Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [101]
Sure thing. Everybody’s more Parisian than I am. The whole world is Parisian. The Chinese woman who makes little Eiffel Towers in the depths of Shanxi and the illegal Malian who sells them on the sidewalks of Quai Branly, the interpreter of Albert Camus or Jacques Derrida, and the French cancan dancer who raises her leg around Hamburg. Nothing is more Parisian than the Mona Lisaand yet she’s Italian, that Mona Lisa. My Parisianism isn’t worth a damn. I haven’t left the 14th arrondissement for ten years, the only one on the Left Bank through which the Seine does not flow.
“You are absurd,” the woman writer said to me.
“I am a stranger, a foreigner. I’ll never make it back home. Besides, I got an eviction notice.”
“So you’re not paying for my drink?”
“Not paying for your glass, not screwing your ass, we got no class.”
“Fuck off, you asshole, you dickhead, get the hell out of here.”
Honorable Exit
Reread this in Lord Jimin the bookstore next door:
We are only on sufferance here and got to pick our wayin cross lights, watching every precious minute and everyirremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go outdecently in the end—but not so sure of it after all—andwith dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbowswith right and left.
Less courage than indifference. Does all that really concern me?
“What?” asked the bookseller.
“Me, the eviction officer, the biopsy. What’s the use? When my mother died she wasn’t in her right mind anymore, but if she had been, what could I have done with her mind? And my children … what the hell do they care about the biopsy, the eviction officer, and me? When China opened its economy to the free market, it led to the biggest exodus from the provinces human history has ever known. Young Indian women work sixteen hours a day in export industries for a salary of fifteen euros a month. In the same month a model or a soccer player makes a million euros.”
“Are you buying the book?”
“No, I don’t buy anything anymore.”
Rue de la Santé
I humbly returned to the 14th arrondissement. As long as I was on boulevard de Port-Royal I was in the sun, broad-shouldered, with my head held high despite the humiliations of my constitution, but the end of rue de la Santé came down on me like a notch in a tomahawk, I turned off into that gorge, Little Big Horn. On my left the good guys, on my right the bad. So it was kind of hard for me not to zigzag, stagger, and go bumping from a wall to a gate, from a sentry to an intercom. Good thing I don’t walk by the prison every day, because I can’t help going inside to see my son who happens to be housed there through the fortunes of life, and he doesn’t like me to come see him all the time in the visiting room looking as if I want to get him out of there. When he sees me he always has that dismayed look he had when he opened his Christmas present under the tree—a nice book, when he was counting on a PlayStation, latest generation.
He knows very well that I don’t like knowing he’s in there, but he also knows very well I don’t like knowing he’s somewhere else. In short, I’ve never known what to do with the big guy since the day he was born. He’s a boy who has no problem telling good from evil, but claims that the former is more harmful than the latter, and the promoters of universal good have created more victims than the devotees of dirty tricks. In other words, he says the Crusades, the Inquisition, Communism, and colonialism have been more generously murderous in good faith and in the name of God’s law or man’s than a handful of rascals