Paris To The Moon

by Adam Gopnik

  But such moments were mostly drowned in tedium and then by something worse. By the time the English players arrived on the scene, on Monday, June 15, everything was already ruined. Hooligans had invaded Marseilles, where England was opening against Tunisia, and not merely got drunk and beat up shopkeepers but overran a beach where Tunisian families were picnicking (there is a big Tunisian community in the South of France) and beat up kids and moms there. Everyone had known that they were coming. One source said that the authorities had done their best to keep out the hardboiled Category C hooligans, but some of them had managed to sneak in—a rare case of England's having a deep bench.

  Though headlines about English hooligans sweep the world, they don't do justice to the terror involved. "Lager louts" and "hooligans" sound vaguely quaint, but these guys are cruel, violent, and twisted by inarticulate hatred in a way that terrifies the French and makes them wild partisans of the Scottish team. The persistence of English hooliganism—the Englishness of hooliganism—can maybe be explained by the possibility that at some half-conscious level a lot of English people are proud of their thugs and approve of their behavior. This approval consists of a toxic combination of sentimental left-wing anti-Thatcherism (a kind of Trainspotting pride that at least the thugs aren't businessmen) coupled with a romantic right-wing chauvinism (it's an English tradition to go to the Continent and hit foreigners). In the Marseilles attacks most of the thugs turned out not to be poor kids, or unemployed kids; they couldn't have afforded the passage over. The thugs were, apparently, mostly postal workers (what is it about mail?), and they were not going to be damaged in the eyes of their mates for having gone over to France to beat people up, or for being sent back from France for having beat people up.

  ***

  Despite the reports of violence from provincial fronts, Paris itself has been relatively blase about the cup. The streets are peaceful, the mood is calm, the atmosphere pastoral. The boulevard Saint-Germain has never been so quiet. The morning after the giants' march, for instance, with Scotland and Brazil about to begin at the Stade de France, the only evidence I saw of anything unusual was the appearance of two Scotsmen in kilts waiting for a taxi on the rue du Bac. Expecting to hear a war cry ("Ay, we'll leave them samba-dancin' laddies guid and bloody"), I tentatively wished them good luck. "We'll need it!" one said feelingly, and the other chimed in, "It's simply a privilege to be playing Brazil." They turned out to be lawyers from Hong Kong—Scottish lawyers from Hong Kong, but lawyers. They talked about the Brazilian esprit, and then got in their cab and, in perfect French, ordered the driver to go to the Stade de France.

  I saw Italy beat Cameroon, 3—0, from the back of a bar in Venice. Watching soccer in Italy, you have the feeling that you have wandered into a family drama more complex and intense than you can understand. Each player—Vieri, Di Biagio—was greeted with a combination of hoots, cheers, and tears so personal and heartfelt that it was almost embarrassing for an outsider to witness. With Italy into the eighth-finals (eighth-finals!), the papers, from left to right, were bursting with pride. italia padrone! read one headline. "Italy Rules." The curious thing was that Italy played one of the dullest defensive games of all—the famous "blue chain." But this didn't seem to bother anyone. Whatever people were watching for, it wasn't for fun.

  Just afterward I spoke on the phone to an English friend, a big World Cupper.

  "How are you getting on with the cup?" he asked.

  "It's a bit—well, don't you think it's a bit lacking in entertainment?" I said weakly.

  There was a pause. "Why would you expect it to be entertaining?" he asked, reprovingly.

  Perhaps that was a clue. I came back to Paris resolved not to be entertained. I watched a double-overtime confrontation between an overmatched Paraguay and an overpressed France. The Paraguayans, who looked worn out from stress, essentially surrendered the idea of scoring and kept dropping back—kicking the ball out, heading it out, willing it out, again and again. It was obvious that their desperate, gallant strategy was to force a nil-nil draw, over 120 minutes, and then "go to penalties," the shoot-out at goal where anything can happen and anyone can win. The nil-nil draw wasn't a "result" they would settle for; it was everything they dreamed of achieving. When the game finally ended, as Laurent Blanc (a traditionally French-sounding name) stumbled a ball into the Paraguayan net, what was most memorable was the subdued triumph. The French celebrated, but they did not exult; the Paraguayans cried—really cried—but they did not despair. They did not seem ruined or emptied out, as American losers do. They seemed relieved. The tears looked like tears of bitter accomplishment. We knew we were going to lose, the faces and the back pats said, but, hey, didn't we hold it off for a while? ("Heroique, heroique," murmured the French commentator.)

