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Paris Chez Moi
Between semesters, West moved to Bordeaux where he would continue studying oenology, and my other friends from home moved back to California. I was the only one dissatisfied with one semester in Paris so I had decided at the last minute that I would stay, enrolling in a new study abroad program at the Sorbonne. I moved to the 14th arrondissement, a fifteen minute walk away from the last metro stop on line 4, Porte d’Orléans, on Boulevard Brune. I was so far away from the center of the city (in terms of walking) but I relished living in one of the few arrondissements that had no daunting monument overshadowing it. There are only the catacombs, which are thankfully underground. The 14th arrondissement, unlike the center of the city, is untouched by Haussmann’s renovations. During his era, the 14th was just an unincorporated suburb of Paris whose low buildings looked old and a bit shabby, not in the way the rest of Paris looked old and well preserved. Cafés and parks in the 14th lacked the flair and elegance of central Paris, catering to a more working-class clientele of early risers who wore leather jackets and caps to keep the cold out. My building on Boulevard Brune was another subsidized apartment complex, populated mostly by students who commuted to the Sorbonne, though it was nothing like an American dormitory. I would see other students carrying backpacks and groceries from Le Champion, a supermarket chain ubiquitous in the French suburbs. I knew I was living at the fringes when I began shopping for my groceries at the only extra-large supermarket I’d seen in Paris instead of the street markets and small specialized food stores you see in Amélie, where only the wealthy can shop nowadays. I finally escaped the unreal faç ades and found a part of Paris that had not been exhausted in literature or in film.
I didn’t mind moving away from the center where most people long to dwell in. Living here felt more authentic to me, among people whom I equated to the French version of me had I been born here: modest, born to an immigrant family, a little bit indignant. I embraced my new persona, feeling like I’d gone the other extreme and resolved to discover the outer bounds of Paris.
At a bar in an outer arrondissement, I ran into a French acquaintance I’d met briefly at a music festival in the desert and then ran into later, coincidentally, at my school in California. We’d only spoken once back then. His accent was heavy and I barely understood what he was saying since he was so tall and I’m so short. After this third serendipitous encounter, we exchanged numbers and became more than passing acquaintances. I could finally pronounce his name, Baptiste. “Bapteezy,” as he liked to call himself, became my new, witty and unsparing travel companion. At first, we spoke English because he said he needed to practice after several months of being back home. I complied, putting friendship over fluency, though I didn’t think he needed help since he knew English well enough. He regularly dropped enduring 90’s slang like “Yo!,” “Word,” and “T hat’s the bomb!”— funny vocabulary for a guy with black horn-rimmed glasses perched on a Roman nose.
We were technically going to the same school, the Sorbonne, but a week after we resumed the second semester, the faculty cancelled classes in protest against reforms proposed by the Ministry of Education. My study abroad program held a mandatory meeting to discuss the events. What I thought would be a lesson in the French school system turned into an announcement that we will all be transferring schools, keeping in line with our home universities’ requirements. I was forced to enroll in a private university, L’Institut Catholique de Paris, whose students were not at all like my 14th arrondissement neighbors. Disappointed that I would be leaving the Sorbonne, I enrolled in a class that vaguely pertained to what was happening at the Sorbonne, a class on the history of political ideas.
I asked Baptiste about the protests. He told me he was part of the inner circle of students who planned protests and drafted slogans and declarations.
“That sounds like 1968!” I said, drawing loose connections to the notorious student revolution that happened in France (a model for 1960’s student protests all around the world, including Berkeley).
“I hope not,” Baptiste said. I forgot that 1968 had turned into a flop, no matter how memorable. He reminded me.
“What else are you doing? You need to explain it to me! Did you know I’m writing about 1968 for my class, ‘Histoire des idées politiques?’ It would be great if I included a section addressing the recent strikes.”
