Her Name Was Toula

At the book launch in the Oberkampf district of Paris last Tuesday night I met an incredibly beautiful dog named Toula who was adopted as a rescue from the Greek Island of Santorini by a couple who live in Switzerland, all three of whom had just that afternoon arrived by train from Zürich in Paris for the event.

There is no greater ambassador for the project of the modern European Union than Toula; a defenceless Greek citizen in debt to the German-speaking world after a post GFC bailout. Even as I reached down to reassure Toula that she was loved and safe I could hear the distant maledictions of Yanis Varoufakis float in on a wisp of summer evening air.

We had the frailty of nation states on our mind, in fact, as we launched Australian-via-UK-via-Zimbabwe-now-in-France writer and journalist Megan Clement's book Desire Paths ostensibly about the race to get back home to Melbourne to see her dying father during the worst of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions – and the peculiar horrors of 14-day hotel quarantine – but, beyond that, a wise and often startling meditation on what it even means to have a border, or consider yourself to belong to one set of lines on a map over another.

Of course Toula and her annual Eurostar pass were interested. And, as it turns out, so was one of the stars of the 2000 cult classic film Coyote Ugly and another, a male lead from one of the Magic Mike movies, a series of films about removing the purportedly civilising vestments of modernity in favour of a more stripped back form, to rock out with one's Eastern Bloc out; a little something for everyone (in theory).

You know, I have never in my life seen so many people just out and about reading books. Everywhere you go. On the metro, line 4, line 9, line 12, whatever, I've seen a dozen people in a single carriage reading paperback books. This kind of density is genuinely unheard of back home. I want to live in the world where the Magic Mike guy drops into a book launch (although, it must be said, I firmly believe authors of books should not be allowed to be both conventionally hot and authors of books; may such greed mark you in the eyes of the Lord forever).

What impressed me about the launch on Tuesday was Meg's hosting ability. I did the extremely Australian thing and turned up on time at 7pm – for the record, I am not usually on time but the fear of having to potentially explain myself in French to a large and disappointed crowd was overwhelming, not even Marie Antoinette could manage it and she spoke the language – and Meg, still setting up, welcomed me warmly and then immediately introduced me to the only other people there, her friends from all over the world, and thus I passed the evening in an ever widening group of smart, interesting people.

And then I met Toula, of course, and shamed myself with my own nature when her parents told me she had come from Santorini.

'I'm more of a Hydra guy myself,' I said, never having been to either.

The next day I ventured out to Place de la Réunion in the Charonne quartier of the 20th arrondissement just on 6pm to play the card game Polish Rummy, a variant of the rummy games with the added thrill of being able to pounce on an opponent's set of cards if you can add one or more of your own for points.

Exciting though the game was – the stakes are high with the loser subjected to some kind of torture crêpe – it was largely a vessel for the delivery of aperol spritzes on this paved over round-a-bout on a 28C sunny evening days out from solstice. I played with a friend from Australia who I had not really known back home and her friend here, a man called FeFe, who is about as European as you can get with family links back to various forms of nobility that I do not at all understand. He is a freelance art curator and my friend has landed a job in an American bagel shop with minimal French, earning less than the cost of an aperol spritz every hour.

They are both younger than me by some margin but I made up for it by being worse at cards.

Even so, we played until the street lights finally came on about 10.30pm. I haven't had that much fun with a deck and a few bad hands since The Beach Boys' classic Sloop John B.

Callback!

I told FeFe that I had a coffee date in the morning with the friend of a friend back home, somewhere in the 14th arrondissement, and he winced ever so faintly before offering that he thought it 'quite residential'.

Images of the Ripley Valley growth corridor suddenly spawned in my mind which, of course, on arrival, it was not. Certainly, the area was quieter than others in Paris but it was still Paris, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and not, say, the Scenic Rim local government area with its Boonah IGA that occasionally, when it can be bothered, will order in a replacement box of orecchiette pasta – Barilla, too, nothing fancy – after three months of empty shelving.

Which is to say, my friend's friend A could do a touch better in 'residential' Montparnasse. We stopped for coffee, the world's freshest (and potentially most expensive) strawberries, a 20-something month aged plank of comté from the fromagerie and a baguette de tradition before wandering off into the cemetery to see how many lipstick smooches have been applied to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's grave (too many).

It was here, broadly speaking, that I discovered something quite serendipitous. And by discovered I mean in the Captain Cook or Christopher Columbus sense: I wandered on to something known to a great deal many people but about which I had never heard so much as a jot and now profess to be so kind as to share it with you all.

