It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

by Engel, Patricia

  We walked without a destination, yet I felt something within me take root.

  I grasped that I would love him.

  To observers we likely appeared as talkative as barnacles, and only knew each other a few days, but this inkling, this awareness, felt as real to me as my sore feet when we stopped so I could sit on the ledge of a shop window and loosen my bootlaces.

  We continued in the direction of Place de la Concorde. As we passed the old opera house I asked why we didn’t just jump on the métro. It seemed easier.

  “You don’t see anything down there.”

  “You see people.”

  But Cato resisted. “I don’t like the feeling of being underground.”

  We took the bus instead. A young couple sat across the aisle from us sucking on each other’s lips. I tried to keep my eyes on the window, on the hordes of tourists swelling from the top of Rivoli to the wooded bottom of Les Champs and the standard clusters of Asian couples on those Get Married in Paris package tours posing for photos. He wanted to walk across the Pont Alexandre, his favorite bridge, and when we were halfway across it, he touched my arm.

  “This is where we met.”

  “No, we met by the torch.”

  “No, the bridge. First I was behind you and then I was beside you. It was the first time you looked at me.”

  From his pocket he pulled a fat black marker like the one Sharif used that first night to write into the stone wall of the Pont de l’Alma. He leaned over the side of the bridge and reached for the golden chariot hanging above the river and used his sleeve to wipe a small patch of bronze that hadn’t already been tagged with graffiti. He then wrote Lita et Cato on the statue and looked to me with a slow smile.

  “So when you cross this bridge you’ll remember you were once here with me.”

  I thought this would be a great moment for a kiss, but it didn’t happen. We grinned at each other, thunder stirring overhead, and got on our way again.

  We were slow, though, and the rain fell fast. Within minutes we were wet, our clothes soupy, rain dripping off our lips and nostrils. We took shelter in the doorways along the quai and finally made it to the House of Stars as the winds picked up. I dropped to the foyer floor, peeling off my boots and waterlogged socks while Cato slipped off his sweatshirt, slim and shivery in his T-shirt, revealing pointy shoulders and a sloped spine. I hadn’t expected him to walk me all the way home, but here he was and I hadn’t yet figured out what to do with him. It was a big house, perfect for parties, but when entertaining just one person, the only place to go, it seemed, was the bedroom.

  Séraphine heard us come in and called for me to come to her room. I left him in the foyer and found her in bed, an extra crochet blanket pulled around her shoulders, bifocals on the tip of her nose, and some dusty old book in her lap.

  “You fell in the Seine, chérie?”

  “The rain caught us.” I pulled my hair off my neck and twisted it into a knot.

  “You and the boy?”

  “He’s in the foyer.”

  “Bring him in.”

  I stole a few seconds in the shadows of the corridor, watching him look out to the courtyard as rain rattled the windows. He was beautiful. I understood it when I saw him then, netted in the white and blue glow of the afternoon rain.

  “Séraphine wants to meet you.”

  I’d told him about her, but not enough to prepare him for the sight of alabaster Séraphine in her antiquarium, reclined like a sphinx. I introduced her the formal way, as Countess, which I think she appreciated. She offered us each a cigarette from her engraved silver case, an especially kind gesture on her part because she kept a separate box of Dunhills for guests and only offered smokes from her personal stash to her favorite people.

  I accepted one, but Cato declined.

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “No, madame. Never.”

  Séraphine was immediately suspicious.

  “What sort of a name is Cato?”

  “A nickname my mother gave me. I’ve been called that way all my life, madame.”

  “What is your birth name?”

  “Felix.”

  “Just Felix?”

  “Felix Paul.”

  “Felix Paul what?”

  “Felix Paul de Manou, madame.”

  I slid my unlit cigarette back into Séraphine’s case and stepped back from her bed to the wall, wondering if it was odd that I hadn’t thought to ask his last name and he hadn’t asked mine.

  She noticed my retreat, moving her eyes to Cato, to me, to Cato.

  “De Manou is not a common name.”

  “No, madame. It isn’t.”

  “It’s quite an unusual name, in fact. Is it not?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Are you something of …” She paused, cleared her throat, and began again: “Are you something of … of … Antoine de Manou?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “He is your …”

  She waited but he said nothing.

  “He is your … great-uncle?”

  “No, madame.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “What is he to you then?”

  I became annoyed. She never went through this kind of trouble with any of the other guys who came to the house.

  “He is my father.”

  Séraphine’s eyes went so big they looked taxidermied.

  “Your father? That’s impossible.”

  I think she expected him to try to convince her otherwise, but he just stood, quietly waiting for whatever came next.

  “How old are you, Felix?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “You are the son?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “Are you aware the rumor is that you are dead?”

  I thought that was a rude thing to say no matter what she’d heard but kept quiet.

  “As you see, madame, I am not.”

  “But your mother?”

  “Yes, my mother is dead.”

  “But not from the bomb.”

  “No. A car accident.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember.” It was all coming back to her. “She took you away …”

  “She took me to Normandy, madame. She never liked Paris. It was better for us.”

