DANCING WITH LILACS

AN ENCOUNTER IN 'TWENTIES PARIS.

Bal Musette, Montmartre, 1920s.

            When Ernest and Hadley Hemingway moved into their fourth-floor apartment on rue du Cardinal-Lemoine in 1922, they found themselves living above a bal musette, the Bal du Printemps.

            Named for the musette, a musical instrument related to the Scotch bagpipes that was often played for country dancing, these informal dancing clubs were another example of the French having it both ways. After the Revolution, restaurants opened by now-unemployed chefs allowed ordinary people to eat like the aristocracy they had recently slaughtered. After Napoleon legalized prostitution, a system of “tolerated” brothels condoned illicit sex under the supervision of the police, and in a bal musette you could flout the rule that people should not socialise unless they had been formally introduced.

Most men and women arrived separately but even if they were a couple, they separated and took their place on opposite sides of the dance floor. When the music began, men crossed the room to stand, silent, in front of the woman with whom they wished to dance. If she agreed, they joined the melée on the floor, she with one or both arms locked around his neck, he with his hands on her buttocks, crushing her against his pelvis. Joined like this, they danced to the jigging rhythm of the java.

At no point did they speak to one another, not even to give their names. Men, to signify their disdain for formality, kept their hats or caps on, and a cigarette glued to their lower lip.  Women clung, staring over the shoulder of their partner, and enjoying the opportunities offered by the dance for frottage; the pleasure of rubbing up against someone for sexual stimulation.

Bal Musette (Louis Bonnotte, 1931)

The dance done, he escorted his partner back to her friends, then re-joined the men. It wasn’t really a meeting, but if the two should run into one another in the street a few days later, they could stop to talk, perhaps share a coffee. The ice had been broken.

Bals musette gave new arrivals to Paris a chance to meet potential partners. Since nobody spoke, ignorance of French wasn’t a problem, and the Hemingway spent many evenings at the Printemps. “I got lots of dances,” Hadley said. Ernest, chronically awkward,  “did his best.”

Like restaurants and brothels, bals musette came in varying sizes and degrees of elegance. The Printemps was just a café where the owner played the accordion, beating time with a foot to which was attached a belt of bells, but the Bal Bullier, opened by François Bullier at the intersection of Boulevards de Saint Michel and du Montparnasse, had four musicians and a bar. Bullier, who also owned the Closerie des Lilas cafe opposite, had an unerring sense of where money was to be made. On the other side of Boulevard St Michel was the wall against which Michel Ney, Napoleon’s “brightest and bravest” marshal, was shot for deserting the regular army to join his former emperor when he escaped from Elba and launched the lightning campaign that ended in defeat at Waterloo. Everyone knew the painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme of Ney’s corpse lying face down in the mud while the firing party marches away into the rain, but Bullier, indifferent to sentiment, opened a pleasure park on the other side of the wall and used it to introduce Paris to roller skating.

The Death of Marshal Ney by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Just a fifteen-minute walk from his apartment, the Closerie des Lilas became Hemingway’s preferred place to work. Tourists seldom strayed so far from  the bright lights and noisy conversation of the Rotonde and Dome. As long as he bought the occasional coffee or fine a l’eau, he wouldn’t be disturbed. In A Moveable Feast, he wrote “I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote. […] There were days ahead to be doing that each day, no other thing mattered.”

The following short story is part of a series about lesser-known aspects of life in nineteen-twenties Paris. The plight it describes of African American soldiers returning to the United States after experiencing the relative freedom of France is based on fact.

BOULEVARD DU MONTPARNASSE: BAL BULLIER.

The more he hung about the Closerie des Lilas, the more Fletcher persuaded himself that this was a fool idea.

A tower of small white saucers, each representing an inky black express, varied by a couple of cognacs, stood as a monument to his indecision. His head swam with the perfume from the head-high lilac bushes separating the terrace from the street. It dragged him back to Memphis and nights on the banks of the Mississippi; the stride of blues piano; a shack that sagged on piles over black water; the gut burn of home-brewed booze; the rank fishy smell of swamp mud, mixed with unwashed pussy. 

