Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  A lot of my friends in the States refuse to buy it when I tell them that our neighborhood’s rough. They don’t need to say it. I can see it on their faces as they stare back at me over beers. Sure, in large part, their reverence is a way to butter me up before they ask to crash at our place for a week in spring, but deep down, I honestly think they believe the myth of Paris is mine.

  So when Fox News blared that my Paris neighborhood was a “No-Go Zone,” in 2015, that roving marauders had taken to the streets and imposed Sharia law, I felt oddly vindicated. No, my neighborhood wasn’t a “caliphate of Paristinians,” as some pundits claimed, but it wasn’t a cakewalk, either. And it surely wasn’t the place I imagined myself living when I first arrived, the one with the ideal apartment with the nineteenth-century Haussmannian facades and tree-lined boulevards and manicured parks where you can sit underneath a two-hundred-year-old willow, not realizing your bench was actually a sculpture by Rodin.

  Much of my vision at the time was nourished by the film Amélie, whose arrival in theaters coincided with my arrival in France. The small-budget film that followed the life of a young woman discreetly controlling the lives of those around her had gone berserk at the box office, giving France its personal Star Wars moment and me cinematic inspiration.

  And while there were some who critiqued the film, claiming its depiction of Paris was “cliché ridden,” almost “reactionary,” and that its “good ol’ days” message harkened back more to Vichy than to Edith Piaf, I was smitten. For me, Amélie’s character didn’t look like a collaborator at all. She wore her hair like Anaïs and walked and talked in accordion-playing Montmartre streets, waving to café owners and helping old ladies cross the street. No, she didn’t really work, and like the characters in Friends, she lived in an apartment she obviously couldn’t afford, but who cared? She had the Parisian life I wanted.

  The one hitch was that I was no longer a single twenty-five-year-old like Amélie. Anaïs was seven months’ pregnant at the time, and the soon-to-be three of us living in a two-hundred-square-foot studio didn’t strike me as charming. Montmartre prices (thanks in part to Amélie) had skyrocketed, so we soon found ourselves looking for larger places in other neighborhoods, one being the Tenth, which was almost next door, and as Anaïs reminded me, it, too, had served as a backdrop for a couple of scenes in Amélie.

  Although only three metro stops apart, the Tenth and Montmartre are starkly different, probably because they’re separated by Barbès, Paris’s quintessential Arab neighborhood. If you choose to make the fifteen-minute walk east down the mount, you’ll gradually notice a change not just in the inhabitants, but in the makeup of businesses along your way. Fifties antique stores, upscale real estate offices, and trendy cafés give way to mint tea rooms with dominos players camped out at the sidewalk tables, Arabic wedding dress boutiques, Bollywood video stores, and Western Union money transfer bureaus flashing Algeria and Morocco currency rates.

  We’d been briefed by people that the Tenth was a bit “chaud” (dicey), due largely in part to a bad reputation it earned in the nineties as a haven for drugs. But how bad could it really be? I wondered. Having lived in Brooklyn and East Harlem, I wasn’t about to be intimidated by Paris. I mean, please. I’d been held up at gunpoint on 117th Street and scammed in Brooklyn by a man who tossed flour on me on the way to the subway one morning. I settled quickly with the scammer, paying him to leave me alone only because it was too embarrassing to see my neighbors pass by on the sidewalk, me covered in white powder, a stranger yelling in my face at 9:00 a.m., “But who’s going to replace my stash!”

  No. The neighborhood wasn’t quaint and time-honored Montmartre, but it wasn’t Gary, Indiana, either. There weren’t bulletproof bodegas and vacant lots, just drab and boring storefronts and a bit more garbage. And even if the brick-on-brick motif were true, I told myself, it only confirmed we’d followed rule A of real estate success—buying low in a dodgy section at the right time. All we had to do now was wait like spiders for all the loser-come-latelys to arrive, so I could be that annoying holdover who brags when he points to the corner and says, “You see that Keihls store over there? It used be a crack house!”

