For an hour, Nick and the other solider solemnly poked and sweated profusely. When they saw a truck rumbling down a nearby road, the two young men looked at each other with the wordless understanding of terrified soldiers. The driver wasn’t quite convinced they’d been given a leave of absence, so he asked them to throw their rifles and uniforms in a bush before giving them a ride back to Belgrade.
Nick left Yugoslavia shortly thereafter. Without the proper work papers or even official refugee status, he did the one thing he could: hit the streets. First, he sold bootlegged tapes and videos in London. Then he came to Paris and had so far operated a hair-braiding stand, sold tawdry beaded jewelry off a sidewalk blanket, and, at the time I entered the picture, defrauded a major department store with the consonant-rich name of FNAC.
The sweetest part of the job was that it involved only the barest of illegalities. There were about half a dozen FNAC outlets in Paris, and though they all sold the same products, they didn’t have a central computer or pricing system. This meant music CDs in the twenty-five franc discount bin at one FNAC store were often still being sold for the full price of more than a hundred francs at another outlet. Having discovered this gambit, Nick spent his days scouring the discount bins and buying CDs that could be returned for a profit. All he did was peel off the discount sticker to reveal the original price tag underneath and then, taking advantage of FNAC’s generous chainwide exchange policy, he presented the unopened CDs to a clerk at another outlet, saying they were an unwanted birthday gift.
He’d been working this angle for several months and had earned thousands of francs. The only problem was that now all the clerks recognized him, which is why he subcontracted the job out to the likes of me. The afternoon I agreed to work for him, we walked from the bookstore up to the FNAC outlet at Montparnasse, where he handed me a bag of four CDs with a combined sticker price of 460 francs.
“Whatever you do, just stay calm. You can’t get in any trouble,” he said.
Though Nick was trying to be reassuring, the fact that he thought it necessary to wear oversize sunglasses as a disguise while waiting outside the FNAC did make me slightly uneasy.
The CDs were by Johnny Hallyday, a pop star who’d been button-cute in the 1960s but was now all artificial dyes and tans, the French version of Las Vegas Elvis. The young woman at the exchange desk nodded compassionately when I said they’d been a gift but I didn’t really enjoy that sort of music. She wrote me a credit slip that I used to buy a fifty-franc long-distance telephone card, and then I left the store with a fresh 410 francs in real money. Nick let me keep the phone card and one hundred francs. So, just like that, I had my first job since leaving the newspaper.
Unfortunately, any visions of a quick fortune were dispelled when Nick told me I couldn’t work for him too often. “Your face, you have a very unusual face,” Nick said, motioning to my prominent nose and shoulder-length red hair. “The clerks, they’ll remember you.”
But with frugality such a crying necessity, there was no better place than at George’s side.
Having traveled around the world with little more than a change of shirt and a paperback book, George had long ago learned to live lean. While riding the rails during the Great Depression, he’d arrange to do yard work in exchange for a meal or would panhandle in the city square until he had enough money for an eight-cent can of beans. “Some of the others would go on begging until their pockets were full of coins,” George recalled. “I was happy with my beans. What more did you need?” Later, one of the reasons George got his seafaring papers was because of the expensive berths on the ships. “My friends would pay two hundred dollars to take a boat to Europe and I’d get off the same boat with two hundred dollars in my pocket.”
Once George opened the bookstore, these lessons proved crucial. He washed his clothes by hand, ate the most basic of meals, and shunned the cinemas or restaurants. With this regime, not only was he able to survive on the bookstore’s paltry receipts but he also managed to provide communal meals and tuck away enough money to keep expanding the bookstore.
After seven decades like this, George could stretch a franc to unimaginable lengths. No piece of bread was too stale or rind of cheese too dry. Once, I was soundly berated for pouring the leftover pickle juice down the sink while washing the jar. “That’s a delicacy! I can make soup with that. I used to drink pickle juice,” George roared. “What are you? A Rockefeller?”
Watching him live was a daily lesson in parsimony. He would walk miles to save a few francs on green peppers, he bought the barest of staples from the discount grocery stores, he furnished his wardrobe exclusively through church rummage sales. In his kitchen, the same piece of aluminium foil was reused until it was blackened and tattered, while tea was bought in bulk because it was marginally cheaper than buying it in individual bags.
The practice of such discipline is how Shakespeare and Company survived, and how he was able to spend half a century feeding and housing people for free. George had discovered money to be the greatest slave master, and by reducing your dependence on it, he believed, you could loosen the grip of a suffocating world.
“People all tell me they work too much, that they need to make more money,” George told me. “What’s the point? Why not live on as little as possible and then spend your time with your family or reading Tolstoy or running a bookstore? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Under such tutelage, I found myself going whole days without spending more than a few francs. Still, George insisted I could do better. While I was cleaning up the kitchen, he caught me throwing away a crust of bread that should have been saved for soup croutons. Then, sin of sins, he noticed a plastic bag that I’d put in the garbage because it had been splattered with grease.
“What are you doing?” he asked, raising his hands to his head in despair. “We save these bags for customers. Wash it out, don’t throw it away. When are you going to learn?”
