The first one I opened contained my contract with the Ministry, offering me a very generous per diem and the chance to bill them for all interventions, a pleasantly vague word that sounded as if it could generate lots of expenses. The only condition was that all my work needed to be pre-approved by Marie-Dominique, which probably meant more brain-frazzling meetings with her and her colleagues.
This Ministry envelope also contained a memo addressed to all blue-badge holders. I could collect my free cinema pass whenever I wanted, it said, and I would be receiving an information pack about my pension rights. Which was weird – I was just starting work and they wanted me to retire already?
The second letter was a little note from the préfecture saying they had my driving licence. I knew this already, but it was kind of them to admit it, and I was not overly anxious when I saw that the handwritten name in the space on the photocopied letter was semi-legible and misspelt – it seemed to call me Paul Vessie, vessie being one of the few medical words I knew, and meaning bladder. Paul Bladder. My only real worry was that the letter said my application would be dealt with before a date which had been left blank. But at least there was a printed ‘20…’ at the end of the date box, so I knew it was going to be sometime this century.
The third letter was less personal but much more frightening. It had obviously been sent out to everyone on the Ministry of Culture’s list of agents and contractuels. It was a communiqué from all the unions I’d seen represented on the Ministry’s noticeboards, and seemed to be a version of the leaflet I’d been handed on my way out. The ‘Non!’ was smaller but more clearly explained. Apparently, the unions were all agreed on one thing: no money for elitist projects like a new artists’ residence.
The Résidence Guy Étalon was, I read, ‘a confirmation of government discrimination between the needs and rights of ordinary workers and the desires of an already-favoured elite’. They were calling for all employees (including, apparently, people like me whose job was to get the project moving) to protest when the Minister returned to Paris after his two weeks representing French culture in the cocktail parties and luxury hotels of Cannes. Rendez-vous outside the Palais-Royal a few days later. It looked as though my contract was about to be terminated before I’d even signed it.
‘Bonjour,’ Marie-Dominique said, quite softly for once (I had taken the precaution of turning down the volume on my phone and wearing earplugs, of which my local pharmacy stocked a surprisingly large range). ‘Don’t worry,’ she replied when I told her why I was calling, ‘it’s as I said before, they are just saying “non” to everything.’
‘But this letter is très spécifique,’ I argued. ‘They are against the new artists’ residence.’
‘Not really. They are just trying to annoy the Minister because of all the restructuring in the Ministry. They say that it is an astuce.’
‘Astuce?’ I didn’t know the word.
‘Oui, un trick, as you say in English. Our new administrative structure will be very stimulating.’ She sighed with pleasure, like someone who has spent her whole career since the baccalauréat studying different ways of administering French bureaucracies. ‘The new Minister is creating new departments and sub-departments, n’est-ce pas? And the unions do not agree with this. Because you get automatic promotion if you have years of seniority in a department. But if the department is new, there is no seniority for ordinary agents. In some cases, this might mean a reduction in future promotions or bonuses or holidays. You see?’
‘Not really,’ I confessed. ‘What has this got to do with the residence?’
‘It is being created by my new department, and the directors of new departments have been parachuted to the top, if anyone can be parachuted to the top of something’ – she guffawed at her bureaucratic joke – ‘thereby getting instant promotion above the former heads of the old departments.’
‘Now I understand,’ I said. I’d always heard that the French civil service was a sort of giant filing cabinet, with people moving slowly up, drawer by drawer, and then bailing out when they reached retirement age to land on the plump mattress of their pension. In fact, though, what Marie-Dominique was describing sounded more like a French queue, with people getting marooned at the back because others were allowed to push in and join their chums nearer the front. The never-changing lives of these fonctionnaires seemed to be changing at last. No wonder the folks up in the Ministry’s narrower corridors looked so depressed. And this also had to be why Marie-Dominique, the head of a new department, was so boomingly happy.