  And this was the narrative I’d hold to for years despite the occasional glitches. The man climbing the wrought-iron fence of our backyard two years later? Not a hopped-up junkie, just a neighbor who’d forgotten his keys. That woman I’d found dressing in the garbage room one winter morning? No doubt the custodian changing into her work gown, not a crackhead shitting in the drain. I was in Paris, the City of Lights, where the ether alone would raise my game in all fields. My kids would be the Cartier-Bresson–photographed icons of well-behaved bébé manners, and the beauty and sophistication of my surroundings would shepherd a newfound John toward dignified and continental grace.

  Anaïs, on the other hand, was working off a different theme, one inspired more by industrial Brooklyn, where we’d met. She wanted space, which came in the form of our future apartment, a disinfected warehouse she’d stumbled over while visiting another apartment in the same area. The three-story brick building was converting into lofts, two spaces per floor with each raw space delivered as is, or as the French poetically call it, brut. During our first visit, while I lingered on the third floor, trying to imagine how I could make the spread more Amélie-esque, Anaïs shouted up through the shaft that would be the building’s future stairwell that she’d found the one with the most potential, the building’s garage.

  “This could be the salon,” she said as I stood next to her on a dirt floor staring at two Renault loading trucks. “And upstairs là bas,” she pointed to what was maybe a twenty-five-foot ceiling of cables and ducts, “we’ll put in the bedrooms.” Our apartment would be a bit atypique, as the French say. We asked for ceiling fans and wanted a “play room,” all of which the French contractors found bizarre and a waste of space. The more they became annoyed by our weird demands the more they asked to be paid up front en black (in cash). Funding your renovation partly in cash is standard in France. It’s a way for contractors to keep their charges (employer taxes) down, and they’re willing to reduce their prices some to make it happen. But this also meant my taking out wads of cash each Friday from the bank, the teller growing more and more suspicious each time I entered smiling, with a fake bonjour, to ask for five grand.

  Also to keep costs down, we agreed to do a lot of the legwork for the contractors ourselves, which entailed my heading off to the Leroy Merlin, the Home Depot of France, looking for stuff I didn’t know how to pronounce or use. Rosace, you may want to know, means kitchen faucet ring. Along the way, an order would be botched, which would slow the work, or I’d okay something I shouldn’t have, simply because I didn’t understand what the contractors were asking me on site. “How high do you want these baseboards to be?” would be met with a simple “Oui, merci,” which generated a fatalist shrug on their end and a return to work. Things moved quickly this way, until Anaïs would arrive a few days later screaming with shock. “Did you okay all of this? They said you did!” Feeling backed into the corner, I responded the only way I knew how. “Well, they’re lying!”

  With hiccups like these, the renovation took longer than expected, which surprised nobody. All of our friends had their own stories; I’m convinced now that renovation is a French hazing ritual each young couple must experience. We’d already sold Anaïs’s studio in Montmartre to finance the work, so we were forced to move in before the renovation was complete. And there, after I carried Anaïs over the threshold, four-month-old Bibi crawled on the sanded cement floors looking as if she were veiled in nuclear fallout, her ash-covered face screaming for another bottle, me rummaging through another taped-up box looking for it.

  Eventually, our apartment took on a true New York/American hue. We had the famous walk-in Berlusconi, the open kitchen. Bikes were in the living room. We had a tiny backyard with an Ikea rope swing. We even had the pretentious idea of han
ging two clocks on the wall, one for New York and one for Paris. It was the kind of place whose owners you could easily be annoyed by. Even those who knew us were annoyed.

  And the neighborhood did improve. A movie theater moved in nearby, and a park opened across the boulevard in the Nineteenth. We became close friends with some of the neighbors, and our kids would come and go in between apartments at all times of the day like traveling emissaries. I barbecued in our tiny garden with a beer, while Anaïs pushed Bibi in the swing, and if you took a close-cropped shot of us, you might have pegged us for a young couple in Palisades Park, New Jersey, not Paris.

