Potholes

Something’s missing. It’s not that I miss it and want it back, but I have that dull, strange feeling that there’s a… what can I call it?… a deficit, not quite a loss, just a subtraction. That’s it, and I know what it is. This feeling always hits me my first day or two in Paris and, you’d think, by now I’d know what it is immediately or just ignore it completely like an unlovable picture hanging in a back hallway: yes, there it is, it doesn’t matter to me, not worth the eyesight to look at or the brain-wear to think about. Once it hits me, and it takes less and less time as the years go by, I stop thinking about it, but not always right away. 

What’s missing is actually a number of things, but I keep them all in a drawer I call Potholes—a better term than deferred maintenance or slovenliness. Paris is short on potholes. They must exist here, being as natural as thunderstorms, pimples, and the abundant residue of dogs in the streets. But you never see them. I began long since to suspect that Paris has been exporting potholes—on the sly, the way Afghanistan exports heroin—to America’s great cities where low-level dealers make them available at no cost, installation included, without even asking if you’d like some or not. American cities are never short of potholes and their aftermath. Making a Parisian’s jaw drop with awe and wonder is a great deal harder than putting chickens to sleep by tucking their heads under their wings. But I can make a Parisian bouche bée any time I want by explaining that when I bought a car a couple of years ago, I spent an extra seven hundred dollars to insure my tires and wheels against the damage wrought by potholes or any other unnatural rubber-hits-the-road mischief—and that I’ve already seen my money back in replaced tires. 

“They must be très chers, your pneus.” Yes, they’re very expensive. “Well, that explains it.” What does that explain? The potholes that shredded my tires didn’t know my tires cost a lot. They just ate them alive, at random: they didn’t care if it was bifteck marchand de vin or a baloney sandwich with mayo. “Oh. Yes. Seven hundred dollars, you said? That’s…?” That’s about 560€ today and a lot more the day I bought the car. “Excuse me, Joe, I think my mouth is open again.” 

The mouth always closes and no permanent harm is ever done, but there are sure to be relapses. I tell some people over dinner about the repair of a small bridge near where I live in Washington. The work was extensive: the entire roadway was dug up, rebuilt, resurfaced. The ornamental ironwork was cleaned up and painted. And then it was done—or rather, then the workman were gone—but a few pieces of plywood, some ropes, and a large metal plate were left lying on the bridge. A year later, they are still there and so are clumps of sand and leaves on the sidewalks over the bridge, debris in the road, and no one has touched up the paint on the railing or installed light bulbs in the nicely spruced-up old fixtures. Every time I walk across the bridge, I get the feeling that they paved a road and decided to leave—or maybe build in—moral or psychological potholes. Nothing should be right, nothing should be just so, it seems to say—and yet it’s only when I talk to friends away, friends here, and see their amazement in the slovenliness of my city that I grow amazed myself. 

And no one says to me, “Well, I suppose it’s better in your quartier in Washington than it is in the…the… quartiers populaires, yes?” Actually, it is a lot better in my neighborhood than in the working-class or no-work-to-be-had-class neighborhoods. But I am spared having to explain to my friends the undemocratic lack of solidarity in America’s capital city against les nids de poule because no one in Paris brings it up. And for good reason. Take a walk along the rue de Belleville, the border of the unglamorous, unlovely, and unloved Nineteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements. The complexions are darker here, the clothing cheaper and skimpier, the accents less parisien, the signs in store windows less often in the Roman alphabet. But the streets and the sidewalks are as smooth and whole, the lights come on as regularly at night, and the stripes in the crosswalks are as carefully maintained as they are around the corner from the Jardin du Luxembourg or across the street from the École Militaire.  

Neighborhood does not matter in matters of paving, not in Paris. Walk down to the bottom of the Thirteenth along Italie or to the bottom of the Fifteenth on Vaugirard, thriving but hardly fancy-pants quartiers, and it’s the same story—even when you get off the main streets with their subway and bus stops, their crowds, their commerce, and their connections to the main roads bringing tourists on buses into Paris. When I tripped running for a bus in Place Falguière in the Fifteenth, the culprit was my left foot that did something to my right foot (without provocation), not a crack in the pavement or a hole in the street, and it could have happened on Avenue Montaigne, and I think it actually did, come to think of it, a few years ago. For the record, the average car parked on Montaigne is worth more than the average apartment—probably the average building—on Falguière. 

But I think I’m all wrong about democracy and solidarity, all wet or still just wet behind the ears after all this time. I have never sensed a dangerous excess of égalité and fraternité among the Parisians who live in style in St. Germain or la Place des Vosges for people who live in lesser quartiers in lesser style and with lesser incomes. Nouveau-riche and arriviste are French words after all, even if what they describe should probably be expressed in Esperanto. The democracy of asphalt and the solidarity of cement of course are easier than actually fraternizing with some unfraternizable person because someone else does the work for you. 

Yet this is still unsatisfactory, no matter now stuck-up Parisians can be, no matter how cynical their observer has grown. It’s not snobbery, but urban chauvinism—another French coining—and it makes sense. This chauvinism believes that potholes and broken sidewalks look so awful, so embarrassing, so like… la banlieue, where they burn cars, you know, for no reason and tear the doors off the apartments in public housing. Reasoning like this tells me that if Haussmann hadn’t annexed most of Montrouge and Passy and Ménilmontant and all the little towns that became the outer flesh of Paris, then the ordinary Parisian neighborhoods that are so well tended would be pocked and potted like the Arab banlieues of Bobigny and Clichy-sous-Bois and Livry-Gargan—and like everywhere in Washington and Boston and New York. 

This reasoning is impolite—I think a Parisian would call it mean or really immaterial: Who was talking about Haussmann or Arabs, monsieur, and perhaps suggesting racism? Ah, I was, but I can’t prove my point and anyway it won’t do any good. Better to believe in a better nature, a love of order or just tidiness—even if it seems to me to flow from a sense of noblesse oblige or county-mouse-city-mouse snootiness and strife. The results are certainly better than in the streets and sidewalks and vile alleys of Washington. And besides, it’s not that I’m missing anything I ever wanted or taking a loss that I don’t write off with pleasure. 

© Joseph Lestrange