Paris Noir

by Aurélien Masson

  “Castrate him?”

  “Cut his balls off, man. Abelard retired to a monastery and Heloïse to a convent. They wrote each other love letters for years. But it was all over, you understand.”

  And Rachid did understand, for once. He loved Mi-quette, who would often give him blowjobs in the basement of his building. He went wild when she licked his balls, there, a little lower. Can you imagine having them cut off? He could imagine this guy Abelard suffered a lot after that, alone in the basement of his monastery writing letters to Heloïse. The story also taught him to watch out even more for Miquette’s father, the Fulbert in an undershirt who walked his German shepherd through the project every night before going out for a good chat with the crime squad so he could tell them about his Algeria, the one during the war. Her old man didn’t talk Latin; he growled at his mutt in French, blew his nose in a dish towel, and gave Rachid dirty looks when he walked by the door to their building. If he had any idea that his daughter and Rachid …

  “Let’s keep going, okay?”

  Rachid was beginning to like it there on the banks of the Seine across from Notre-Dame. He lacked the knowledge to put a date on the gothic building. Contrary to Big Brother, Rachid didn’t read books. He listened to NTM, Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dogg, but he never opened a book, no way.

  “You know who killed Tupac?”

  “Society, Rachid, society.”

  “They say he was still alive in his producer’s car.”

  “Now he’s dead. Mozart is dead too. One day you’ll die.

  No matter how, you will pass away. There are more dead people than living on this earth, Rachid. And Tupac is part of the multitude now.”

  “But the imam in the projects says that on Judgment Day we will rise from among the dead.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Muslims.”

  “How about the others? The Jews? The Christians?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For Jews, Christians and Muslims are dead for good and they won’t rise up at the end of time. According to the Christians, Jews and Muslims are damned because they have the bad luck not to be Christians. And for some Muslims, the Jews and Christians are going to burn in hell to the end of time.”

  “So they’re all wrong?”

  “Maybe they don’t have the same god. Maybe there’ll be a war of gods at the end of time. Ever think of that, Rachid?”

  “You’re blaspheming. There’s only one God. The imam says so.”

  “The Jews and Christians say so too. So tell me why you’re not a Jew or a Christian, Rachid? And why Christians and Jews aren’t Muslims?”

  “You’re driving me crazy, for God’s sake!”

  “And what about the others?”

  “What others?”

  “Buddhists, animists, atheists, agnostics.”

  “They’ll go to hell along with the Jews and Christians,” Rachid decided.

  “That’s a lot of people. We’ll be in good company in hell.”

  “Impossible.”

  “If the god of the Jews is right, we’ll burn in flames, because neither of us are Jewish. If it’s the god of the Christians, then we’ll go to hell with the Jews.”

  “Allah is the one true God.”

  “One chance out of three, Rachid, once chance in three. It’s mathematical.”

  “God doesn’t play with dice!”

  “Einstein thought the same thing, Rachid. May He hear you both! Besides, maybe it isn’t the same one.”

  Big Brother began to laugh as he looked at Notre-Dame over there, so near, and so far away. Sometimes seagulls would fly up the Seine and get lost. They were having fun too, in a way, they were playing as they flew over the work of Maurice de Sully and Louis VII. An endless project; its construction was still going on. It seemed to him that generations were disappearing into the limbo of history, into the nocturne of memories.

  “What about people before us, Rachid? What do you do with the Arabs from before Islam? Will they go to hell? Mohammed hadn’t taught them Allah existed yet. Mohammed himself didn’t exist yet. What do you do with those men, Rachid?”

  “They’re dead, that’s all.”

  “That’s a lot of dead people, don’t you think?”

  They crossed the quay and entered rue du Fouarre.

  “Fouarre means straw.”

  Big Brother had already gone on to something else. Ra-chid was still on their discussion about God and his worshippers. It was bothering him some. If Big Brother was right, then nothing made sense. But Big Brother must be wrong, no doubt about it.

