Shadow

My mental bags are packed and I guess it shows. The reliable driver will be outside the door on the dot tomorrow morning—or, if he’s showing off, a minute early—then the miserable airport, a flight blurred out of feel and focus by food and alcohol, if possible, afterwards two days of jetlag. The same. A walk around the neighborhood, one I don’t know at all well, sounds like a good idea given my mood, and off I go, heading nowhere as usual and trying to feel pretty good about it. But this quartier, no more than a small triangle bordered by the river up that way and a couple of implacable French monuments to each side, has already given up what’s it’s going to give me. And no one seems to pay me any mind whatsoever. What’s the point? When one of Hector Guimard’s entrances to the Métro, nearly hidden by sycamores already dropping yellow leaves, hollers Run for it, I do.

I’m not really sure where I want to run, but it seems a good enough idea to find a friend who hangs out in his café—his one-and-only—most afternoons and say goodbye and see you soon, whenever soon happens to show up next, and who can tell anyway? He gets things like that. Good enough, better than just good enough, but something nags even so. Once you start thinking about packing up and going, you might as well be gone. It’s like giving notice on a job. You do it out of courtesy or in hopes of a future good word or two, and out of sanity the employer tells you, orders you to go now, we’ll be glad to pay you not to be here. Because you’re not here, you’re demoralizing everyone, you’ve already left: beat it. And that’s the truth of the matter today. It’s not that people always come up to me in the street or in the subway and start a conversation, but today there is no eye contact, none of that normal French politeness that recognizes another human being who happens to pass by with a nod or maybe a grunted bonjour. Richard Strauss conjured a heroine with no shadow: today I am all shadow and no me, and no one says hello to a shadow let alone to the absent person. I get off the train.

Across the street when I come up from the buried train there are three cafés—one I avoid because I think the waiters are not polite, another that is always too cramped, and in between a third I have barely noticed before, but today I see it has a little window on the side where a man is making sandwiches for customers who want to eat on the fly or maybe it’s on the hoof, though I think better of that. More and more Parisians are eating this way—and it puzzles me. I’ve always liked the idea that the French sat when they ate, the grownups. But it’s not just the high-school boys with the scrawny sandwich de jambon stuffing their hungry faces after school whom you can see eating a sandwich that they push centimetre by centimetre out of its wrapper as they bound or slouch down the street. Not these days. People of all ages in every part of town are doing the same, and no one ever asked my opinion. But there it is, and I join their ranks.

There is a customer just ahead of me. He knows the sandwich man. They talk about this and that and, as the sandwich man cuts off the tip of the baguette—a slice no bigger than two euro pieces one on top of the other—he flips it to his pal who pops it in his mouth. When it’s my turn, I tell him what I want—the menu has already told me I have six choices and that’s it—and he starts to make my sandwich. But he does not flip me the bout de pain and doesn’t say a word or nod his head when I say I want mustard on the sandwich—a request I’m about to repeat when he hauls out his mustard pot and applies some, and the same when I ask him to cut the sandwich in half. Not even a shadow. Maybe he’ll go home that evening and tell his wife he made a sandwich for a ghost or an invisible man and perhaps he ought to see the doctor about that. His problem, and I’ve got my own. I pay him and head back across the busy main street to a little park I know, bordered on one side by a street that, translated liberally and with peculiar humor, might mean “No Fools Allowed.”

The park is nice one—shady, no parching gravel, just a few people: a guitarist who is practicing scales with brio and deft fingers, a rough looking guy who could be homeless or then again could be putting a Blackberry in his pocket—neither one excludes the other—another couple of people also having lunch, me. I eat, and half the sandwich is enough. The rough guy has already left. The guitarist might be insulted if I offered him what’s left of my lunch, still nicely wrapped up—and the thought of explaining that I know he’s not a clochard, but it’s a sin to waste food, so here, enjoy the sandwich, et cetera, becomes ten molehills all stacked up. The beggar I used to see all the time just outside the park is not there today—fermature annuelle, no doubt, and no doubt he’s split for the beach. Near the gate where I came in I see an old man on a bench, not quite napping, but with his feet up on the back of the bench that serves both sides, trying to get comfortable: this bench is not meant for sleeping any more than the widely separated seats in the Métro are. I figure he’ll do. I go up, greet him politely, and ask him if he would like half of my lunch. He looks at me a little puzzled. It’s half a sandwich, I tell him. He peers, and I think he means what kind of sandwich? Chicken, tomato, and avocado, with mustard and some herbs, I think, but I’m not sure what kind. Maybe herbes de Provence, maybe not. He thinks for a moment, sticks out his hand, takes the sandwich, tucks it in his shirt and immediately seems to fall asleep. I think he says something, but I’m not about to put any money down on that.

I keep going and find my friend, but he’s not there any more than I am, having just had an unsettling experience—explained later in an e-mail, and we’re cool—so I give my shadow a kick in the shins and head back to my temporary quartier. On the way back, I make a detour down the little commercial street at the corner of my bigger one to get some juice for tomorrow’s breakfast—annoyed that I have to buy a litre and most of it will have to go down the sink. The man ahead of me at the cash register is wearing the give-away Day-Glo green of the men, and now a few women, who keep Paris clean, collecting the garbage on all days and at all hours, flooding the gutters and sweeping them out, emptying the endless poubelles. Of course, says the man at the cash register, today’s your turn to buy dinner for the guys. And so it is, with a large package of chicken prepared à la méxicaine—when did the French get into Tabasco sauce?—a big bottle of soda, a loaf of bread, and an enormous can of peas and carrots. In Paris, the éboueurs eat real meals—no sandwiches on the fly for them—and maybe they have a little portable stove on the truck to heat up the peas and carrots. A nicely balanced meal, they both agree, and off he goes in his Day-Glo for a companionable early dinner with his pals on the truck.

The man at the cash register passes my bottle of pear nectar over the scanner and sticks his hand out without a word or a glint of expression. I pay, take my change, and leave, thinking I have reservations at a restaurant tonight, but feel that the trash man is having a better time at dinner than I will.

© Joseph Lestrange

[email protected]

Photo credit: César Astudillo, Flickr. Used under Creative Commons licensing.

Please post your comments and let them flow. Register HERE to do so if you need a user name and password.