Like a Sky Inside
“From March 7 to 8, 2020, I spent the night in the Louvre, alone. Alone and at the same time anything but.”
MARCH 21, 2024
From March 7 to 8, 2020, I spent the night in the Louvre, alone. Alone and at the same time anything but.
In the antiquities section. In the Salle des Cariatides, though I was compelled during the night to move my cot. Because places have souls; places have lives, especially in the dark; and it is sometimes the case that the places most visited, most paced and strolled in, can, once empty, unfurl and exact their own kind of revenge, chasing away those presumptuous enough to linger.
Or maybe they sense, these places do, when one’s conscience is not altogether at peace. When one’s heart is not altogether at peace.
To spend the night in the Louvre, there’s a protocol. My mother, whose research took her last century to the great library in Moscow, told me she spent the first three days of her week there going to the reception desk on Mokhovaya Street and being denied clearance. Some rituals are established quickly: I would show up, she said, I would ask if my documents had arrived; they’d tell me they weren’t there yet. I would smile, I’d set down my gift, and I’d leave. In three days, she gave out a box of Swiss chocolates, a half-bottle of champagne, a palette of makeup from a high-fashion brand. All of this she had bought on her outbound trip, in the duty-free boutiques at Charles de Gaulle Airport, for this specific purpose, because my mother is Slavic, a Russophone — even if Russian, she says, abandons her now as leaves fall from a tree — and knows the etiquette. The explicit etiquette and the implicit. On the morning of her fourth day, though, she began to worry: her duty-free trinkets exhausted, she had nothing left. Showing up empty-handed would have been a major faux pas. I didn’t know what to do: I took your Venus de Milo, the one you’d slipped into my suitcase the way you used to always slip something in when I traveled, so I wouldn’t forget Paris. She chuckled. How could I forget Paris? This city has been my greatest love.
And I find it strange and sweet to think that my own childhood fingerprints await me, on a statuette I haven’t thought about for over a quarter of a century, in a city and a country where I’ve yet to set foot.
That day, my mother got her clearance. Maybe because of this unlikely present. Maybe not. Maybe there’s still a miniature Venus de Milo sitting at the reception desk of that immense Muscovite library. The Berlin Wall has fallen, as have the Communist regimes in Europe; Gorbachev is no longer in power, though you still see him here or there, in advertisements where the ideological chessboard of the Cold War has been reduced to the trademark checker pattern of a luxury leathermaker. But maybe my miniature is still there. Still standing in that mythical place, a library the size of a neighborhood, a city within the city, where foreigners get lost and sometimes go searching, by smell, by aroma, for a smoking lounge that ceased to exist years ago. Who knows, maybe sometimes they find it. And I find it strange and sweet to think that my own childhood fingerprints await me, on a statuette I haven’t thought about for over a quarter of a century, in a city and a country where I’ve yet to set foot.
The Louvre today is certainly not the Leninka of thirty years ago; nonetheless, one still has to show credentials. The explicit etiquette and the implicit aren’t the same, but both exist. There are interviews, more or less official; character witnesses, more or less unofficial; a certificate of criminal record is required. It’s a lengthy process, and surely a necessary one: you don’t let just anybody into such a place. Alone. At night. Once the security personnel and the curator were convinced of my good faith and pure intentions, I was finally granted my precious authorization.
And you, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?
I want to write a book about the Louvre, I said in these interviews that were, or were not, auditions. I want to write a book about the Louvre and my family. About the Louvre and about my father. And everyone thought this was an excellent idea. Honorable. But places, or the works held there, perceive things that escape us.
At the time neither the security personnel nor the curator, nor even my editor, who supported me at every stage, championed my plan and my methods, knew this: I am the daughter of a man who, each time I visited the museum, asked me how many painted animals and sunrises I had seen, how many boats and moonlit nights. How many windows I’d seen, how many stairs. How many security guards and cameras. And how many emergency exits? And how many fire extinguishers? No, none of them knew that I am the daughter of a man who, each time we visited, asked me:
And you, how would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa?
✺
I leave home by métro. It’s the first night I’ll be spending away from my son, who turned nine months old a few days ago. It’s dark already. It’s raining. I consider taking a taxi, but taxis lull you, taxis rock you to sleep; I need to descend beneath the city, senses alert — to descend beneath the city and emerge into the open air, into the night of streets that are never dark. To feel, if need be, the rain on my face — if the rain is to be synonymous, tonight, with this city where I was born.
