Gina is taking me to the Turkish bath-house in Paris for the first time. Though I have been living here for almost a year, I have never been. Gina, a drop-dead gorgeous Los Angelina of African/West Indian/Vietnamese/Irish descent who wears her hair in tiny braids that cascade all the way down her back or up in a serpentine chignon, has a gift for finding the tiniest diamonds in fair Paris' crown. She also introduced me to the secluded (and thus exclusive, in the sense that you really have to be shown how to find it by someone who was shown how to find it, and this geneaology of chic does not include tourists or other people with guidebooks, though there are plenty of expats) velvet-and-candles bar sans nom that is hidden away behind an entirely unmarked door near the Place de la Bastille. But that is another story for another time.
Now we walk through a gorgeously tiled court, rich with blue and green enamel and paint, all of which also is chipped and mossy enough to convey the serenity of ancient places. We enter the arched doorways, and pay our 50 francs to the elderly woman sitting at a little hexagonal table just inside the door. She is wearing a long gown and veil. When she smiles at us, we see that her teeth are limned in gold.
I do not smell or feel the presence of water, which is what I had expected. When Gina asked me along, I assumed that a Turkish bath would be something like a Roman bath - a large and nearly excruciatingly hot non-bubbling tub in which at least ten women could comfortably sit, soak, and talk while being attended. There is a particular smell here, though. It is the smell of a hot sidewalk after a hard rain - steam and rock and heat. There is also the scent of eucalyptus, but not as I have ever smelled it before. This is not the smell of a sickroom or a coughdrop, but an invigorating green sharpness that speaks of newness and growth. Altogether, it is the smell of a hothouse without the rich dark must of earth.
This bathhouse was like the one borgo describes above in some respects, but was also very different in others.
Camekan and Sogukluk
The first room we walk into has many cubbies with little baskets. We take off all of our clothing and put it in a basket, picking up a little chip with the number of the cubby from an adjoining nail. We then walk through a curtained doorway into another courtyard, in which women of all ages talk and laugh, standing in small groups or reclining on reed mats. No striped, checked, or fringed towels are in evidence. We are all completely naked, and if not for the modesty of the absolute nude, would easily resemble a harem. Women in simple dresses circulate with trays of honey and pistachio cakes (like baklava), and trays of tiny, steaming hot cups of strong mint and sweet apple teas.
In the center of the courtyard is a merry little fountain that bubbles over three marble tiers. The ledge of the fountain is ringed with clear glass cups. If you wish for a drink of cold water, you walk over and fill one of these cups with water from the fountain, drink, and then place the cup back on the ledge.
Passing from the Parisian street into the easy intimacy of sharing drinking glasses and being surrounded by so much naked stranger, all within the space of ten minutes, elicits a mental transition not unlike the physical one - my mind first stops in an antechamber in which insecurity is quickly basketed and put away, then eases into a decadent state of absolute relaxation and entitlement.
Gina and I shake out two reed mats and take our ease on them for a moment, drinking tea and basking in the soft glow of sunlight diffused through the milky glass of the courtyard dome. My American democratism wavers under the pleasure of being attended to while naked and reclining, and I soon find myself wishing for a slave boy or two. Alas, no men, not even slave boys, are allowed in the bath. This is, after all, a holy place.
After we have had many little glasses of hot apple tea, and cool water which we bring each other from the fountain, we rise and enter the next room. The cakes and other treats are for after, as this room is also where people return to cool off and dry before leaving the baths.
Hararet
There are three separate rooms in the Parisian hararet. The first is a room of marble and terracotta. It is very hot, and very much like a sauna in its humidity, which is promoted by pouring water from a simple brass pipe fountain over the marble dias upon which women are sitting or lying. There are also smaller chambers off of this one, in which one can receive a vigorous eucalyptus massage (by which I mean that you are lightly beaten from neck to toe with leafy eucalyptus branches until the entire body is suffused with a pink glow, and then have every inch of your skin expertly ravaged with a kese by a bathwoman until you feel like a peeled carrot).
We do not have the money for a pro job, so we have a leisurely DIY hamam instead. Here we sit, and sweat, and massage ourselves and each other's backs with the rough raw silk fiber kese mittens. Dead skin sloughs off of me in grey curls. I can hardly believe how much of it there is. As I rub, more skin exfoliates, lifting like pages of a book curling up after sitting too long next to the pool. I obligingly rub it off, too, and eventually the mild sense of horror that this process has invoked resolves into a feeling of satisfaction with the process. Once there seems to be no more dead skin coming off, we go into the next room.
In the next room, it is very, very, very hot. Gasping for air hot. And I soon discover that yes, there is more dead skin, and that comes off as well. We do not linger for very long here, which is good, because it did not take long for me to start seeing large black spots in my vision. I think I very likely would have passed out if we had stayed any longer - it was that hot. We return to the less hot (but nevertheless quite hot) room we were in previously, and scoop up brass bowlfuls of cool water from the simple fountains, pouring it over ourselves and gently sluicing it off to rinse away the last remnants of dead skin. By now I feel almost exquisitely sensitive to every sensation of touch. The water, the air, my hand sluicing cold water down over my arm. It is so pleasurable that my throat tightens and I shiver the kind of shiver that begins in the muscles.
We re-emerge into the courtyard with the reed mats, and I see in the bright sunlight of the room that my skin is almost translucent with an inner glow, like alabaster in a Tuscan sunset, all creamy and pink and peach. I have the skin of a newborn, and the wit to enjoy it. We recline, drink tea, eat cake, lick honey off of our fingertips and grin knowingly at each other's goosebumps.
Eventually it is time to go, and we put our clothes back on. I am very glad that I was wearing a simple white cotton t-shirt and a skirt. Both are very soft, and feel delicious against my skin. The breeze outside has never felt more like a physical caress. We part at the St. Paul metro stop, and I luxuriate in my newfound sense of being touched, intimately, by air and light and texture. This feeling lingers for days.
DIY
I have wished and wished for a hamam since then, but have never lived near to one, even when I was in Boston (you would think, but alas). As far as I know it is not possible to reproduce the intense levels of heat and humidity in a private home unless one has a room (or rooms) which are made entirely of marble and terracotta. However, I have found that a heavy workout followed by sitting in a regular sauna at the gym followed by a vigorous loofah scrubbing in a hot shower followed by a cool shower is a reasonable approximation, if you can stand so much wet heat. Don't forget to stay hydrated!
Chiisuta says "The skin scrubbing you describe is quite like akasuri or "red scrub," a treatment developed centuries ago in the bathhouses of Korea."
Chii knows so much that I think she is a sekrit agent with the CIA like that chiX0r in Alias
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