by Jayne Tuttle
The flaky pastry melts in my mouth. It’s like no croissant I’ve ever eaten. At home we have them on Christmas morning, defrosted from a packet and baked with ham and cheese inside. They generally taste like nothing much, but this one feathers my mouth with butter and sweetness. I savour it as I walk down the tree-lined boulevard, turning onto the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the street the taxi brought me down. I know it goes all the way back to the Louvre, so I point my body that way and walk and walk, glad I chose to wear the Converse and not the shoes with the little heel.
The rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a feast of clothes shops and cafés, movie theatres and bars, all with tall, cream-coloured or grey apartment blocks above them, reaching to the sky. There are lots of woven wicker chairs like in the movies, but a lot more graffiti. I wander and marvel and drink it all in, beyond delirious now, and as I move through the complete unfamiliarity I start to see familiar things, familiar people – the French version of my brother on a motorbike, the Australian prime minister begging outside a supermarket, Chris in a dark bar, kissing another girl. Mum selling bread. Myself in a cheese-shop window: Hello, French me.
Bon-Jour.
I keep walking. If I stay in a straight line I know I’ll be able to find my way back. A sign reads Internet so I go in and write a quick email to Mum, telling her I’ve qrrived and am qlive, because the ‘q’ on the French keyboard is where the ‘a’ should be. Back in the street the sun is now low and bright in my eyes, casting the people in front of me in silhouette. I shield my eyes and keep walking, back past the gold angel at Bastille, past a church, a row of fashion shops and a small children’s fair, to where the street becomes wider and the shops begin selling berets and snowdomes and posters of old French cabaret shows. Tourists gaze and wrestle maps. I still can’t quite see; I bump into a man who says, ‘Bonsoir Mademoiselle!’ He is selling last-minute tickets to a play at the Comédie Française, and he is so nice that I buy one. The play is by Tchekhov: La Cerisaie, whatever that means. The man points towards the theatre and I walk right past the space octopus and the recent ghost of myself on the backpack in the square. Sorry, mademoiselle, can’t stop – off to the theatre, courage!
Inside, the Comédie Française is a fairytale of gold and red velvet, and I glide up the stairs to the highest floor, where a handsome usher says, ‘Bonsoir,’ and lights his little torch. My seat is in the front row of the topmost balcony. I can see just a small part of the stage, so I stand and peer over once and never again. Falling from a balcony in the Comédie Française would be a dumb, if romantic, way to die. The play starts and I can see only the tops of the actors’ heads, which eliminates any chance of understanding their words. That’s okay; from up here I can almost touch the gold of the proscenium arch, and in this place just below the painted ceiling of swirling clouds and sky, nothing earthly matters anyway.
When the play is over we clap and clap and then everyone starts clapping in time, which gives me a curious feeling and I feel compelled to break the rhythm. There are about eight curtain calls, which seems a bit indulgent, and then, hands tingling, I climb down all the stairs and go and sit in a brasserie and eat three-cheese tagliatelle, because it’s the only vegetarian thing I see on the menu. I still can’t eat an animal, even a French one. The pasta is rich and salty, and I have a glass of chablis that the garçon recommends and am drunk straight away. I suddenly feel self-conscious about being alone and so take out my notebook and try to act like I’m a writer, or a journalist. The garçon is very energetic: I write the word ‘maniacal’ down and try to make words of four letters or more out of it. I am very pleased with ‘almanac’ and desperately wish I could make ‘claimant’, but there’s no ‘t’, and no point wishing there was.
It must be midnight when I arrive back at the hotel.
‘Vous venez d’où mademoiselle?’ asks the smiling man from earlier, handing me my keys. ‘Where you coming from?’
‘Austra-lee,’ I say. ‘Australia. Sorry, my French is very bad.’
‘No, French good,’ he says, showing his incredible teeth, of which there aren’t many. One is silver, two are gold, and the rest are shades of yellow and grey. ‘Comment tu t’appelles?’
‘Jayne. Tu – comment t’appelles-tu?’
‘Gérard.’
A successful interaction. He ‘tu’d me – the form you use for friends. That’s nice. He starts talking fast and I make out a few words and laugh, thinking to myself, Good, this is good practice.
