Old Man: a Portrait

  He has dined on Sundays at the same Brasserie for 25 years, on the corner of two grand boulevards in a quartier that was once famous for the artists who lived there, though it isn’t anymore. He walked up a road that descends towards the river and took a table overlooking the street, closer now that the Brasserie has extended its interior to where the old awning had been.   He never expected the waiters to keep a table for him; he wasn’t called anything beyond ‘Monsieur’; but everyone liked him and the waiters knew that, unlike many others, he would always leave a fair tip. Since he first began dining here, the quartier has changed much, from its more glorious past, celebrated in guide books, to the fashionable days, having become so gentrified that one might have thought its original appeal had gone. But somehow a few of these spots – this Brasserie, for example, and one or two others – have managed to guard something in the heart of them, as if, like ripening fruit caught and coated at just the right moment, they still hang, here and there, where everything else has been cut and pruned away.   Pictures of him sitting at his table might be the one constant by which to measure just how much things have changed. His hair is white and combed finely back. He sits erect before a tray of oysters and a glass of wine, and when others come to visit – nieces from his family overseas or sometimes old friends – he likes to treat them.   He keeps his napkin folded; and if one were to try to locate his gravitas, one could point to where it almost physically lay: there, between the slightly raised chin and the rounded tip of his nose, as if, between the two, in what gives him, beyond his dark suits, an almost aristocratic air – there, pinched in some perfect dialectic, lies the whole balance of his being. He can be quite jovial with others but looks much different when sitting alone, dinner done, staring out the window, before finally getting up and going away. He has not, of course, come every Sunday. That ritual really began after his wife died a number of years ago. Then, he had disappeared completely and when he returned the waiter had said, ‘Bonjour, Monsieur’, with a certain understanding in the distance taken, and he had replied ‘Bonjour, Abdel’, looking much older, his collar a little too starched and the scent of cologne a little too strong.   He sat down at a table by the window and the chair across from him, where his wife should have been, seemed terribly alone, until with the years it became a sort of partner in itself. At 65, he is still handsome, though of type that comes from a consciousness of past powers which warm his features as the declining sun lights aspects upon a building we have not noticed before, or an like artefact which, no longer of our time, sustains a dignity in its silence. Regarding Abdel, the waiter to whom he’d said ‘Bonjour’ – this had caused much speculation and began to make people say terrible things about him. It began when he used to leave Abdel larger tips than the others, and then, once, when Abdel had been sick, he had asked after the waiter’s absence, ‘Monsieur Abdel est parti?’, his accent oddly disengaged from the words.   He had always been a great lover of women; even before his wife had died, he had brought a number of mistresses here to dine; but this had not stopped the rumours. ‘C’est un vieux pede’, one of the older waiters said, to which Abdel wryly smiles. And it is true that there is something effeminate to him, in the silk cravates he has begun to wear, in the excessive manicuring of his dress, especially of late. Or not so much effeminate as effete, something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the frayed edges of an old epoch’s dreams. “He was once rich but is now very poor,” says one waiter. “He has known many great people,” says another. “There are pictures of him here, somewhere, from long ago,” claims a last while the old man sits beyond such speculation, looking out at the passing traffic, at the declining light, like one looking out to sea. “He is a good customer,” finishes the maitre d’, and that is all that can be said with any certainty. Whatever the case may be, they all step back as he leaves, after he has stood, fixed his cravate, put in his chair; and as he passes, briefly lifting his eyes to yours, you can feel it, something great and silent, even if they are only the years themselves, disappearing with him now down the same avenue from which he’d emerged, slow and steady, gently bobbing, like some buoy receding into the distance the rest of the world is leaving behind. —Morgan Mary is a Canadian living in Montmartre. You can find more of her articles at parisiana.com