Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  The tourist gave this a moment’s consideration.

  ‘Mais pourquoi vous ne marquez pas les options végétariennes avec un signe végétarien?’ he asked.

  ‘Signe végétarien?’

  ‘Oui.’ The guy mimed writing a V on the menu.

  ‘Ah.’ Benoît leaned forward and confided to the guy that we wouldn’t dare mark anything veggie because that would scare off the French customers. He caught my eye and winked. He was learning fast.

  The tourist wasn’t convinced.

  ‘Est-ce que vos pommes de terre sont végétariennes?’ he asked.

  No, I thought, the potatoes are carnivorous. You try sticking your fork in one of them and it’ll have your arm off.

  Of course I knew what he meant. Were the fillings veggie? But then a dish of baked beans is a dish of baked beans. He must have known that they weren’t frog’s kidneys in a horse-blood sauce.

  Initially, Benoît was stumped. His logical French brain had crashed when confronted by someone asking whether a vegetable was vegetarian. Fortunately, though, French schoolkids study philosophy until the age of eighteen, so he was able to perform a spectacular leap of lateral thinking.

  ‘Why don’t you just have a cheese-and-tomato toastie?’ he suggested.

  ‘Est-ce que le fromage est végétarien?’ the veggie asked.

  This time, Benoît almost fainted with mental exhaustion.

  I knew why. Vegetarian cheese? The French could not get their heads round this concept if you offered them a swimming pool full of champagne every day for the rest of their lives.

  I came over to catch Benoît in case he actually passed out.

  ‘No, it’s French cheese,’ I said, in English. ‘You never know whether the rennet is animal or vegetable. But if you’ve eaten one mouthful of cheese over here in France, then this is exactly the same.’

  ‘Hmm.’ The tourist stood there mulling this over. The only sign of life he gave was a slight twitching of his water-bottle tube.

  It was lucky, I thought, that it was early and we didn’t have a queue of people to serve. Half an hour later and every member of my staff would be gathered around him doing their ‘all for one’ problem-solving thing.

  It was at that moment that I understood French waiters.

  They’re in a rush to serve twenty tables at once and they get confronted with a guy like this asking about vegetarian options. A French waiter in a hurry would quite naturally think, vegetarian option number one: ram his head down the toilet.

  Because apart from the time-wasting element, there’s also a kind of impoliteness going on here. A chef spends years at catering school, months planning a menu, hours buying ingredients and cooking them, and then a family of tourists orders three plain omelettes and a plate of spaghetti. With ketchup. It’s as if Michelangelo had sketched out the Sistine Chapel and then the Pope wanders in and says, ‘You know, I think I’d prefer a plain coat of eggshell all over.’

  ‘Look, you speak really good French,’ I told the guy, ‘but there’s no point speaking the language if you use it to say things they’ll never understand. They honestly don’t care about vegetarianism. They think that anyone who doesn’t orgasm over undercooked beef is a total philistine. To them a vegetarian coming to France is like someone who takes a vow of chastity and then goes to live in a harem. They think vegetarians are nuts. No pun intended, of course.’

  I knew that I’d fallen into the trap of treating a customer like a dickhead, but I really thought the guy needed to understand the country he was visiting, otherwise he was in danger of starving to death as soon as the emergency rations in his utility belt ran out.

  ‘But you should mark the vegetarian options on your menu,’ he replied.

  ‘I can’t. It’s against French law,’ I told him, falling back on stereotype.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No, you’re right, I’m not sure. I’ll call the police and ask them if you want.’

  To my surprise, the guy didn’t stomp out in a huff, he simply grunted, turned to Benoît and ordered.

  ‘Un toastie avec fromage, s’il vous plaît.’

  ‘Comment?’ Benoît hadn’t quite emerged from his coma yet.

  ‘Un toastie avec fromage, s’il vous plaît.’

  Oh come on, I thought, be French. Moan about my rudeness, yell at me until you win the argument, don’t just give in.

