Three Squares

My fault, my fault.  Partially my fault, contributory negligence.  I’m wandering through the marché biologique this morning, looking at the expensive organic tomatoes, organic salamis, organic sunflowers, organic chickens, and organic Panama hats and not looking where I’m going.  Something nearly immovable collides with me.  My back hurts, my legs hurt, I wonder if I’m going to throw up.  But I have not walked into a wall, a Vespa, or a péquenaud cop.  The implacable object is a Paris lady, fifty years old, plus or minus—what do I know?—who apologizes as much as I do and goes on her way without missing a beat while I try to catch my breath and hope my breakfast stays where I just put it.

I guess that was my fault too.  My habit is to get up early, make coffee, drink lots of it, eat something after a while, get cleaned up, then out the door to continue my pas à pas stepping off of Paris with breakfast safely stowed out of harm’s way.  Today it was different, or maybe today God is perverse, but I got up later than usual, did not want coffee, and headed out the door to a café in the neighborhood for a large cup of chocolate and nothing to keep it company, and here I am in the street market.

The best way to enter the biologique is from the north, right past the man who makes the galettes, and that’s it.  His high-brow hash browns are so organically greasy, so alternatively leaden, so anti-corporately unwholesome that I am amazed I only eat one—all five hundred grams of it.  It is good, it is comforting, and it is not on speaking terms with the hot chocolate.  After the collision with big square lady—a menhir escaped from an Astérix comic strip—they abandon giving one another the cold shoulder and start squabbling.  I remember thinking that I have never thrown up on a public street in Paris. So much for history—and being condemned to repeat it or waking up from its nightmare.

Paris is no place to sit still for long—no place for me to sit still.  Walking pneumonia—peculiar name—was the one and only thing that he has ever kept me inert, penned up, unwilling.  The day is too good, too bright and clear, to burrow in and moan, so I take my chances and head off to nowhere I have thought of, trending east, hoping for the best, hoping to walk it off, and manage to get turned around, my normally reliable sense of direction having departed along with everything else.  I figure that’s the idea anyway, that’s why I never carry a map in my pocket, that’s why I am a semi-pro flâneur—and you can’t beat the hours, if not the pay.

I have arrived in a bleak neighborhood, somewhere in the northern end of the Marais, as far as I can tell, that offers store-front wholesalers of handbags, costume jewelry, and accessories that are clearly destined for a flea market from which, like as not, they came in the first place.  Ashes to ashes…  The only distinction is Chinese restaurants and a predominance of Asians, mainly young, going placidly about their business in the homely streets and talking to women leaning out their windows: Chinatown’s satellite commuter campus, who knows?  It doesn’t matter much, but it is a quiet quartier and a curiosity, if certainly dull and bland, which I find appealing.

An empty stomach that is also queasy is an awful thing in Paris.  Even for someone who does not usually eat much at all during the day, the simplest meals or snacks in Paris tend to command internal attention and labor, handsomely paid.  A dull restaurant in a dull neighborhood offering, I hope, a dull dish of rice with a few vegetables on top seems as safe a bet as I’m going to make today.  I perch at a table outside the next restaurant I pass and order something safe, after assurances that it will not be épicé, which probably makes the kid taking my order think I’m another dim round-eyes, and wait for lunch.  It doesn’t take long.  As soon the kid puts my plate in front of me and retreats into the restaurant, a woman I have half noticed standing next door and looking in a window sits down at an empty table as far from me as the little terrace will allow.  I look up, see nothing except an ordinary looking woman, start on my lunch, and stop.

A couple of years back, I had the same sort of experience.  I was walking out of a store and passed an unremarkable family group of four waiting for me and others to clear the doorway.  Without meaning or thinking, I did a double-take, looking back at something my brain saw, but I did not.  Something wrong.  It was subtle enough, but visible.  The man, le père de famille, as I guessed, evidently had a mild form of dwarfism—a little under average height, not remarkable at all, but his arms were too short, perhaps by as much as five centimetres: hard to tell, but telling.  A scar or a strawberry mark would have been somehow less surprising, less likely to freeze my attention.  The woman, who has sat down away from me at an angle that hides her face from me, does the same.