In one corner of the Montparnasse graveyard a Romanian gentleman called Solomon Marbais has furnished the plot of his young lover, a Russian student named Tatiana Rachevskaïa who took her own life in 1910, with the sculpture commissioned from a then quite unknown chap called Constantin Brâncuși. His name may now sound familiar.

The sculpture is called Le Baiser, or the kiss, and there are actually a few of them that were made by Brâncuși which look very similar to the naked eye but which are, in fact, refined and subtly changed between castings.

It just so happens that, according to art itself, the Montparnasse cemetery Kiss is the best one of them all. It has been valued at between $71 million and almost $90 million pathetic Australian dollars and caught the eye of a Parisian art dealer called Guillaume Duhamel circa 2005.

Anyway, long story short, the Russian descendants of the dead woman on whose grave is one of the most valuable sculptures on Earth were tracked down in Ukraine and applied to have the sculpture taken into their possession, possibly to be sold, and the city of Paris was like ha, not so fast and issued a halt on export. This legal battle of ownership – is it public monument now after a century, or family keepsake? – has stretched on since 2006 but, as patience thinned, the family decided in 2018 to put a box over the sculpture.

If they couldn't have it immediately than nobody could. Weirdly, there is a hole in the side of the box so that, if you squint, you can see into the darkness and perhaps make out one edge of the piece. It makes it look like the world's most highly guarded possum box. What Mum would have given for that set up back in the days at the old place when she was, at one instant or another, involved in some Homerian siege of will and chattel with a family of possums that had moved into her roof.

Anyhow, I stumbled on to this boxed monument in the corner of the cemetery. It is watched from no fewer than three permanent security cameras, festooned with signs that even my patchy French understood to be extreme and urgent warnings not to approach the statue under any circumstances and, as I found out, an apparent motion sensor alarm that triggers a verbal warning if you do, in fact, find circumstances under which to approach the statue.

Mi scusi, Brâncuși!

Blessed regular readers of this dispatch (bound for the spoils of eternity, one and all) will recall my love for the Belgian surrealist René Magritte and in particular his series The Lovers which depicts the shrouded faces of a man and a woman i various stages of frustrated (or mysterious?) intimacy.

Those paintings form the spine of the novel I hope to write (have started writing!) precisely because of their ambiguity. Ever the party pleaser, though, I am often filled with a sense of such palpable grief that it physically hurts when I see these images.

It was funny, then, to be confronted with another piece of art that represents lovers who actually manage to embrace with a kiss only now it is us, the audience, who are forbidden the pleasure of the fruit, of the art, and not, by some readings, the lovers themselves as in Magritte, always and forever separated by a veil.

One could go further with these works. Although clearly fashioned in the spirit of passion, or at the very least domestic intimacy, they also represent something even more foundational for the human species; the desire for, the necessity of, connection. This is not even faintly an original thought but it bears repeating especially for those (me) who may have fallen (actually did) into the weirdly seductive trap of grumbledom.

Every worthwhile experience I've had in Paris so far has been borne on the wings of yes. Yes, I would love to, or That's so kind, thank you for the offer, I'd love to, that's a yes from me. Before I left I had all sorts of offers from people to put me in touch with someone they knew in Paris, or a friend of a friend they've never met who works at some non-descript cheesery or even, simply, with the name of an emergency Australian-owned cafe within the Périphérique. I have accepted all of these offerings and have become the richer for it.

And, lest I be misunderstood, there is still a very conscious effort here. I didn't wake up free and easy. Before each engagement – the book launch, the cemetery morning tea, the cards – I seriously considered whether I could just skip this one and do the next one. And then what would I write about?

Not Toula!

It's not that I can't do my own company. Oh God, can I! I'm too good at it. If the world ended tomorrow, as it seems it might, I reckon it would take me a week or two to catch on. The problem with this approach is that it is exactly half. Half a lover, half a kiss statue; half a life.

Within minutes of making it back to my apartment on Friday after my sojourn in the Montparnasse wilds I had a message on Instagram from the Australian writer and Francophile (and The Bookshop at Queenscliff co-owner) Jayne Tuttle.

'Heyyyyy Parisien! Wanna come to a weird party tomorrow eve at the Récollets?'

Saturday was the Summer solstice and Fête de la Musique all across France. It was 34C. Even so, I dressed up and wandered through the streets of Paris on the way to meet Jayne where every corner bistro, general store and bar seemed to have its own band, DJ or music installation and the city itself crackled with an intense energy.