            Every minute he spent in the cafe, the noise from across the boulevard became louder. As each new couple arrived and pushed through the double doors, another, like water from an over-filled jug, spilled onto the sidewalk. Most slumped on the gutter, exhausted. A few – drunk, or simply elated? - reeled out into the traffic along boulevard du Montparnasse, careless of the hooting automobiles that swerved around them.

Before the door swung shut each time, Fletcher glimpsed a room filled with smoke, light and noise, within which couples, clutching one another as if drowning, pivoted, jostled and jigged. Then  he was back opposite, mouth  bitter with the taste of coffee and chicory.

            “Three Sixty Ninth?” asked the man at the next table.

            Fletcher struggled to formulate a reply in French before he realised he’d spoken American.

 “That’s right.”

Not that the questioner deserved a prize. A black American in Paris pretty near had to be from the all-negro 369th Regiment of Artillery - unless he was a barman or a musician, and none of them would wear a suit as sad as the one the quartermaster handed Fletcher on his demobilization.

“Thought you’d all gone back,” said the man.

“Most have,” Fletcher said. “I caught a bullet at Chateau-Thierry. Once I healed up, they put me to work clearin’ all that unexploded ordnance we shot at the Germans. Did that for near on eighteen months….”

He looked across the road again as the door disgorged another shouting knot of people.

“....and I’ve been three months waitin’ on a boat.”

The ugly fact hung between them. Sharing an enemy didn’t eradicate old hatreds. A year of war and two of peace had changed nothing. White Marines, seeing  black soldiers debarking from a ship at Saint Nazaire, shot at them. When Fletcher and some others fired back, an officer called them “bloodthirsty”. That the 369th took more ground than any other American unit in the war only made it worse.

A lone colored on an all-white troop ship would be bundled overboard before it cleared the Channel. Transport officers saved up blacks until they were numerous enough to share cabins and watch one another’s backs, and the number returning stateside this long after the war had dwindled to a trickle.

The man nodded towards the dance hall. “Going in?”

Though his jacket was as patched as any Fletcher had seen in Montparnasse and the heels of his high-sided rubber-soled boxing shoes were worn down almost to the canvas, he probably wasn’t an artist, he decided.  His shoulders were too broad, his hands too heavy – the pencil was lost in them. And his face spoke of hard times; a nose broken more than once, and scar tissue round the eyes. A boxer? A criminal?

“Thinkin’ about it, yeah.”

“Last night in Paris?”

“Last week anyways. I ship out Friday.”

“To where?”

“Memphis. Biloxi, maybe.”

“What sort of work did you do?”

“Pullman porter. Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific.”

“Choctaw Rocket.”

“That’s it.”

“Good money, I’m told.”

“Can be.” If you were prepared to “Yas-suh” and “No-suh” the first-class passengers; brush them down, shine their shoes, and clean up their vomit and piss when they were too drunk to make the bathroom; smuggle whores on the train at Little Rock and off at Memphis when these righteous white businessmen had the yen for a little Black Velvet.

“And.... you feel like dancing?”

“Feel like doin’ somethin’.  So far, I seen a lot of mud and dead folks, some hospitals, the barracks, and the Eiffel Tower. Not a lot to take back to Tennessee.”

The man slipped the notebook and pencil into the side pocket of his jacket.

“I’ll go over with you, if you like.”

“You know that place?”

“I know people who go there – or at least they know me. In Paris, that’s enough.”

As they crossed the street, the music, the java, an insistent, giddy and accelerated waltz, got louder, but as they reached the steps, it halted, and they stepped inside to, if not silence, then a diminished level of noise.

At the far end of the hall, the four musicians -  accordion, violin, piano and drums -  refreshed themselves with beers and wiped their faces. Noting the absence of sheet music, Fletcher feel more at home. Like the jazzers in Storyville, these old birds knew everything by heart. 

