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by
Janelle Flores
I used to lie awake, tracing familiar routes on a well-worn map of Paris even after I had memorized every cobblestone and every line of scrawled graffiti along the way. Sometimes, even now, I peek back at my convenient little notebook, pages frayed, smeared to the end of legibility, full of faint, penciled-in landmarks, at once upsetting me and rousing wanderlust with its notes and sketches, a year’s worth of hoarded ideas and thoughts, aspirations and impulses.
I arrived in August, when the only Parisians still in Paris are hotel staff, tour guides, and professional thieves who prey on clueless tourists. That wasn’t going to be me, equipped with practical shoes and an anti-theft bag strapped firmly across my chest. I dropped my suitcases at the Auberge Internationale des Jeunes without unpacking and left the keys to my room on the receptionist’s desk in a hurry, anxious to get away from the other ugly Americans and to see the city I’d read about for so long. I was out for only an hour, still suffering from jet lag despite my excitement. I came back to find my keys missing and discovered the door to my room hanging open and my suitcases flung across the room. I knelt on the floor, defeated, compulsively searching for the laptop and camera that I knew would not be there. The thieves rummaged through everything. Those filthy hands even leafed through my books! And my notebooks! Still numb with disbelief, I leaned over my window overlooking rue Trousseau to curse the unsuspecting Parisians. They looked back up at the darkening sky, concerned only with fashionable shoes and the end of tourist season.
I went to the police the next day. The officers treated my case with an unfeigned indifference, as though grand thefts happened every day, which no doubt they do here in summer. A simple report turned into a laborious lesson in French. And this was to be my memorable, my inescapable first conversation ever, in French, with French people. I relied on my textbook vocabulary, which failed, because in school, I’d only learned how to discuss women’s clothing, pastries, and the grandeur of France. Nobody ever taught me how to describe reality.
It didn’t occur to me until much later what losing my laptop and camera meant. For days I sulked around Paris borrowing digital cameras so that I could take pictures to send back home, proof that I was actually here. I couldn’t message or email anyone. In a sense, I was cut off from the rest of the world, keeping contact only with my immediate surroundings. Like a forced abstinence. But soon, I grew accustomed to having to walk around and search for the nearest grocery store or boulangerie on foot, instead of just looking it up on Google Maps. It was important for me to find the market the shortest distance away from my apartment. After all, I had to carry everything all the way home on foot. This minor inconvenience made even walking a challenge, though Parisians didn’t notice this problem. They shopped and ate for each meal individually.
In any case, I could not afford to be without my map, saving me from looking too lost or walking aimlessly. Sooner or later I learned how to fare as a discreet tourist, angling my notebook, just so, to make sure no one else on the metro saw the panic on my face when I had missed the stop for Opéra. I learned how to use monuments to find my way. I learned how to find the Seine, and once I’d found that, I could find almost anything. No matter where you are in Paris, lower building numbers lead to the Seine. I used the map inside my notebook like a crutch as I blundered through Paris. Like some tick of writing, I developed a tendency to organize everything I saw into sentences, giving grammar to the world and turning Paris into a text. I wanted the same understanding as an expat who has been living here for years, even decades; I wanted a coherent, mappable world.
I lived alone at 39 avenue Daumesnil at the edge of the undesirable 12e arrondissement, underneath the Viaduc des Arts, whose lofty arches had supported trains from Bastille to Vincennes until 1859. A giant gate separated my street from a large courtyard of several apartment buildings. From my window I could see families loafing in living rooms, students reading by lamplight and meals served three times a day. It was like a scene from Rear Window, and we would watch each other silently across the concrete courtyard. This was considered low-income housing in Paris: sizable courtyards, modern buildings with steel frames and working elevators, and iron gates instead of old doorways. My part of town was like nothing I’d seen walking around in the older, more scenic parts of Paris.
On a rare, balmy afternoon in October, I went out to Boulevard Haussmann in search of the perfect horse-chestnut tree to photograph with my old, lo-fi Holga camera, which the thieves had left behind. The grandiose limestone façades of the glittering Galeries Lafayette, seven stories high, immediately attracted me. Like one of Émile Zola’s matrons, I could not resist the heaps of cheap goods and shining window displays luring throngs of shoppers in and out of the department store. I walked into this ladies’ paradise and saw that the interior atrium was decorated with colored glass and intricate gilt moldings even more glorious than the exterior façades. I stood on the ground floor, gawking up at the scene above me: sales associates in black scurrying from one corner to the next while their clients never looked up from racks of clothes, the pinks and blues and reds and golds flashing in every greedy eye. Nobody even noticed the astounding ceiling, an authentic creation of the 1800s, and not fabricated like L.A.’s wood- and- plaster imitations of luxury and splendor.
I made my way down Boulevard Haussmann in awe. I realized why most tourists come to this city: the grand, classic architecture is as alluring as the heaps of cheap goods and shining window displays of the Galeries Lafayette. In the buildings of Paris, the French have created an international architectural wonder, a façade attracting millions of tourists each year. As in the case of the Galeries, it doesn’t matter whether you need to go to a particular destination or not. From afar, the ubiquitous images of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Café de Flore were at the core of the classic image of Paris that was marvelously unreal and too picturesque. I couldn’t believe that people lived like this every day, running out for coffee or laundry detergent or toilet paper into these streets.
But I was looking for the Paris I already knew – the Paris of art, literature, and photographs, a Paris I’d seen from a distance, mediated. No, I did not find that perfect horse-chestnut tree on Boulevard Haussmann. Instead I decided, giving up on originality, to go to the Jardin du Luxembourg across the Seine and down the Boulevard St. Michel. My idea was to stage a déjà vu, hoping that I could make sense of the city this way, imposing some kind of social map, as Hemingway had. Or in film montages set in Paris. I didn’t realize that this mappable world was what I was seeing all around me until I began photographing it and writing about it myself.
But then, I had already seen all the streets of Paris in which I walked, and in the end I would tour all of them in one night’s dream: streets in late summer, where café chairs faced the street even with the littlest strip of sidewalk. Streets where, in the wintry chill, arcades have sheltered weary flâneurssince the nineteenth century. As I searched for the Paris I knew, my wonderment only increased, but I could not express the familiar foreignness I felt at such intrusions of allusive beauty into a city where I had forged my new, adopted identity. That is, not until my façade also melted into the landscape. I was at that age, nervous, reserved, insecure, intimidated by everything, and all I could see was the familiar Paris that was already written about, from the point of view of other foreigners. And never my own.
For an entire semester I roamed the city mostly alone, living a life relatively solitary, with passing elations, adventures, love stories. In the 12th arrondissement, long after my French classes ended for the day, I would take to the path I traced in my notebook the night before. Every now and then I would pass by a plaque commemorating a poet or novelist or some lost soul that would lead me, naturally, to think about that place and imagine how it had been written and overwritten and then blacked out and written over again through the centuries—the city as palimpsest. Or I would run into something I’d read about from The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s European expat masterpiece. The Café de Flore—now full of tourists and old French men in suits for show—is a well known landmark that captures the exported image of Paris that tourists come to see. This is what I thought to be the heart of Paris, the reason behind Paris’s cultural longevity. But upon examining it further, I realized it wasn’t really Paris at all and it was only an image.
I was the type of tourist who longed for authenticity. But all I could get was an annotated version, like the imaginative form of a double-decker bus tour. I found my antiquated Paris spoiled by tourists, which was half of who I was, too, after all. I respected the tourist version of Paris no more than I respected myself. I decided then that I would seek out the ventre de Paris, the underbelly of the gleaming façade that the city center hides so well.
(continued on page 2)
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