"Ah, you are in lack," he said.
Over the past few months his English had disintegrated almost beyond recognition, but I now knew enough of the French expressions he was translating to understand him.
"Yeah," I agreed, trying to remember the last time I'd had any physical contact with a woman outside my dreams and the meaningless pecks on the cheek from colleagues saying goodbye.
"What have you done before, when you, like, found your girlfriend the photograph?"
"Photographer," I corrected him. Sometimes I couldn't help myself. "She was a part-time waitress."
"Voilà your solution."
"Yeah, but I seem to go to different bars now, where the waitresses all get chatted up non-stop and don't even see anyone who hasn't got the keys to a Mercedes sports car poking out of his trousers. Or to English pubs, where the barmaids all have French boyfriends."
"Yeah, it's problematic."
We sipped our coffees, watched the sunlight flickering down through the leaves, and wondered why the sweating two-mile-an-hour joggers didn't stay at home instead of scuffing their feet along the ground and kicking up dust for us to breathe.
"Besides, you're looking for something different, Jake. You just want to shag them, right? In a way that makes things easier."
"Non, non, man. Sometimes I'm obliged to really boss, you know. Like, tell her I love her and such conneries. I can put weeks before I have a result."
"But I want more than that result, Jake."
"Oh, you want to install yourself in her apartment?"
"Yeah. No. I mean, I really want to meet somebody."
"Meet somebody? Oh, you must become an English teacher, man. You meet beautiful women and they're obliged to talk with you during, like, an hour."
"Teach English? No way." I shivered at my momentary vision of grey teeth.
"Allez, Paul. You know I have a course this morning with a real beautiful woman here there." He nodded through the trees towards the main street outside the park. "In an assurance society there. She's your type. Office worker. Chic. Trop belle pour moi, you know what I mean? And she is not at all an exception."
I shook my head, and turned away to watch the old waiter, a grey-haired black-waistcoated guy of about sixty, as he served a coffee and a croissant to a middle-aged woman in an expensive cream-coloured leather coat. He stayed to flirt, she laughed.
Why not get a waiting job, I thought. Anything except teach.
"In Paris you must go in the sense of the hair," Jake declared. This may well have been a deeply wise observation if I'd been able to understand it.
"Go with the flow," he explained. "Regard those people." He pointed towards the boating lake. There were no model yachts on the water, but plenty of people were strolling or jogging in the sun.
"What about them?"
"See the way they walk?" Jake waved his right arm as if it was a car going round a roundabout French-style, to the right. I saw what he meant. Almost everyone was acting exactly as if they were on a roundabout, coming out of one of the walkways or down the steps and heading right to go round the lake.
"It's the same thing in the metro stations," he said. "People comport themselves like in a car. You try to mount up the stairs on the left, they believe you're crazy. They all go with the flow, at the right. It's the same in politics. The politic leaders all come from the same école. They don't want to change France. They all want just one thing, for France to be capital of the planet. Et voilà."
"So what's this got to do with teaching English?"
"Ah, that is the biggest flow these days. Whatever the politicians say, all French want to learn English. Regard me. I do my best since a year to get fired. I go to the courses, OK, but, like, I insult stupid students, I dress anyway."
"Why do you want to get fired?"
"The dole is, like, seventy per cent of your last salaire, you know? But they never fire me. They need me. Because every person in France wants to learn English. It's for that that you should teach."
"But I don't have any teaching qualifications."
Jake's whoop of laughter made every pigeon between him and the Eiffel Tower take to the air in terror.
"What did you have for dinner last night, Sylvie?"
"I made some crap."
"You mean crêpes? Pancakes."
"Yes, pan-cack."
The hardest thing was to keep a straight face.
"OK, Philippe, what would you say to the waiter if you had no cutlery?"
"Er, excuse me, I want a knife and a fuck."
It was cruel, and my French wasn't any better than their English, but sometimes you couldn't help but giggle.
"At five PM, I was working."
"Good."
"At seven PM, I was sitting on ze train."
"OK."
"At nine, I was listening ze radio."
"Was that AM or PM?"
"No, FM."
And occasionally, especially during role-plays, you just wondered, what the hell am I doing here?
"If you do not pay our invoice, sir, we will contact our lawg."
"Your log?"
"Yes, our lawg."
"Your lump of wood?"
"Oh? OK, we will contact our lumpawoo."
"No, you mean lawyer."
