Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [53]
A police van came skidding along the buried street. It stopped in front of the crazy woman’s building. People in the neighborhood must have called to complain, finally. Nobody’s very patient on Christmas Eve …
On my way up to my place, I heard Tino Roastbeef’s stupid “Petit Papa Noël” song trumpeting out from under a door. I wasn’t in the mood. I nearly rang the doorbell of my downstairs neighbor, an eviction officer with ugly daughters, and acted tough, like a private dick, threatening to smash his face if he didn’t turn the sound down. But then, why bother? I was too tired, even to talk.
When I got home, I sank into my Voltaire chair and bour-bonized. I finished off everything I had left. And I listened to “Wild Horses” over and over again, not the Stones’ version but my buddy Elliott Murphy’s Last of the Rock Stars, last of the bluesmen, the ultimate loner, like Dylan, like Neil Young. He lives not far from here, on rue Beauregard, on the other side of this arrondissement. Sometimes when I feel blue, I go visit him; he takes his guitar and plays some Willie Dixon for me. Beautiful, my friends, just beautiful.
But tonight, it was Christmas and it was too late. And Elliott, after all, is a married man and a father.
So I kept on playing “Wild Horses,” all alone.
On Christmas morning, I had a terrible hangover.
THE REVENGE OF THE WAITERS
BY JEAN-BERNARD POUY
Le Marais
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
The whole neighborhood called him Zatopek.
Every morning he’d trot five times around the Place des Vosges at a slow pace, keeping under the archways even though it’s a lot more exciting, humanly speaking, to be running beneath the linden trees of the park when it’s nice out.
Something every other stupid jogger in the area actually does.
But he was nothing like any of those fitness fanatics who sweat in their name-brand, pastel-colored, see-through jogging suits, their iPods in their ears, rings of perspiration under their armpits, and the stupid look of someone forced to read Derrida.
He didn’t really look like your basic 4th arrondissement bourgeois bohemian who works himself up into a sweat before he gets on the sweaty backs of the employees in his start-up company. His shaggy head, his strange and frightening grimaces, his intimidating glances, his tramplike clothes, they all stood out in this temple of outdated good taste. He spoke to no one. Not even to himself. He never bumped into anyone, even when passing right by the tables of Ma Bourgogne from where a group of apprehensive Italian-American tourists watched him go charging by, breathing hard and staggering on his skinny legs like a frenzied duck, as if he intended to send their tea and pastries crashing down.
His ritual was unchanging: On his third loop he would stop in front of me and I’d hand him a glass of water, which he’d gulp down like a camel. In my old-fashioned black-and-white waiter’s livery, I felt like a magpie or, on weekends, like a stork giving a drink to a muddy and exhausted fox.
When he’d completed his five rounds of the Vosges Stadium he would disappear, literally melting into the ancient stones of the rue de Birague, passing beneath the archway of the Pavillon du Roi, and no one would see him again for the rest of the day. But at 9 on the dot the next morning, summer and winter, Zatopek would reappear from the rue de Béarn, on the other side, emerging from the Pavillon de la Reine as if he were charging down onto the cinder track in Prague.
Several of us, true professional barkeepers, had figured out that he’d been working out like that for three years. Five times, or about two kilometers, around the square each day over three years adds up to a total—another round, boss!—of 2,190 kilometers in all. Hats off. Here’s to you.
Zatopek.
And then one clear Tuesday in late September he didn’t show up. Nor the following day. The neighborhood