He and I are both in drunken awe of La Notre Dame which, viewed from Le Pont Tourbelle, appears to me as a huge, deformed heart, the exterior of the apse bursting out with arteries. Earlier in the evening we attended a book signing in the Village Voice bookshop. We went along to listen to Don DeLillo’s pre-signing spiel about Mao II which is his tenth novel. His intellectual earnestness made an impression on us. But now all we can recall is the sentence: ‘The future belongs to crowds.’ After the talk we crawled into and out of various Irish pubs, finishing up in The Oscar Wilde. In the years to come, will Parisians be drinking in The Seamus Heaney? The alcohol makes Eddy maudlin. He is a little fed up with the teaching. I empathise, remembering Madrid when I sometimes felt like an impostor, asking colleagues what a gerund was. My experiences weren’t like anything out of The Education Of Hyman Kaplan. ‘I’ve got to get out before we started on the past perfect continuous,’ declares Eddy.
Irish pubs and Breton creperies; one chain importing Guinness with bonhomie while the other specialises in cider with Breton dairy products. There are, however, similarities: the franchised decor of uniformity and the businesses’ lucrativeness.
I have no difficulty in locating ‘Mont St Michel’ in Montparnasse. At 11.15 a.m., as arranged, I walk into the creperie and make for the bar, squeezing myself past tables and chairs. Up from behind the bar pops the smiling face of a man with a viciously receding hairline. His expansive smile conveys the warmest of greeting. But before either of us can speak, an emaciated individual appears with a cigarette poking out of his sullen face.
‘Luc?’ I ask. He nods and makes it obvious I am expected to follow as he descends a spiral staircase. The cavernous cellar turns out to be the kitchen and where the restaurant’s dishes are cleaned.
On trolleys and shelves is piled a mountain range of food-stained plates. Stack upon stack of crockery. There are also smaller piles of white bowls on a table amid the cutlery and glasses that bear the remnants of last night’s wine and cider. Luc doesn’t trouble himself to speak — perhaps distrustful of my French. Body language is used to explain what is required. A preliminary clean to remove most of the food and the cigarettes butts; a knife used to scrape the debris into a bin liner. The plates are then to be placed (with loving care if his gesture, made in slow motion, is anything to go by) into an industrial cleaner. A green button is pressed and the machine makes a rumbling sound for the three minutes it functions on a timer. Hey presto. The plates are removed in a puff of steam to be neatly stacked on a trolley.
Luc leaves without a word and I surmise that I am to get on with it. The cable operating the dumb waiter makes a creaking noise under the strain. A stockily built Indian about my age is filling it with crates of Perrier. Having sent it heavenwards into the eating arena he comes over and is delighted to find that I’m English. ‘It good job. Easy work,’ he says. He wants to talk but has to react to instructions that are being barked down the intercom. More cider needed. Singh complies before efficiently preparing the salads.
After several hours of tedium, I can just about see the end in sight but then Singh carries over more plates from the lunchtime service.
We eventually emerge from the kitchen. The boss isn’t about so Santos, who is Portuguese, can speak freely behind the counter. ‘Engine off,’ he says before treating us each to a fabulous banana and chocolate crepe.
Another man in his forties turns out to be the real boss. Singh explains that that he owns four creperies in the district, two in the same road. Luc is second in command.
After eating, I get ready to leave. Singh will hang around as he also works the night shift. He matter-of-factly tells me that afterwards he’ll visit a brothel. ‘I’ve been going there for three years.’ Five minutes earlier he had been describing to me the beauty of the Mahabharata, a celebrated and sacred epic poem of the Hindus, written in Sanskrit.
Days pass. Dishes are washed. In the bowels of the creperie, I try to calculate how many dishes I’ve washed in my lifetime, my current job boosting significantly my daily average. I imagine a dishwashing day of reckoning whereby a mighty column of plates reaches high like Jacob’s ladder into the clouds of God’s kingdom.
My French is improving but the result is a chipping away at illusions I’d naively held onto until recent weeks. People the world over wallow verbally in the mundane routine of everyday life and that the weather is chief among their preoccupations.
Mornings drag by, after which I play exuberant games of football with ex-pats in the Jardin des Tuileries. Eddy plays too and it’s the only time we now spend together. Eddy has moved in with Sylvia and it’s weeks since I saw Delgado. I spend most evenings with a book for company. I am re-reading Edgar Allan Poe’s only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
‘Having barely escaped this danger, our attention was now directed to the dreadful imminency of another — that of absolute starvation for we found the whole bottom, from within two or three feet of the bends as far as the keel, together with the keel itself, thickly covered with large barnacles, which proved to be excellent and highly nutritious food.’
I keep this book close to my bed as a talismanic object, hoping to use it to draw upon some of mankind’s innate resourcefulness. Pym’s salvation lay, unknown, just yards beneath his feet. Maybe mine is similarly within reach, requiring just a mere helping nudge of fate.
Shakespeare, Avignon, 1994
Author, former harpsichord maker, environmental activist, Wolfgang Zuckermann, now in his seventies, has recently opened a bookshop in Avignon. He’s named it Shakespeare in honour of Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare & Co. opened in Paris in 1919.
Having opened our bookshops at roughly the same time, we like to compare experiences and even our respective takings. He kindly listens to my complaints over ‘les charges sociales’. Wolfgang has astutely set up his shop as an association to avoid such costs. I call it wisdom.
Fulham Broadway, 1987
‘Just another Saturday. Chelsea v Arsenal 1–0. Everybody went to Chelsea on Saturday to continue the party, and it lasted for another fifteen minutes, until something — a Hayes miss, or a Caesar backpass, I can’t remember now — provoked the howls of frustration and irritation that you could have heard on any Saturday of the previous years.’ From Fever Pitch, A Fan’s Life by Nick Hornby.
I went to this game but, being a Chelsea fan, experienced rather different emotions on the day. I wouldn’t have expected Nick Hornby to appreciate the fragile artistry of Pat Nevin or the surging runs of David Speedie. As home supporters, we are first to stream out from the ground. Outside I catch that smell of league football; the mingling odours of cigarettes, hotdogs and horse manure. The crowd is mostly good-natured, buoyed by unexpected victory, but there are still men who proceed down the Kings Road with an air of menace about them.
I check out a nearby second-hand bookstall. The exhilaration of the game is beginning to fade, replaced by a warm glow of satisfaction, but my mind can’t focus in the search for books. Random stupid thoughts assail me; given his career as gunrunner, would Rimbaud have been an Arsenal fan? The Arsenal hordes will soon be let out. I don’t intend to loiter. There are old match progammes but I’ve never been really tempted by these. Like memories, they are somehow infinite and yet ephemeral.
My loyalty to the club dates to junior school when teachers generally held less liberal and caring attitudes towards children from rough neighbourhoods.