Cabaret tables, each jammed with  a dozen people, crowded up to the very edge of the dance floor. Narrow booths along one wall overflowed as well, while, along the opposite wall, men lined the bar three deep. Sweating waiters snake-hipped through the crowd with big metal trays held over their heads, delivering glasses of wine and beer.

His new friend guided Fletcher round the edge of a wooden dance floor. Years of sliding feet had worn its soft pine planks into smooths and hollows as intricately undulating as river stones.

Automatically, Fletcher scanned the crowd for black faces, and found a few. Since France owned most of north Africa, a black man scarcely rated a second glance, though he saw some people raise their eyebrows at his ill-fitting blue suit, so dull that it seemed almost ostentatious. Everyone else wore tight coats and trousers, in busy checks or the houndstooth Prince des Galles pattern, set off with a colourful scarf tied around the neck, and even, sometimes, gloves. Hats were common too; everything from berets to stiff straw skimmers.  The women favoured frilly satin blouses and tight skirts  halfway down their calves. Hair-dos were frizzy, often bottle blonde, with the occasional daring cropped mannish cut of the boy/girl garconne style. Over everything hung an almost solid miasma of  perfume, hair pommade and sweat. 

“How it works....”

He drew Fletcher out of the stream of young men circulating round the hall. Though they chatted among themselves, their eyes were covertly assessing the women.

“....you choose a girl, walk up to her, and invite her to dance.”

“What if she’s with someone?”

“That doesn’t matter. Most of these types....” He used the French pronounciation; “teeps” – “...don’t come to dance. A lot are crooks, or pimps. For the girls, it’s their night off. If they want to dance, they let them. But if she shakes her head, or he does, don’t insist. They’ll cut you as soon as spit. Another thing. It’s bad manners to talk on the floor.”

“About what?”

“About anything. Don’t ask her name or where she comes from. She certainly won’t ask yours. And no small talk. Just dance.”

“Don’t seem very social.”

“Nobody comes to a bal musette to be social.” He sniffed the air, like a hound dog seeking the scent. “It’s sex.”  He nodded towards a entrance almost hidden behind the bandstand. “Go out back, and you’d see that well enough.”

As if his nod had been a signal, the musicians took up their instruments and, without consultation, launched into another jigging waltz.

Instantly, the room was in motion. As a few couples whirled out onto the floor, the crowd at the bar dissolved into dozens of individual men weaving among the tables in search of partners. Fletcher watched as one man in a tight blue suit, extravagantly striped, with a thin moustache and black hair slick with pommade, approached three women in succession, stood by each for a few seconds, then, as they ignored him or shook their head, bowed and moved on. 

Once on the floor, each man, without exception, grabbed the woman’s ass with spread palms and dragged her to him, grinding his groin into hers, while she draped one arm around his neck, letting the other dangle loose at her side. Locked  like this, they jigged and spun in absorbed silence,

“Want a drink?” his new friend asked.

Fletcher was already scanning the women still seated. He stopped at four girls sitting together, without men, at a table by the wall. At first he thought only one was black, but decided they all were, though their colours ranged from his own jet to the cafe au lait that whites along the Mississippi  labeled “high yaller”. 

In particular, he noticed a small, almost plump young woman, in a polka-dotted dress of yellow and black. She was neither the lightest in skin colour nor the prettiest, but her face....

 “I think I’m just gonna....” he started.

He looked around, but the man with the notebook had disappeared. Skirting the dance floor, Fletcher wove through the tables to the four girls and, as he’d seen the other men door, stood awkwardly next to her.

Closer to, the quality he’d noticed from the other side of the room was even more pronounced.  If he’d known more French, he’d have used  the word diablerie. Devilishness.

She stared at him, silent, one eyebrow raised.

Could it be right that he shouldn’t say anything? He felt idiotic just standing there. Finally, he mumbled “Uh, mam’zelle, voulez vous....” and swirled his hand in a circle -  the universal gesture for dancing.

Her three companions dissolved in giggles, but she didn’t – just looked him over, like a prospective buyer wondering if he was the best bull on offer.

Then she held out her hand.