‘The Minister will calm the unions,’ she assured me. ‘It’s not really about our project at all. It’s a negotiating tactic. In the fonction publique it happens every time we want to change a lightbulb.’
‘So I can start my work for you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course. Just send me a brief description of what you intend to do so that I can approve it.’
‘We don’t need a meeting?’
‘No.’
I tried to stop myself giving a whoop of relief.
‘There’s only one thing you should be aware of,’ Marie-Dominique added. ‘To coincide with the Minister’s return from Cannes, there is going to be a transport strike. I think they want to see him get stuck in a few traffic jams. I hope that won’t disrupt your trip to Brittany.’
‘Oh no,’ I assured her. A transport strike, stop moi? Surely it couldn’t be that hard to drive a train.
III
It was time for a think. And not in Jake’s apartment, where at any moment, thinking could be interrupted by the plumbing, the yelling neighbours, amorous pigeons flapping about on the roof, or the arrival of Jake himself wanting to try out a new poem.
So I made for the café closest to Jake’s garret. When he first moved into his apartment, the bistrot on the corner of the street was a dump. It was a dark room furnished with old, unmatching tables, and populated by wrinkled men in dirty shirts who would prop up the bar and spend hours peering at the racing pages. The landlady looked like a retired wrestler and the coffee tasted as though it had been filtered through her sweat-stained nylon pullover. Jake, of course, loved it. He said it was ‘real Paris’, as though decent lighting and a drinkable espresso weren’t Parisian.
Since then, however, the café had been sold and refurbished, and now it was unashamedly boutiquey: velvet armchairs, pink-and-red wallpaper, black panelling, globular light fittings. The same crinkly old guys were still at the bar, but now they looked like life-size sculptures put there so that arty types could get an odour-free look at the area’s low life. There was a new barman, too, a smart guy in a spotless white shirt, who spent much of his time with his arms folded, waiting for the neighbourhood to get gentrified.
The makeover was starting to have an effect, though. A few of the area’s dyed-blonde mums would chat and smoke the afternoon away in the new movie-director chairs that now lined the pavement outside. And at lunchtimes, some of the black lacquer tables attracted office workers, who were slowly being lured away from older, more established cafés to this formerly grungy street corner. Lunchtime is the key to success for any restaurant outside touristy areas. Tempt the local office workers in two or three times a week and you’ll make a living. Lunching is one of a Parisian’s favourite pastimes. When done properly, it can feel like a miniature holiday, or a short romantic encounter that ends before emotional complications set in, simply because everyone has to get back to work. And part of the enjoyment is the guilty pleasure – every minute after 2 p.m. is a forbidden fruit plucked from the tree of life. Anything beyond two thirty is a mortal sin, and all the sweeter for it.
What, I wondered, was attracting the office workers to Jake’s corner café?
I had a peek at one of plastic-covered menus standing on a terrace table. It featured most of the café standards like onion soup, smoked herring with warm potatoes, boiled egg with mayonnaise, several kinds of steak – rump, entrecôte, faux filet, tartare – but had a few novel additions –
rillettes de maquereau (mackerel pâté), a salade asiatique with spicy chicken and warm noodles, even a far breton, a sort of prune flan that you don’t usually get outside Brittany. All this as well as the menu du jour, with the option of having the entrée/plat or plat/dessert at a reduced price.
There was also, I noticed, a whole section of the menu given over to Nos Hamburgers. They now did a straight hamburger classique, as well as a bacon burger, something called un hamburger spécial cheese, and a chicken burger, presumably for the many people in the neighbourhood on a pork-free diet. ‘All our homemade burgers are served with a mixed salad and a glass of fries,’ it said – ‘un verre de frites’. They were offering an upmarket version of the fast-food restaurant’s carton of French fries. A Parisian café imitating McDonald’s? It was the world turned upside down, or rather flipped over and grilled on both sides.
When the barman came out to the terrace to take my order, I asked him who the new chef was. .
‘It’s the owner’s husband,’ the guy said helpfully.
