Free B004MMEIOG EBOK by John Baxter Page A

gave way to distaste. Those who’d feared physical exhaustion no longer did so. Compared to this leaden progress, a walk to the mailbox was as thrilling as white-water rafting. It reminded me of something the director Terry Gilliam said about working with Robert De Niro on the film Brazil. The actor was so meticulous that it took weeks to shoot a few brief scenes. “We were all in awe of De Niro,” said Gilliam, “then we shifted round one hundred and eighty degrees and wanted to kill him.”
    If Andrew’s soporific lectures affected me less than the others, I put it down to having survived a traditional Catholic education, administered by the sort of priests and nuns you’d expect to find in an Australian country town. Their aim wasn’t to educate but rather to create a mind barren of all information, a blank page, receptive to the church’s multitudinous thou-shalt-nots. Over decades of droning lessons and Sunday sermons, I’d built up a partial immunity to boredom, in the way that repeated snakebites make you resistant to venom. Faced with Andrew, however, even my energy began to fail. As we reached Place Saint-Sulpice and the church towers loomed over me, I feared the consequences if I stepped inside. What if I fell into a trance, was taken for dead, and woke up a week later interred in the crypt, like a character out of Edgar Allan Poe? Rather than risk it, I dropped back, slipping away around the first corner.

    Girls on a café terrasse, 1920s
    Over a gin and tonic on the terrace of the Café Flore, I relaxed into the ambiance of the late afternoon. If only Andrew could see Paris as I did—the way it had been in the 1920s, when the cafés’ wicker chairs spilled onto the sidewalk and new arrivals from America lingered over a glass of white wine, absorbing the street life flowing by, so unlike anything they knew at home: the taxis with their hooting klaxons , the boulevardiers in tightly fitted three-piece suits, tipping their hats to the women in their cloches and silk stockings as they shared a fine à l’eau with a friend and wondered what the night would bring.
    The love of a city, like the love of a person, often begins in the first instant of encounter. The rest is discovery and exploration. “We didn’t feel out of place,” wrote the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan of his first evening in Paris.
         The corner was like a great bowl of light, little figures moving into it and fading out, and beyond was all of Paris. Paris was around us and how could it be alien in our minds and hearts even if no Frenchman ever spoke to us? What it offered to us was what it had offered to men from other countries for hundreds of years; it was a lighted place where the imagination was free.
    Though Andrew was interested in Paris, he didn’t love it. Oscar Wilde scorned such people who “know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Andrew knew the facts but not what they signified. He could recite them, but he could not bring them alive. And in a guide that’s fatal.
    “H e looked ideal,” Dorothy said. “Good credentials, pleasant manner. . . . Such a disappointment.” She flourished a handful of papers and started quoting from them: “ ‘Frankly boring’ . . . ‘Not what we expected’ . . . ‘We didn’t finish.’”
    “Well, you’re stuck with him, it seems.”
    “Not necessarily.” She gave me one of her pointed looks. “Anybody can be replaced.”
    My sluggish perceptions finally delivered her message.
    “You don’t mean me ?”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m no guide,” I protested. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
    “Oh, John!” she said in exasperation. “You live here, for goodness’ sake. Just tell them some of your stories.”
    “Stories?” I said uncertainly.
    “And didn’t you say you were looking for a way to get some exercise?”
    “Yes . . .”
    “Walking is excellent exercise.”
    “Well . . . let me think about it.”
    “Think