A photograph my father found in the apartment where he grew up: a Parisian street circa 1944, a barricade. A shadow splits the facade of a café, sunlight whitens the hair and foreheads of boys. If I were to touch the metallic carcass of the old van, toppled on its side, that obstructs most of the street, I would burn my hand. I count eight men and two women. The longer I stare, the less obvious it becomes who is actively involved in the making of the barricade, who is simply passing by. They dig up the pavement together. Breathe the same hot summer air, full of concrete dust. They carry heavy bags of sand, an old mattress, a van. They push the van on its side in the middle of the street. They stuff the innards of the van with the mattress. They build a wall with bags of sand, or concrete, between the sidewalk and the van. They dig up cobblestones. Their eyes focus on the pavement, on the bags, on the van, not on each other. On their way to the market, or on their way to work, they stop and stare, or they ask questions, or perhaps they help to lift one or two sandbags but then they really have to go, they will come back later, with another mattress, or another old tire or two. When they address each other, they talk in a low voice, and they exchange only words or fragments of sentences and always they keep their heads lowered and their eyes on the cobblestones. They are very fatigued, but they have not allowed themselves to know they are fatigued. They are fifteen, perhaps seventeen. Their legs float inside of black cotton shorts that don't belong to them, but to an older cousin. They are thirty, perhaps forty, the white shirt they put on early this morning to go to work is now covered in concrete dust and sticky with sweat. Concrete bags resemble sleeping bodies.
Grand-père,
Some time in May, it's your birthday. I think it's May 29. Since you were born in 1923, you would have been 97 this month. It is a beautiful morning. I drink coffee in bed, and I think of you. It makes no sense to write to you in English, but now that you are dead, perhaps you do not care what language I choose to address you. I remember you liked coffee. In the morning you would drink coffee in a large bowl: black, with two sugar cubes. You kept the sugar cubes in a blue metallic box. When I was a toddler, the blue box full of sugar cubes was special.
Then, at that point in my life, we were close. We loved each other. I would stand near you in your tiny kitchen in the Paris apartment. You and Henriette would drink facing the wall, listening to the morning news on the radio. Black coffee, black tea, biscottes, butter and home- made raspberry jam. You would dive one extra sugar cube in your coffee bowl with your spoon and present it to me. I would swallow it. An entire sugar cube boiling hot and crumbling with black coffee. You taught me that joy.
You drank your coffee in a large ceramic bowl in the morning and a miniature porcelain cup after lunch. At home here in Portland, I inherited one of your coffee cups. When I am in its presence, I see the small kitchen, perhaps six feet wide and ten feet long, cluttered with food and utensils (even more so now that you are gone). I smell coffee. I hear the buses in the street below. I hear the radio. I hear chickadees, sparrows, pigeons. I smell summer, warm tar, the fumes of exhaust pipes, pollen and something crisp and fresh in the morning air that was all new to me, it did not exist in the woods and countryside where I lived.In August 1944, during the liberation of Paris, a barricade was built on rue du Moulin-de-la-Pointe, in the 13th arrondissement, the street where Charles and Henriette, my grandparents, grew up. People chose to build the barricade at the narrowest part of the street, right in front of Charles' apartment (the main room, dug partially below ground, had one window at the same level as the sidewalk). One day, a German tank came, pointed its cannon at the barricade, froze. Then, without having fired, left.
When in June 2022, for the first time, I visited the street, I saw nothing. No barricade, no car, no passerby, no dog, no cat, no café, no shop, no pigeon. In a sense no houses either, because the arrondissement, perhaps in the Sixties, chose to destroy and reconstruct all of its buildings. The only thing that remained was the space in between the houses, unusually narrow and fluid, opening and closing softly, obeying a diastole and a systole, running its course the way a creek flows, following pathways dictated by hidden things. Perhaps the street once followed the curve of the river Bièvre, now hidden underground. The silence too remained. A silence from long ago that grew upwards from sidewalk to roof and protected the space in between the houses that were no longer there.
At home I keep the small empty shell of a white snail on my desk. I spend time with the shell, I become aware of its sturdiness, its strength, the perfection of its construction. I see courage, the capacity for protection against predators. One part of the shell looks rebuilt, perhaps it broke during the life span of the snail, or the snail suffered an attack, the beak of a crow, the tip of a human toe, then it healed, it grew a new layer of shell on top of the ancient broken one. The part that suffered trauma, a bit bluish, appears stronger. A line demarcates the old from the new, or perhaps all shells have that same mark towards the aperture of the spiral? The shell could break, the shell does not break. When I scratch its surface with the tip of my nail, the friction creates a pleasant sound, the sound reminds me, almost reminds me of something from childhood that would give me protection, but the image eludes me, remains just out of reach. The snail is small, the size of the tip of my thumb. The shell is almost transparent. Was it always so or did it lose all of its colors after the death of the snail, step by step, as the shell stayed in the grass, in the rain, empty? One part remains of a burned sienna shade, as if recently repainted with a thin watercolor brush, too much water, not enough pigment, the tracing of the spiral, perfect, teaches me new ways to measure time, but I resist learning, because of a fear of spirals, the absence of periods, punctuations. The shell could break, the shell does not break, it remains after my death, a circle, a shelter.
