Any time I e-mail a friend that I’m working on an article in Paris, he’ll send me back a short note reading: “Tough assignment!” or “Life is hard, huh?”
Well, it is. This is, in fact, one of the saddest weeks I’ve had in years. I’m working myself to death in a lonely (and exceedingly modest) business hotel. This piece, for instance, is being written at 2:40 in the morning on a Thursday — a Thursday that was supposed to (and will) begin with my getting up at 6:00 A.M. to catch a train. To go to a slum. To spend 12 hours interviewing people in a language it embarrasses me to speak.
It used to be a mystery to me why Balzac’s characters were always poisoning themselves and throwing themselves into the Seine. Why don’t they just go to a museum? I used to think. Why don’t they get a nice choucroute garnie or a confit de canard? But now I understand their mentalite, as they say over here. Under ordinary high-pressure work circumstances, Paris can become as dark, utilitarian, and un-magical as any city. It used to be that when I came to Paris, and I arranged to meet someone a block from, say, the Arc de Triomphe, I’d think, “Wow, I have an appointment near the ark-de-tree-ornf!” Nowadays, I think, “Why the hell do I have to schlep all the way out to the Arc de Triomphe?”
What’s more, last week was one of those weeks when I would have preferred being in America to being any-place else on earth. With whom can one discuss baseball playoffs here? Certainly not the Manchester United fans who descended on Marseilles in droves when I was there a couple of days ago. Their arrival inspired considerable panic on the part of the local police, because last year, when England played Tunisia in the World Cup in Marseilles, the British supporters sent a few dozen people to the hospital with brain damage and gouged-out eyes. This is rather a different way of enjoying sports than sitting around the television weeping over the Green Monster and the Curse of the Bambino.
The thousand national police deployed around the center of Marseilles gave the city a war-zone feel. Good to get back to Paris. Unfortunately, Man-United’s fans, angered at a 1-0 loss, are drifting home — through Paris, of course. Tonight, as I came back to my hotel, there were six of them milling — no, staggering — about on the corner. One of them spotted a French person minding his own business across the street and began wading across to him with fists clenched, yelling: “Oy! Yer wanna go, mate? Yer wanna go, yer f — er? Yer f — ing froggy!”
Luckily, not even a soccer hooligan would ever mistake me for a French person. There are two especially glaring signs that I’m not French: First, having foolishly brought only a single carton of Camels on the trip, I’ve had to switch over to the next-closest thing, which are Gauloise brunes. (For some strange reason, the unfiltered Camels in Europe taste like a light cigarette.) Even in a country where most people smoke, I have never — never, ever, ever — seen a French person under the age of 50 smoke a French cigarette. (Maybe they keep them on the shelves here only to sell to the curators of some future Museum of Proletarian Culture. Or maybe the junior-year-abroad Hemingways-of-tomorrow you still see all over the sixth Arrondissement smoke enough of them to keep the company profitable.)
Second, I don’t have a cell phone, referred to here as a portable. Or maybe it’s pour-table, since they tend to get used primarily in restaurants. Anyone who’s eaten out in Europe in the last decade will have noticed natty men yapping into phones at their clients, while their wives stare up at the ceiling and fiddle with their food. But sometime in the last two years, these little gadgets have become not just popular but universal, and held to be not just convenient but indispensable. No one asks you if you have a portable; they just ask you for your number. When I told the secretary of a former government minister with whom I was arranging an interview that I didn’t have one, she actually said, “That will be a problem.”
The reason it was a problem, and the reason cell phones are universal in France, is that the French national pastime, as far as I can tell, is standing up journalists. A well-known French writer left me in the lurch for coffee this afternoon, at exactly the same restaurant where a well-known French banker stood me up for lunch two years ago, and down the street from a place where a French politician stood me up last year. If a journalist has a cell phone, you can call him up and tell him you’re desole, mais . . . And if he doesn’t have a cell phone, well, then, that’s his fault, isn’t it?
When I came out of the cafe, the fine pluie that had been falling when I went in had turned into a full-blown, torrential orage. So I lit a Gauloise and, as they say in the sixth Arrondissement, walked back to my hotel in the rain.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