Jayne was right, the party she'd invited us to was weird. But the kind of weird it's good to say you saw. Like if you clocked a kid eating a slinky. But I was there, and so was the writer Laura Elizabeth Woollett completing the Creative Australia residency at the Cité in the Marais district, and Jayne took us up through the historic Récollets with our glasses of French box wine and, for reasons that might be owing to myself, we got lost in a discussion about Albert Camus (fave) and Jean-Paul Sartre (not fave, but did good during the Nazi occupation) and René Magritte (fave) and how Dali was a fuckhead by an open window as the music and late night sunshine poured in from outside.

Truly, we were insufferable.

Addenda

Jog On

On my now customary post-dinner amble around the Butte – no I will never get tired of saying that – on Sunday evening I stumbled across a supermarket that was a.) open and b.) actually sold bottles of spring water and not the shelves and shelves of mineral water the French seem intent on guzzling despite the fact it tastes like pool water. L'eau de piscine! These two things were not a given so I bought a six pack of water, source de montagne, and continued on my merry promenade (from the French: promener) until I came across a little ice cream store and decided to treat myself. The woman politely but directly corrected my attempts at her language and I walked away with my scoops and my haul of water.

I couldn't eat and walk with my hands full so I stopped by the side of a cobblestone street next to a box, placed the bottles of water upon it and ate. The spot I'd chosen was a sort of Tour de France but for joggers running up the hill to the Sacre Cœur. I didn't even have to extend my arm fully and I could have given them a pat on the back as they huffed past. I saw one running toward me as I ate and thought it would be funny to reach out with my ice cream and offer it to the jogger as a drinks station might hand out water during a race, so I did. And the runner looked at me quite seriously, shook his head and mouthed 'non' with a furrowed brow as if I had fully intended to give him a lick of the pistache and chocolat.

That's him right up the back. No fun!

MUNA Redux

In March 2003 I was doing what most Queensland high school students with a rich social calendar and vivid interior life were doing: the Model United Nations Assembly. We were in a global will-they-or-won't-they holding pattern on a possible US invasion of Iraq. During the model UN assembly, which included schools from all over southeast Queensland, we represented various countries.

Me and a small group of my friends were Iraq. To be honest, I did not understand then – and still do not understand now – how a Model UN is supposed to work or, for that matter, how the actual UN works. Which was quite possibly the point of the model one. I do faintly recall that my tactic in 2003, as Iraq, was to offer the US oil in return for not bombing the living shit out of us. This was, in hindsight, not the bargaining chip I thought it was. We were invaded that day and, a week later on 20 March 2003, the real life US invaded the real life Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist but about which then Vice President Dick Cheney had said there was 'no doubt' they did, in fact, exist.

I have no necessary insight into the strikes in Iran over the last few days except to say, as history starts to rhyme once more: it's nice to feel young again.

And hey, turns out nobody knows what they're doing!

I'd include this guy in that, too.

Hughbert

I cannot even begin to describe how much fun it is to Facetime my nephew Hugh now that he a.) knows and remembers me from Real Life and b.) can take his mum's phone and run off with it giggling. This is a screenshot I managed to take of our chat on Monday (Sunday? what is time?) and although it looks like he is sort of having a tantrum he is actually grinning with the kind of wattage that could power a ship.

His literal embrace of technology has come at the perfect time given he and the fambam have moved even deeper into Australia's centre, taking up jobs on a remote property four-and-a-half hours from the nearest town. In theory, it will be almost as hard for Mum to get up there to visit as it would be for her to come to Paris and see me. Not to worry, my sister is pregnant again and due to give birth near home in the next few months. I haven't run this by anyone in the family yet but I have decided that where Hughbert is my affectionate name for he, the name I shall bestow on the as yet unidentified second will be Twobert.

I figure I am well within my rights, as a fellow Twobert, sequentially and spiritually. This is a fact very strong in the Morton family lore because, when my sister came along seven years later, I was no longer the youngest or the last child. But I still had two. I was still Twobert. At the Sydney launch of my first book One Hundred Years of Dirt, possibly the biggest party I will ever have, a group of readers asked Mum to sign the book in addition to me.

She was stumped, having never been asked to do anything of the sort before. So she fell back on a series of facts. In one she wrote: 'Rick is my Number Two son. In order of birth'.

Twobert, you'll fit right in. We're all so excited to meet you.