Grâce

(Place Alphonse Laveran, Val-de-Grâce, Paris. Autumn 2024)

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The square has rhythm.

A Tesla glides past, rumbling the cobbles.
Behind me a smooth tsh-tsh-tsh. A jazz drummer’s brushes, sweeping across a taut skin. Sandpaper on plaster, a slow waltz.

A fluff of a puppy explores the world, nose to the ground. Soft legs and ears flapping independently and out of synch. Above him a parakeet and a crow vocalise in different registers.

This is a place of patching and mending. Behind the wrought iron fence lies histories of war wounded. The gilded fleurs de lis gives this place heft and status. This is where you learn how to heal the visible wounds of war.

Stemming and stitching. Reattaching, and cutting off.
Fix one, get ready for the next.

War is another rhythm.
An eye for an eye, and all of that.

Where the road curves, a newer wound is slowly healing. It’s hidden behind a painting of the original symmetrical scene. Now there is ghost outline where the building stood until last year. A gas leak, a spark. Headlines across the world. One dead, many scarred.

The widowed building next door has been blinded. The empty window frames propped open with yellow timber. It lost someone too. A stable neighbour. The buildings held each other for hundreds of years, and now one is left unsteady and alone. An amputee.

But the daily rhythm continues.

A mirrored fountain. A perch for a lunch out of a bag. Craftsmen who deliver, mend, construct. Two men on the bench share a meal. The pattern of their hands mirror as their conversation deepens. One shifts closer.

Tsh-tsh-tsh

A bin lorry breaks the rhythm. An aggressive honking – a free form jazz. The engine growls waiting for the obstacle to clear. The horn is louder in the second solo.
Path cleared, the bin lorry roars around the corner, close enough for me to see the writing on the back warning of the Angle Mort.

Then the quiet returns.

Only the soft tsh-tsh-tsh,

Sweeping, revealing, smoothing.

Stitching, unstitching.
Moving, resting.
Life, death.

Grace.

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Drifting back

A week later I go back to the start.

L’Église Vâl-de-Grace glows in the sunshine. Sandstone against blue sky.

A handwritten sign in a window:
baby foot 1 €.
A horror sequel to world’s shortest tragedy: For sale | baby shoes | never worn.

The teens at the Deaf school are having an argument in grunts and sign language. Chasing, shoving. Maybe it’s a friendly game. Maybe I’m misreading the signs.

I stop and look at my own reflection in a broken mirror left on the pavement. I’m fragmented, kaleidoscopic. At the next corner another broken mirror. That’s 14 years of bad luck in only a few paces.

It comes quickly.

I watch an older woman topple on her bike. It’s in slow motion. Before I understand what’s happened she’s surrounded by helping hands. Someone’s found her a seat. Two men check out her bike. Reattach the light.

She’s shaking her head. It could mean:
“No, I’m not okay” or
“No, I’m not hurt”.

I watch my step crossing the road.

At Place du Pantheon people stand in the bus lane for the perfect selfie. It seems dangerous.

As dangerous as making eye contact:
Excusez moi/ Madame vous n’avez pas/desolé/petite pièce/bonne journée/ticket resto?

As dangerous as making eye contact with the woman sprawled on the steps who is talking to herself. She reminds me of a Goya.

I watch how we pose for pictures. A smile.

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This is taking too long I can’t hold this smile/
           aren’t you done yet/
                      gritted teeth/
                                yes portrait please/
                                          yep got it/
                                                    back to normal face
-smile.

Ahead a black Porsche with German reg, films the Pantheon with one hand and barely overtakes the cyclist with the other.

A bell trills.

I watch my step.

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