“It would be hard,” he said, always discouraging. “And I can’t tell you anyway. C’est un secret! But yeah, it’s a little bit like ’68. Tomorrow we will be meeting at L’ Amphithéâtre Richelieu and then we start marching from Place du Panthéon.”
“Will it be violent?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said, hopeful.
Baptiste was in his last year at the Sorbonne, working towards a Master’s Degree in history. Though class was not in session, he still went to the library every day to work on his dissertation, L’objet guerrier: nouvelles approches, essentially about the history of violence in war. Of course. One day while I was at Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève, where all the undergrads went, Baptiste called and asked if I wanted to babysit his apartment.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to the countryside for a while to visit my Mom in Bergerac. Me and my brother Timoté are going to try and build a bomb that explodes by itself. Like a Molotov cocktail.”
“WHAT?! What do you mean? Baptiste…”
“Don’t worry, we’re going to test it out in the countryside. There are only trees.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“Somebody told me. I think it’s going to get crazy, yo! You know what happened in Greece? The riots? I think that is going to—what’s the word?”
“Uh... a ffect??” I said.
“No, no, no.. spiral! Yeah, I think that is going to spiral out to here! Dude, I think it’s going to get violent so be careful. OK, I have to write. Come over later so you can pick up my key.”
After he left, I settled in his apartment on Rue de Turenne in the trendy Marais for a few days—I couldn’t resist pretending to live here, as much as I liked the 14th arrondissement. Baptiste only lived here because his grandfather owned the building and let him live in what were once the maid’s quarters for free; but he was a self-proclaimed anarchist trapped in a bourgeois house amid a well-to-do family line.
The space was small and smelled of cedar and mold like most of the Marais. It was the ideal apartment for a student: cramped, colorful, books stuck on every ledge, shelf and table. One particular =shelf stored Baptiste’s coveted English books. He left one out for me to read, Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, one of his favorites. The book is set in L.A. and tells of a college student named Clay who moves in a 1980’s scene of drugs, sex and vice. It read a lot like Baptiste’s antics while he was studying abroad in California. Perhaps his equivalent to my Hemingway. I wondered then what he thought of my current escapades, trying to understand the protests through 1968, secretly hoping that it would turn into something I could write about. But of course, none of it would live up to my expectations, just as Baptiste had found out that California was not a meaningless wasteland for manic highs and morbid lows, as it was in Ellis’s 1980’s. What I took for the real Paris—the 14th arrondissement, the protests, Baptiste—was in danger of collapsing once again.
The day after I read the relatively short book, I suddenly felt indifferent about all the protests. I met with West at Le Loir dans la Thé ière, a tea café nearby. He was also enjoying the protests but for a different reason. Now he could visit the big, cosmopolitan city all he wanted instead of being stuck in the provincial abbreviation of Paris.
“Baptiste is leaving for a while,” I told him, pouring a cup of tea.
“Oh? Are the protests blowing over?” he asked, concerned.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like he wants them to. I still don’t get what it’s all about exactly.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said.
Baptiste came back without any explosives. The protests, like most demonstrations, lulled over time, squandering everyone’s interest. There was the threat of still having to take exams at the end of semester despite the aggravation. Still more concerned with grades and being held back a year, students filed to the libraries to make up for lost time. West insisted we find other things to do while the protests blew over, so we occupied our evenings stomping through the city like savvy tourists again. Baptiste knew all the cool bars in the 20th arrondissement where drinks were cheap and people less snob, bars like Le Motel; he showed us the Paris I never would have seen just as a tourist. I even introduced him to my familiar hangout at Le Motel as it grew more and more popular among the other American students abroad. During the day, West found all the hot galleries and exhibits, always stopping around 4 p.m. at Chez Prune or Point Ephemère along the Canal St. Martin for tea or an apéritif to study, faking our tedious French homework for something more important. The two of us were committed to speaking French exclusively, smoking packs of cigarettes a day. According to our daily loafing, we were as French as could be.
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