Salim Bachi - Paris Noir

“I’m a gastroenterologist, not a psychiatrist. I can see you’re a depressive, but you’re not the only one and beds are hard to come by. Your colon looks okay, your stomach has definitively found its spot in the mediastinum, and aside from the problem of anemia, you’re in perfect health. I don’t want to see you here anymore. Next time, go see your primary caregiver. You had an operation ten years ago, that’s old news, and you still keep coming to see us. You live next door? You’re just dropping by like a neighbor? You moved into a boarding house across the street?”

“Across the street there’s a convent. And your nearest neighbors are jailbirds and insane people. I live further away in a new neighborhood where the lower middle class lives. I feel like I’m my father, but unlike me he didn’t have debts and he paid his rent.”

“Good. What did your father do?”

“He biked every morning and evening to the station and back, but I’m walking back.”

“Don’t get caught in the demo with your dickhead and your wobbly legs. It’s the firemen against the CRS riot police; things are going to heat up. And call me this evening for the results of the biopsy.”

I went back up to see my room. It had no smell anymore. The moron who’d slit his throat ten years back was there, he’d come back again, all sewed up, in bed, in bad shape. He didn’t want my compassion, and he didn’t even recognize me. I went up to the window to take a look at the convent. Veiled Ursulines were walking around the courtyard, I didn’t know which one was mine. They never went outside, or very rarely. A little like me. We were not fated to meet. On the other side over the rooftops you could see the Eiffel Tower as if it were brand new.

Once I was outside I backed up. I crossed the boulevard and I went and sat down in a garden of the Observatory. From there I could see Sacré-Coeur, but between the big hill of Montmartre and that part of Montparnasse, there sits all of Paris: In the mist, it wasn’t much. And to think I’d wanted to stick something up the ass of this fucking city. Walls, houses, and behind the walls of the houses, heads, and in each head other walls, dollhouses, makeup, and monkey-dreams — that’s all there was.

I was mad at myself for not being in good shape. I’d been afraid of a relapse and my body had become an irresponsible mechanism.

I say eternal words to myself with no substance, fine day, bare sky, the blue transparent skin of emptiness, the trembling of the air, the border of absence, rue de la Santé, Health Street, the health of the street. So everything is in everything else? But I am in nothing. Isolating, escaping, thinking against the grain, alone, thinking Tao, sparrow and Tao, not acting, no longer moving, until the reality test.

That’s when that first corpse came into the picture. I heard myself saying: He’s dead, that’s life . There was no border between him and me. I had already thought all that about someone I loved, or maybe not, or else someone with wings, or crawling, or an inanimate object. A household robot? No doubt FN, French Norms, I have always been faithful to French Norms, even to my smallest whim.

I am a man of quality, I said aloud, French quality, a creation of national craftsmanship. Not a top-of-the-line product, but not supermarket junk. I am a “cultural exception” in the French sense, except for the fact that there’s nothing exceptional about me. Perfectly average. It seems to me the corpse is sitting on the bench and I’m sitting on my ass. I have no other spiritual base but my own bottom, bottomless anyway, ever since I got sick, but that’s the base I’m talking from, right? To the walls, to the dead.

I stir thoughts with the pins and needles in my legs. Maybe they’re the pins that stir my thoughts. They think in German, like strategists, they hold me very straight in my boots, like Bismarck. But I’m going to take French leave, like the Invisible Man. I may think like a strategist but I still act like a wanderer. I wander standing still. I have this corpse on my hands, it’s hard to get away from it. He’s a young man and I find him touching. What should I do? Administer first aid? Aid yourself first. Wait for help, some clarification, after which I could kiss this episode goodbye and enjoy the benefits of resilience? This city is dead and inhabited by corpses. Even the leaves of the chestnut trees are dead. The wind growls at the big trees and the rain’s teeth are chattering on the surface of the Fontaine des Quatre-Mondes. A leaf falls on my nose, soft and wet, dead. An actual slug coming out of my nose. I’m more or less in the same state of dismayed stupor as the day I was excluded from the Great Competition of Floral Poetry because I shat in my pants before the official jury.

At present, through a shining rain, I am distressed to see a young man next to me on the bench all slumped down with his shoulders hacked to pieces by a machete, and just five minutes ago he was telling me with a smile and flawless teeth about his reasoned ambition to live here in France, the land of welcome — a young, practically French-speaking friendly Rwandan who lived, from what I could glean from his damned gobbledygook, in the dorms of the Cité Universitaire and wanted to give up his studies in Paris. He had met a girl he liked, someone of the same culture and status, and his temporary job as an interpreter for tourists on the Bateaux-Mouches was enough for him to begin integrating into society, while he waited. Waited for what? I said to him. Waited to get old? He had Camus’s The Stranger in his pocket, that asshole. It’s funny. When you read The Stranger , you always think you’re Meursault, the one who kills, the one who thinks, and never the Arab who dies like an asshole. If I were the general-in-chief of smalltown France I wouldn’t have been very proud of myself. A guy asks someone for a cigarette, the other guy’s a nonsmoker, so the first guy persists, walks away and comes back with a machete, and hacks the guy to pieces. No comprendo. I hadn’t seen the danger coming, I didn’t sense that the enemy offensive was coming around the Maginot Line either. But after all, we don’t have eyes on our backs. On our backs we have wings, right?

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re still acting in shitty films?”

“I write books,” she said. “I’m the new Virginia Woolf.”

I shouldn’t have been there in the Closerie des Lilas, a stone’s throw from Cochin and the Observatory. Famous writers had come to this brasserie, then their ghosts, finally plaques on the tables in memoriam and finally fat men smoking cigars and skeleton women coughing away.

The last time I saw the woman facing me was twenty years ago and the shitty film was a time in my life, not a masterpiece they show in the cinematheque. I should go back home along rue de la Santé with my eyes closed and lock myself up at my place. Last time, I’d managed to make her laugh with Parisian gossip, that red-haired slut in leopard tights. Maybe I had intrigued her, maybe not. I gave her a hard-on, what else can I say. I had a furious beast between my legs, a famished tiger. She looked like an elegant scarecrow at the time and now like an epileptic mummy. She was always smoking little foul-smelling cigars and she used to laugh loudly but without gaiety or any reason to laugh, aside from me. She drank large quantities of beer. Ten or twenty years ago — the last time — she was already a former dancer, or a former model, and a former American too. She already had an impressive length of service in a whole bunch of fields. She didn’t speak French very well and wasn’t listening to what I was saying. She didn’t want to listen to just anything. She was in a rush to live and now in even more of a rush, in a state of emergency really, except with me. It was as if for ten or twenty years she’d been recharging her battery and I’d emptied mine. I had absolutely no desire to be sitting across the table from her. If I could have chosen a female companion I would rather have chosen a dead woman, or one with Alzheimer’s, a mischievous little madwoman, inoffensive, hesitant, stammering, out of it, with gestures and signs of affection from another era. I was not unhappy to have left my cock in the cloakroom. I had nothing under the table that could have given me a hard time; under the table there were only cigarette butts that nobody would have thought of lighting.