“She Gave a Parking Fine a Key Change and the Car Nothing”
Mirabelle Dautry's new cycle runs four songs on one 35-euro ticket from Rue Solférino. Mirela Sund counts the choruses, finds the bridge, and goes looking for the vehicle.
The ticket arrives in the first bar. Under a slow piano, Mirabelle Dautry sings the time on it: 9:42. Then the date, the street, the amount. "Trente-cinq euros sous l'essuie-glace." Thirty-five euros under the wiper. The audience sighs like people who have been there. I have been there. I did not write a cycle about it.
The cycle is called Horodateur. It has four movements and a cellist who looks as if he was promised something else. The first movement is the discovery. The second is the denial, with a chorus you will hum on the tram against your will. The third is a letter of appeal, sung entirely on one note, which is the only honest decision of the evening. The fourth is payment.
I must be fair, because the verses are well made. The rhymes land. The pauses are cut by someone with a ruler. In the second movement the word "amende" is stretched over eleven beats until it sounds like a small country. That is craft, and I resent it.
But where is the car?
Four songs, roughly twenty-six minutes, and not one line about the vehicle. Was it blue? Was it hers? Did it have a dent, a smell, a name? She sings of the wiper, the paper, the plastic sleeve, the rain on the plastic sleeve. The thing that was parked wrongly is treated like a witness who may not be named. A fine is a consequence. She has written the consequence four times and left out the act.
Then the bridge. Her voice drops. She sings the payment reference, all sixteen digits, one per beat, and the cellist is allowed to look sad for the first time. It is the best moment in the cycle because it is the only one that is specific and does not know it. Then she ruins it. The key change arrives, a full tone up, for the confirmation email. A tone up! For an email! Somewhere a modulation that should have been saved for a wedding, a death or a surrender has been spent on a receipt.
She bows to long applause at Salle Marguerite Vanhoutte. She deserved some, for the rhymes. I gave none to the key change, and I will not discuss the cellist's face, which is his own business.
I left at ten to nine. On Rue Solférino, a small grey car sat half on the pavement with a ticket under its wiper. It was the first time all night I felt sorry for the car.
