Fatalism

He’s looking over his shoulder and not slowing down.  What caught his eye caught mine too, both of us hooked like a couple of big dumb fish ready to gutted, scaled, and dropped on the grill, perhaps with a few herbs.  A pretty girl—what else?—has snagged us both.  She is going about her business, paying no attention to us or any man, yet knowing, and enjoying the idea, even if deadpan and looking straight ahead, that every man she passes in the street is looking at her and wanting her.  Not least, of course, the boy on the little moto who has instantaneously lost any idea of where he is, what he is doing, and, most important of all, where he is going.  As she continues west along the little street, he cranks his head farther back over his shoulder to watch her—you wonder how far he can twist his head on his neck or if he will turn into a cartoon character who can swivel his head 360º—while cruising east at thirty or thirty-five kilometres an hour toward a T-intersection with a bigger street with a blind curve.  I yell “Stop,” as much a French word as an English one.  He squeezes the brakes and manages to stop about a metre from the side of a plumber’s van.

He raises his Darth Vader visor and looks at me, vexed and puzzled: no thanks, no secret metaphorical handshake validating masculine lust.  He just looks annoyed.  I shrug and start off.  He has caught his breath—apparently it has taken him a  little time to realize what was happening or could have happened—and says, “Mais elle était foutrement belle,” as if this obvious statement shrinks the importance of his near-death-or-disability experience or worse breaks a date he really wanted to keep.  Yes—I am all agreement—I also noticed she was really pretty.  But I wasn’t on a motorcycle, you were, and you were almost foutrement dead.  But he isn’t and takes off, maybe hoping like a true French fatalist that his last view of life and the world would have been an incredibly pretty girl, walking up the street and paying no attention to him.  There are worse ways to go.

Much worse, more painful, and drawn-out forever, and how can I blame him anyway?  We may grow old—and wonder how it happened and where the hell was I when this was going on?—but that’s no reason to be jealous of young people or sell them short.  I hope I’ll never be so old not to get turned on by a pretty girl in the street or to play golf or to wear wingtips.  It would be cool to be able to turn my head back 180º, even if experience would counsel me not to try it on a motorcycle.

And still I think the boy on the moto and I have something more in common anyhow.  I think pretty girls—the ones who make you sigh, hard, and sweat, who with enormous girl-like contradiction make your heart stop and beat faster simultaneously, not sequentially, who keep you up at night, but not the way you want to be kept up—are becoming scarcer in Paris.  I don’t know why this is, but a few friends—male, I confess, but of varying ages and hardly identical proclivities toward women—are all inclined to agree.  They have no idea either, save one who thinks that French girls are getting fat like American girls—and he doesn’t even want to get into the Brits.  While I’m not alone in appreciating the pleasures, imagined or answered prayers, of a truly ample woman, it’s a sad-if-true given that chubby girls don’t turn our heads, not most of our heads, anyway.  Perhaps the boy felt the same as his elder brothers and, thinking he had discovered something rare, decided to risk death and dismemberment on an undistinguished short street in a sleepy quartier of Paris to look at a pretty girl walking away from him.

It would not be a surprise if a sociological anthropologist or an anthropological sociologist were to condemn my thoughts—and they’re not only mine—as a modern degeneracy that denies the primal beauty of earth-motherhood or places an absurd aesthetic, that probably does not exist in nature, beyond maybe the teen years in Samoa, above the wholesomeness of normal flesh, however well or awkwardly attached to the skeleton.  Of course, that would be their métier, their trade as professional scolds.  Even Rubens would probably disagree, and it’s hard to argue with such a wonderful painter, though I’ve always suspected he was given to fantasies of flesh because it was in such short supply in the early seventeenth century or simply proved that he was intimate with the well-fed few.  And anyway, the anthropology and art d’antan don’t matter since we live in our time, our moment, with our desires, our fantasies, and the divine Peter Paul is beyond having his questioned, let alone forcibly removed.  No argument, none at all with him—and besides, it may not be about flesh and chubbiness after all.  Doesn’t matter: scarcity is scarcity.

So I find myself agreeing more and more with the boy on the moto.  Maybe he got carried away, but if it’s true that pretty girls are hard to find these days in the streets of Paris, then doesn’t it make sense to make the most of the opportunity, no matter the risk?  I think so, and have been thinking as much as I have walked away from the corner of the near accident and headed north on a busy street to meet a friend with whom I’m eager to share my thoughts—and realize as I walk that while lost in all this twist and tangle of speculation I have at least twice nearly stepped in front of a car as I was crossing a street.  Living proof, it seems to me, that it’s better to share with the boy, to adopt his point of view, his youthful fatalism—and I do, slowing down to a shuffle as another sexy, young girl walks toward me, eyes and nose in the air, knowing what her sister knew, pretending not to care, stopping hearts and traffic.

No, I must continue walking—that’s my part of the bargain, my job—but I keep turning my head back farther and farther to watch her, not to lose her before she vanishes into the crowd, to squeeze every ounce of—of fantasy? pleasure? death-cheating desire?… it does not matter.  Get the most of the moment.  And walking almost backwards, I collide with a man, about my age more or less, but much bigger.  He is very annoyed, but his French is not native and hard to follow.  He gestures.  He looks innocent.  He seems to accuse me.

I do my best, straightening myself up, and offering a complete and honest explanation.  Pardon, monsieur, mais elle était foutrement belle. He does not understand, not at all.  I could tell him, I could explain, but I’m sure he hasn’t noticed anyway.

© Joseph Lestrange

[email protected]