Leading her to the floor, Fletcher took a breath, grabbed the cheeks of her ass, and pulled her to him. The next instant, with a twist of his shoulders, he thrust them into the mob.

Whatever was taking place on the floor, it didn’t resemble any dancing he had ever done.  It was more like the time had to fight across a road thick with desperate refugees fleeing a bombardment. 

All the same, he saw why men clutched their women to them, and why the women kept their arms at their sides. If you didn’t cling to your partner, you’d lose her. And an elbow in the face could knock you cold.

Through the panic and the sense of strangeness, Fletcher realised with a shock that he was enjoying himself. He was exhilirated by the savagery of the dancers, the feel of the woman pressed against him, mirroring his moves, even anticipating them. 

All sensation contracted to their private world. Pressed so close, his ribs crushed her breasts and his dick ground against her navel.

No wonder they danced like this, he thought, elated.. Why would you ever want to dance any other way? Like his new friend said. Can’t you feel it? It’s sex!

The whirlpool of the java carried them by the bandstand. He glimpsed the sweating musicians as he passed – not as a single scene but in fragments, like the images of a movie; the accordionist’s great right foot pounding the beat; a piano keyboard with half the ivories missing and the rest yellow and cracked; the pianist’s gnarled left hand making the whole instrument shudder and jump....

Then an open door, gaping on darkness.

Go out back and you’ll see that well enough....

Spinning away of the dancing mob,  Fletcher dragged the girl out the door and into some kind of back alley. The rush of oxygen into his lungs was exhilirating; no wonder people reeled out into the road as they left the place.

Against the stone wall, half a dozen couples, patches of thicker darkness, grunted and moaned. Pale flesh flashed above a stocking top. Male legs naked below a shirt tail.  He heard a giggle and a sob.

Shoving his partner against the wall, Fletcher held her shoulder with his left hand while he plunged the other into the front of her blouse. Buttons popped and rattled on the ground and her breasts tumbled free, ripe and gleaming in the light that spilled from the door. Of her face, he glimpsed only a flash of teeth, the white of her eyes.

His groping hand under her skirt found silk, and ripped. The seam parted,  and he felt hair, and wet lips parting like an open wound. At the same instant, his dick, having strained against the buttons of his fly from their first few seconds on the floor, burst out. The next instant, her arms around his neck were supporting her full weight while she locked her legs around his waist,  heels jabbing the base of his spine.

With the fated precision of a bullet slotting into the breach, he entered her.

He heard nothing but his own rasping breath, and hers, loud in his right ear, where her head lay on his shoulder.

“Oh, Daddy,” she moaned. “You fuck me so good.”

Fletcher stopped dead, and drew back her head a few inches so he could look into her face.

“You’re American?”

She shook her hair out of her eyes. “You what?”

“You’re American. Like me!”

“Yes, I’m American. You’re American. Who gives a shit?”

She tightened her arms round his neck, lifted her hips and thrust them forward, drawing him deeper inside her.

“Just don’t stop!”

Hemingway let himself into the little hotel room on the top floor at 39 rue Descartes – the hotel where, he often reminded himself as he climbed the  narrow stairs, Paul Verlaine had died alone; elected “prince of poets” by his peers, but dead at fifty-one of absinthe and self-neglect.

Madame Lerman had set the fire. Putting a match to the crumpled papers under the slivers of pine,  he peeled one of the mandarin oranges he’d bought on his way up to this high point above Montparnasse, and tossed the peels into the growing flames. Their skin curled and dried, scenting the air with tart citrus.

Standing at the window, he leafed through his notebook. Scraps of conversation overheard at Le Dome; a beggar on the corner of Boulevard Raspail, slumped and defeated under Rodin’s statue of the triumphant Balzac, the black soldier at the Closerie des Lilas, fearless around unexploded shells but unwilling  to enter a dance hall alone.....

Looking out over the roofs, he thought about Paris and fear and failure. He knew all three, but they didn’t seem so bad – not compared to Verlaine and the young black soldier in the ill-fitting suit.

Later, when he finished, he might roast a few chestnuts.