  “Is your father still in the Vaneau house?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “You never returned to live with him?”

  “I prefer the countryside, madame.”

  She eyed him. “It must be peaceful. My own doctor often tells me a move to the coast will improve my health. Better quality of air, good for the lungs. What do you think?”

  “A fine recommendation, madame, though you have a lovely home here.”

  In two minutes, Séraphine had learned more about Cato than I had in six hours of gentle meandering through Paris’s passages. I thought you should let a person tell what they want to tell. When you turn on the questions it gives them the right to do the same to you, and I hated when people asked me about myself—always left with the feeling that no matter what I revealed it was either too much or not enough. That’s why I decided to end the interrogation right then and there and told Séraphine we’d let her get back to her reading.

  Cato told her it was lovely to meet her. I started for the door and motioned for Cato to follow, but Séraphine called after our backs.

  “Felix, please tell your father that Séraphine de la Roque sends her regards.”

  Back in the foyer, he pulled his sweatshirt off the coatrack and threw his arms into the wet fabric. I didn’t want him to leave but I wasn’t ready for him to stay. In my bare feet he was two inches or so taller than me. We stood by the door and made plans to meet the next afternoon. He didn’t kiss me, not even a good-bye bise, so of course, it was all I could think about as I watched him cross the courtyard in the rain hoping he’d look back at the House of Stars, but he didn’t.

  I couldn’t stop Séraphine from spilling to me as soon as Cato was go
ne: how she’d known Antoine de Manou in the fifties when he was just back from Suez. Then he went to Algeria and she didn’t see him for many years. He was always a jackal, she said, but now he was an old jackal with money and experience and influence, all of life’s most dangerous things. He was on the Parliament until they grew tired of his radical antics. Now he was on the Assembly and had his own political party with the main objective of putting walls around the country to keep out my kind. I thought Séraphine meant Americans, but she hooted, “That’s part of your problem, chérie. You don’t even know what you are. But it doesn’t matter your nation or whether you are a street cleaner or a greenblood, because Antoine de Manou hates all foreigners indiscriminately. He’s the worst of France, chérie. The worst. No wonder that boy never mentioned him.”

  She told me Antoine’s apartment was bombed when Felix was a baby. It might have been the Basques, Algerians, or Corsicans. It was never decided because so many people hated him. Except his small yet devoted following. Even the devil, Séraphine said, has fans.

  “If he has an ounce of his father’s blood, you should be very careful, Leticia.”

  I told Séraphine that Cato was different. The only French thing I could point to about him was his language.

  “And yet that’s everything.”

  “Maybe in your generation. Not in mine.”

  “Chérie, a wise man once said racists, misers, and saints are always the last to be aware of their condition.”

  “What wise man?”

  “My Théophile. He was very wise sometimes.”

  “I don’t think it matters who his father is.”

  “Of course you don’t. Your father is the Colombian Oliver Twist.” She laughed, and I sensed that it wasn’t the first time she’d spoken of my family that way. “You don’t understand lineage and bloodlines and why these things matter. I am starting to think it might be too late for you, Leticia. You might never catch on.”

  “We can’t choose our fathers just like we can’t choose our children.”

  Though I’d been offended, I regretted my words instantly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said but somehow my apology didn’t translate, and Séraphine stared at me, shaking her head slowly.

  “You are very young, Leticia. Life has a way of humbling the arrogant. And I am reminded that I am an old, old woman when I look at your face and know that you will not listen to a word I have said.”

  I thought of my parents, the moment my mother said she knew she would spend her life with my father. She saw him from her window in the convent. It was an overcast Bogotá day, and he worked on that fence for hours before stopping to eat under a tree on the edge of the convent garden. She couldn’t make out his face, but she said she might as well have been blindfolded, because the feeling had come to her even before he arrived that morning, the knowledge that he was whom she’d been waiting for. They didn’t speak until many weeks later when his work on the fence was nearly completed and she’d gone out to the garden to bring him a piece of cake left over from a birthday celebration for one of the nuns. To hear it from my father is to hear a recipe, a poem he spoke to the sky every night that he slept in the bed made of old car seats in a corner of his boss’s garage. He’d asked for a woman adrift like him, a woman with whom he could start a family, craft a dream, a woman within whom he could find his purpose, and himself.

  My brother and I used to laugh at our parents’ old-world love story. We understood how they’d found refuge in each other, but I think we thought ourselves better than to naively surrender to a divine providence. With our American privilege had come a certain sterility and cynicism that I was surprisingly pleased to now be shedding. It was as if my blood had been moving slowly through me for years, and with Cato my pulse had been altered, changing course. No matter what I was told about the family name that preceded him, I knew I’d found a new piece of my life in Cato, stepping into my fate as if claiming a part of my inheritance.

  7

  I’d already been to the Rodin Museum with Loic. Cato didn’t want to go inside the museum, only toward the back garden, through the pebbled pathways along the tree-lined perimeter, around the fountain to the sphere of benches dappled with tired travelers and local lovers resting their heads in each other’s laps. He stopped to buy a sandwich from the café by the hedge and we settled onto a vacant bench at the far end of the museum grounds.

