Neighborhoods have a rhythm, the predictable beat of living. Where I live, in an older district of Paris, the rhythm is slow and consistent. Nothing changes. I see the same faces wearing the same overcoats at the same times of day.
The same young artists talk and laugh loudly, night after night, in a bar down the street. I recognize their faces — they know mine. We nod in passing; subtle acknowledgements of an “other.” It’s strangely existentialist. Camus-like. The bar’s patrons, mostly young artists, flirt constantly. They pair and re-pair in different configurations: however the night’s coupling is arranged, it is always preceded with self-conscious and strained laughter. It’s sad. Empty.
Desperate laughter, empty eyes, and drunken amnesia will be topped off late tonight, once again, with loveless sex. I pray they know love.
Below me lives a classical pianist. She’s been working on the same piece for the last five weeks. I can hear improvement. Her fingers now fly through one particularly difficult part. Every day around 2pm, she practices quickly at first — she seems to play through the piece entirely and then repetitively, focusing on the difficult sections.
There’s a child on this street who could use some discipline. Loud and rude, the boy constantly begs his father for food or attention. When school is done for the day, in the late afternoon, the boy hangs on his father’s arm while walking home, looking up at his face, scanning for love. The father lives across the street — I’ve never seen a mother. Whenever their window opens, even when it’s raining, the father sits in a chair, leans precariously outward and smokes in silence, flicking his ashes down to the street below. It’s just another scene that could have been conceived by Camus.
Twice a week, or so, around 5am, I hear huge garage doors open widely, creaking loudly and scraping. The father pushes those doors opens, carefully blocking with a stone the one on the left that tends to swing shut. Then, leaning against the building, he smokes a cigarette. He’s completely still. The only part of his body that moves is his arm lifting the cigarette to his face. Another man usually joins him about now. It’s his neighbor. Together, they carefully back a white van out of a hole in the building. There’s only an inch or two clearance on either side of the small hole so it takes both men to inch it out and into the alley-width street. A few hour later, the van returns.
The owner of the bar and his wife have different schedules. He stays at the bar until dawn; she appears in mid-morning until midnight. They rarely talk to each other. They show no affection. Never kiss in greeting or goodbye. They’re more characters in this street’s Camus novel — nihilistic, repetitive, isolated.
Yesterday, when writing at an early hour, I watched that man take a large broom and bucket of soapy water to the street in front of the bar. He dumped the water on the ground, then vigorously scrubbed the sidewalk with his broom. The swish of the broom against the lumpy cobblestones sounded surprisingly pleasant to my ears. I wondered if some deep, visceral part of me inherited, as via genes, a love of that sound. Certain things are just pleasant: the smell of mint, voice of a cello, shades of green … and the swishing of a broom.
This is a young neighborhood. Only one older guy hangs on this street — he’s a regular at the bar. When I spoke to him in my broken french, I could see paint in the crevices of his fingernails, blue, yellow and orange. He gestured with his entire body to help me understand what he was saying, as I could interpret his pantomime better than his words. He must be an artist. A painter. But I’m not certain.
Next door to me, a young woman has two, maybe three boyfriends. They spent the night sequentially. One spent the night yesterday. In the early morning, she tiptoed out of her flat to call another one on her cellphone.
As the sun rises, around 9am, I hear the old, wooden front doors creak open and shut up and down the street. Most of the people in this neighborhood leave their flat rather late, according to the American rhythm. It’s a working neighborhood, but the hours of work vary greatly …
as I watch. My work is to finish another chapter or two by Friday. My hours, like theirs, vary somewhat.
—
“He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed. They were glad when it grew calm and he guided them to their desired haven.“
The primary difference between my life and the lives of my neighbors is that I have a “desired haven” and they don’t.
- Storms are whispers here. Weather, strangely, never really changes. It rains often, but not hard. Temperatures barely change from night to day — it’s groundhog day, every day. Today it was in the low 40s (in Fahrenheit) and tomorrow it will be the same. When I mentally convert F to C, I remind myself that 39F=39C. That’s the point at which the two temperature scales pull apart.
- The ripples on the Seine are always hushed. There are no storms. No white caps.
- Life, here, is always calm. Repetitive. Predictable. Patterns of life are small and discernable.
- Camus … when Camus died, they found the half-written text for Le premier Homme under the wreckage of his car.
—
This is a working class neighborhood. They’re not poor, but becoming so. The policies of the EU and France’s elitist class have been grinding my neighbor’s hope into the dust. The Camus-like ambiance here is, in part, a consequence of hopelessness. They look outward for salvation. Their interest in strangers, like me, reflects their desperate need to be rescued, to be given hope and purpose. I’m just a tool to them, a means to an end, something to cling to, like driftwood. They think I will subsidize their forward march into the abyss.
Camus understood their mentality. More than fifty years ago, in Algeria — a former French colony — he wrote:
“To begin with, poor people’s memory … has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are grey and featureless. Of course there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labour, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.”
The emptiness and ennui among the working class of Paris grieve me. It’s quite possible that I care more about France’s culture and polity than the locals. My neighbors live for the day– small existentialist crises happen silently and without fuss; trapped in a Camus novel.