  The next morning I slipped in a tape I'd made of the fifth game of the NBA finals, for purposes of comparison. It was a French broadcast, and the commentators announced that the game was a test of truth—une epreuve de verite—for the Utah Jazz. To my surprise, I was, after a week of starvation, used to the austerity of soccer scoring. All those basketball points seemed a little loud, a little cheap. Points coming in from left, from right, cheap points, inspired points, stupid points—goals everywhere you looked, more goals than you knew what to do with, democratic goals, all leveled and equal. It was too much, like eating whipped cream straight. And why had I never before noticed the absurd, choppy, broken rhythm of deliberate fouls and time-outs in the last two minutes of the game?

  A few nights later England-Argentina—to see who would go to the quarterfinals. The match started off with two typically exasperating soccer events. After only five minutes David Seaman, the English goalkeeper, lunged for the ball, and an onrushing Argentine stumbled over him. Penalty and, inevitably, a goal. Then young Owen, who, with his brush cut, looks as if he ought to be wearing a blazer and beanie, got tripped. He acted out the death scene from Camille and drew a penalty himself, which was knocked in by Alan Shearer, England's captain. A few minutes later Owen raced half the length of the field—really sprinting, huffing—mesmerizing an Argentine defenseman, who kept moving back, back, defeated in his own mind, and then he sent it in: 2-1, England! With fifteen seconds left in the half, Argentina got the ball, executed a jagged, pinball-quick exchange of passes and, shockingly, the ball was bouncing in the net, and the game was tied.

  At the start of the second half, David Beckham, the blond midfielder who was at the time engaged to Posh Spice, was expelled from the game, leaving England, like the Spices, a performer short. Though England scored on a corner, the goal was ruled out by the referee for a meaningless, barely visible (but undeniably real) elbow. Nothing happened in thirty minutes of overtime, and the game went into the self-parody of soccer: a series of penalty kicks. With England needing only one more to tie, David Batty, of Newcastle, stepped up and, rushing his shot, fired it right into the diving goaltender. The Argentine side rushed out into the pitch, weeping with joy and exhaustion.

  The game had been marked by everything that can exasperate an American fan: the dominance of defense, the disproportion between foul and consequence, the absurd penalty shoot-out, the playacting. (In England they will be arguing did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed about the first Argentine penalty for years.) But it had been as draining as any contest I'd ever seen.

  Soccer was not meant to be enjoyed. It was meant to be experienced. The World Cup is a festival of fate: man accepting his hard circumstances, the near certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal. Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield. But soccer is not meant to be an escape from life. It is life, in all its injustice and tedium: We seek unfair advantage, celebrate tiny moments of pleasure as though they were final victories, score goals for the wrong side. (In the first three nights of the World Cup, three of the seventeen goals were "own" goals: A playe
r would head the ball away and watch it backspin past his own goalkeeper, his face a rapidly changing mask of decision, satisfaction, worry, disbelief, and despair.) A bad play or call in baseball—Merkle's boner or Denkinger's call - hurts, but usually there's a saving air of humor. "We're due," "It's our turn," "Wait till next year" are the cheers of American sport. We are optimists and look to sports to amplify our optimism.

  In soccer tomorrow is a long way off, even in ordinary circumstances, and four years in these special ones. By then everything will be different; there are no second chances in the World Cup. It is a human contest on a nearly geologic time scale. Grievances, injustices rankle for years, decades, forever. But along with that comes, appealingly, a sense of proportion. Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. If American sports are played in paradise, soccer takes place after the fall. Even its squabbles have their echoes: Did he fall or was he pushed? It's the oldest question.