  He offered me half of the sandwich and I took it.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow, Lita. I have to go home.”

  “Do you have a job waiting for you?”

  “Yes, but that’s not why I need to go back.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “I love being with you.”

  The word love from his lips, vertiginous.

  “But …”

  “But what?”

  “I can’t stand Paris.” His face was suddenly shadowed. “This city makes me ill.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every day that I’m here I search for the horizon and I can never find it through the buildings. I look for earth but there’s only concrete. I can’t get the noise out of my ears. And the air. Can’t you feel how heavy it is?”

  I inhaled deeply. Cool, dry air, the fall fragrance of leaves and ash.

  “It’s just air.”

  “It’s suffocating. I feel starved for real air here, and like a zombie among a million other miserable faces.”

  He stared at me gravely, almost as if I were to blame.

  “I’m not made for the city. I need ocean air. The open sky. I need friendly faces. I wish you could see where I live. Then you would know what I mean.”

  I felt the warm October sun on our faces. The noise was the song of a city, conscious, pulsating. Some days we’d hear about the pollution levels going up, only half the cars could drive, and the government recommended staying indoors, and as for misery, in my month in France I’d seen three or four strikes—the Basques, the university students, and the taxi drivers. But all these things are proof of life, a society, a civilization.

  “Every place has its flaws,” I said. “I love Paris for what it is, not for what it isn’t.”

  “I’m trying to tell you I can’t stay here another day.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning on the seven o’clock train.”

  “You’ve already booked a ticket?”

  He nodded and we looked at each other but didn’t say anything more.

  I care too much. I can’t help it. It’s congenital. I care too much about life, particularly about people. Santi would say it’s the immigrant genes; immigrants are genetically predisposed to caring about life too much, which is why they put themselves in all sorts of crappy circumstances hoping for a better tomorrow. That kind of hope is a disease. If you carry the chromosome for faith you’re doubly terminal because you’ll always believe your misfortune is a prelude to something better.

  So he was leaving.

  I chewed the last bits of my sandwich with my best je m’en fous face. Cato watched me, but I watched the fountain, the silver water spots of coin-tossed wishes. I made a silent penniless wish that he would change his mind and thought he might have when he touched my sleeve gently, but it was only to say, “I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  He looked puzzled and I was pleased. He deserved to be confused.

  “You seem upset, Lita.”

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “Because I’m leaving.”

  “You’ve got to go back to your life. Besides, we hardly know each other.” Loic the nonpracticing actor would have been impressed with my delivery.

  I stood up and took a few steps toward the fountain before turning back around to him, inhaling as if I couldn’t get enough of this alleged putrid air around us.

  “Thank you for a lovely afternoon.”

  I’d already charted the
scene, expected him to come after me. But by the time I crossed rue Barbet de Jouy, hot in the face, I realized Cato had no plans to follow.

  My parents have always prided themselves on their manners, which is funny considering they were both raised like wildflowers. The nuns taught my mother to be quiet, acquiescent, prudent, but those qualities are different than the manners that serve you at a dinner table or party. My mother learned hers from a Park Avenue lady whose apartment she cleaned during the early days of her and Papi’s arrival. The lady was a grouch but grew fond of my mother because Mami spoiled Byron, her cranky Persian cat, cooking him filet mignon just the way the lady wanted. After teaching her how to serve lunch, the old lady would invite my mother to join her at the table for lessons on posture and how to hold utensils. Santiago and Beto hated hearing about our mother’s days as a janitor and maid no matter how much our parents insisted there was no shame in honest work. When the Park Avenue lady died some years later, a lawyer tracked us down in New Jersey and said she’d left Byron to our mother in her will. We thought he was on his last legs but Byron got a second wind of life with us and lived for another ten years, though Santiago changed his name to Boyacá.

  I passed for a lady most of the time, which pleased my parents, but our father also taught us to defend ourselves in case we ever got jumped like he did during his years on the streets. He took special interest in my self-protection because my parents believed that many men were rapists-in-waiting. He made us practice throwing and blocking punches in our home gym, taking my hands in his: “These hands look delicate, mi amor, but they are not. These hands are machetes.”

  Then he’d bring in one of the gardeners or handymen or whoever was around, instructing them to pretend to try to kill me to see if I could stop them. One by one they’d go for my throat and I’d duck, throwing my fist into their chests with all my weight behind it, and that is how Isidro the electrician ended up with a broken rib.

  It’s not like Papi was training us to be paramilitants or anything. We were pacifists, and I never had the chance to use my violence until I was fourteen and won a state award for English and some remedial girls started calling me a dirty wetback whore, saying they were going to have my family deported, pulling my hair and spitting on me as I walked through the school halls. One day they followed me out to the parking lot. My body took hits, but I blocked the shots to my face so there would be no evidence and I wouldn’t have to tell my parents what happened. They thought their kids would be safe growing up in the suburbs. I didn’t want to be responsible for them losing their innocent view of my world.