[Read: Notes on the International Lightning Strike Survivor Conference]
Nobody in the métro knows what I’m on my way to do, and this gives me a wild feeling of freedom. I love Paris for its constant collision of secrets. Nobody pays me any mind. I’m wearing a black coat and I have a leather and canvas weekend bag over my shoulder, a bag that looks respectable, bourgeois, far more respectable and bourgeois than I am. It’s the quality of the bag that gives it this appearance. Its cost isn’t exorbitant, far from it, but it denotes means other than financial: a certain self-confidence, as though one deserves, in one’s own eyes, a finely crafted bag. A confidence in oneself but in the future too, because it’s a robust piece of baggage, that’s clear immediately, made to last. Now, as it happens, this bag was stolen. Or perhaps found. Or better yet, as they say, borrowed. Robust but light, it gives an impression of elegance, and its story is beguiling because it’s the story of an object that came into my possession almost inadvertently. It was forgotten in a bookstore, near the Panthéon, after an evening reading by someone who didn’t write, not really: his name was on the cover, as was his face, but the sentences weren’t his. In reality his book had been written by someone I knew well and hoped to get to know still better, and it was for this reason that I came to the bookstore: not unsuccessfully, because the ghostwriter stayed after the official author left — the one about forty people had come to hear, having seen his face often on the screen, feeling as though they knew him. But many things can happen, to faces, among others, in the passage from two dimensions to three, from the screen to reality. They were surprised, I think, slightly disoriented by the person they saw there, whom they recognized, yes, but they hadn’t expected this, not really. Maybe it was because of this that someone, disconcerted, left the bag behind. Whatever the reason, this surprise, or this disappointment, didn’t stop them from buying the book, never suspecting that the sentences they would read while picturing his features, that night and the nights to come, that those sentences had been written not by the person they thought but by the young man at my side. Whom nobody was looking at besides me. I couldn’t not look at him. This rarely happens to me and it was for this reason, not for the book or its presumptive author, that I was there. Each time I failed to not look at him, my gaze met his, because he couldn’t not look at me either, and it was awkward and wonderful all at once. We lingered, and that’s how we found the bag, forgotten under a table.
The ghostwriter kept it. Normally I wouldn’t condone such an act, but that night I said nothing. It wasn’t just a question of desire. It was that the bag seemed to have been made for him, so much so that you might think he’d shown up with it in the first place. Once you saw him with this bag on his shoulder you had the feeling that, without the bag, something was missing.
The young man I couldn’t not look at saw a sign in this. With the money from the book he had written but not signed, and with the bag he hadn’t known he was missing until he found it, he left on a trip. A long trip, around the world, so to speak, except that he stopped here, and stopped there, longer and then longer still, to the point that he seemed to stop moving. The more he lingered, the less news he sent, and one day he stopped writing to me. Gone forever, it appeared. His life seemed to have been thrown off course, more than mine had, by this encounter. This encounter with me — or with the bag. A few months later I found a replica of the latter on a secondhand website, bought it, and would sometimes catch myself thinking it was I, and not he, who had kept it. I who had left. But in reality I stayed, and our story, it seemed, stopped there.
He was fleeing and his flight led him to the Louvre.
Tonight the bag contains a black sweater, a very light bronze-colored sleeping bag rolled up in a parachute-silk sleeve, a little toiletry kit (toothbrush, moisturizing cream, horn comb), a glasses case and contact lenses, a bottle of water, an orange notebook I will later lose, two pens, a phone charger, a cube of nougat wrapped in cellophane. And one last thing, which I wasn’t sure would pass through security.
Food is forbidden in the Louvre. They told me so, they told me again, they told me in writing; it seemed obvious that this restriction was to be taken literally. The nougat is there to divert attention from the other thing. The nougat is there to tell me how serious, how literal, I should expect this institution to be. If it makes it through security, things will be less difficult, perhaps, than I’d imagined.
✺
The Louvre was the first French city where I felt at home, my father used to say. The official story: he came to Paris in 1971, for the love of my poetess mother. He stayed for the Louvre. He was twenty years old and the twenty years that followed — covering, in part, my childhood — would unfold as though in a dream.
His joie de vivre. His appetite for the world. His optimism, and the limits thereof. He had no money and still believed it made no difference, because he had enough to act like he did. To pretend.
