A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  At least the waiters' strike made me feel a bit more popular.

  After the first half-day of chaos, when café owners were run off their feet and yelled at, the places where the waiters were on strike - virtually all the posher brasseries - began to take on temporary staff.

  Suddenly the clients were being served by horrendously inefficient but cute students, who traded in their smelly, underpaid jobs at fast-food counters for the joys of earning tips and not having to wear a baseball cap.

  Instead of cowering before a caffeined-up grump in a black waistcoat, suddenly you were being smiled at by an Amélie Poulain or an apprentice Latin lover.

  They didn't know the ingredients of anything, they dropped plates, they got bills mixed up. It was just like being in England, where we think that waiting is a temporary job ideally suited to the totally unqualified.

  But at the same time it was bliss, like discovering after a lifetime of watching only Ingmar Bergman films that there is such a thing as Monty Python.

  Lots of these new young waiters and waitresses were only too happy to speak English as soon as they heard how badly I mangled French. Even if it was no good for my education, I was delighted to find that they liked talking to me. I even got a couple of phone numbers. Female, of course.

  After a week of watching the young part-timers take their tips, the waiters started to realize that they might have screwed up, and suddenly the waistcoats were back at their regular jobs, their Post-Its less legible than ever, their hover-by-the-table times cut to new world-record levels of brevity. Life returned instantly to normal, as it always seemed to do in Paris. Nothing, not even a strike at the heart of the country's key industry - food - could push the city's daily rush off trajectory for long.

  I had to get used to being hated again.

  * * *

  The final straw was the cards.

  In the last week of September, several days late, grumpy Marianne brought my business cards.

  I looked through the transparent plastic of the box. My name had been corrected. Good.

  And in place of "VD" there was a new logo - My Tea Is Rich.

  My Tea Is Rich? The bastards.

  Marianne hovered, no doubt waiting for a chance to gossip about my reaction.

  "Merci," I said, as cool as an English officer whose sergeant has just handed him the revolver with which he is going to blow his brains out rather than face the shame of surrender.

  I made sure Marianne was still watching me, and dropped the whole bloody box unopened in the bin.

  OCTOBRE

  One foot in the merde

  The French, as we all know, love snails. Escargots.

  One of their favourite ways of cooking snails is to put them straight on the barbecue, alive. Before being cooked, the escargots are covered in salt, the equivalent of giving them an acid bath, and they get rid of all their slime trying to protect themselves. Basically, people make the creature shit itself to purge its insides of impurities. Even the French don't eat snailshit.

  Given this extreme cruelty, it might seem strange to say that the French love the humble snail. But what few people (and even fewer snails) realize is that France has paid these sacrificial molluscs the ultimate tribute - its capital city is, in fact, a giant escargot.

  I didn't realize this myself until the first Saturday in October. It was a grey morning, a first-pullover-of-the-season morning, when Parisians suddenly started to walk even faster than usual, as if they were all scared to death the department stores would run out of stock before they got there. I was sitting outside a café, ogling. Not women, though the selection walking past was of its usual Olympic standard.

  I was ogling the autumnal explosion opposite. It was a fruit-and-veg stall like I'd never seen before. Not a square millimetre of clingfilm in sight, and everything seasonal. Great bunches of radishes with their leaves still on. It occurred to me that I'd never knowingly seen a radish leaf before. There were piles of things I didn't even recognize. Big white bulbs -"fenouil", the notice said. I looked it up in my pocket dictionary - fennel. Yes, I'd had it before, but only in little grilled slices in a fish restaurant. These things were as big as hard white human hearts with severed green arteries poking out the top. Next to them was a huge basket of red-and-white speckled peapod things. "Ecosser", the label said. "Scotsmen" was the nearest my dictionary came. No. A Scotsman often goes red and speckly when he becomes a football manager, but these looked more like some kind of bean. There were spectacular heaps of fresh purple figs, and cascades of small, juicy-looking grapes that looked real and mud-splashed, as though they'd actually been on a vine out in the fresh air at some point, as opposed to the polished clone grapes we see in English supermarkets.