She is wearing jeans, a light sweater, low-heeled shoes.  She has on her back a fashionable mini-knapsack, leather, I think, and a little larger than the cute ones favored by cute girls.  By her left side, she has put down a very large carry-all in needlepoint or some elaborate fol-de-rol of decoration.  As I watch, she is taking off her shoulder bag, also I guess leather, and big enough to take me anywhere I wanted to go for a very long weekend.  I’ve seen parisiennes even of advanced ages carrying a cabas that would daunt me to and from the market, but if this is the case, she must be getting ready for a siege or a summery blizzard.  I don’t know what this is, and then she shows me, twice.

She has suddenly started talking, to herself or someone I and anyone else passing by cannot see, talking and gesturing, not happy.  Without pausing, she zips open the top of the carry-all to her left, rummages near the top, and produces cigarettes and enough for me to see that it is not filled with canned peaches, bottles of olives, and tins of tuna from the alimentation down the street, but underwear.  She’s a crazy lady, a turtle carrying her home on her back and shoulders, a homeless woman catching her breath and a smoke—it can be done—at an empty table in a Chinese restaurant in a bleak corner of Paris: what could be sadder?  I go back to my rice and vegetables and quit after a mouthful or two.  Too much cornstarch in the thickened white sauce, what you get if you don’t want spicy, has seized up: it’s like eating stale air-bread, blotting paper for the mouth.  It won’t go down, and now is not the time to force the issue.

I look up again.  The woman is loading up, getting ready to leave.  Could I say anything?  Do?  I don’t know what.  I put money on the table and leave, in the other direction from the woman and, still turned around, walk east instead of west until I come to a broad and likely street and ask for the nearest Métro stop: two blocks either way.  I find it, figure out the changes, and head for home.

This should be an afternoon for hot tea and an early meal of cream of wheat, but dinner is already planned with a friend at a restaurant specializing in the cuisine of the southwest, not the southwest of chiles rellenos and chimichangas, but the sud-ouest of duck and beans, and so I go.  Perhaps not what the doctor ordered, but the starter of rillettes made from poultry, not pork, is fatty and soothing with a big red Bordeaux. Otherwise and from there on, it is not.  For some reason, my friend and I have been stashed in the back of the nearly empty restaurant, too near the kitchen despite protests, which annoys me.  The main course comes, and I send it back.  It was supposed to be a duck breast, grilled and as rare as law and digestion allow.  It is hard and I tell Madame.  She is puzzled.  Dur? How can that be?  Why do you think?  It was cooked too long.  She shrugs, takes it away, and I wait.

Too irritated to risk talking to anyone, I start looking around, and I spy the only other couple, also pushed to the back of the house.  The man looks about seventy-five, bland, elderly, what you’d expect.  The woman could be wearing a sign around her neck saying I’m from Texas, honey.  She is sitting upright, talking to the man, but barely moving either her neck or her lips.  At first she looks to be his daughter, but even at a distance she’s not for real.  The brass-blonde is nothing special or worthy of notice: the most bourgoise of women in Paris do utterly amazing things to the color of their hair.  But the blonde is much more done.  She has been cut and pasted, excised and filled probably fifty times and can barely move a muscle.  She is sadder than the crazy lady in the Chinese restaurant and more physically overwhelming, even at a distance, than the big lady in the market, dismaying, unappetizing.

My food comes, second round, and I try to eat.  I’m not hungry, my stomach is still not smiling, and Madame is trying to explain that this is not really the season for magret de canard.  Then why are you serving it?  Well, the customers, you know…  I say Merci, madame, drop my knife and fork, tell her it’s more than time to go.  She is shocked and I think a little frightened.  She hands me the bill.  I pay it, adding nothing.  She stares.  Well, you know, Madame, I could find fault with you, certainly could.  But it wasn’t in the cards today.

© Joseph Lestrange

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