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. Miquette 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 through 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.”