"Sorry?"
"Look - I'll write it. L-A-W-Y-E-R."
"Yes, lawg."
"OK, you go ahead and contact your log."
But overall Jake was right. For a few weeks at least, English-teaching was fun, a bit like visiting a load of houses that you don't particularly want to buy. You can be nosy. It gives you a really good close-up of other people's lives without any emotional commitment.
Jake's school was happy to take me on, happy in fact to give me classes the very day I knocked on their door, especially because I'd had a "real" job, unlike so many of the no-hopers who put on a tie and become English teachers in Paris.
The owner of the school was called Andrea. She was a tough 50-year-old German, a slim, business-suited mass of opportunistic gristle. She spoke perfect English and even more perfect French. She had large diamond earrings and deep creases across her suntanned forehead, the combination of which suggested that the language-school industry was a place of both pleasure and pain.
The photocopy of my carte de séjour was still warm when Andrea handed me the address of the company where I was to teach that afternoon.
"But what do I teach them?" I asked.
"Just go and talk to them. Introduce yourself, ask what they do, tell them what you have been doing, and take note of their errors. When there are twenty minutes of lesson to go, start analysing their errors. Or, if they talk until the end of the hour, say you will analyse the errors next time. It sounds very professional. And takes up more time. And don't forget to make them sign the presence form. That's how we know how much to bill them."
Andrea looked at me as if I ought to have left the office by now. Teacher training course over, it seemed.
I didn't have any beautiful women students. I had a tired working mum who needed English to work behind the counter in a bank on the Champs-Elysées, but preferred to talk about what she cooked for dinner (hence the "crap"). Three engineers who were off to China to sell telecommunications masts and were terrified of catching SARS. I taught them not to say "I don't hope to catch it". I failed abysmally to get them to pronounce "lawyer" properly, but they seemed satisfied anyway. And I went to a large hotel where the manager (Philippe - the "knife and fuck" man) wanted a transfer to the USA and needed to convince his head office that be could deal with his staff and customers in English. I pretended to be one of his waiters, a visitor from head office, and, slightly worryingly, his American secretary, and that was it. Signature on the form, out of there.
If I was stuck for teaching material, I'd whip out the day's English paper and we'd talk about something in that. I tried to get them talking about the French journalists' strike, but a surprising amount of them hadn't even realized there w
as a strike, or didn't care. They didn't read daily papers much except for the freebies given out at metro stations which weren't on strike because they weren't recognized as journalism by the unions. And no one missed the TV news, half of which was usually given over to plugging the film that was due on afterwards. As far as my students were concerned, the lack of official news was not news. By contrast, they loved reading stories about David Beckham's haircuts. Not that I wrote that down in the "subjects covered" section of the presence form. It was always "discussion of British culture inspired by study of contemporary design".
And that, give or take a few practice books and cassettes, was all there was to English-teaching in Paris. You just had to accept being the world's lowest-paid chat-show host.
Jake was right. What made it so effortless was that these people all had an almost desperate desire to learn English. They now seemed to blame all the world’s ills, from genocide in Africa to the price of coffee, on America, but this didn't stop them wanting to learn its language. Iraq war? What Iraq war? ... Bad Franco-American and Anglo-French relations? Who cares? ... Would they like to have lunch in a typically English tea room? Yes, please, where is it? (Yes, Jean-Marie, where indeed?)
I kept my eyes on Jean-Marie, and my ears. Via the internet and Nicole, I followed his political goings-on. I still saw Nicole for lunch once a week, though now I had to be very careful not to ask her to sign a presence form at the end of every meal.
She said Jean-Marie was spending more time than ever out in Trou. Stéphanie would go up there sometimes to take work to him. (Work and play, I thought.) According to what Stéphanie told Nicole, Jean-Marie was visiting all the farmers within his electoral boundary, as well as showing up on market days to shake hands and buy something from every stall. And when he was in Paris, Nicole said, Jean-Marie often received visits from national political figures, including - she whispered - a certain party leader who had once suggested that Auschwitz, if it had existed at all, was just some kind of precursor of the Club Med.
"No," I objected through a mouthful of under-cooked tuna steak. "I think Jean-Marie would rent his dead great-grandmother out as a call girl if he thought there was money in it, but I don't believe he's a Nazi."