Charles,
I decide you took that picture. It is August 1944, and you are 21. On a sunny morning, I follow you in the streets of your neighborhood, you walk with speed, you have no jacket, no hat. Only your camera, its thin leather band wrapped around one shoulder. Faces around you are all familiar. Perhaps you raise a hand and say Bonjour Monsieur from afar, the same way that thirty-five years later I will see you do, when together we go to the boulangerie behind your apartment. But for now, it's 1944, you will be late for school, and that concerns you. Yet you must slow down, stop, stare, and perhaps stay for a few minutes, at a distance. No one asked you to come. No one is looking in your direction, no one seems to be aware of your presence. You seem furtive, like a ghost. You don't belong to the circle of the makers of the barricade. I don't think you know anybody. You left your apartment that morning with the intention to capture something, just for you, an image that would contain the seed of an old memory, like the seed of a tree. You love what you see: that sun, that energy, the concentration on the faces, all the light on the sandbags, it pleases you. The more I spend time inside of your photograph, the more I sense joy.
You too want to extract cobblestones, topple the rusty carcasses of trucks, offer an old mattress as a wall of defense against the bullets of rifles. But perhaps your father forbade you. Perhaps your parents asked you to stay home and to study. Perhaps your father even put a hand on your shoulder, looked at his feet and said your mother already lost two children, you can take a book, a camera, a pencil, but not a rifle, not a cobblestone. I will. I am used to it. Before you, in between you and your parents' eyes, there were two ghosts floating in silence. Your brother, your sister.
When the war stuttered, repeated itself in the lives of your parents, around you men fell, people disappeared, you saw the front doors of apartments left open with no one inside. Each time you left your apartment below the sidewalk you saw your mother looked at you and anticipated the coming of a disappearance. Always in her eyes, your future death about to materialize like a polaroid taking shape.
In your photograph of the barricade, I read joy, desire and the impossibility to partake. It would have provided for your mother's grief an energy no one could have sustained. Did you do it anyway, in secret?
Do I construct all my memories like barricades? Where is the inside of the barricade? Where is the outside? How do I know on which side to hide and wait for the tank to come? Is a barricade a collective sculpture, a hybrid animal? Can you reason with a barricade? Does a barricade dream at night when there is a full moon? Is a barricade a poem? Once a barricade has been erected, can you ever undo it? Do barricades have ghosts? Do streets lovingly keep the ghosts of their barricades from long-gone wars? Is a word a barricade? Is the making of a barricade an act of war or a sort of loving enmeshment, the fusing of elements of disparate natures for the creation of a new protective body?
Victor Hugo, in a book within a book called La Guerre Entre Quatre Murs, War within Four Walls, tells the story of two barricades and the two men who created them. One barricade resembles a dragon, the other a sphinx. One is full of peaks, needles, blades, holes. The other offers a smooth, perfectly geometrical surface that no man can climb, no weapon can pierce. The shape of the barricade reflects the soul of its creator. Sometimes one destroys the walls of houses in order to build barricades so that it is impossible to delimit what is being destroyed, what is being built. Secret passages, hidden doors, corridors, niches, pockets, holes.
Once I am hidden inside of my barricade, like a snail inside its shell, I experience time differently. I breathe more freely. My body becomes a fragment, a limb of the barricade. I breathe in harmony with the ghosts of houses, the pavement that is now a crater, the sky that is now full of smoke and dust. I ask for protection to the old mattress, the rusty shell of the broken van, the bag of concrete, the eviscerated sidewalk and its melted black tar, I ask for protection to the ghosts of my ancestors who had the knowledge of barricades. I must wait for the phase of the heartbeat when the heart muscle contracts and pumps blood from the chambers into the arteries. There, at the furthest end of the contraction, the narrowest part of the street, from a plurality of miseries, a thousand of vulnerabilities, I build my barricade and it opens a street, an artery. Perhaps when a city or a body collapses and barricades appear, streets lengthen, morph, maps blur. New pathways appear: between a sidewalk and a window, between the wheels of a car and a lamppost, between an eye and a hand, a mouth and a voice.
Recommended Reading: I am currently reading: "Changing Planes" by Ursula Le Guin. My favorite books/ short-stories of the past few months include: "Entangled Life" by Merlin Sheldrake, "Cahier du Retour au Pays Natal" by Aimé Césaire, "The Fruit of My Woman" by Han Kang.