It was coming, I told George. Day by day, I was beginning to understand.
18.
There was a blinding light and in the fog of sleep I imagined secret police, aliens, and even that famous tunnel to the afterworld. Then there was a familiar cackling laugh and I realized it was just another morning at Shakespeare and Company.
“Pancakes! Upstairs for pancakes!”
My eyes opened and George was standing over me with his flashlight on high beam and a wicked grin across his face. His mission accomplished, he scuttled off and performed a similar wake-up service for Kurt, who had by now taken Esteban’s former bed in the front room of the library. As I felt for my clothes in the groggy dark of the fiction room, I could only wonder at this latest insanity.
“Lazy people!” shouted Ablimit when Kurt and I arrived at the third-floor apartment. “You finally wake up! Come, eat pancakes!”
This was another of the great bookstore traditions. Every Sunday morning for more than four decades, George had served his guests a pancake breakfast to ensure there was at least one common meal a week. Sure enough, this was the first time I’d seen everybody together in the same place since the night at Polly Magoo’s. The only absentee was Simon, who, I was gruffly informed, hadn’t bothered to wake up for a pancake breakfast in years.
Wearing flannel pajamas and well-holed slippers, George was in the kitchen stirring batter. There was already a panful of pancakes frying on the stove and a pot of freshly brewed coffee on the counter. In France, many of the dairies package yogurt in tiny glass jars that the majority of consumers throw away afterward. George uses these jars for everything from paper clips to strawberry ice cream, and we now cradled them in our hands to absorb the heat of our morning coffee.
I sat beside the Italian woman, who was in the midst of telling Ablimit why George especially liked guests from Bologna. Not only was it home to the oldest university in Europe, she said, but it was a stronghold of the Italian Communist party. Ablimit was on the verge of arguing politics, but the Italian drowned him out by singing a rousi
ng refrain of “Ciao Bella,” that George accompanied from the kitchen by banging pots to the rhythm.
The song done, George emerged and began slapping pancakes onto plates. They were tapioca in color and had a lumpy appearance. To go with these pancakes, there was a metal pot of syrup, but not syrup that would have come from any maple tree. George watered down molasses because it was less expensive, and he now spooned it onto my plate and urged me to eat up.
Pushing the pancake once with my fork, I tried to prepare myself. I had never been an enthusiastic morning eater and this breakfast didn’t look desirable, no matter the tradition. The Italian woman cut into her pancake as if dissecting a frog while Kurt elbowed me discreetly. “These can be pretty nasty,” he whispered. “Sometimes George uses the same batter for a month.”
I bit. It wasn’t that it tasted bad, only so very different from any pancake I’d previously encountered. There was a cloying sweetness from the molasses, patches of salt where the batter hadn’t been mixed thoroughly, and the general taste and texture of clumpy flour paste. Yet while I forced myself to finish the one pancake, Ablimit was happily munching a second, then a third.
“We live like kings!” he burst out as George finally joined us at the table with a pancake of his own. Despite the questionable nature of the meal, I don’t think anybody disagreed.
Sunday was the busiest day at Shakespeare and Company, and George asked the residents to give the store a thorough cleaning before the crowds arrived. Kurt was ordered to vacuum the entire bookstore, Ablimit’s job was to wash the windows, and the Italian woman had to straighten the shelves of books. I was to scrub the tile floor at the front of the bookstore, a job in which George took a special interest. He insisted that over the past fifty years nobody except for him had ever done the job properly.
“You have to get down on your knees and scrub, really scrub,” he said, handing me a bucket, a beaten wire brush, and a tin of scouring powder.
It was a challenging assignment as the floor was filthy from a week’s worth of grime and the rust-and-cream tiles were so old that both colors were closer to gray. It didn’t help that the few bristles left on the wire brush sagged more than they scrubbed, but still I sweated for half an hour, cleaning harder than I’d ever cleaned anything in my life. My craving to please was accentuated by the competitive side of my nature, which made me keen to outdo George. When I was finished, the floor didn’t exactly shine, but I was confident it couldn’t look any better.
“Look at that!” George grunted as he inspected my work. Pointing to a corner under the cash desk where a shadow of dirt remained, he got down on his knees, scrubbed it cleaner, and then stood up.
“Ha! You people today don’t know how to do things,” he said, and went humming off to continue his inspection.
With the store open, I went to take my usual station in the antiquarian room, but when I opened the door, I found Simon lying comatose in bed.
“You mean I overslept?” he groaned when I told him George was already at the desk next door.
He spoke in a slurred voice and had such trouble coordinating the movements of his limbs that I worried he wouldn’t be able to dress and get away before being discovered. But Simon was prepared. Each night, the last thing he did before returning to the bookstore was order a double espresso to go from Panis. He kept the plastic cup a hand’s reach from his bed in order to kick-start his mornings.
As I watched, he downed the cold coffee in a single swallow and then, Popeye after his spinach, the poet leapt to his feet and flung on his clothes. During his exile from the bookstore, Simon had been spending his days at the various libraries and museums in the city, places where you could both stay warm and read in peace. Putting on his hat, he told me he was off to library of the Centre Pompidou.