‘Where did he work before?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is he Breton?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘Far breton,’ I said, pointing to the tart in the menu. ‘I’ve never seen it outside Brittany.’
‘Are you Breton?’ he asked me.
‘No, I’m Britannique,’ I said, hoping this would qualify as a pun.
‘OK,’ he said with crushing indifference. No pun, then. ‘So what can I get you?’
I ordered a coffee and a slice of the far breton. I’d had it once during a weekend in Brittany with Alexa. I remembered that I’d bitten into a date stone – Breton recipes apparently didn’t include a line about removing pips from dried fruit – and Alexa had found it highly amusing to see an Englishman holding his jaw after being assaulted by a French pastry.
I’d loved its creamy stodginess, though. Given my current lack of cash, it would count as early lunch. And it would also get me in the mood for wading through the report that Marie-Dominique had given me, which at first sight was as impenetrable as a bed of Breton seaweed at low tide.
Later, aided by chewy mouthfuls of very fresh far washed down with hot, tasty coffee, I actually began to see through the verbiage in the report. Behind the endless sentences of long Latin words (at least three -ations per line, I reckoned), were some very simple concepts. All they really wanted was for me to explain how the ‘sourcalisation of the ingredientation of the restauration at the residencialisation’ or something similar, could be ‘of local and preferably organic origination’.
This begged a very obvious questionalisation, of course: how did they expect a Breton artists’ residence to source local coffee, sugar, rice and olive oil?
It was, basically, well-meaning bollocks. And expensive bollocks, too. The budget per meal was more than the price of the three-course menu at Jake’s corner café. I’d always thought that the concept of the French artist included a bit of starvation – wasn’t it a cocktail of hunger pangs and absinthe that had inspired Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and co. to push back the boundaries of art in the hope of inventing something new and expensive to sell to collectors? These overfed artists in Brittany would be spending most of their time sleeping off their massive meals. Hardly surprising that the civil servants were saying that the project was too elitist.
Still, I reasoned, that wasn’t my problem. I was all for getting my hands on some of the French State’s cash if it would pay for a decent place to live. My only worry was getting to Brittany before the train drivers went on strike. Well, no, that was far from being my only worry, but it had just become the most urgent one – the wilting slice of industrial fromage atop my hamburger spécial of problems.
IV
Obviously harbouring no hard feelings about my refusal to have sex with her, Marsha called to invite me to play pétanque. The old men’s game from Marseille was, she explained, back in fashion. Throwing their boules about had become young Parisians’ favourite sport. So she suggested we have a picnic that evening, in the hottest hotbed of this new activity up in the 19th, not far from the One Two Two arts centre, on the gravelly bank of the Canal de l’Ourcq. The right bank, Marsha stressed, not the left, which was where the untrendy locals played. She’d also invited Amandine and the handbag twins, Connie and Mitzi.
We met at the canalside at seven o’clock when the sun was still strong and the first picnickers had already claimed their pitches along the tree-lined bank. Marsha was looking as wonderful as ever, in a loose but sexy flowery blouse and another of her pairs of microscopic shorts. Her lips were painted scarlet, but she didn’t seem to mind smudging them with a long hello kiss.
As I wiped lipstick off my mouth, chin and cheeks, we walked along the canal and I checked out the other picnickers. Marsha was right – this part of town was getting seriously trendy. There were still a couple of old-school student picnics – a six-pack of Kronenbourg and a packet of cigarettes – but most of them were of a sophisticated new breed. One group of arty twenty-somethings had spread out a rug and were arranging formal place settings with paper plates and plastic cutlery. They had brought a leg of ham with a vicious-looking bone-handled clasp knife embedded in it, and a large tub of homemade potato salad. They even had serving spoons. Another bunch were sitting around a big tarte Tatin with a pot of crème fraîche – they looked like a cross between that Manet picnic painting and an advert for the Normandy tourist board.