  Finally, on a stray, leaking cable channel, I got to see highlights of Detroit and Washington in the Stanley Cup final. I turned it on with joy and then found, to my shock, that... I couldn't see the puck! It was too small, way too small—a tiny black spot on a vast white surface, with huge men in bright-colored sweaters hulking over it. When a goal was scored (and goals do get scored), I knew it only by the subsequent celebration. I squinted at the set and called in Martha, a purebred Canadian, and asked if she could follow the puck. "I could never follow the puck," she told me.

  Had I been corrupted by the Old World's game or enlightened by it? Another of the old, unanswerable questions. All I knew was that I was looking forward to the next big match, between France and Italy. Anything might happen, or nothing at all.

  ***

  Although France didn't win the World Cup until just before midnight on Sunday, the celebrations in Paris started hours before the game began. By two o'clock in the afternoon the beeping of horns along the Seine had become a din, and the kids with their faces painted red-white-and-blue, heads poking up through the sunroofs of Peugeots racing along the quays, had become a menace. Win or lose, the crise was already over.

  Cars are cars all over the world, of course, and horns are horns, and a victory celebration in Paris doesn't sound much different from a victory celebration in New York or, for that matter, from a traffic tieup outside the Holland Tunnel. Even the theme song of the French victory was not the "Marseillaise" but Queen's "We Are the Champions."

  Anyway, the whole point of the celebration was that it wasn't a champagne occasion. It was bottled water and cheap booze and a lot of beer. What made it memorable was that, for once, the carnival atmosphere of the Latin Quarter and the Marais spilled over into official French culture, and kept right on spilling. (By Tuesday morning, it had even spilled over into the garden of the Elysee, where a visibly blanching President Chirac greeted the players to a chorus of "We Are the Champions," sung, in best Freddie Mercury English, by the crowd thronging the team.)

  At one-thirty in the morning after the victory, you could take the world's most beautiful walk—beginning at the Institut de France and moving across the pont des Arts and around the cour Carree of the Louvre and then to the Tuileries and the Champs-Elysees—and feel as if, in the presence of so many happy people, the grand siecle itself had gone a little lopsided and blissed out. Misrule ruled. A man wrapped in a tricolor was relieving himself against the front wall of the Institut de France—discreetly, with maximum esprit de corps, but, still, relieving himself. Someone was selling beer out of a cooler, violating about twelve hundred French laws in the act, and someone else had one of those pin-ball arcade love-o-meters set up. (Everybody's hand was hot;

  even an American writer saw his score shoot past "Casanova" and all the way up to "Chaud Lapin"—"Hot Rabbit!") Kids were singing; men were grabbing politely at girls, presumably with a memory of 1944, when the girls were said to have grabbed back. This time they didn't, but it didn't matter.

  Many people had talked a lot about the ethnic mix of the French team, which was composed of players of Algerian, Basque, and Ghanaian descent, among others, but the players themselves seemed a lot less self-conscious about this than journalists did. French identity is not that hard to achieve; if you speak French, you feel French. What is hard for an immigrant or an outsider in France to achieve is French institutional acceptance, a place in the crowded, ancient French iconography. The faces you saw on the World Cup team—the faces of Zidane and Djorkaeff and Karembeu—are already part of French society. They just hadn't been integrated before into the French self-image, and now they were.

  It's natural for people to hope that the victory of a multiracial team might be the beginning of the end of Le Pen and the racist National Front, but it probably won't be. The ability of sports to solve social problems is limited—the Dream Team didn't change black income levels—and anyway, Le Pen blandly claimed the victory for himself. It was a reassertion of French glory, he said, and who is more glorious about France than he? The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.