  As I sat there slavering, one of the fruit-and-veg sellers leaned over the display and started dunking his hands into a mound of wild mushrooms, scooping up whole fistfuls of gnarled, chocolate-brown ceps which still had their muddy roots attached. It was almost erotic. If you were a wild mushroom kind of guy, that is.

  I tore my eyes away from the food and focussed on the map of Paris in my guidebook. The map gave each of the city's 20 arrondissements a different colour. They were, I noticed for the first time, arranged in a spiral pattern, starting with a small rectangle, the First arrondissement, in the centre. The Second was a larger rectangle just above the First. Then across to the right was the Third. Below that was the Fourth, then down a bit more and across the river on the left bank was the Fifth, and so on, a spiral of numbers that took you up to the Twentieth on the far northeastern rim of the circular city.

  The city's districts quite definitely formed a snail's shell. The snail itself had presumably been eaten long ago.

  I scanned the map for landmarks. The First arrondissement had the Louvre. The Second? Apparently nothing. It had one grey blob that seemed to mark the location of something interesting. "Bourse", it said. I looked this up in my pocket dictionary - "purse; stock exchange; (informal) scrotum". Aha, Paris's famous scrotum quarter.

  The Third had the Pompidou Centre. The Fourth, the Place des Vosges, which my guidebook described as "a droolingly chic 17th-century square, formerly the site of a royal jousting field, where the French King Henri II was accidentally skewered by a British knight, the Count of Montgomery". Another reason to hate us.

  The Fifth had the Pantheon, "a huge classical mausoleum where the French bury their famous writers". A bit harsh on the writers, I thought, just for being too intellectual.

  The snail went on, unwinding a list of must-see buildings I'd never been in.

  So far, I'd been chronically lazy about exploring my new home town. Well, I had done a dutiful tour of the main sights - the Louvre, of course, Notre Dame, the Pompidou Centre, all seen from outside - but I'd spent most of my first month either working or sitting around trying to fill my bloodstream with caffeine and alcohol.

  If, like me, you're able to find temporary happiness in a pint of beer and live, wide-screen football coverage, then you can inject your evenings and weekends with bliss in any one of Paris's many "English" pubs. You order at the bar (no danger of being assaulted by someone in a waistcoat), in English (a brief respite from humiliation), and you can eat typically English pub grub like chicken tikka masala.

  My only real excuse for this cultural isolationism was a disease. Throughout history there have been many diseases that have baffled the medical establishment. Some aren't even recognized as medical conditions for centuries. In medieval times, for example, the cure for an epileptic fit was to burn some lonely old widow who was unlucky enough to possess a warty nose and a black cat.

  Since moving to Paris, I'd begun to suffer from symptoms that seemed to have gone totally undocumented in medical textbooks. I didn't know it, but I was just about to have an attack.

  After my coffee, and a last wistful look at the radish leaves, I wandered through the pedestrian Montorgueil ("mon-torgoy") area in the Second, with its slippery white-paved roads, its cafés and erotic food
stalls, and went to check out the Bourse, which was not pink and hairy but Greek-temple-shaped and stony. The old stock exchange, in fact, as my dictionary had hinted.

  The streets around the Bourse were busy, full of darting scooters and impatient cars. In Paris, just because it's an office district doesn't mean that all two-legged life forms are sucked out of it after work on a Friday. I headed east with the flow of the rushing traffic, and at a crossroads I suddenly came across the rue Saint-Denis, which was lined with the most brazen prostitutes I'd seen since running out of a bar in Bangkok because under-age girls kept sitting on my knee and asking, "You want blowjob, mister?"

  These Parisian girls were all adults, though, more like ripe figs, bursting out of their hotpants and half-open blouses. Their eyebrows were savagely plucked, their mouths lipsticked to oblivion. There was something for all tastes - Black, Asian, White, nineteen, thirty, gulp, fifty.

