The Baker’s Dance

My good luck, no planning involved: one of the best bakeries in Paris is a block from the apartment.  The two women behind the counter are always cheerful when they say Bonjour to me, if a little amused, when I show up early, unkempt and bed-raggled, though they think they’re keeping their thoughts to themselves.  If I happen to come in later, shaved and brushed, they give themselves away because they smile and one of them usually tells me I look so nice today.  The greeting, either one, then my request for a baguette or some croissants, handing over the money, and getting change are all there are to our time together, just a couple of minutes. But I have gone out of my way to prolong the pleasure by letting people get ahead of me or asking about some unfamiliar pastry or sandwich.  The pleasure is not the cheerful ladies, but the baker.

I can see him through the wide rectangular window just behind them.  When I’m in luck, he is loading loaves into the oven, and this is worth a trip, even a couple of euros if they decide to sell tickets.  The head of his pelle is loaded with half a dozen loaves ready for baking.  To arrange them on the bricks inside the oven, he holds the handle of his paddle, a good four metres long and balanced across his right shoulder, then moves back and forth the width of the store with little jerks to make the loaves come off, one by one and spaced just so.  The movement is like a moon walk with syncopation, smooth, but with a bounce and an occasional thrust.  He has the discipline and concentration of a dancer, but without the performer’s professional smile.  He is almost grim—no, blank.  No curtain calls, either, no smile or wink through the glass at the customers: when he’s done, he’s gone, so abruptly that I wonder if I really saw him at all.  I take the bread as evidence and take comfort—I think that’s the word—in knowing he is there, dancing daily though not Sundays or most of August, dancing reliably if not gracefully, and somehow calming.

Paris is not known for making people jittery, but I find I get le trac here more often than I imagine I should.  I don’t know why it is.  The noise level is moderate—horn-honking is out—and the walking pace in Paris may not be a shuffle, but by no means a sprint.  The panhandlers, pickpockets, tourists, street musicians, and other menaces to public order never leave me in a tizzy the way respectable parisiens frequently do.  Some of it has to do with their rapid-fire speech: they can make me feel that anything is urgent and I must make a decision, an important one, right this minute, life or death, naturally, and everything’s riding on it, no turning back—even though the question is do I want my wine cool or at room temperature.  It need not even be a question: a statement about the weather—pretty low stakes since there’s nothing to argue about if it’s raining or the sun is shining—can be delivered in the same way and have the same effect.

It may also have something do with Parisians’ eyes.  I know they blink, they have to, but not when they talk with me.  The question about the wine or the statement about the weather come across with an unblinking stare, as if full of expectation and intolerant of any delay in a response, even though the waiter really doesn’t care if I want my wine frais or tempéré and we agree it’s a rainy day.  The deer of my soul does not freeze in the headlights of their gaze and speech at times like these, but it does require some physical effort to keep my body temperature about normal.

It’s not that I walk around Paris with a constant, grade-B case of agità, but it doesn’t take much to make me jump, at least on some days.  I remember once screwing up my ticket at a railroad station.  After buying it, I had to go to one of the machines on the platform and get a date-and-time stamp.  The reason for this is clear enough: the odds are a conductor on a short ride—and I was only going about an hour to Normandy—will not bother to show up and punch the ticket, and the unpunched ticket could be used again.  However, if he finds you with an unstamped ticket, you will have trouble that you don’t want to know about and I won’t trouble you about it, either.  When I stamped my ticket, I put the return end of the ticket in the machine, thought this was not swell, and ambled over to the ticket window and said amiably to the man there that I’d screwed up.

I had always wondered what someone in a swivet looks like: that was the day I learned.  He leapt up and said, “Du calme, monsieur, du calme!” I assured him I was calm, always am, even when confused or screwing up.  Holding his breath and nearly choking the life out of his pen, he wrote something on my ticket, gave it a dollop from a rubber stamp, and begged me to remain calm and stamp the proper end of my ticket.  And so I did, with him watching me the entire way.  I held up the ticket and smiled to show I had got it right this time.  Instead of beaming the way a proud parent would after the kid has finally tied his own shoelaces or returning my thumbs up, he slumped back in his chair—I think he did because he disappeared behind the counter: maybe he passed out?  I hope he was relieved.  I was not—his frousse was catching—and the warm monotony of riding the train was welcome.

And the shoelaces, they remind me.  I had tried on about seven pairs of walking shoes and was having no luck at all.  The clerk was getting a good workout.  He kept bringing one pair at a time from the backroom which was also down a long curvy flight of stairs—very chic to look at, a disaster to have to use fifty times a day, I thought.  Finally, a pair fit, almost.  I unlaced the shoes and relaced them, skipping the criss-cross from the first to the second eyelets.  Perfect.  The clerk unlaced the other shoe and began relacing them, but exactly as they had been originally.  I began to show him, and he began explaining how shoes of this quality absolutely must be laced.  He didn’t say, “Du calme, monsieur, du calme,” but might as well have as I patiently took the laces that he kept dropping or skewering through the wrong hole away from him and showed him how I wanted the laces to go.  I was glad to pay up, leave, and walk home through the park with the familiar music from the carousel soothingly thundering away, forgetting that I wanted another pair of shoes and had to go back the next day.

And so, and so: the visit to the flower shop that needed a walk around the cemetery afterwards, the conversation with the bouquiniste about a story by Anatole France (he produced the book two days later) that sent me to a nearly empty museum on a side street, the successful purchase of a set of Allen wrenches that found me later sitting on a bench in a park where I was the only person sober and with a roof over his head to go home to at the end of the day.  Anything, I suppose, can produce a case of jitters, and the antidotes like these or like the train ride and the carousel’s organ are helpful, if improvised.  I need the luck of the moment to find one—and you can’t count on that.  But I’ve already had my luck, the luck I need, nailed it down, when I found myself down the street from the bakery where I can watch the baker’s dance whenever I want to.

© Joseph Lestrange

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