  Who was it called the French ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’? We Brits are the mild-mannered, mild-flavoured, vegetarian-cheese-eating surrender Corgis.

  ‘Oui, Monsieur.’ Benoît flipped open the toaster and slotted in a sandwich.

  ‘Est-ce que vos jus de fruits sont organic?’ the tourist asked, and I felt a sudden craving to go and squeeze some oranges.

  But I was the one who’d learned a lesson.

  French waiters are professionals, I realized, and too many of their customers are so damn amateurish.

  For a professional waiter, dealing with amateur customers is like a tennis pro who never gets the ball knocked back to him. Of course he could content himself with serving ace after ace, but where’s the fun in that? Good waiters enjoy the game, they like an opponent with style.

  They send over a brisk request to order, the customer returns with a crisply hit choice from the menu, the waiter meets it at the net and crashes in a volley about wine, which the client can only lob back in the form of a plea for advice. The waiter smashes home the vin du mois and the point is won. There are similarly tight exchanges about dessert and coffee and everyone gets a good workout.

  But what if the customer doesn’t even understand the whole concept of the serve? What is this round, bouncy thing that is being hit towards me, the tennis virgin wonders, and what should I do with it? It’s no wonder that waiters occasionally get frustrated and overcharge amateurs for wasting their time.

  Hang on a minute, I thought, what’s going on here? Someone get me a mirror. I think I’m mutating into a French waiter.

  5

  That Was No Lady, That Was Your Wife

  1

  WHEN A MARRIED lady invites you to join her at a museum, you assume it’s a perfectly innocent invitation, don’t you?

  Even if she gives you the museum’s address instead of its name, which did strike me as a bit weird.

  Weirder still, when I walked out of the metro station I came face to face with a row of topless ladies, all of whom were wearing large black crosses or red hearts over their crotches. Some of the women had their hands thrust down behind these crosses or hearts, and the expressions on their faces suggested that they were astonished to find that they had no knickers on. Others, their mouths locked in a gaping ‘O’, were pointing their unnaturally large boobs at me as if I was the target in a milk-squirting contest.

  They were photos, of course, although some of them were nearly lifesize. And they were the first in what looked like a whole, long boulevard of similar photos.

  What kind of museum could there be up here? I wondered. The national vibrator gallery? The breast implant collection (otherwise known as the unnatural history museum)?

  When I stopped in surprise at the first of these photo displays, a man in a tight leather jacket stepped out of the doorway and told me that these ladies were lap dancers and that they were all waiting for me downstairs.

  I found this hard to believe for two reasons. First, only one person knew that I was coming up to this neighbourhood today – the married lady. And secondly, through the little golden-framed door I could see a dingy staircase that really didn’t look as if it led down to a big enough basement to contain all of the ladies in the photos. But when I expressed my doubts that they could all be waiting down there, the man got angry and called me a rude French name that implied, inaccurately, that I was a small vagina.

  I didn’t know why he was so upset at the loss of one potential lapdancee. Over on the other side of the Boulevard Clichy, two big tourist coaches were spilling out their human loads along the row of sex
shops and lapdancing clubs. And they obviously weren’t the first coaches of the day. Giggling, ogling groups of foreigners were wandering slowly along the street trying to picture what went on behind all those ladies’ crosses and hearts. Most of them kept at two or three yards’ distance, but some were bound to go into the clubs.

  At this point, I really should have asked myself why I’d been invited to a rendezvous up here, but I didn’t. I only wondered why it was that the sex clubs were interspersed with kebab bars. Perhaps the ladies in the basements needed regular high-protein snacks to maintain their gyration speeds.

  I kept walking past the alternating displays of sex and Mediterranean food until I found the right street number, and only then did I seriously begin to question the motives of the married lady who was waiting inside.

  The museum looked just like one of the sex shops, except that the objects in the window had little multilingual signs explaining what they were. Not that an enormous wood carving of an erect penis needs much explanation.

  This was, a neon sign proudly announced, Le Musée de l’Érotisme.

