After weeks of gracious hosting by lovely people all over the Pays Basque and Provence, we were back in Paris and I had an entire Saturday to wander around by myself! First stop,

Pain
the Bastille street market – blocks-long aisles three-deep, offering every conceivable vegetable, flower, bread, cheese, fish, fungus, unpronounceable and mysterious sauce, jewelry, watches, CDs and DVDs in exotic languages, clothes, shoes, black market perfume and homeopathic remedies for an array of startling disorders, frequently involving the word, foie (liver.) In France the liver is, apparently, the seat of most ills. But not all, as I’m about to see.

The Bastille Hippo
Next I sneaked into the corner Hippopotamus, a sort of French Denny’s considered too tacky for words by my hosts. And it is tacky, offering Americanish food I can eat without the usual, hard-to-hide terror. I’m deliriously happy, wolfing a Caesar-chicken sandwich and fries (without ketchup, a depth to which even Hippo refuses to sink) and looking forward to dessert – profiteroles gourmandes made with Ben and Jerry’s! (Scroll down the menu in the Hippo link above to see photo of profiteroles.)
Still, this is not Denny’s and I find myself watching a peculiar drama at a table for two against the back wall. A couple are sharing a little carafe of what looks like rose’. His back to me, I see an expanding bald spot, leather coat and fashionable scarf draped over his chair. They aren’t young, maybe late forties. His back exudes confidence, a businesslike detachment. He could be an accountant, insurance adjuster, bank officer. But something’s wrong.
She’s facing me, her gaunt face scrupulously made up, big eyes made bigger with liner, shadow, fake lashes and mascara. The makeup looks expensive and her short, dyed hair is either well-cut or a trendy wig. But even though she’s painfully thin, her sweater is too small, as if she’s borrowed it from a child. She’s so thin, and yet there’s nothing on their table but the squat carafe of pink wine, the glass-and-a-half size meant for one person. It’s lunch time, she obviously needs to eat, and yet there’s no food on the table. As I watch, she flirts with him. Desperately. She bats those big eyes, looks at him with vampy, retro-eroticism so often and with such clear intent that she becomes a caricature – Betty Boop as tragic figure. He doesn’t seem to see or hear her, just relaxes with his wine.
I want to send her a note on a napkin saying, “Don’t do this! I’ll buy your lunch!” but I’d never get the French right and I sense that I’m so “other” in her context as to be invisible. I wouldn’t even qualify as an obnoxious, meddling stranger. And I don’t think it’s lunch she’s after anyway.
The wine finished, they stand to leave and her coat slides from her chair to the floor. He doesn’t lean to retrieve it, doesn’t seem to see either the fallen coat or the woman. Shaking, she bends, her too-small sweater sliding up in back to reveal the bony vertebrae moving beneath transparent skin. Her body, absent the makeup that has created her face, is a skeleton in a fragile veil. A skeleton that has just played a dangerous game very badly, and lost.
He leaves a few euros on the table, shrugs on his coat and seems quite content as he walks out into the cold, bright day, never looking back. She struggles awkwardly with her coat for minutes after he’s gone, her face still attractive but blank now. The charade is over; she has no expression left. Not a soul in this red plastic restaurant looks up as she passes and vanishes into the street.
And I’m left wondering if she was really there at all, but rather a ghost replaying some forgotten moment in which the one thing, or one man, that could have made a difference, didn’t. The buildings of the Place de la Bastille are fairly recent, built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but of sufficient age to have housed countless pivotal moments. I choose to imagine this as one of those, in which long-dead bones in painted glamour and stolen clothes return to recreate with the oblivious living some amour fou or grim monetary transaction lost in time and unchangeable. Unless, of course, the guy at the table had been able to see her. 😉
When I was in high school French classes, Paris Match ads for Perrier would read, Ma foie? Connais pas! Rough translation would be–My liver? Not bothering me/don’t notice it.
Did you get to Boulangerie Poilâne for a baguette or a boule? Thés du Mariages Frères? Dehillerin, home of exquisite copper items for cooks–and everything else for cooks? They are three of the non-museum places I want to visit in Paris, should I ever get there.
Packed away is a book on baking bread by Poiâne, in French; I like quite a few MF blends, but Dehillerin, never ordered anything from them.
I spend a lot of time in France, and of course that involves eating, but I’m (obviously) no foodie and am always overjoyed when I can actually eat what’s put in front of me. Love copper pans, though!
How sad! One of those ships that pass, unknown forever.
I’m still wondering about her…
I think I’m being haunted (second hand) by her. It has also brought to mind an incident that happened to my son and I about 25 or so years ago. It was a summer evening and my son was out side went a young man came running down the street, bleeding from his head, I think. He had been at a pay phone (remember them?) in the business district a couple of blocks away when 1 or more young men came over to him and began to beat him, he said. We brought him into the living room and sat him down while I got him a wet towel to press to his injury. We called the police for him, they came and spoke to him and called an ambulance. The last we saw or knew of the whole thing was him stepping into the ambulance and being driven away. We never knew any more about the episode. Your story about the woman has brought it to my mind again. I still wonder.
Hi, Linda –
I have no idea how your story got lost in the email queue, but I just found it! Yes, there are these glitches in time or connection, or something, that almost seem like collisions between realities. Little moments in which some story in which you have no part is abruptly IN your awareness and then, just as abruptly, gone. And they leave shadows that resonate forever. Who was he? What happened to him? Where is he now? It’s like a compelling narrative (made compelling by your participation in it) that has no beginning or end, no backstory, detail or resolution. Just that moment 25 years ago. You did The Right Thing, played your part well, but in the end that’s never enough, is it? The Right Thing is always just sort of pro forma. What we really want is The Story, and its absence leaves a permanent, haunting discomfort.
Reads like the beginning of an interesting novel. Love your descriptions and sense of desperation in the woman.
It does sound like a novel, doesn’t it? But what plot? I think she’s a ghost, but if she isn’t, what was going on there?