Storytelling and street smelling

This past week has been just as hectic and fantastic as the others. This city seems to be crammed with surprises, and I'm loving every minute of it so far.

So last weekend, I'm on my way home through Parc La Fontaine, and I stumble on a group of storytellers, sitting in a circle around a chair. It's a fairy story about a baker woman who tricks fairies into letting her back into her life, after being kidnapped as a slave, explaining the history of the 'Baker's dozen'. Little kids and big kids are sitting in a circle around this fifty-something year old woman, with a dark shawl and a little squeaky voice, sharing a tale she'd probably heard as a child herself. The sun occasionally lights her face from between the branches of the overhead trees as she tells her familiar story, and she makes the most of it to show the children where fairies live... in trees.

I stayed for three hours, listening to the rambling tales of Quebequois mountains, clever Arab merchants earning donkeys through language trickery, and even attempted a story myself. I've told the tale of how Finn was saved from his fellow giant Cuchulainn by his clever wife, Una, several times to my grade six and seven classes. Storytelling is easy when it's your mother tongue, you've got the attention of a class, and a book to support you if you get lost. But telling Irish folktales in French, in a park, with no book to support me, was another matter.

A matter which allowed me to admire the talents of the Breton storytellers, who are unparalleled in the art, next to the Irish, that is. In this Francophone group, the Breton guy (I've got his name on a card somewhere, I'll dig it up) completely stole the show, turning folk tales and Bible stories into modern commentaries about news stories. He used tales by Marcel Ayme, and tweaked them to suit his own lively style. Outstanding.

And this was a complete fluke, a chance event, like so many in this city brimming with music, art, theatre... That's precisely what I missed in Stuttgart; being able to scour the city as a 'flaneur', soaking up whatever is going on. Like I did as a kid in Paris.



My friend Lisa sees the 'flaneur' as a privilege of a wealthy society, and which is largely reserved for males (women are often pestered if they meander about a city alone), and I'm sure this is absolutely right. Nobody with six children and a mortgage to pay can really hope to be much of a flaneur. But it's something so engrained in me that I can hardly help it.

I grew up in Paris, in a very privileged, wealthy neighbourhood, which was largely geared towards the retired Christians and dinosaurs of Parisian aristocracy. Neuilly-sur-Seine had large boulevards with leafy trees and ecologically friendly solar-powered parking metres, each worth about the price of a new Mercedes. The entire community flocked to the church every Sunday in knickerbockers and prim red reading glasses, squawking out hymns as they left the feelgood ceremony. The priest sang along with the guitar-playing adolescents, who had rehearsed the hymn during their scout weekend in the hills of Dordogne the previous weekend. The birds sang, and Sarkozy - yes, THE Sarkozy of current fame and infamous dizzy presidential heights - was mayor, and had the excruciating dilemma of choosing the colour of the new set of children's slides and swing sets to adorn the local park behind the church. And the slides were changed every six weeks, if my memory serves me right. The unnamed north African teens were safely kept away through Sarkozy's subtle tactics of having military police at every other street corner. A peaceful, Christian, whiter-than-white safe haven, barely a stone's throw from Paris. But no one threw stones. Of course.



I hung out with the 'foreigners', who were scarce in the local public school, populated almost excusively with the offspring of respectable, God-fearing French families, who owned apartments in Paris and the Alps (for skiing in winter), Corsica (for swimming in summer) and a country house not too far from Paris (for fine weekends). So my friendship circle consisted of a Croatian hippy with body odour issues, a Serbian singer whose father had earned a fortune in professional basketball, and a French hanger-on who had lived in Egypt and had gotten into our school through some shady deal with the headmistress, because of his father's connections. We didn't have the money or the privilege of going to the trendy overpriced cafes, bars and nightclubs sported by the glitzy teens who populated our school, and were strangely unimpressed by the priest's efforts to recruit us for the scouts and the upcoming church fair. We smoked, were sarcastic, and played guitar on benches in the cold. We wrote songs and poetry, and admired the indie music scene for its 'alternative' nature. Radiohead CDs littered our bedrooms, and we read Henri Bergson and Nietszche, and knew how fake it all was.

The dichotomy of horrifyingly wealthy christian hypocricy versus teenage pseudo-marxist spleen left little room for anything else at that time, and after many evenings of sitting on the same bench listening to Predrag (the Serbian kid) groan about how, like, unreal it all was, I would decide to get lost. Literally.

I'd go to the Metro station, Les Sablons, and after a 10 minute ride, hop off at Chatelet-les-Halles or Odeon, to meander around the streets of the latin quarter. Sure, it was full of tourists and students, but at least it wasn't packed with money-and-religion-soaked teenage girls with pretty haircuts and expensive scooter bikes, or depressive wannabe artists. I'd browse books in the second hand bookstores, and walk around the labyrinth of streets near the Sorbonne, till the cobbles all looked alike and I wasn't sure which way was north. I'd listen to blues CDs in the stores, and on a good day, spend my Mum's treat of a restaurant ticket (a 30 Franc voucher redeemable only against food in restaurants or takeaways) on a slap-up crepe with cheese and a dessert. There were hairy weirdo travellers and students with dreadlocks selling posters in the metro, and that saxophonist at Concorde metro station, who summed up Paris in a solo.



So being a 'flaneur' means more to me than meandering about aimlessly or window shopping (which, again, it surely is in some places). In Paris (as now in Montreal) it was a way to anonymously soak in the city. It's a sort of altered mind state in which you absorb whatever's going on - and so much of it is - without having to dwell on specialising or knowing everything about a subject to be a part of it. I'd stop to listen to Bulgarian orchestra musicians playing the Four Seasons on accordeons (they couldn't bring the church organ with them into the street), as well as teenagers breakdancing in the underground corridors of Les Halles. I'd talk to bums about where they came from, and chat with American tourists, explaining the conversion rate between Dollars and Francs. I learnt what I later understood from reading and speaking to artists, actors and musicians; that there is no high or low culture except the canon fabricated by political elites. There's culture in the museums, planned by a government-appointed and state funded organisation, but there's the culture growing organically, in all its uncontrolled weirdness. The Bulgarian organists in the Paris metro, sprouting out between the cracks of the French music scene, just like the storytellers of Bretagne appearing in the park in Montreal.

My French literature teacher used to sardonically quip that 'Shakespeare is worth a pair of boots' to ridicule the notion that the literary canon is political. Well, by revisiting the flaneur in me, while meandering about this city, I'm finding out that Shakespeare is certainly in a pair of boots, when you can afford to wear them down that far...