Paris Noir Read online

  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 Lisaand 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.”

  Honorable Exit

  Reread this in Lord Jimin the bookstore next door:

  We are only on sufferance here and got to pick our wayin cross lights, watching every precious minute and everyirremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go outdecently in the end—but not so sure of it after all—andwith dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbowswith 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.”

  Rue de la Santé

  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?”

  “I know it without knowing it, it’s not my hangout.”

  “The waiter there, his name is Willy, ask him for the package I gave him, and stash it away for the time being.”

  “The time being of what?”

  “That’s all, Dad, stop your bullshit.”

  It’s amazing how much self-confidence this boy has now. A guy who used to give up his turn on the slide to other kids, I see him walking away, towering over the guards by a head. A kind of sun king. Well, a sun locked away in the shade. But with global warming, maybe that’s not such a bad place for it to be for the time being.

  “For the time being of what?”

  “You can do time without being, dickhead,” the guard answered me. “Get the hell out of here, asshole.”

  Once I’m outside, I stare life in the face and I don’t see myself in it and a kind of perplexity takes hold of me, in fact a feeling of melancholy like that twinge of sorrow I used to feel when I dropped off my son, or was it his sister, with the woman who took care of them, a fine woman no doubt, often very easy-going, but certainly perverse.

  Come to think of it, I’ve always abandoned my children. I left them with an inheritance of insecurity; insecurity isn’t bad, for someone who likes surprises. One day he’ll have his PlayStation. If I had the money I’d buy him one right away, I’d send him a package. But I don’t have any money, I don’t want any, I don’t deserve any. If I wanted money it wouldn’t be around here. Here, people not only have everything, they know how to use it too. They even know how to use you. They would even use my boy, if he was of any use whatsoever.

  Packing Tape

  The prison wall seemed even higher and longer than it had on the way there, or else the sky seemed lower.

  It was 1 o’clock when I walked back under the elevated train. The café was crowded, Africans eating pink spaghetti twisted in a heap on their plate like handfuls of complicated neurons. People often think Africans are cheerful, but these were sad. It was only the owner who was merry—a red-haired white woman, with zebra-striped tights—she danced behind the counter. I think she was missing half her teet
h but I could only see with one eye because of the smoke. I asked for Willy in a low voice, as if I were coming on to him.

  I laboriously explained my business to this Willy, who didn’t answer because, as the boss confided to me, he’d had his vocal cords slit in Kigali, in 1994. Willy listened to me, staring straight into my eyes as if I were finally confessing that I was responsible for the massacre of his family and his whole people, as the commander-in-chief of the French army that protected the Hutu militia who murdered 800,000 Tutsis with machetes and screwdrivers. The manager seemed to agree, she wasn’t laughing anymore either. Willy disappeared and came back with a package wrapped up with tape. He put the package in a plastic envelope and then in a Nicolas wine-bottle bag. He put it on the bar and again I thought of my boy unwrapping his presents under the Christmas tree. It seemed polite to order a beer and buy one for Willy, but the manager said fuck off, asshole, we’ve had enough of you.

  “Yeah, we had enough of you,” Willy echoed. “Fuck off or I’ll gut you like a chicken.”

  I thought my guts had been emptied out already but I didn’t get into an argument.

  Episode

  I went back by crossing through Sainte-Anne. It’s a shortcut, and a peaceful walk. You’d think it was a big convent with its tennis courts, archways, statues of men on horseback (or not), a romantic garden, and a decent cafeteria with reasonable prices. My daughter is a performer there sometimes. It took her a long time to find her way. When she was thirteen she became introverted and anorexic and I really thought she would become a nun, but that’s when she came back to us with bright red hair and a black mouth, fishnet tights and parachute boots. She was inseparable from her girlfriend Fred who had the same deadly pale gargoyle face tattooed with aggressive devils and pierced from eyebrows to lips with square-headed nails. Which is why, when Fred jumped out of the fourteenth floor across from our apartment, first I thought I saw the two of them together, but I was seeing double at that time anyway. Now I see clearly, I see simply, I see things the way they are. I think my daughter was the one who pushed Fred, the way you push away your evil genius. So my daughter wasn’t so crazy, but she was crazy enough to be locked up in an asylum with a room kept for her here for the last five years.

  “No such thing as crazy,” she said to me last time. “I’m paranoid because of you. I was unable to sublimate my homosexual desire, which you never recognized, into a social drive. You never accepted Frederique as my sister because then your attraction to her would have been incestuous.”

  “I wasn’t her father.”

  So we sort of had an interesting discussion, I mean it went way beyond the disgusted faces and monosyllabic yells our father-daughter dialogue had been reduced to. At the time she was part of a theater group in her psychiatric hospital. If there had been an audience she would have turned her back on it, and if she’d had a script to recite she would have watched out for spying ears. But there was no script, no audience, just a director, who in fact didn’t have a stage. Nonetheless, my daughter had found her way and if some might say it was a dead-end street, what could they say about their own way? I really felt like consoling my daughter and telling her that her little dead-end was finer than the widest highways. I knew where I could find her, she usually hid behind big trees to throw stones at the birds. I don’t look anything like a bird and yet when she saw me she screamed and threw a handful of big pebbles. I think she recognized me. At least she recognized a man. A potential rapist: She hates that. That’s the way she’s been, especially since her nonpsychiatric episode a year ago. She was doing better, she’d gone back to school and even found a temp job as a cashier to pay for it since I was unemployed at the time, but the boss kept telling her she was a dumb jerk and a fat bitch and a fat jerk, all day, behind his mustache, so she quit that job to become a temp prostitute and that disgusted her, that masculine promiscuity, the disrespect for the human person and the assault on feminine dignity.