‘On prend un ’tit verre ensemble?’ he says, pulling out two glasses and a bottle of something amber, and I think, Excellent, this is excellent practice, though I’m really woozy now.
‘Jeaahhne,’ he says, coming out from behind the desk and gesturing towards the little chaise longue next to the piano. He looks out of place in this dainty, feminine setting. Instead of choosing a tapestry chair, he sits next to me on the chaise.
‘Alors … why you coming in France?’
‘Euh, I’m not really certain. Just to learn. You can speak to me in French, I studied it at university. Je parle Français.’
So we start a conversation in French, which in retrospect I imagine went something like this:
‘Want to sleep in my room tonight?’
‘Yes, my room is very nice.’
‘Are all Australian girls this beautiful?’
‘Yes, Australia is a beautiful country.’
‘Australian women are sexy.’
I hear ‘sexy’ and put two and two together.
‘Okay, well, I’m going to bed now, thanks for the drink.’
He stands and offers to accompany me up to my room. ‘That’s how we do things in this country,’ he says before I can object, a serious look on his face. ‘La politesse.’
What can I say?
The walk up the stairs seems to go on forever and I keep thinking, I’m sure it’s fine, I’m sure I’ve just mistranslated the situation, but with each floor the realisation sinks in deeper that there is nobody else in this hotel, no doors slamming, no kids crying, no noise whatsoever in fact, just the floral relief wallpaper becoming more and more yellowed the higher we go, the carpet more and more worn, until the last floor – broom closet open, mop in the corner now dried stiff. The world is silent. Mum says, Silly girl, in my head.
‘Merci, bonne nuit,’ I say, stabbing my key in the lock.
‘Un bisou.’ He puts his hand on the door.
‘Pardon?’
‘Kiss. Bisou. This is custom in our country. I drink you. You kiss me.’
‘Non. No bisou.’
He is not smiling now. I try to turn the key but the lock is old and sticky. His hand is damp. My heart pounds.
‘Bisou,’ he says in my ear, but the key has turned and I squeeze backwards through the doorway, slam the door and press my body against it.
‘Sweet dream,’ he whispers through the keyhole.
There is a long silence in which neither of us moves. Finally, he clomps down the stairs. I grab the Swiss Army knife and flick it open, clutching it close to my chest, my other hand clenched so tight around the lucky penny it cuts into my palm. He has a key. Will he come back? If he does I will stab him. Would I stab him? Yes. Deep in the ribs. No one will know. I can live life on the run.
I prop a chair under the doorknob like they do in movies but it won’t stay. The desk won’t budge. I stand by the door for what feels like hours, then eventually sit and finally lie on the bed, heart still thumping hard in my chest. Hours go by. Cars. Buses. Motorbikes. Ambulances. There are cracks in the ceiling. A moth in the corner of the room, frozen. Dead or alive? It seems to be staring at me. Is it a French moth or has it too flown here from somewhere far away? I wonder what it is thinking. Idiot, turning up in this city alone with no job, no plans. Shut up, moth. My shoes knock together, tap tap tap. If I keep my gaze fixed on the moth, it makes me feel better.
A street sweeper goes by. A pigeon coos outside my window.
I watch the moth. It doe
sn’t move. And I don’t move. And it doesn’t move.
And the man doesn’t come back, except in my mind, in all kinds of ways.
When the sun is up I pack my things. The old lady is at the desk now, and in awkward spurts I try to explain what happened. She gets the gist and goes on an indecipherable rant. I understand ‘bastard’, ‘begs for a job’, ‘I am kind’, ‘I am not racist’, and ‘police’. I’m grateful that she believes me but I don’t want to deal with the cops, so I ask for the rest of my money back and leave her railing around her salon like an aproned Rumpelstiltskin.
It’s a relief to be at ground level. Lights are still on in the streets. The sky is early-morning blue. Mini trucks sweep the pavements. Men in overalls smoke and drink coffee in the bars. I don’t know where to go, so I wander all the way to the Louvre again and on to the Tuileries Garden and sit down on a steel chair near a pond with ducks in it with electric-green necks. The Eiffel Tower spears from the trees. I think about calling Mum and Dad but they will just worry. I think about calling Chris but that would be confusing. There’s nothing to do but be here.