  And everywhere there were men eyeing up the goods, asking the price, disappearing into doorways.

  There was no plate glass here like there is in Amsterdam. This was quite literally in your face. Women standing there on the pavement trying to turn men on. If I hadn't been so terrified of Aids, I could have let myself be sucked in on the tide of sex.

  I turned off the main drag into a side street, relieved to have escaped temptation, and skidded on a gigantic dog turd that had been sitting in the middle of the white-paved street shouting "Here I am!" at my sex-numbed senses.

  How could I have missed it?

  I heard a laugh. A 50-something prostitute, who looked like a Marilyn Monroe waxwork dummy after an overload in Madame Tussaud's heating system, was standing in a doorway a few yards further along.

  "La merde," she sang in a tobacco croak, "qu'on voit danser le long des golfes clairs."

  I understood "la merde", and thought she was singing some typically French hymn to bodily functions. I didn't find out till months later that she was actually making quite a clever joke, adapting an old song called "La Mer". Only in France - an intellectual prostitute.

  This, you see, was my disease - an uncanny ability on the part of my feet to home in on the nearest dog merde.

  The more I tried to explore Paris, the more I messed up my shoes.

  According to an article I found on the internet, I wasn't alone - every year, 650 Parisians end up in hospital after somersaulting over a sample of the 15 tonnes of poop dumped on the city's streets by its 200,000 dogs. 200,000, I thought, that's more than Genghis Khan's army.

  I began to bolster my defences.

  I went to a discount store and bought myself a stock of incredibly cheap North Korean canvas trainers for my weekend walks. I pooped them up for a day and chucked them in a bin outside the hotel. Not very ecological, but good for my hotel's carpets. And the receptionist kindly pretended not to notice me walking past in my socks all the time.

  To get to work unsullied, I equipped myself with a bumper pack of string-tie bin bags that I slipped over my shoes as disposable galoshes. OK, so people stared at me on the metro, and I had to make sure I took them off before I got within range of Marianne's gossiping eyes, but it was worth the bother.

  This was just treating the symptom rather than trying to cure the disease, though, and I began to branch out from literal to metaphorical encounters of the turd kind.

  At work, for example, when I went to confront Bernard about sabotaging my business cards. It was obviously Bernard, wasn't it? My Tea Is Rich was his baby, and I'd tried to abort it.

  "Me? Me?" he replied, showing his usual talent for monosyllables, and sounding like a French version of the roadrunner in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. "No. Ah do not do dese cards, me."

  His moustache danced about as he suppressed a victorious smile. He was looking very pleased to be able to shrug off my accusations. So pleased that he wasn't even hiding the sports magazine he'd been reading.

  "If you're reading that, I hope that means you've had time to read my reports?" I asked pointedly.

  "Zis? Oh, Ah look at zis because eet as big publicity for us." He opened the magazine at a full-page ad for Jean-Marie's prime minced beef, with a famous puff-eared French rugby player looking orgasmic about biting into an undercooked hamburger.

  "Good, uh? Zis rugbyman ee do dis for us because ee eez friend wiz me." Bernard was looking only slightly less orgasmic about the clumsiness with which I'd leapt with both feet into this diplomatic booby trap.

  And outside work, too. I called up one of the waitresses from the strike days, and arranged to go out for Sunday brunch. Before we met up, though, she sent me a terrifying email with an attachment of "some lines that are very important to me".

  I opened up the attachment and, from what I could gather, it was about some spirit visiting a woman and explaining that "tristesse" (sadness) was really "joie" (joy) and vice versa.

  Oh God, said my head, get the hell away from that shit. No, no, said my groin, get in there.

  She was a tall, studenty blonde who hid what promised to be a great body under baggy clothes. She had very fair skin, with a cute curved nose you just wanted to nibble and a tiny beauty spot on her left cheek that seemed to say "kiss here". Her face looked as if it had never seen a molecule of makeup in its life. She was the kind who doesn't seem to know she's beautiful. I love that. Alexa, her name was, she spoke great English, and she was doing a course in photography. What better excuse for a girl to ask you to get your clothes off?

