Read Online Ghosts by Daylight by Janine di Giovanni - Free Book Online
Authors: Janine di Giovanni
Ads: Link
nineteenth-century sofas in one room, a dark wood dining room table squashed by a chaise longue, paintings, easels, books, the smell of paint and paint thinner, piles of old magazines, marble tables, a pointy obelisk that looked frighteningly dangerous, and a long canary yellow sofa that looked like it came from 1970s Sweden.
The cleaner opened one of the shutters to a door that opened onto a balcony. It ran the entire length of the apartment. I stood outside the bedroom balcony, next to a withered grapevine, and saw, across the Tuileries, the clock on the top of the Musée d’Orsay.
The cleaner said, ‘It’s a big apartment. For Paris.’
There was a long narrow hallway stuffed with yet more sofas and paintings, a bedroom painted dark maroon, another room – the baby’s room, I decided – with a wooden bed from Kerala in Southern India. The master bathroom had an old-fashioned claw-foot tub. There was an office with a balcony and a fireplace for me to work, and a large dining room for friends to gather and eat. The kitchen was painted apple green, like my study in Africa.
There were jars of pasta, and heavy iron pots hanging from silver hooks. There were salt shakers and thick dishes from Sicily. It felt, I thought, like a country house in Tuscany. I thanked the cleaner, handed back the key, and left.
In the Place du Marché Saint-Honoré, I found a café with long scrubbed wooden tables and I ordered a tea and a lemon tart and called O. from my cell phone. I am not sure who convinced whom, or what arrangements were made, or how he was eventually convinced, but in the end, I called Bruno and told him we had a home for our family.
The taxi driver who picked me up on the corner of rue de Rivoli to take me back to Gare du Nord came from Uganda. He spoke English. I told him I had lived and worked in Africa.
‘Then you know,’ he said. He did not have to say what I knew.
‘What do you miss about Africa?’ I said. I told him I missed the air right before the rainy season, when it was perfectly still, and then the rains came, and the time of morning when the light was still pink, just after dawn, when you saw everyone on the road walking to work. I thought briefly of Matthew, our cook in Abidjan, walking to work on the day his brother died. In Africa, people walk slowly, with great patience, but always with a destination.
We were stuck in traffic for a long time. I could see the Gare du Nord from where we sat, in front of an Egyptian café where a group of men sat reading Arabic newspapers and drinking tea and smoking water pipes.
I once had a friend from Zimbabwe, a writer called Shimmer. We were meant to meet for lunch in a café in midtown Manhattan one afternoon and he was late. When he arrived, he drank a large glass of water and told me he had spent the morning walking the length of Manhattan Island. ‘It reminded me of being home,’ he said.
‘You walked the entire island?’
‘Yes, walked. Is that so strange?’
Later, Shimmer told me, ‘You can always tell someone who is very far from the place of their birth by the sadness in their eyes.’
‘I miss the moon,’ the driver said finally when he dropped me off. ‘That’s what I miss the most about Africa.’
On the train, I thought about how I had spent most of my life missing something. When I left for England from America when I was very young to go to school, I missed my family. When I was working in strange places, with long days and no sleep, I missed laughter, I missed the normality of daily life and routines, and I missed faces whose features I knew and could feel safe near.
I already knew that I was going to miss London, the city, and the life I had before: the people in the cafés, the greyness of a November day, the newsagents and the Sunday papers, and the smell of roasted, slightly burnt potatoes on Portobello Road. My gypsy life. But I also knew that I was going to have a happy life in that dirty, cluttered, and
The cleaner opened one of the shutters to a door that opened onto a balcony. It ran the entire length of the apartment. I stood outside the bedroom balcony, next to a withered grapevine, and saw, across the Tuileries, the clock on the top of the Musée d’Orsay.
The cleaner said, ‘It’s a big apartment. For Paris.’
There was a long narrow hallway stuffed with yet more sofas and paintings, a bedroom painted dark maroon, another room – the baby’s room, I decided – with a wooden bed from Kerala in Southern India. The master bathroom had an old-fashioned claw-foot tub. There was an office with a balcony and a fireplace for me to work, and a large dining room for friends to gather and eat. The kitchen was painted apple green, like my study in Africa.
There were jars of pasta, and heavy iron pots hanging from silver hooks. There were salt shakers and thick dishes from Sicily. It felt, I thought, like a country house in Tuscany. I thanked the cleaner, handed back the key, and left.
In the Place du Marché Saint-Honoré, I found a café with long scrubbed wooden tables and I ordered a tea and a lemon tart and called O. from my cell phone. I am not sure who convinced whom, or what arrangements were made, or how he was eventually convinced, but in the end, I called Bruno and told him we had a home for our family.
The taxi driver who picked me up on the corner of rue de Rivoli to take me back to Gare du Nord came from Uganda. He spoke English. I told him I had lived and worked in Africa.
‘Then you know,’ he said. He did not have to say what I knew.
‘What do you miss about Africa?’ I said. I told him I missed the air right before the rainy season, when it was perfectly still, and then the rains came, and the time of morning when the light was still pink, just after dawn, when you saw everyone on the road walking to work. I thought briefly of Matthew, our cook in Abidjan, walking to work on the day his brother died. In Africa, people walk slowly, with great patience, but always with a destination.
We were stuck in traffic for a long time. I could see the Gare du Nord from where we sat, in front of an Egyptian café where a group of men sat reading Arabic newspapers and drinking tea and smoking water pipes.
I once had a friend from Zimbabwe, a writer called Shimmer. We were meant to meet for lunch in a café in midtown Manhattan one afternoon and he was late. When he arrived, he drank a large glass of water and told me he had spent the morning walking the length of Manhattan Island. ‘It reminded me of being home,’ he said.
‘You walked the entire island?’
‘Yes, walked. Is that so strange?’
Later, Shimmer told me, ‘You can always tell someone who is very far from the place of their birth by the sadness in their eyes.’
‘I miss the moon,’ the driver said finally when he dropped me off. ‘That’s what I miss the most about Africa.’
On the train, I thought about how I had spent most of my life missing something. When I left for England from America when I was very young to go to school, I missed my family. When I was working in strange places, with long days and no sleep, I missed laughter, I missed the normality of daily life and routines, and I missed faces whose features I knew and could feel safe near.
I already knew that I was going to miss London, the city, and the life I had before: the people in the cafés, the greyness of a November day, the newsagents and the Sunday papers, and the smell of roasted, slightly burnt potatoes on Portobello Road. My gypsy life. But I also knew that I was going to have a happy life in that dirty, cluttered, and
Similar Books