  “Straw Street. Funny, isn’t it, how the streets of Paris always have a hidden meaning, a new story. Here they used to cover the street with straw so the students could sit down on dry spots to take their classes. The whole street was covered by those studious people. It was closed to traffic. And if a cart happened to go through during the classes the monks were teaching, the students would beat up the driver and they’d dump his load on the ground. To avoid fights, the city authorities would close the street off with chains. Classes began in the morning, after mass. Since bums would come and sleep on the straw at night, they had to kick them awake before they changed the straw for the students in the Middle Ages. Hence the expression the last straw.”

  “How d’you know all that?”

  “Books. Man’s best companions.”

  Now they were walking along rue Dante.

  “Dante is supposed to have lived here after he fled Florence.”

  “Florence?”

  “Shit, man, you really should get out of La Courneuve from time to time!”

  Big Brother traveled a lot, crazy as it may seem. He had disability papers that allowed him to take the train free and gave him discounts on most airlines. He had been wounded in Sarajevo while defusing an antipersonnel mine. At eighteen, he had joined UNPROFOR and was sent to Bosnia. After he was discharged, he lit out for Italy, as he told Rachid, who’d never been out of the projects of La Courneuve: The only Italian he knew was pizzaand spaghetti. What’s more, he got bawled out by Big Brother whenever he cut his pasta before he gulped it down.

  He had traveled, he said, to set his mind aright after the horrors of the war. A kind of convalescence. Rachid couldn’t really remember all the places on his journey. But he did know Big Brother had a disability card. And he was very discreet about his war injury. He never talked about it. When Rachid insisted, Big Brother would tell him to read The Sun Also Risesby Hemingway. But Rachid never opened a book, everybody knew that. Actually, that was the problem. If Rachid had the slightest bit of interest in anything written, he would have understood his older friend a lot better. But since hanging out with Big Brother had always paid off, Rachid just said forget it, even if his ignorance could fill the Seine.

  “In 1309, Dante leaves Italy. He comes here, to Paris, to attend the lectures of Sigier de Brabant. Right here, on the straw of rue du Fouarre, he absorbs those odious truths, demonstratedwith syllogisms.”

  Rachid was feeling the pangs of hunger. A sweet, heady aroma of kebab was tickling his nostrils: The only truth he managed to put into a syllogism was not at all odious to his belly.

  “I’m starving.”

  “One should have an empty belly and a light mind.” Big Brother began to recite, in a loud voice, right there in the street: “Is this the glorious way that Dante Alighieri is called backto his country after the affliction of an exile that has lasted almostfifteen years? Are these the wages of his innocence, obvious to oneand all? Is this, then, the fruit of the sweat and fatigue of his studies?Never will the man who is an intimate friend of philosophysuffer the disgrace of being chained like a criminal to be rehabilitated!Never will the man who was the herald of justice, and wasoffended, accept the idea of going to his offenders as if they werehis benefactors, to pay tribute! This is not the way to return toone’s homeland, father. If you or someone else can find a way thatdoes not blacken the reputation and honor of Dante, I w
ill takeit, without hesitation. If there is no honorable way to see Florenceagain, I will never return. What then? Can I not see the sun andstars from any corner of the world? Can I not, under every part ofthe heavens, meditate on the truth, the most precious thing in theworld, without becoming a man who has no glory, dishonored inthe eyes of the people and city of Florence? Even bread, I am sure,will not be lacking.”

  Big Brother fell silent.

  Big Brother was born and grew up in Algeria, in Cirta.

  When he was ten years old, his father, an immigrant he had never known, sent for them, his mother and him, to come live on the outskirts of Paris thanks to the new policy of family entry. Ever since then, he’d always felt exiled: Hence his excessive love for Dante and Joyce, his pantheon of the banished.

  Above all, he was drawn to lives that had been ripped away from their childhood, broken by political events, wars, famine. Or simply alienated through an absence of attachment to the environment where they were born and grew up, a bit like Joyce fleeing Dublin, which had become too narrow for his genius. He himself felt that France had become a suit that restricted his movements; this explained his enlistment in the army at eighteen and then his flight to Italy, a copy of The Divine Comedyin the pocket of his khakis.