  The real victory on Sunday night was a victory for disorder, an unexpected blessing, bonking the head of an unprepared population. On that long, beautiful walk, there's a moment when you arrive at the gate of the Tuileries and, for the first time, see the expanse of the Champs-Elysees. On Sunday you expected to see what you always see: a line of red car lights going up the right side of the champs and a line of white lights running down the left—two perfect, side-by-side mile-long lines of red and white, framed by the Arc de Triomphe. On Sunday night, for the first time that anyone could remember, the two neat columns of light were gone. The champs, a chaos of people and cars, was a blur of indistinct movement, the lights and colors a smear of milky pink. For once Paris was all mixed up.

  The Balzar Wars

  The Balzar, on the rue des Ecoles, in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, happens to be the best restaurant in the world. It is the best restaurant in the world not because it has the best food— though the food is (or used to be) excellent—and not because it is "hot," or even particularly fashionable, but because of a hundred small things that make it a uniquely soulful and happy place.

  The Balzar is a brasserie, which means that it is Alsatian in origin, serves beer, and stays open late. Over the years it has added a full dinner menu, so that it has become indistinguishable from a restaurant. For more than a hundred years the Balzar has been a family business, and each of the families has managed to keep it constant without making it stale. It's a one-story, one-room spot, small by brasserie standards—with only ninety or so covers—and has a glass front that looks out onto the street; you can see with one eye people boarding the number 63 bus in the twilight, and with the other a pretty little park dedicated to Montaigne, with plane trees and pink-flowering chestnuts.

  The Balzar is a democratic place. You are greeted at the door with a handshake and a quick squint of crinkled, harried warmth, by the two maitres d'hotel—one always in a tuxedo, the other in a suit—and are shown to your table with a few pensive words about families, children, and the weather. There's not a trace of unctuousness or forced familiarity, no appraisal of your wallet, your last review, or your weekend gross. There are long banquettes covered with dark brown leather along the walls, and a T-shaped banquette in the middle of the room. On the tables are white linen and glasses and silver. The light—from eight round globe lamps, high above—is warm and bright, gay without being harsh. The carte is a long printed card, with the dishes listed on the front and the wines on the back, and it never changes. There are leeks and tomato salad and herring for starters—foie gras if you're in an expansive mood—and then the same five or so plats:

  steak au poivre, roast chicken, grilled sole or salmon, calf's liver, gigot with white and green beans. The wine list is short, and usually the best thing on it is the Reserve Balzar, a pleasant red Bordeaux. The only sauces are the sauce au poivre on the steak and
a bearnaise for the grilled salmon. The pommes frites are fine, the creme caramel is good, the profiteroles the best in Paris.

  It is the waiters—or serveurs, as they're called—who give the Balzar its soul. A team of the same ten men has been in place for decades: They are courteous, warmhearted, ironic (able to warn a client off a dubious plat with an eyebrow), and mildly lubricious. (They have been known to evaluate, sotto voce, the size and shape of a woman's rear even as they pull out the table to make way for it.) They work hard. By tradition at the Balzar, the plats arrive beautifully arranged on an oval platter and then are carefully transferred by the waiter to a round plate. This doubles the work but creates an effect. Whenever I am feeling blue, I like to go to the Balzar and watch a waiter gravely transfer a steak au poivre and its accompaniments from an oval platter to a plate, item by item. It reaffirms my faith in the sanity of superfluous civilization.

  The other famous Left Bank brasserie, the Lipp, is known as a canteen for the men of power in the Fifth Republic, but when Lionel Jospin, the virtuous Socialist who is trying to transform French politics, was running for president three years ago, he made an event of being photographed, for Paris Match, having dinner at the Balzar. Everyone got the point.

  On a Sunday night in April, Martha and I, with Luke, were sitting at a table in the back, just finishing one in a long line of good dinners and were once again refining our long-term plan to be buried at the Balzar—or, more precisely, to have the urns containing our ashes placed on the dessert counter just above the mille-feuilles and the lemon tart, and on either side of the flowers. The plaques, we decided, should read "A Faithful Client" or, better, should repeat the words of those inscriptions you see all over Paris: "Here, fallen for France . . ."