Marsha was carrying a couple of bottles of chilled champagne, so I was glad that I’d come amply supplied. I’d convinced myself that the promise of Ministry money gave me an excuse to splurge, and my Monoprix plastic bags were bulging with apéritif nibbles, a couple of baguettes, a Camembert, a log of goat’s cheese, taboulé à l’orientale, slices of smoked swordfish, a fresh lime, four punnets of long French Gariguette strawberries (exactly the colour of Marsha’s lipstick) and – get this – some little finger-wipes in sachets like the ones they give you in seafood restaurants. French civilisation in a packet.
Marsha and I laid out her blanket at the edge of the canal. The water looked soupy brown and unappetising, but the view was spectacular.
On the opposite bank, a couple of barges had been converted into waterside bars, and people were lounging on the decks, chatting to each other’s sunglasses. To our right were the twin buildings at either end of an old canal bridge. One was a cubic stone warehouse that had been converted into student rooms, the other a hotel that had been enmeshed in metal grapevines. To our left, a neon-lit cinema was bathed in blue light like a spaceship about to blast off. It would all have been much too industrial for Paris, except that the scene was set against the constant clack of pétanque balls, as the new converts behind us tested their skills.
We’d just finished setting out the food when Amandine arrived. Marsha declared that this was the perfect time to open the champagne and celebrate the first meeting of her new poetry-judging panel.
‘Let’s have a quick chat before Jake gets here,’ I suggested as we clinked glasses.
‘You invited him?’ Marsha asked curtly.
‘Well, he kind of invited himself,’ I said. ‘And he is letting me live rent-free in his apartment, so I couldn’t really say no. He’s not so bad when you get to know him.’
Amandine laughed.
‘You’ve met him?’ I asked her.
‘No, but Marsha told me about his poem.’
The two women shared a grimace as though they’d just spotted a dead rat floating in the canal.
‘He called me,’ Marsha said. ‘He wanted to know how many poems he could perform.’
The girls did the dead-rat look again.
‘You can’t blame him for being keen,’ I said. ‘It’s his dream to get his poems published in Paris.’
‘He will get published, online, like all the other contestants,’ Marsha said. ‘And maybe in an e-book compilation.’
‘No, he wants a book,’ I t
old her. ‘He’s strictly old school. He wants a little volume he can carry around in his pocket and show people, like Baudelaire or Rimbaud. When he was living in Louisiana, he was going to change his name to Rimbaud until he realised that they thought he just couldn’t spell Sylvester Stallone’s screen name.’
‘Well, we can’t show any favouritism,’ Marsha said, and Amandine nodded. ‘His poems scared the shit out of me. And this isn’t going to be a French-style competition, Paul. The winner isn’t going to be our best friend.’
‘He wouldn’t want that anyway,’ I assured her. ‘He’s got to think he’s won on merit.’
Marsha laughed, rather cruelly, I thought.
Right on cue the man himself turned up, his shirt as rumpled as a used tissue and his feet clad in the first pair I’d ever seen of mismatching training shoes – one a high red Nike, the other a low striped Adidas. What else could he be but a punk poet?
I had to ask. ‘What happened to your shoes, Jake?’
‘Oh, a woman has threwed all my other shoes out the window,’ he said. ‘You know how it is.’
‘And don’t tell me, she threw your jeans out, too, and a car ran over them?’
‘No,’ Jake protested. ‘It was a bus.’
He kissed Marsha hello and hummed his admiration for Amandine.
‘French name, n’est-ce pas? You Parisian?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Amandine said, smiling despite herself at this stray-spaniel apparition.
‘Oh,’ Jake groaned. These days, straightforwardly French girls were off his wishlist of nationalities. ‘You don’t inhabit in the rue Beaubourg, do you?’
‘No,’ Amandine said.
‘You look like a voisine I had there. She was très belle, but just as French as you.’
‘Thanks for the compliment, I think,’ Amandine said.
‘Yes, she lived in the apartment on the other side of a cour. And she always looked at me when I did the repassing.’
‘The what?’ I asked.