Of course, his head must have spun. To imagine the City of Light, to dream of it, is one thing; to discover it, to be a body, a twenty-year-old body wandering its daytime and nighttime streets, is another. All forms of difficulty — loneliness, poverty, the roundly accepted fact that the slightest cough, the slightest cold, is far graver in a foreign language — all forms of difficulty have disappeared from his official story. Among them, his reasons for emigrating: Paris, certainly. My mother, of course. The Louvre, naturally. But it would take me years to learn that he did it the way he did to escape military service in Yugoslavia, his country of origin, which today no longer exists. That was the real reason, or one of the real reasons, for his adoptive Parisianism: he was fleeing. One thing at least; others too, perhaps. He was fleeing and his flight led him to the Louvre. Because everything in this city was bigger than he had imagined: the avenues, the buildings, everything but the sky, imprisoned, indented on all sides. When his head spun too fast, he took refuge in the museum. In the Louvre too he got lost: the Louvre must have been the size that, when he dreamed of it as a young man, he ascribed all of Paris. A city within the city.
The Louvre was heated poorly, but better than the chambres de bonne he and my mother lived in. Always in beautiful neighborhoods, because appearances counted more than the rest, more than comfort; it’s bad enough to be foreign, if you look poor too you’re screwed: that’s what my father thought. A good real estate investment, my father thought, was a handsome coat. A coat to live in, to live intensely, pushing off as long as possible the moment it was time to go home to bed. A coat to smoke in, in the chic bars around the Place de l’Étoile, in the company of diplomats and businessmen whom he was not one of but believed he could have been; a coat to play chess in, in the basement bars of the Latin Quarter, in the company of wealthy young men, heirs of Napoleonic nobility, self-proclaimed ends of the bloodline, fallen out with their milieu, whom he was not one of but believed he could have been; a coat in which to nod off, at dawn, in the lecture halls of the school of architecture, alongside a generation of ambitious youths whom he was not one of but believed he could have been. A coat in which to lay down, as though under covers, on a banquette in a bar, in a guest room, his very little girl, the one he brought everywhere with him, who saw the same things he did, though with the eyes of a child — his very little girl whom he had neither the means nor the desire to entrust to a nanny, because (this he knew, in one of the rare moments in those years where he didn’t turn a blind eye to his true nature) he was not of that world.
The Louvre was heated poorly but it was his place, his own place, a place where beauty triumphed, he believed — let’s not forget that he crossed Europe at twenty, that he came from a socialist federation — over politics. His own place where gradually, with great effort, he regained the ability to see colors, those colors that in French he lacked the words to name and that perhaps for that reason, he said, he struggled, physically struggled, to perceive.
He did everything at the Louvre. Even brush my teeth, he confided to me once, which struck me as insane and which I’m nonetheless going to do in a few hours. He read books there. He circled the words he didn’t know. Over the years he had to sell, then buy back, some of his possessions. Never the books, to which he stayed loyal, books whose paper is now dry, yellow, brittle like tobacco — books that have no worth but the immaterial value of his annotations, which must in fact only depreciate them further, making them of interest to me alone. He circled the words he didn’t know — there aren’t all that many ways to learn a language, and I would do the same, in the nineties, with English. You can still follow today, from book to book, the evolution of his vocabulary. He read biographies of Leonardo da Vinci; he read Paul Klee’s On Modern Art; and, even if fiction, the novel, was never his preference, he read Night Rounds by Patrick Modiano. He forged a refined French for himself and took meticulous care of it; in a way, I suppose, it was like wearing a handsome coat. So, despite his accent, he spoke like a book. Like the books I would later write. Or rather it’s I who write the way he spoke, the way I believed he spoke. In my first published piece, I used the word charron, an obscure shade of blue, and the editor wanted to change it. It’s not that it doesn’t exist, but nobody will understand it, she told me, and because I was young, because I was shy (and sensible, too, and ambitious), I acquiesced. She was wrong, though: my father would have understood.
But would my father really have understood? One day, at his apartment, I flipped through his copy of my first novel. A novel he loves, that he insisted I dedicate to him — which surprised me, because it’s a book about a bad father, a dimension he never commented on, perhaps never even noticed: he liked its language, its images. Or maybe he liked the idea of it. Yes, maybe he liked the idea of that book, the idea of his novelist daughter. When I think of that preschool teacher who told me This little girl will never speak French, he would recall with pride. With bitterness, too, a twenty-five-year-old bitterness that still held him in its sway as though she had said it yesterday. This little girl will never speak French, he would repeat, and caress the cover of the novel as one puts balm on a burn. For a long time, I have to admit, I wondered whether he’d read the book.
Of course he’d read it. Of course. Here are some of the words he circled:
lévitative
lézardait
fruitarien
I never used them again.