Salim Bachi - Paris Noir

I had set foot in a place I shouldn’t have, onto the other side of the boulevard. In the space of a hundred yards I’d gone through the 5th and 6th arrondissements, whereas that night I had dreamed that I belonged to the middle middle class, you know, the one people say is neither more nor less. So in that dream I was walking my dog, a ghost dog, without hurrying, and the dog starts pulling on his leash, he crosses through Sainte-Anne from rue d’Alésia to the elevated subway, then he scratches at the little metal door of the prison and he goes sniffing out sickness in the crowded ER of Cochin, as if he’s looking for something or someone. Not at all. He’s just trying to get rid of me among the crazies, the jailbirds, and the dying. He makes me go through the revolving door of the Closerie des Lilas, pulls me up to a lady with bright red hair and leopard tights, then leaves through the same revolving door and makes me wander out onto rue Campagne-Première, a street Godard used in Breathless . He bites the ass of the stone lion on Place Denfert, plunges into the catacombs, and to finish things off, to finish me off, he raises his leg on me. I wake up all pissy, sticky, sweaty, in a lukewarm smell that makes your stomach heave and breaks your heart, and makes you cry pissy, sticky floods of tears, it’s the smell of chemotherapy embalming you and profaning you while you’re still alive, I’m stretched out on a bed in a white room and the dog’s not there anymore, he must be sniffing around the Montparnasse cemetery behind the high gray walls, looking for a concession. That’s the kind of polytraumatising dream I came in for. But the worst is still to come: A doctor throws me out of the room saying I’m a simulator. Go figure Parisian life!

Sure thing. Everybody’s more Parisian than I am. The whole world is Parisian. The Chinese woman who makes little Eiffel Towers in the depths of Shanxi and the illegal Malian who sells them on the sidewalks of Quai Branly, the interpreter of Albert Camus or Jacques Derrida, and the French cancan dancer who raises her leg around Hamburg. Nothing is more Parisian than the Mona Lisa and yet she’s Italian, that Mona Lisa. My Parisianism isn’t worth a damn. I haven’t left the 14th arrondissement for ten years, the only one on the Left Bank through which the Seine does not flow.

“You are absurd,” the woman writer said to me.

“I am a stranger, a foreigner. I’ll never make it back home. Besides, I got an eviction notice.”

“So you’re not paying for my drink?”

“Not paying for your glass, not screwing your ass, we got no class.”

“Fuck off, you asshole, you dickhead, get the hell out of here.”

Reread this in Lord Jim in the bookstore next door:

We are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go out decently in the end — but not so sure of it after all — and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with right and left.

Less courage than indifference. Does all that really concern me?

“What?” asked the bookseller.

“Me, the eviction officer, the biopsy. What’s the use? When my mother died she wasn’t in her right mind anymore, but if she had been, what could I have done with her mind? And my children... what the hell do they care about the biopsy, the eviction officer, and me? When China opened its economy to the free market, it led to the biggest exodus from the provinces human history has ever known. Young Indian women work sixteen hours a day in export industries for a salary of fifteen euros a month. In the same month a model or a soccer player makes a million euros.”

“Are you buying the book?”

“No, I don’t buy anything anymore.”

I humbly returned to the 14th arrondissement. As long as I was on boulevard de Port-Royal I was in the sun, broad-shouldered, with my head held high despite the humiliations of my constitution, but the end of rue de la Santé came down on me like a notch in a tomahawk, I turned off into that gorge, Little Big Horn. On my left the good guys, on my right the bad. So it was kind of hard for me not to zigzag, stagger, and go bumping from a wall to a gate, from a sentry to an intercom. Good thing I don’t walk by the prison every day, because I can’t help going inside to see my son who happens to be housed there through the fortunes of life, and he doesn’t like me to come see him all the time in the visiting room looking as if I want to get him out of there. When he sees me he always has that dismayed look he had when he opened his Christmas present under the tree — a nice book, when he was counting on a PlayStation, latest generation.

He knows very well that I don’t like knowing he’s in there, but he also knows very well I don’t like knowing he’s somewhere else. In short, I’ve never known what to do with the big guy since the day he was born. He’s a boy who has no problem telling good from evil, but claims that the former is more harmful than the latter, and the promoters of universal good have created more victims than the devotees of dirty tricks. In other words, he says the Crusades, the Inquisition, Communism, and colonialism have been more generously murderous in good faith and in the name of God’s law or man’s than a handful of rascals fearing neither God nor man.

“Why’d you come here, Dad?”

“I was in the neighborhood, passing by, son.”

“You’re sick? It’s your cancer?”

“Don’t worry, boy.”

“I’m not worrying, Dad. I’m inquiring, that’s all — you’re hanging in there.”

“I’m holding up, big guy.”

“I don’t see what hold-up you’re talking about, Dad.”

“We’re talking man to man, son, it does you good.”

“The trouble with you, Dad, is that you talk when there’s nothing to say, and you don’t say anything when I ask questions.”

“I don’t have all the answers, big guy, you don’t get answers just like that.”

“You never saw the sunny side of life.”

“And you did?”

“I’m going my way, and you’ve always been in the street. You’re the man in the street, Dad, a nobody. Nobody pays any attention to you.”

“How do you like it here? Good food?”

“I’m fine here, Dad, nobody can kick me out and nobody wants to take my place.”

“You’re pretty smart, the way things are now. People lose their jobs, can’t pay the rent anymore, their wife cuts out on them, their boys sell drugs and their girls sell their ass, all of them end up homeless, young, old — forty-eight percent of the French are afraid of becoming homeless. You got a cushy place here, don’t screw around with me.”

“Life isn’t rosy every day, Dad. The National Committee on Ethics reports that prison is a place of regression, despair, violence done to oneself, and suicide. The suicide rate is seven times higher than in the general population.”

“You know, boy, like I say, it’s not exactly all brotherly outside either. Here, at least you’re with people of your own kind. It’s like in Cochin or Sainte-Anne, or the Ursuline Convent. You see your mother?”

“No.”

“Well, I saw her on TV, on a literary show. It seemed to be going good for her: She had nice bright red hair and panther-skin tights. She was testifying about her orgasms, but nothing that could have incriminated me.”

“Hey, while you’ve got your mouth open, you’re gonna do me a favor. Not that I want to boss you around, but... you know the yellow café further down, right next to the boulevard, at the metro stop?”