  So instead of deleting her and her email, I replied with some bull about how it'd be all "joie" and no "tristesse" to see her (yes, groan - I'm sorry) and carried on fantasizing about the photo sessions to come.

  At my request we arranged to meet in Montmartre in the 18th, at the place where Amélie Poulain's boyfriend looks down at her through the telescope.

  I took the ultra-modern funicular - a vertical metro - up to the off-white, wedding-cake Sacré Coeur. I was five minutes late, but luckily Alexa was over 15 minutes late, as most Parisian women are.

  We said hello with a chaste kiss on each cheek. She was brimming with understated sexuality in a battered old leather jacket, a baggy-necked sweater and jeans with a hole in the knee. A fine-looking knee, too. She had a camera slung over her shoulder.

  I was brimming with under-used sexuality, and although it was a bit blowy up here on Paris's mountain-top, I'd left my shirt open enough to expose a manly hint of what I hoped was photogenic chest hair. I don't have much, but what I do have she was getting a good view of.

  "Great to see you again," I told her.

  "Yes," she agreed, apparently examining me for light sensitivity.

  We then turned our backs to the Peruvian nose-flute band that was currently entertaining the hordes of tourists taking photos of each other, and looked out over Paris's rooftops.

  * * *

  In Van Gogh's day, Montmartre was a hill in the countryside where artists came for inspiration, fresh air and cheap booze. Now it had been well and truly sucked into the city, but it still felt somehow outside, mainly because of the altitude. You could look down over a chaotic jumble of grey zinc roofs that had probably changed little in a century. With the Eiffel Tower hidden away to our right by a stand of gold-leafed chestnut trees, there were very few intrusions into the low skyline until you got the tower blocks around the city's fringes. There was the blue and white piping of the Pompidou Centre and of course the Tour Montparnasse, jabbed like a black glass dagger into the heart of Paris. But apart from that, the city seemed to be a collection of a million romantic garrets for budding Baudelaires to scribble away in. I couldn't prevent myself from smiling.

  "It is a real visual cliché," Alexa groaned.

  What was this, I wondered, my joie equals her tristesse?

  "It's not a cliché for me, it's the first time I've been here."

  "Hm," she grunted.

  I turned away from the clichéd view. Keep her talking, I urged myself. What does she like?

  "What did you think of Amélie?" I made
telescope-focussing motions down towards the street a hundred feet or so below.

  "Oh," she shrugged. "Jeunet is an intelligent director. But I preferred Delicatessen. Have you seen that?"

  "No. What's it about?"

  "What's it about?" She winced. This was apparently a film that was too good to be about anything. Another gaffe. "There were so many close-ups in Amélie." Alexa sounded outraged. "Half of the movie was just a poster of Audrey Tautou's eyes."

  "Cute eyes, though," I tried to joke.

  "Exactly," she huffed.

  I suffered a moment of panic. Maybe, I thought, Alexa was under the impression I'd invited her out for a lesson in contemporary French aesthetics rather than a pre-bed snack.

  But the conversation flowed a bit more smoothly as we wandered through a small art market selling paintings by all of the worst Renoir imitators in the world. We chatted about why I was in Paris, about her time in England (she'd spent a year in London as a photographer's assistant), and only a little bit more about where she thought contemporary French aesthetics were going (to Disney-style oblivion, apparently).

  She wasn't aggressive, I discovered, just honest. She hid her physical beauty inside a baggy jacket and the softer side of her personality behind outspoken opinions that probably scared men off in droves, thank God.

  * * *

  Near the Moulin Rouge, 1 naturally managed to stumble into a dried-up dog deposit that was like some foul brand of poisonous cocoa powder. It had been lurking at the base of a tree, and made me do my own version of can-can dancing as I kicked the tree-trunk in an attempt to dislodge the cocoa from my shoe. Like a fool, I'd worn some smart, non-Korean trainers.