  If the pictures of naked women in the window had been more modern, I probably wouldn’t have dared to stop and look at them at such close range. But hey, this was a museum, it was culture. So, like the tourists, instead of giggling or looking furtive, I furrowed my brow and pondered upon the historical importance of these particular nudie pics.

  Although everyone, including me, had problems keeping a straight face when they caught sight of a seat on show in the central section of the wide glass facade. A normal dining-room chair had been covered with fake leopard-skin, and a section of the seat had been cut out. Into this hole, a kind of mill wheel had been fitted. As it revolved, it sent a series of plastic tongues flapping up through the hole, the idea presumably being that a naked woman would be sitting there getting a good tongue-lashing. But judging by the dirt sticking to the tongues, I thought that the chair would be more likely to give her thrush than thrills.

  And this was where I was to meet a married woman. What did it all mean?

  Well, if it had been Jean-Marie’s wife, I’d have presumed it was a kind of ironic foreplay and run a mile.

  But the invitation had come from Nathalie, the TV reporter, who’d told me she was preparing a travel item about quirky places in Paris, including my new English café and this museum. I didn’t see much of a link between the two, but maybe that’s why I’m not a reporter.

  I’d been expecting a more conventionally quirky museum. There are some prime examples in Paris. The Tobacco Museum (Oh, Daddy, look at that lovely tumour!), the Perfume Museum (Hey, a bottle of perfume. Wow, another bottle of perfume, etc.), the Doll Museum (Mummy, why is that man taking photos of the Barbies?).

  But Eroticism, I thought, why not? What could be more Parisian? Apart, perhaps, from a dog-merde archive.

  Things got still more explicit inside the museum’s sliding doors. Before I’d even paid the hefty entrance fee, I’d seen a ‘phallic owl’ (a realistic, six-inch-tall porcelain bird with, quite inexplicably, a human penis growing out the top of its skull) and a fountain consisting of a crouching naked woman with water spurting out of her nipples and one strong jet giving her a colonic irrigation. I could understand why I’d never seen one of those in the French branches of Habitat.

  The general feeling, though, was that all this was a million miles from the sordid world of massage parlours and sex clubs. There was a young Italian couple bending down to get a close-up rear view of the fountain, a small group of Japanese girls (or maybe Koreans – I’d have had to ask Jake to be sure) taking phone photos of some raunchy etchings.

  I didn’t even feel self-conscious about being a single male until I caught sight of a prime saddo on the stairs leading up to the first floor. Thirty years old, baseball cap, denim jacket, no tourist accessories like a day pack or camera, his eyes not on the photos in the stair well but constantly checking out the visitors, an expectant look on his face as if a woman was suddenly going to accost him and say, hey, want to try this with me?

  Yes, apart from the baseball cap, a few extra years and the expectant look, he looked a lot like me. Now I understood why people came here in couples or groups.

  Time to find Nathalie, and fast.

  I caught up with her on the second floor. She was gazing intently at a set of Nepalese wooden dildos, which looked as if they hadn’t been properly sanded down. I hoped they were fertility symbols rather than sex toys. One quick session with those and you’d need twenty-four hours of microsurgery to remove the splinters.

  We said hello with a professional handshake, and started to walk around the museum together. Which wasn’t much less embarrassing than going round on my own. In a normal museum you can comment on the incredible age of something, or how you used to have one of those when you were a kid. Here, though, the only appropriate comments would have been things like ‘Look where she’s putting that’ or ‘I can see why he’s smiling.’ And when you don’t know a woman very well, it is pretty difficult to make intelligent conversation in front of exhibits like a ten-times-lifesize resin model of a vagina.

  None of this seemed to embarrass Nathalie, though. She strode purposely from room to room, chuckling at the commentaries and making notes into her dictaphone.

  Très bizarre,’ she dictated. ‘The Indian paintings show men with long, thin penises. The drawings of Japanese men all have monstrous members out of all proportion to their bodies. Inferiority complex?’

