Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [95]
Camus
“Mom died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. But I know she died today. Or maybe yesterday, I didn’t know. What does it matter? Yesterday, today, dead or not, her or me? Last night I reread Camus’s The Strangerto fall asleep. Result: I didn’t sleep at all. I dreamed that a dog who was allowed to go anywhere was dragging me by the sleeve through the sleaziest places you could think of, dungeons of passing time, the bottoms of which you could never get out of since the social elevator’s broken and the competition is international, I was in a nine-square-yard cell with two other inmates, I was on a hospital bed next to a cancer of the liver, I was like an overmedicated zombie in a cafeteria in Sainte-Anne and the dog was telling me to hurry up, we still had to visit the Catacombs and the Montparnasse cemetery. That dog finally left me alone but I began thinking about our appointment. I really shouldn’t have done that, because I hold you completely responsible for making me come here and then leave without getting anything. It would have been better not to come and not to think about it.
“At 9:30 a.m. I left the house at the last minute to see if I had any mail. There was that letter from the eviction officer about my unpaid rent and the eviction notice. My father died penniless and my mother worse, all alone, she’d even lost her mind. Paris was off limits for her, because of her blood pressure and the high rents. For her, Paris was no way to live. For me, that’s all there was. In the ’60s I’d already burned down all the projects outside Paris with napalm the way cobalt can get rid of your cancer.”
General-in-Chief of the Middle Class
“When I was a kid I always dreamed of the Champs-Élysées, the banks of the Seine, and the Quartier Latin. I lived twenty miles from Paris in low-income housing. My father was general-in-chief of the middle class and a representative of smalltown France. That just shows you he didn’t exist. He used to bike back from the station and into the parking lot in front of the neighbors’ cars and their wives’ windows. Of course he had battle plans and naval maps in his pockets but he wouldn’t spread them out in front of his family who had homework to do or dinner to make. In the ’50s and ’60s the son of a modest wage earner in the southern suburbs could consider a career as a teacher in Paris. Paris was a conquerable citadel. The kind of target you could hit. It seemed to me the right spot for a young man with some French culture to have the firm illusion he’d be living in the center of the world. But it wasn’t a target made of concentric circles, it was more like a spiral with a constantly moving center. The more Parisian I was, the more of a stranger I was. An immigrant. I didn’t even give myself the right to vote, or a work permit. I would settle into apartments without paying the rent until I got evicted. I could always manage to melt into the city, I looked like seaweed, the spitting image of the crowd. I lived by writing and lying; in other words I lived on nothing. Most of the time I lived underwater, in the fog, but with the technique of the flying fish, I had flashes of scintillating lucidity that lead me to say I actually did live. Or at least I think so.”
Impoverishment
“It seemed to me that in the ’70s, as I emerged in Paris, I was reproducing the fate of all humanity, I was like that fish with legs coming out of the ocean and becoming a monkey in a few million years, then a man; I was on dry ground, the promised land. I came from the southern suburbs, I didn’t realize I was leaving that impalpable, infinite, slimy old-people’s home to its economic stagnation and unemployment, hopelessness and mindlessness. I landed at