  As for me, I wasn’t so brave. I retreated, and when I turned around I couldn’t see her anymore, but the tree was shaken and trembling. The tree was going into convulsions and howling dickhead, asshole, get the fuck out of here, go roll in your shit. A psychiatrist took me by the arm, dislocating my shoulder, and I asked him if there were any rooms free. That cracked him up, because they were emptying the mental hospitals to fill the prisons. I thought of the policy of family entry and settlement and I felt like going back home.

  I left the walls of the hospital thinking about my father, the general-in-chief of the middle class, who never knew his grandchildren, but always had faith in social progress and the great chain of being. He also used to say you had to get a good education, be equipped for life without killing yourself, and find a nice cushy job in the public sector.

  Others

  I hadn’t done anything to improve my anemia. I didn’t even know if I’d had a biopsy in Cochin or a bio-psych in Sainte-Anne. This kind of word problem could torment me, unsettle me to the max. I never should have walked on my head. A bunch of young hoods saw my weakness right away: “You sick, or you dead already? What were you doing with the crazies? Why’re you hanging out in front of the prison? Why don’t you go home?” They called me a dirty Frenchman; they must have been Arabs or blacks, I have a problem with colors. I said I had indeed passed by the hospital, the convent, the asylum, and the prison, and I’d heard the walls crying, but I hadn’t seen anything. There’s nothing to see on rue de la Santé. Nowhere. I could have walked by shop windows, brasseries, and cafés, I still wouldn’t have seen anything. There might’ve been bright lights, they might’ve been laughing in there, oh yes, but I would’ve walked on. I’m broke, nothing to sell nothing to give. I’m tired. When I go out I get claustrophobic. Outside not at home. At home’s bigger than outside. This city is a dead city the way a language is a dead language. Obsolete. Nothing is alive. People are thinner and thinner. They have the thickness of a light jacket, of spandex tights, jeans with holes in them, or a DVD. I tell these young assholes I can’t hear them, I can’t see them, I don’t even know if they’re there every day, dealing, hassling people, waiting while waiting for life to wait for them. Life doesn’t wait for anyone. They don’t exist. They’re sub-shits.

  I tell them that because Hassan, the gardner, is behind me with a big pitchfork and he’s strict about the rules. He doesn’t like to see pre-delinquents smoking in his garden, sleeping on his lawns, or challenging honest passersby.

  “You okay?” he asks me.

  I don’t tell him I’m just out of the hospital, he doesn’t give a shit. I tell him I’m okay. He tells me about the garden. I don’t give a shit. I wonder what the teenagers are thinking. They’re not thinking, they’re waiting, they push things out of their way. I don’t know what Arabs think either, you never know what they’re thinking, they don’t think, they pray. Hassan gardens while he prays, maybe he prays while he’s gardening. Who knows. I don’t know what women think either—they talk, but do they think what they’re saying or say what they’re thinking? And when they think they don’t think about me but about Brad Pitt or George Clooney, I can tell. I don’t call that thinking. Anyway, my aggressors aren’t black or Arab or young, just morons. You have no idea what morons are thinking. A wild boar, a tiger or a snake, even a mosquito, you can imagine, but a moron? He thinks about himself. He doesn’t think of others. I don’t think of others either, but at least I try to think for others. I hear the walls crying. I don’t piss on prison walls, I don’t tag the walls of hospitals. Suddenly I realize I’m in Hassan’s arms, like an old fag crying his eyes out. It’s the anemia. Seems it dilates the tear ducts. Hassan is extremely embarrassed because he’s a modest, reserved man.

  “You should go home.”

  I tell him the kids are blocking my way. He drives them away with the back of his hand, like flies. You’d think he’d done that all his life, driving young assholes away like flies. I know them, he says, they’re not really bad. I blurt out that’s exactly what I tel
l my children about wild boars, snakes, and tigers, they’re not bad, but that being said, it is not unpleasant to see a fence, a wall, an ocean, and a few virgin forests between them and you.

  The teenagers are threatening me behind Hassan’s back, they’re cursing me out, they’re cursing my mother and my children to the seventh generation, they’re saying they’re going to whip my ass. In their pants they have either fat dicks or huge knives, but it’s the same humiliation of my human person.

  “Leave him alone, he’s crazy in the head,” one of them says. “Go finish yourself off,” he says to me. “We don’t play with dead people.”

  “Don’t listen to them,” says Hassan. “They’ll play with anything.”

  Elevator

  In the elevator a neighbor, blocked breathing, impenetrable face. He looks at me while looking somewhere else. It’s almost like we’re turning our backs on each other while forcing ourselves into a merciless face-to-face confrontation. He looks around thirty, with a fresh, pink complexion. Each new generation is an invasion, a recent wave of immigration trying not so much to integrate into society as to disintegrate me. We have nothing to say to each other and we don’t say it. Well well, he has a little pimple on his lip, that’s normal. One, two, three, four, the floors go by without saying what they’re hiding like the walls on rue de la Santé. The neighbor doesn’t bat an eyelash. Me neither. I look at the pimple on his lip. Our bodies are close. There is nothing between us. As I say that, I don’t know if I mean that nothing separates us or that we have nothing in common between us. I can see his face as if he were an enormous sphinx, or the Mona Lisa, every detail, but a huge mystery. I don’t particularly believe in the existence of God but the existence of man remains to be proven. A lot of absence in all that. I have an urge to poke his pimple to verify its material existence. The elevator stops at the sixth floor and the neighbor gets out, says goodbye. No smile. Fuck him, that asshole.