Paris

April 1994

I had come to the rooftops near La Basilique du Sacré Couer de Montmartre and, alone, had stood amidst the rain and tourists, ever mindful of the raised eyebrows of those back at home who questioned why I’d quit my job, sold my things and made this journey. 

The streets smile of bread: long loaves prominently displayed from glass windows and carried about the hip and over the shoulder.  I had come to a two-room walk-up on the third story of a turn-of-the-century building that first cold April day.

Rue Campagne Premere – Montparnesse.

The apartment was small: one room, one big open room, where light falls in from a very large and tall open window.

I had come to Paris to escape the mediocrity of what my life had become – and because I wanted to write.  And because Paris is where James Baldwin had gone – and where my father had gone.

Large doors, very tall, shield the apartments from the city streets.  I was, in essence, looking at the Paris I had come to discover.

I run across one shop – right off Boulevard St Germain – where a sandwich, a drink, and a pastry (flamandine) go for 30 francs.  I sit day after day, thinking: Any one of those dark warrior faces could belong to my older brother.  My Dad fathered a child while he lived in Paris after his Army tour – and when my father was steamshipped back to the States, he left his son behind.  I am the third son, Robert Wesley, trying to find the second born.  And there is still the story of my father’s first born son.

I went looking for my father’s memories in Pigalle; in the ethnic markets where bulky produce raggedly spilled into the tight, dirty sidewalks that pulsed with more brown faces than I’d seen in the Latin Quarter.

Montmartre was like H Street in Northeast Washington, for all its commerce and black entrepreneurship – the small, narrow beauty supply stores triggering oh-so-many lonely and familiar reminiscences of home.

I wanted to see my father in this landscape and perhaps see him again, other than as this disciplinarian; a distant, roaring voice of a taller-than-me, fiercer-than-me bear I had to wrestle with, who commanded me to do the chores, to rake the leaves when they fell and to stack the firewood dumped into our backyard (at the onset of winter) by toothless rednecks in a truck from West Virginia.  I wanted to see him as more than his demands.  I wanted to see him when he was fun and free and without the responsibilities of his current life.

PARIS: My Favorite Place to Be!

Robert Lee Branch, before he was my father – France, 1958.