of a
window to the back of an outbuilding and gazed in through the semi-dark at a
statue of a man, marble, consigned to a basement palace of his own.
And as we had jumped
for a photograph in the gardens I also did not bring up the sore point of why
we were not treated to a fine display of rabble rousing villagers – battling on
the golden gates and descending in a riot into the bedchamber of Marie
Antoinette. So I just recalled how we had eaten our little pan-au-chocolates
sitting on a ledge in the courtyard and gazed up at the balcony belonging to
the King’s Bedroom and I had imagined a little man opening the huge glass doors
and lots of hangers-on fluffing around him, putting his wig on and stuff like
that.
And then it was time
to go, and I remarked on the price of everything, how you had to keep an eye
with the children, on what you ate and where you decided to sit down, otherwise
they would charge you an arm and a leg for it.
But wondered how
much of Anna’s heart she was actually leaving behind, like mine, and what other
experiences she had shared, just like me and if she had taken precious time to
live life on the edge.
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