“I don’t envy you,” he said as he hurried away. “Sundays are impossible here. They descend in swarms. Swarms.”
Indeed, there was such a constant rush in the antiquarian room that for the first time I understood why the poet occasionally locked himself away. The door kept swinging open, the cold air kept rushing in, the absurd questions kept showering down. “Did William Shakespeare really live here?” asked one particularly misinformed customer.
At one point, George came in and introduced a gentleman as an editor at the Paris Review, saying he had once lived in the store. The man said hello and George left him to browse through the books. Minutes later, Kurt burst in with several typewritten pages clutched in his hand.
“Is the Paris Review guy here?” he demanded. I realized what was about to unfold and kept quiet in hopes of preventing the imminent scene, but to no avail. There were two men in the antiquarian room and Kurt grabbed the closest one.
“Are you the editor?”
The man, a German tourist, shook his head in a frightened manner, while the actual editor shrank farther into the back corner. Kurt swooped like a hawk on a gimpy rabbit.
“I want you to publish this,” he said, thrusting a chapter of Videowrangler into his hands.
The editor appeared pained and said he was overwhelmed with submissions but would try and give it a read. After receiving half a dozen hearty slaps on the back, the editor quickly fled. I wondered aloud if Kurt didn’t think he’d been presumptuous.
“How else am I going to get my break?” he scoffed.
My vigilance at the desk was later rewarded when a sparkly girl by the name of Gayle appeared at the door with a basket of freshly baked bread. With the residents’ reputation for poverty, it was common for people to deposit spare baguettes or even bags of groceries at the front desk. No contribution was anticipated more than Gayle’s. She was chef at the New Zealand embassy and, as the bread attested, a master of her art.
Another pleasant surprise was the identity of Gayle’s boyfriend. He was sitting outside on the bench under the cherry tree, reading a book about bullfighting and smoking an unfiltered cigarette.
There is a certain discrepancy of view when it comes to a bullfight. Some consider it a tremendous sport that pits man against beast; others contend it is cruel to taunt, torture, and kill an animal for the pleasure of a supposedly civilized human audience. Rare is the individual with no opinion at all.
The classic bullfight as seen in Spain or Mexico has three parts. The first involves the angering of the bull, where a picador on horseback circles the bull and stabs bright ribbons into the animal’s neck with a lance. By the end of this procedure, the blood is streaming down the bull’s flanks and the ribbons are a sticky red. The second stage is the famous one, where the matador brandishes his cape and encourages the bull to charge, then steps aside and ushers the beast past. After the bull is exhausted, the final stage begins. Here, the matador approaches the bull, looks it in the eye, and plunges a sword between the animal’s shoulder blades. The bullfighter then takes his bows while the bull is dragged away by a team of oxen, the corpse leaving a wet trail of blood across the sand of the arena.
After a few moments of conversation, it became evident that Tom, Gayle’s boyfriend, appreciated this sporting tribute to man’s struggle against animals.
The only professional bullfight I’d had the pleasure to witness had been in Portugal and this left me of the opinion that the sport could be enjoyed without the slaughter. There, the first two parts are the same, but the final stage is one of the most gripping events I have ever seen.
Once the matador leaves the ring, thirteen men dressed in white enter and confront the angry bull. The men, all of whom wear white caps except the leader, whose cap is bright red, form a line opposite the bull and then creep toward it like a slithering snake. When the bull charges, the man with the red hat leaps onto its head in an attempt to land between the horns and block the animal’s vision. The second man in the line then runs behind the bull and yanks on its tail to slow the bull’s forward progress while the other eleven men wrestle it to the ground. Once the bull is on its knees, it is considered vanquished. In thanks for its troubles, a herd of lo
vely cows is then ushered in and the bull is allowed to sniff their genitals and follow them out of the ring.
That moment when the man is about to leap onto the bull’s head is as intense as a World Cup shoot-out. The day I spent at the Portuguese ring, there were six bulls on the bill. Three times, the bull was successfully subdued on the first leap, twice it took two attempts, and the final time the line of thirteen men had to approach the bull four painful times and the red-hatted man was barely able to walk after being thrown on his first three tries. Blind courage, in my mind, is defined by a man who will stand before a charging bull and jump onto its head.
Tom had not been familiar with this more humane offspring of the bullfight and, perhaps won over by my animated reenactment of the event, agreed it a worthy thing to consider. A gentleman’s bond of debate thus formed, I inquired if he had enjoyed the Shaw play. To my delight, he withdrew it from his jacket pocket, thanking me profusely for having let him borrow the book. Feeling petty for my concerns, I offered Tom a seat inside the antiquarian room to escape the wind.
One of the most remarkable features of this man, especially considering the breakfast I’d been served that morning, was his last name. Tom went by Thomas Pancake and held true claim to the name. As he told it, his father was baptized Sperry Pancake and had even been photographed for a box of General Mills instant pancake mix when he was a baby.
Time Was Soft There Page 12