  “To return to our conversation, you should know, Rachid, that Dante put men with no religion in Purgatory, that antechamber of Paradise. And do you know where Mohammed is, in The Divine Comedy?”

  “No.”

  “In hell! Even Averroës—Ibn Rushd to us—the second Master after Aristotle, is in Purgatory, ahead of our Prophet. You see, Rachid, you have to relativize things. Always relativize.”

  Big Brother liked to talk. He would hold forth whether or not Rachid was following what he was saying. In fact, he kept himself somewhat aloof in the projects. He didn’t hang out with anybody and was utterly discreet about his little trips back and forth to Paris. Naturally he needed Rachid as a foot soldier, but the boy was kind of simpleminded: Only the neighborhood imam had any concern for him. The other kids his age made fun of him and kept him away from their business—making little deals, stealing motor scooters, taking night joyrides that let them extract a little pleasure from their sordid lives between the huge buildings of the project where the only flowers that sprouted from the asphalt were the ones they smoked at night when they hung out and bullshitted for hours.

  Now they were walking down rue Dante. They reached boulevard Saint-Germain and took it toward boulevard Saint-Michel. They went into the McDonald’s at the intersection, waited a few minutes in front of the registers, and ordered two combo meals from the sexy student in a red apron. They walked upstairs with their sandwiches, fries, and drinks.

  “The girl behind the counter, you think about what her pussy must smell like?”

  “Rachid, I’ve already told you not to be vulgar.”

  “She must smell of french fries and grilled meat. I wouldn’t want to stick my nose in it.”

  “No one’s asking you to, you know.”

  Rachid got out his cell and began tapping on the keys, which lit up and gave out musical notes as he typed.

  “What the hell you doing?”

  “Sending a text.”

  “Who the hell to, for chrissake?”

  “My lady.”

  “You out of your head? We’re on a job here!”

  “I ain’t gonna tell her where we are. She’s working too.”

  “Where’s she work?”

  “At the Quick on the Champs.”

  “What about her? She smell of fries too, your Dulcinea?”

  “Dulcinea? You raggin’ on me?”

  “No. Or, if you prefer, yes. Show me the message you’re sending her.”

  Miquette huny I digon u big i swair. Will call tonite. Mebbeur oldman take da dog out. We fuk inna seller. I eat urapricot. Take shower first. Kisses monamour.

  “Rachid, that’s poetry! You should write more often. Mi-quette must be happy.”

  “My Big Mac’s gonna get cold.” He pounced greedily on the two-story structure of bread and meat. He gulped it down with gusto, not forgetting to add the mushy, smelly fries. He drowned the whole thing in a quart of icy Coke. He punctuated the end of his meal with a resounding belch that made Big Brother flinch in disgust.

  As for Big Brother, he hadn’t touched his tray. Ate like a bird, Big Brother. Skin and bones. Dry as a reed. A thinking reed. Who didn’t know if he should laugh or cry over Rachid and his lovelife. Over Rachid’s life, whose squalor did not escape him. Over the garish, dirty light that permeated the cardboard set of this restaurant, a food factory for all the poor bums in Paris. And over the confused tourists with no place to go, lost en el corazón de la grande Babylon.But he wasn’t going to cry about their lives. That’s the way they were. Okay.

  Often he missed his childhood under silvery skies, at the edge of a sea that seemed infinite. And the shimmering of the waves, bursts of sun under the steel blue. But wasn’t that just a mirage that hit him in front of these walls covered with Keith Haring reproductions? Little stick figures holding hands on the piss-colored yellow. Imitation leather seats and formica tables had become his world, unique, impossible to steal from. There was nothing to take away. You could die here with no regret, he was sure of this.