  As with many young parents, our life soon became enmeshed with the local school, a gray and beige monstrosity two hundred meters from our apartment. Every day at pick-up, I’d be struck by the odd bouillabaisse of parents whose children attended, a group I began calling the “kale moms and veiled moms.” But what made this mixité so unique and Parisian wasn’t just the Benetton ad of different colors and outfits standing side by side against the sidewalk pedestrian guard waiting for their kids to be let out, but the obvious economic variety of the parents, due not only to the strength of the Parisian public school, but also to a law that allows the city of Paris to make pre-emptive purchases of properties and land (which it does often) before they reach the open market. I’m sure other cities do this, but it’s surprising to see in the center of Paris where prices are so exorbitant. Having the right of refusal has allowed affordable housing to coexist in close proximity (next door) to private housing such as ours in “hot” neighborhoods throughout the city, and it’s provided, I realize, a diversity that no longer really exists in American big cities. This doesn’t mean the Tenth is one big melting pot and we’re regularly having dinner with the Malian family down the street, but Bibi is friends with their daughter, and we do see them every day at the grocer’s and at the school, and this proximity has led to a sense of camaraderie.

  Another center of gravity is the neighborhood café, Le Cristal, where parents assemble post drop-off for a half-hour pause before heading off to work or back home to fake work. The café des parents, as I called it, could be the idyllic setting for a reality TV series, only because there’s a mix of mild flirtation, bitchy avoidance, and outright disdain. There are cliques and losers, jocks and nerds, a sort of parallel microcosm of the school sitting fifty meters away, but cast with people thirty years older.

  There I met Rolland, a musician and fellow father, whose side project was shooting music videos of fellow parents singing and dancing in various parts of the neighborhood. Rolland took this beyond a hobby, and the café des parents was his casting couch. Recruits might casually agree in spirit to participate over a coffee on Tuesday, only to find themselves actually having to rehearse on Friday for a shoot on Saturday. That way, by Monday, everyone else from the Le Cristal could eagerly await a link in a mass email to see which couple embarrassed themselves singing Claude François or Joe Dassin. It was all fun and games until I found myself singing “My Way” from a bridge overlooking the train tracks of Gare du Nord, and yes it is online and will be there long after I’m dead. Rolland’s weekly videos were just one of the many events on our school’s associated social calendar, which created a seasonal routine, no different from les vendanges (wine harvests) or apple picking.

  In March, the neighborhood would host the annual carnival (which often coincides with Mardi Gras), a sort of French block party à la Brazil where adjoining streets are blocked off and parents and neighbors and kids dance in the streets in costumes in a procession that slowly makes its way around the neighborhood. Some walk on stilts, others toot trombones, and the confetti each year rains down from the neighbors’ windows like snow. Anaïs, who spent hours helping the kids make a lot of these costumes, couldn’t bear seeing the parade end so soon, so we’d throw an impromptu carnival after-party, parents and children filing in off the street with their face paint and cat tails, looking to milk the early après-midi for what it was worth. Some of the faces streaming in we’d see at birthday parties throughout the year. Some were complete strangers who’d never been to our house. One child was so impressed by the size of our loft, he pulled me aside during the party with a pressing question. “Sir, how is it you became a millionaire?”

  “Hard work,” I told him. “Lots of hard work.”

  In June, there was the end-of-the-year school fair, called “la kermesse,” which featured a student-performed concert and lots of pin the tail on the donkey–style games. And at Christmas, there was ice-skating at the Piscine Pailleron, a ritual we started when I learned, to my horror, that most French children traditionally open gifts on Christmas Eve. The way it works is that after dinner, anyone who still believes in God (small few) heads to midnight mass, while the others linger around a table for an extra few hours waiting for them. Upon their arrival, when it’s insanely late and children are too groggy to appreciate anything, les cadeaux are opened. How the French explain the whole Santa thing is anybody’s guess. Since I was having none of this, I began feverishly searching for alternatives, one being a rink in the bordering Nineteenth, the only place in the neighborhood open on Christmas Eve. There we discovered others who hadn’t bought into the Christmas Eve gift-opening charade; Orthodox Jews in yarmulkes alongside Muslims in headscarves, skating in unison to 50 Cent, looking like smiling North Pole elves celebrating another year in the books. Bibi and Otto flopped and fell and were too tired to even consider opening a gift on Christmas Eve. We haven’t missed a year since.