  ‘Have you ever done any modelling?’ she asked me in English, her eyes lingering on a Samurai who was hung like a kimono’d elephant.

  ‘Only plasticine.’

  ‘No, I mean . . . Oh, sorry, I forgot, English humour. Self-mocking, I am sure.’

  Whatever that meant.

  We moved on to a cabinet full of Mexican earthenware water jugs with obscene decorations. One of them had a handle in the form of two people having oral sex, and a spout in the shape of an erect schlong.

  ‘Oh, pre-Colombian,’ an American tourist said to his wife. ‘Probably Aztec’ He seemed to think he was at the Louvre.

  ‘No wonder their civilization ended,’ the wife replied. ‘I’d have died of thirst before I drank out of that thing.’

  ‘That’s not what they say about American women,’ Nathalie whispered.

  Meanwhile, she asked me to tell her how I’d come to live in Paris and open up a tea room.

  I talked her through my initial problems settling in in France while we stood in front of a collection of distinctly limp jade phalluses.

  As we tried to make sense of a surreal modern drawing of a woman apparently sticking her head up her own anus, I told her how the team assigned to the tea room by Jean-Marie had spent most of their time being a pain in the butt.

  And I was only slightly distracted from my description of Nicolas the architect’s cock-ups by a Thai statue of a robed man with penises instead of hands.

  ‘And you personally, do you feel welcome in Paris?’ Nathalie pushed her glasses up on top of her head to give her hypnotic eyes a direct X-ray view into my brain.

  I reassured her that, apart from a few false starts with receptionists, waiters, the ID card people, certain shopkeepers, estate agents, several of my ex-colleagues, and the city’s entire dog population, I’d settled in pretty well as an Anglais in Paris.

  ‘Ah, talking of Englishmen in Paris, look at this.’

  We leaned in close to examine a photo marked ‘The Prince of Wales Room’. This, it turned out, was the future King Edward VII’s permanent pied-à-terre in a Parisian brothel. The enormous bed and the proudly grinning Madame were proof enough that Queen Victoria’s eldest son was a bit of a lad, but I was more interested in the extraordinary ‘love seat’ that, according to the label next to the photo, the prince had personally designed for his den.

  The base was a chintz-covered divan, on which a man was apparently supposed to kneel. Above this, on sturdy wooden legs, halfway along the
base, there was a raised cutaway seat with two high arm rests. This, presumably, was where a woman would sit with splayed legs while the kneeling prince pleasured her, hanging on to the arm rests to get extra leverage.

  Or maybe he would be sitting back while she did the kneeling. I didn’t particularly want to know. All I knew was that the Prince probably didn’t ask his mum’s throne-makers to knock that particular piece of furniture together.

  ‘I had no idea that you English had such imagination.’ Nathalie, her head tilted to one side, was trying to work out the mechanics of getting the best out of the love seat.

  ‘His dad was German,’ I admitted modestly.

  ‘And do you live in an apartment like that?’

  ‘Afraid not. There was no room at the whorehouse for me.’

  ‘Oh, how sad. Where do you live, really?’

  When I told her, she laughed.

  ‘Why does everyone do that?’ I was starting to get serious hang-ups about living in the Fifteenth. OK, it wasn’t the trendiest part of town, but was it really such a source of merriment?

  Nathalie explained. When you tell someone you live in the rue Eugène Gibez, she told me, it sounds to French ears as if you’re saying ‘rue Eugène, I fuck there’ (‘j’y baise’). Which explained why every taxi driver I gave my address to unfailingly replied, ‘Lucky you.’

  Bloody typical, I thought, that I should end up living in that street among central Paris’s 4,800-odd thoroughfares.

  ‘And is this true?’ Nathalie ran her finger over a bike saddle with a suggestive pink slit cut into the leather.

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That you . . . fuck there?’ That nanosecond pause before she pronounced the key word should have been in one of the displays here as an example of genuinely erotic erotica.