Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands Read Free Book Online Page B

again, into the woman I thought they wanted, and then was shocked to discover they had no interest in the woman I was. In that respect, the problem lay not with my boyfriends’ Frenchness, but with my misguided “Lacanian” belief that
le désir de l’autre
would give shape, substance, and value to my still-unformed self.
    Looking back, I see clearly how all the insecurity and self-doubt of the recent college grad were exacerbated, in my case, by immersion in a culture where my inexperience was thrown daily into fierce relief. However much I may have believed it—in my sad, masochistic heart of hearts—at the time, my paramours were not the villains in my ongoing Parisian soap opera. They were merely complicit in a game that I myself had recruited them to play: a mad chase through a fun-house hall of mirrors where, in all the refracted distortions, the pursuers never reach their target, because she is always already lost.
    Translation from Jacques Lacan’s
Écrits
by Caroline Weber

SAMUEL SHIMON

    Keep Your Distance
    K EEP YOUR DISTANCE from Arabs if you want to be successful in this city.” I had heard this friendly advice from several Arab intellectuals I met when I first arrived in Paris; even the famous Arab poet Adonis told me when I met him for the first time: “You will get nothing from Arabs, only a headache, keep away from them—as much as you can.” I remember Mustapha himself told me the same thing when he bade me farewell in Tunis: “I know Paris. I’ve been there several times and I’ve had difficult experiences with Arabs, believe me!”
    But Mustapha contradicted himself, as did most Arab intellectuals in Paris. They give this “friendly advice,” but you see them always together, everywhere together. Mustapha, for instance, whose knowledge of Paris and its streets and cafés is unmatched, gave me an appointment at Café de Cluny, although he knew very well that Café de Cluny was like a headquarters for Arab writers and journalists. Until then I had been there just three or four times and yet in those few times I had become acquainted with several Arab journalists, poets, artists—like Shamil, Abdelwahab, Nabil and Riadh, and Salem and others. But I agreed with Riadh that Café de Cluny was one of thebest cafés in Paris. It was a large building situated at the point where the two great boulevards of Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel meet.
    Once I went up to the first floor, and that day I had just bought my Erika typewriter from the Duriez shop nearby. I saw Riadh in the café working on a translation of poems by Saint-John Perse. He glanced up and said: “Look at that man!” I turned round to the man sitting at the window overlooking boulevard Saint-Germain. “Oh! It’s Samuel Beckett,” I exclaimed.
    “Yes, and he always sits in the same place,” said Riadh, adding, “You see, the customers on the second floor are better than those downstairs.” It was clear that Riadh was alluding to the Arab journalists who usually gathered on the ground floor.
    The moment Mustapha saw me, he laughed and shouted: “Come here, you Assyrian-escaped-from-the-museums!” And he hugged me.
    “What are you doing in Paris?” I asked him quite spontaneously.
    Mustapha looked at me for a moment and said with a smile: “This is an insult, not a question!”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because an Iraqi is not allowed to ask a Tunisian what he’s doing in Paris. The right question is ‘What is an Iraqi doing in Paris?’ So, never ask a North African intellectual what he’s doing in Paris!”
    I answered him, joking: “Well, get me a visa to America and I will leave Paris to you, my friend.”
    Mustapha started scrutinizing me all over: “Look at you! In just a short time you’ve become healthy and handsome. When you were in Tunis you looked like someone with bilharzia.”
    “Did you summon me to Paris to mock me, Mustapha?”
    “Not at all. I came from Tunis to arrange your life