  * * *

  In 2009, the school was rocked by news that students whose parents were undocumented immigrants, or what the French call “sans papiers,” would be denied admission. Anaïs was furious, not only because some of the children from these families were Bibi’s classmates, but because French law states that, she told me, every child has the right to attend school regardless of his or her parents’ legal status. The problem, she said, was that many of the families didn’t speak French or were too intimidated to visit the precinct and challenge the ruling. Anaïs felt it was her devoir (duty) to become their liaison, and soon she was helping families navigate the voluminous paperwork needed to properly file for asylum or start the naturalization process or simply obtain a stay of residence.

  Within days, Anaïs was meeting various families in front of the school after drop-off. They’d then head off to the commissariat or to our apartment to sort out birth certificates, demands for asylum, or proof of employment. Within weeks there was a Malian family, who’d been evicted, staying downstairs in the guest room. There was a Sri Lankan family and an Egyptian family dropping by the house with stuff for us to photocopy. Once a week, Anaïs would update me and the kids over dinner on the “Belonisse file,” the “Al-Adjur file,” and, of course, “les Soudanaïs” (the Sudanese).

  Not to be outdone by his daughter, Hughes, too, began helping families in Montmartre, and soon, a sort of interfamily rivalry sprang up, Hughes announcing he’d just bought a megaphone to protest while bragging that he’d helped an Iranian family secure papers yesterday. Anaïs graciously congratulated Hughes, but it was only after she hung up that I could tell she wasn’t impressed. “Iranians are easy,” she said, exhaling cigarette smoke. “Their French is usually up to snuff.”

  And never once did Anaïs ask how I felt about all this. She just assumed I was okay with it, which I was, but I can’t say I was comfortable. I’m far from the social warrior. And while Anaïs’s parents participated in the ’68 riots, throwing bricks and getting tear-gassed, my parents held a cocktail party while Reagan fired all air traffic controllers. Plus, I’d read that helping and sheltering sans papiers risked fine or imprisonment or expulsion. An alpinist in the Savoie region of France had been arrested for, get this, helping a refugee family find its way through the mountains. Did Anaïs understand her own husband could find himself on a one-way Air France flight back to his home? Maybe she wanted that.

  Aft
er months of follow-ups and return meetings and finding translators, Anaïs’s efforts would pay off. The families would receive their papers or at least a stay of deportation, and their children could continue to attend school. And I admit. I was proud of my wife. That and a bit jealous of all the attention she was getting.

  Before we knew it, streams of thanks showered down in our neighborhood. Once, a Sri Lankan patriarch named Rashmi invited us to his restaurant in the neighborhood. There he confided that he was happy to be a citizen now, or at least a green card holder, but France, he thought, needed to be tougher on jaywalkers. Jaywalkers to him were just as bad as criminals.

  “You need to put them in jail longer, and definitely need to start caning them,” Rashmi told us as the samosas were passed and the Kingfisher beer flowed. Anaïs, I could see, was frowning but remained polite. She reminded Rashmi that caning was illegal in France, and many countries even saw it as a form of torture.

  “Well, that’s coming from someone who hasn’t been caned.”

  Rashmi told us he’d been caned in Singapore, and he felt the experience had put him on the straight and narrow. “If I hadn’t been caned, I wouldn’t be here today.” For Rashmi, the person who’d caned him and the woman who’d helped to secure his papers had each taught him in their own way.

  Rashmi wasn’t the only one to quickly critique France once he was legal. Another family announced to Anaïs on the day of their written acceptance that “the problem with France was all these sans papiers!”

  “Admit it,” I said as we left their apartment. “It has to make you burn a bit.”

  “Pas du tout,” Anaïs told me. “It just means they’re already becoming French.”

  And here we lived in this neighborhood, where down the street old men smoked from hookahs called chichas and where Otto would bring home Ivory Coast beignets after having spent the night at his friend Najl-Adams’s apartment across the street, where he’d even joined the family in Muslim prayer. We drank homemade Martiniquan punch made by Marie-Christine, whose son, Birham, was Bibi’s first amoureux. During Ramadan, there was always a long table sitting out front on the street for those who’d managed to hold out all day. And if you had the courage to wait until 10:00 p.m. to eat, you, too, could buy a plate right there on the sidewalk and scarf down with everyone else.