Sitter

The years haven’t liked him. When he first appeared sitting on the low wall by the door to the market, you could have said he had missed a shave that morning, but otherwise he looked respectable enough—just a good citizen resting his tired feet. By the time I left a few weeks later, he had a beard, which seemed to get trimmed roughly with scissors now and then, and he was getting the kind of deep tan you don’t usually see on Parisians even in the summer. The clothes were the same, never really dirty, but rumpled—distraught, if clothes can be distraught. A few months later when I came back, he was there, the same, but more so: a little farther from clean, his fingernails black, the cuffs of his shirt, rolled back over the sleeves of his corduroy sport jacket, were frayed. He still wore a tie, the same one, but the knot was bigger and not pulled up between the points of his collar. 

After three years—unless I have lost count, and I could have by now—he is still there on the same perch, growing subtly but irreversibly more unkempt at each sighting and ignoring everyone until someone stops to talk with him or give him some money. He never speaks first, avoids letting his eye contact yours or mine and barely so even after he’s addressed, then responds with no animation, only a grunt or two, nor do his eyes show any sign of life. The tan is permanent now, but as much gray as tan. He smokes and drinks beer from a can, nothing startling to an American, but a rare sight in Paris, especially in a neighborhood like this one. He is also the only human street life constantly present. The street is entirely residential with the exception of a café at the far end of the long block, and the tables there are around the corner. People come and go, but don’t decorate the street. 

On Sundays when the market is closed he is not there. Sitting outside the door is his work, and when the market takes a day off, so does he. I find myself wondering what he does and where he does it. He doesn’t have all the paraphernalia of un sans-logis. The bags, shopping carts, knapsacks—the portable residence—of the homeless man are absent: he carries nothing, not a bag of groceries or a couple of cans at the end of the day when the market closes up. There is another street-man usually a couple of blocks away, rumored to have been a judge or a civil servant of great magnitude. He fits the bill: freighted with stuff and really grimy, but chatty and certainly alive, he wanders in a territory of several streets, gestures when he talks, and often laughs. You can find him on Sundays because he has nowhere else to go. But the man from the market must have some place to stay. 

I have no idea where—no one else I asked has either—but the odds are it isn’t around here. This quartier, which was built up starting around 1890 in the dwindling wake of Haussmann’s rehabbing of Paris, fell on such hard times a generation later that artists—figurez-vous ça!—infested this street, painted a little, copulated much, drank even more, occasionally shot or stabbed one another, and generally proved to be too picturesque for the respectable bourgeois parisiens, some of whom to this day prefer not to set foot anywhere in the Left Bank. 

Times change, even in Paris, despite the despair of bureaucrats and bad architects who wring their hands over its “museum” quality. If Chelsea, not to mention Hoboken, can become desirable for New Yorkers, it is no surprise that this corner of the Sixth Arrondissement has come back to life—a life of luxury, including an infill building that could pass unnoticed on the upper East Side of Manhattan. Cheap rent is gone, so where does the man in front of the market stay? 

Not here, and probably not nearby. The remaining flophouses in Paris are on the edges of the city or in the edgy banlieues. He may live with someone, relatives perhaps, who put him up, but won’t put up with him all day long or whom he doesn’t want to spend any more time with than he has to—and resigns himself (as they might, too) to Sundays en famille. But still not here, not likely, anyhow. So, I guess, he commutes six days a week—on foot, on the Métro, no matter—to sit on his parapet from the time the market opens until closing. And that’s it, his job, his petit train-train, his unalterable routine. A neighbor mentioned once to me that she offered him two or three euros to carry her groceries down the block for her. He refused. He just said Non. Not, Non, madame, not Non, merci, not No, I can’t, I have a bad back. Just Non. Apparently that’s not his trade, his calling.  

You’d wonder, but there may be a good reason that keeps him from taking on odd jobs. In Sous le ciel de Paris, the cheerful if silly song that Montand, Piaf, and everyone else of cabaret fame has sung, one of the many enumerated sights under the sky of Paris is a philosopher sitting under the bridge at Bercy. I have never reckoned how Jean Dréjac, who wrote the words to the song, could tell the man under the bridge was un philosophe assis and not a citizen resting his tired feet or a down-and-outer with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Perhaps he observed him day after day, sitting, doing nothing, turning inward, no doubt thinking deeply, refusing all offers of conversation or work, and concluded that a sitting philosopher was the only possibility—who else turns down all human contact and cold cash? He could have been right, you know. And it could be right again, at the end of my street. 

© Joseph Lestrange