As the city comes to life I leave the seat and go inside the Louvre and sit in front of The Raft of the Medusa for half an hour. The enormity of it makes me feel insignificant and better. Perspective sorted, I go into the toilets, tame my wild hair and splash my face, which looks tired but alive. Then I leave the building and head towards the Seine.
Room of Good
I READ IN A novel once that you can find jobs and accommodation at the American Church, and, sure enough, there’s the church in my little red book: Église américaine. After four days in the youth hostel I decide to try it: I don’t want to be a youth anymore, and the sound of two German goths rooting on the bunk above me is about to send me over the edge.
The church is impressive and has toilets you don’t have to pay for, so I am already pleased with my mission, though I can’t see any board with jobs on it. A kind lady in an oversized knit shows me to a breezeway where all kinds of notices are tacked to a cork board: Babysitter / Au pair / Chambre libre / Can you teach English? Maybe I could be an au pair, I think; I like kids. I take down some details, then go and buy a sandwich niçoise with the tuna pulled out of it to take down to the riverbank. The sandwich has a rank, fishy note to it because the woman refused to make me a fresh one sans tuna. ‘It’s not good like that,’ she said. Vegetarian is proving difficult. All the more reason to get my own fridge.
The water sparkles in the midday light as I sit on the bank, my view of the river and some interesting boathouses blocked by an attractive couple deep-tonguing each other. I shut Chris out of my mind, throw the remnants of the sandwich in the bin, and go and stand in a smashed-in phone booth with my list. The first voice says something about papers, so I hang up. The next two speak too fast in French, so I hang up. The last entry reads: Au pair – chambre de bonne – bonnes conditions. I dial the number slowly.
A little boy giggles as I stammer in French. A man takes the phone and sighs. ‘Can you come now?’
Marcel Florent is a lawyer for Philip Morris. He lives at 41, rue Cardinet, an elegantly understated street in the 17th arrondissement, near the manicured Parc Monceau, with his languid wife, Marie, a psychologist (who smokes Philip Morris); their cherubic four-year-old son, Paul; and their cat-food-ad cat, Ondine. They also have a brusque nanny called Gina, an original Tamara de Lempicka, parquet floors that squeak when you walk on them, balconies that go the whole way around the apartment, and walls high enough to house paintings grand enough for the Louvre. I’m not sure it matters if they like me or not: they seem tired, and, having established that I speak English, hire me on the spot.
Gina takes me through the kitchen into a stairwell and up three flights of rickety stairs to the fifth floor, where there are a lot of brown doors in a row. She points to an open doorway down the hall, turns and leaves. A person’s sharp movements are casting shadows against the wall. I approach the door; a buxom blond girl is throwing things into a backpack, muttering swear words in a thick Irish accent. She gives me a foul look before throwing me a key and blowing past in a haze of patchouli. At the end of the hall she turns and says, ‘Mind yourself,’ and is gone.
I step inside.
I have a home.
Chambre de bonne actually means ‘maid’s room’, but I think it means ‘room of good’, which makes sense because it is good. So good in fact, that the moment I move in the lucky penny simply disappears from the string it was on. I hunt on my hands and knees – nothing – and look for a break in the string. There isn’t one. It makes no sense, but I give up searching for a reason. It doesn’t matter. I have a home. My very first apartment, if you can call it that; it’s really more of a cubby – a simple box with a little square window in a sloping white wall, a floor made of cracked, uneven tiles. I touch everything in it. The mini fridge with a camp stove on top. The damaged Ikea bookshelf. The very ugly and cumbersome desk. The broken floor lamp with its heavy marble base. Mine. Mine. Mine. In the centre of the room is a bed on stilts with a wobbly stepladder and pilled sheets, a lumpy pillow shaped like a sausage. I roll around in it. Then I climb back down. There is a plastic shower cabin over near the window. I pull off my sticky clothes and step into it. My own shower. The free-range hose, I discover, can be pointed in all kinds of pleasing directions.