  He grabbed his bag, stood up, and walked to the restroom. Inside, he locked the half-door and began taking off his tracksuit. Underneath, he was wearing a suit jacket and flannel pants. He opened his bag and took out the new shoes. A world apart from the Nikes he stuffed into his bag with the tracksuit; once he was out of the restaurant he’d throw it away. From the pocket of his Hugo Boss jacket he pulled out a club tie that matched his light blue shirt. When he came out of the bathroom he no longer looked like a young guy from the projects, but some kind of yuppie, almost.

  “Your turn now,” he said to Rachid.

  The same operation witnessed the transformation of Cinderella, but this time the princess had balls, and whiskers on her chin.

  “You might’ve shaved this morning.”

  “I forgot, Big Bro, I swear to God.”

  Mickey D’s is a very good place for this kind of metamorphosis: You could stand in the middle of the room, unzip your fly, and jerk off without stirring up the slightest ripple in the public. The people who eat there become deaf and blind, concentrating only on their pouch of ketchup or mayonnaise, sort of like the subway, where the greatest indifference is the norm. One of the rules of this kind of place is to never stare at anyone. At most a glance out of the corner of the eye, but no staring. If you scrupulously follow this one rule, you can easily bump off a stranger and get away without anyone remembering your face. That’s why Rachid admired Big Brother. He had the gift of identifying the dead spots of modern society.

  They went out. This time, they walked along boulevard Saint-Michel. They almost decided to follow boulevard Saint-Germain toward Odéon. But something held them back. Some obscure commandment. Almost as if someone far away was laying out the lines for them to follow, the border not to cross. Big Brother often thought he was merely the protagonist of a story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. It was probably his reading that blurred his judgment. He often had the feeling that life, his life, was burning in the forests of the night.

  They crossed rue des Écoles, kept going up boulevard Saint-Michel, walked by the Collège de France without a glance, not far from the spot where Roland Barthes was run over by a milk truck.

  “He let himself die.”

  “Who?”

  “Roland Barthes. He was in mourning.”

  Rachid had no idea that a man had written books here, taught students—loved some of them—and died because he couldn’t bear the loss of his one love: his mother.

  Big Brother did not have great esteem for his parents. He blamed them for not preparing him for this life. He had to learn everything by himself, and he had begun late, too late no doubt. He got his education after the army, during his long wanderings th
rough Europe, with his backpack and soldier’s pay for all baggage. The pay wasn’t much more than an empty promise. But it still enabled him to buy books.

  Yes, his parents had been imported from a foreign country; they’d been used by the huge industrial machine and then crushed, like an old version of a computer program.

  But their children had never been part of the program. They had proliferated like errors in a line of code. The change in centuries hadn’t caused the big computer crash, the huge worldwide bug, but a few individuals who became adults at that time had quite simply tripped out in their corner of the world. Of course, not all of them had gotten on the American Airlines plane one morning in September 2001, but most of them had taken risky paths across the world, since the huge machine had spread over the whole planet, using people like simple material, interchangeable and disposable, just as it had used his parents.

  That, he couldn’t explain to Rachid. How to explain that the rich no longer needed to import the poor to keep their factories going since they’d now set up the same factories in their own countries—work at home, you might say.

  “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  “Uhh …”

  “Malcolm X.”

  They stopped for a moment in front of the Place de la Sorbonne. Where once again, no doubt to make fun of him, Big Brother gave Rachid a lecture.

  “On rue du Fouarre, every house was a school. But how could they house all those people who were piling up on the straw during the day and wandering around looking for a place to stay at night? So they created colleges! They were a dormitory, a shelter, and a cafeteria all in one. Robert de Sorbon, Saint Louis’s chaplain … May he rot in hell, King Louis. Robert de Sorbon received a house near the Baths from the King. The man took in sixteen poor students who were studying for their doctorates in Theology. That’s how the Sorbonne was born, on the very same spot as this late nineteenth-century complex, which is quite ugly, with a seventeenth-century chapel in the middle of it that is quite lovely. Cardinal Richelieu is the one who gave the Sorbonne that magnificent chapel, in which he is buried. A masterpiece of classical architecture.”