Invisible Man

It’s not my clothes, I’m sure of that. In some places, people look at the way I dress and tend to look away, maybe out of pity or outright fear that my simplicity and slightly unpressed look might be contagious. I’ve grown sure over the years that Parisians go out late for dinner not simply because the rhythm of their days, and digestion, tell them nine in the evening is the right time to eat but equally because they take a lot of time putting themselves together—and the second toilette of the day takes longer than the one in the morning. Of course it does. The morning exercise prepares for work and colleagues who have long since become wallpaper and furniture. Dinner out in the evening takes you someplace less familiar, puts you among strangers whom the French love to impress, bien sûr, but also live in fear of offending with a loose hem or creaseless pants At dinner in a loud and casual bistrot not long ago, I remember seeing a couple looking satisfied from ear to ear and with their hair still wet, but not for a minute did I think they had just rolled out of bed, pulled on their clothes, and, with a good appetite and for good reason, dashed off to eat. I think the man had even shaved.

But that’s not the kind of place I’m walking in at the moment, not here where the Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements come together without one shocking or jarring or even noticing the other—a touch seamy, maybe, but seamless. At least I’m not worse dressed than average here. The black running shoes I’m wearing, the kind which no one ever runs in, are the local product, visible on half the men’s feet in Paris, trim, a little dull, getting worn. My coat is standard issue, black, stopping just at the knee: another five centimetres shorter and it would be chic this year—I think it would be, but that’s not an opinion anyone wants from me anyway. My red scarf is not one of a kind, not here today, not anywhere at all. It’s not my clothes that make people stop and look, sometimes doing a double-take.

Of course not, and I know it. It’s my, my skin and hair. I am the only man whose hair is not nearly black. In summer, when the sun bleaches me, I get a little blond. It’s barely spring, but the sun’s been shining, and I’m going light brown, fair enough to stand out almost as much as my skin in this neighborhood. It’s not hair and skin you see in North or West Africa, the Middle East, or Asia or where the Nineteenth and Twentieth meet and the Boulevard de Belleville becomes the Boulevard de la Villette heading north and there’s a flea market. I’m one of a kind in the bazaar.

This neighborhood has never been significant, which may have helped blunt the historical march, for better and worse, of Haussmann’s wrecking crews and the armies of carpenters and masons that followed in their wake. The buildings are plainer, some rather nice or were at one time. There are a few rather grand buildings, all property of la République and mainly in the style of Beaux-Arts says hello to Italian Renaissance. One of them, a girls’ school, has stone lozenges with color portraits of nineteenth-century stalwarts of French accomplishment—Renoir, Monet, Poincaré, Camille Claudel, Debussy, Jaurès, Ferry, and Péguy, whose canvas is peeling off and folded down hiding his face. A lot of people will tell you—at least they have told me—that Belleville is coming back the way every down-at-the-heels quartier in Paris is routinely said to be coming back. But it is doing so with an enormous sense of discretion. At 72, rue de Belleville, there is an elegant little marble plaque announcing that it was on this very doorstep that Edith Piaf was born, obviously into a world of trouble. The one storefront in the building houses a taxiphone, a term which used to mean no more than public telephone, but now is simply cheap internet long distance for calling the home folks where people do not have skin and hair like mine.

It is not people like me who have laid their goods on the sidewalk of the wide mall of a median running up the middle of Villette or set up a makeshift table or counter here and there. This is not the flea chic of the Marché aux puces, where the dealers are professionals who lease their stalls for three years at a time and the customers are tourists and plenty of locals who can find something good and cheap and sometimes not so cheap, but not usually utilitarian. Here I have the sense that Robinson Crusoe’s motto must have been posted somewhere and committed to memory: “All that was valuable was all that was useful.” There are shoes, some used, but quite a few new pairs. There are headscarves, used blankets and bed linen, some used books and CDs, and endless supplies of adapters and transformers for cell phones and maybe computers. They look new, and I wonder what kind of market there can be for them, by the hundreds laid out on the sidewalk or in boxes, mostly unpackaged, but with their wires looking as if they had just been wrapped in the Asian factory by nimble teenage girls or slightly less nimble machines. Did they fall out of the sky or off a truck? Can so many people be without their adapters? There are no phones for sale, no computers, not today anyhow. And the bricks and chargeurs are not selling.

Not that much is. People are browsing, picking things up, looking them over, putting them back carefully. No one drops anything, no one is outwardly dismissive. It is quiet and polite, and the litter you see in the streets a kilometre west of here where no one would think of laying out used household good on the sidewalk is absent on Villette. What a stitch to shanghai a busload of the thugs and crypto-fascists of LePen’s Front national or Renouveau français and let them see how the immigrants and foreigners behave. It might do them some good. I can hope.

But if not much is selling, there is business of another kind, conversations between sellers and people who just might buy, between groups of sellers, between people just walking along and having a look-see. It’s social business, conducted mainly in French, but French as a lingua franca, even a pis aller or a makeshift, sometimes fluent, but often nearly impenetrable, like the English lingua franca used by the Nigerian, Pakistani, and Iranian cabdrivers in Washington. It gets the job done, but the job can be hard work. But no one talks to me. They look, don’t shrug or show any puzzlement, just look—a little longer than they need to, I think. I walk up the length of the market, a couple of hundred metres at most, looking first at the goods on the east side, then back, looking on the west. I lean over, occasionally pick up something, smile at the vendors and mouth my Bonjour, and get a nod, not smile, not a word. No one’s pitching me. No one gives me an unkind look, let alone a hostile one, or says anything at all. I could be deaf as a fish: it would make no difference.

The place has no interest in me, and I am losing interest. I was hoping for something to buy since I like bargains or maybe an interesting conversation or a bizarre incident. Nothing. Prim might be an odd word for this part of Paris, but prim and proper is what it is. I set off, a little glum, and something else, even a little worse. I feel that I may finally have not simply understood what Ralph Ellison meant when he wrote about being an invisible man, but come face to face and stood toe to toe with my invisibility, in broad daylight. I head west with a sense of relief, or escape, toward the land of the litterbugs and the anonymous crowds that greet me, look me in the face, and smile.

© Joseph Lestrange

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