There’s no toilet. The shower is fine for number ones, but for twos there’s a cubicle down the hall with a hole in the wall and pigeons roosting in it. It is shared by the dozen or so fifth-floor residents. There’s no lock but there is, I learn one night from a hairy man with red underpants around his ankles, a door-slam code. If the door’s open it’s all yours. If it’s closed you must retreat and wait for the sound of the courtesy slam.
The wealthy residents of number 41 are assigned one or two chambres de bonne for storage, cleaning supplies, humans. The chambres de bonne have their own address: 41bis rue Cardinet. Not to be confused with 41. A bis must be an afterthought. An addendum. 41bis has its own modest doorway, mouse-like in comparison to the imposing entrance of number 41 with its carved wooden door and marble foyer; 41bis only half exists, it is just a stairwell with a door on each floor that opens into one of the grand kitchens of number 41. A servant’s entrance. On the ground floor lives the gardienne, Madame Lechon, who has a little window that opens onto both 41 and 41bis. Whether I’m talking to her from 41 or 41bis, she regards me with contempt, and I start calling her Madame Cochon in my head, which means Mrs Pig, and makes me feel better.
The Burnt Baguette
THE FIRST THING I want to do, naturally, after settling into my Room of Good, is go to the boulangerie and buy my first baguette, wearing a headscarf. The one on the corner screams heaven, with its displays of glistening cakes and constant waft of baking bread. I stand in the queue listening earnestly to the people around me, practising in my head the line I’ve been preparing since high school: Je voudrais une baguette. It seems abrupt the way the lady up front says, ‘Donnez-moi (give me),’ but her lilting tone makes anything acceptable.
‘Deux croissants s’il-vous-plaît,’ says the suited man now up front.
‘Onze francs soixante-quinze,’ smiles the plump lady behind the counter.
A woman orders a baguette and a mille-feuille. How can she eat pastries and stay so thin?
‘Treize dix-sept,’ smiles the shop lady.
My soul is alight with buttery bakery goodness. The baguettes look so good, I can’t wait to make one mine.
‘Mademoiselle?’
My turn. I smile as warmly as I can, and say in my politest French, ‘Bonjour madame, je voudrais une baguette s’il-vous-plaît.’
She looks at me. Pauses. Then turns to the baguettes lined up behind her. But rather than choosing one of the beauties begging to be picked, she reaches behind the upright basket to pull out an ugly, overcooked one.
‘Quatre francs deux,’ she says nasally, bored.
I’m shocked. Is she serious? I
have neither the language skills nor guts to deal with this. All I can do is moronically take the baguette, say merci, pay and leave. As I walk down the street clutching my shame, I’m sure people are staring and pointing: ‘Ha! Loser! Vite Benoît! Come look at burnt baguette girl in the cheap headscarf!’
Back in my room I attempt to break the log against a bedpost, jarring my wrist. If only Dad were here, he loves things overcooked. Great, now I’m homesick.
The incident replays itself over and over in my head. What did I do wrong? How could she be so mean when I was so nice? Tomorrow I’ll try harder, I resolve.
Fool.
My extra efforts have no effect, the reverse in fact: the next day my baguette is even worse – it’s not even straight – and I have a nagging suspicion they’ve prepared it specially for me. I try going to the boulangerie at a different time but the afternoon lady is even meaner. I try other boulangeries but encounter similar frostiness and baseball-bat bread. It’s clear that my photo is sticky-taped out the back of every bakery in Paris.
In the following weeks I learn that the nicer I am, the nastier the baguette. In fact there seems to be a direct correlation between my friendliness and the baguette’s disgustingness.
One day, I’ve had enough. I awake, throw back the sheets, flex, rehearse my slightly improved vocabulary and march down to the bread shop to demand, ‘A baguette, please. No, that nice one over there. And no more nonsense, wench.’ I didn’t say that last part, but if I’d known how to I might have.
The lady stops and beholds me a moment. Then the heavens clear as she breaks into a wide grin. With a great earthy chuckle, she turns in slow motion, and to the tune of ‘Dream Weaver’ selects the freshest baguette on the rack, wraps it lovingly and hands it to me like a prize. When she says, ‘Quatre francs deux,’ she has the voice of an angel.
And so it is. I am in.
This is the Lesson of the Burnt Baguette. Be nice, and eat charcoal the rest of your life.