"No, not a Nazi. Not a real Nazi. You do not hunderstand ow, what is the word?" Nicole waved her fork in the air. ''Respectable. It is to be fascist in France. It is just a form of nostalgia."
"I didn't know you were political, Nicole," I said, feeling slightly disappointed. In my acute state of sexual cold turkey I was even contemplating asking her if she wanted to learn some more intimate English vocabulary. "Ooh" maybe, or "aahh" and "yes, keep doing that to me, Paul, you unstoppable love machine." But if she was political, no thanks. I'd been through all that with Alexa. I'd say one word off message and it'd be orgasmus interruptus.
"Not very political, no," she said. "But my family is from the southwest, near Carcassonne. Traditionally we are Communists."
"Oh yeah?" Suddenly she'd become sexier again. I always think of Communist women as leggy blonde farm volunteers, giving their all for Uncle Joe in the haystack. Not that Nicole was a leggy blonde, even through my sex-starved eyes.
"But again. It is not the same as you think. My usband did not hunderstand this. My family do not want to kill capitalism. They are just members of the hagricultural co-operative. Which is Communist. It is tradition. My father ad been in the Communist Resistonce hagainst the Nazis. Ee elped the Hamericans."
She was getting even sexier. Daughter of a Résistance fighter? With me the fugitive English pilot, forced to hide under her bed. And then one night, when her dad is out blowing up a railway, she says, "there's no need to sleep under the bed tonight," and I teach her all those English oohs and aahs.
"... and Jean-Marie as big, big political hambitions."
"Uh, what, pardon?" She'd brought me back from 1944 with a jolt.
"Jean-Marie. E does not want to be the major of a little town only."
"Mayor."
"Yes. Mayor. Thank you. This nuclear central..."
"Power station."
"This nuclear central power station, it is han important regional question. If e can av henough political power in this region, the power station will surely be constructed. Ee will be respected as a, ow you say? Un homme d'influence."
"A man of influence."
"Thank you. It will elp is political carrier. And, huh," she gave a philosophical laugh. "Ee will certainly profit from it financially also."
"Will he now?" These elections were becoming less boring by the minute. I ordered myself a slab of chocolate orange fondant dessert to celebrate.
"Hey, Nicole, I didn't tell you. I've started teaching English."
"Ah, wiz a school?"
"Yes, giving proper lessons. I was wondering if you'd be interested in learning ..."
* * *
One day in mid-April, when I had a free morning, I went out to read the paper at the gay café. Just before midday I came back to make myself a quick sandwich with the fresh baguette I'd bought. But my front door seemed to be stuck.
I tried my key three times (the normal way, upside down, with yell of frustration and accompanying kick of the door) and it wouldn't work.
"Oh, I get it. The council is playing a belated fish-free April Fool's joke, changing the numbers on all the HLM doors so we try to get in the wrong apartment," I said to myself, sounding more ridiculous with every word. After all, even someone like me who hasn't been to Oxford or Cambridge remembers which floor they live on.
"Or maybe my key has melted in my pocket because of the animal heat emanating from my underpants."
This wasn't particularly likely either, I decided. A more credible explanation for the problem was that, as I now noticed, the lock itself was of a different make than it had been an hour before. Someone had changed my lock.
My phone rang. The call was from a number I didn't recognize.
"Bonjour, Monsieur Wess," a polite male voice said. It then explained, politely, that if I wished to get in the apartment and retrieve my belongings, I could return at four o'clock that afternoon and do so.
"Who are you?"
"You are not the legal occupant of the apartment, and you therefore have no legal right to occupy it," the voice said, which, in my opinion, kind of avoided the question.
"Are you from the HLM department?"
"Do you wish to return at four o'clock?" Again, not exactly a straight answer.
"Yes," I said, trying to set an example.
"Until four o'clock then," the voice said. "Bonne journée."
I decided to rip out the vocal cords of every person who ever wished me bonne journée again. I also wondered what the hell was going on.
When in doubt, ask your concierge. These Portuguese women know everything that's happening everywhere. If Saddam Hussein had tried to hide in Paris, the bounty on his head would have been used to build a new garage on every house in Porto.
I went down to see Madame Da Costa in her "loge", a tiny one-room apartment on the ground floor near the front door of the building. She lived in there along with her husband, who was about two feet taller than her, and the biggest TV I've ever seen. Their three teenage sons ate there but slept in another building somewhere. In the morning I occasionally saw one of them rushing in from tbe street in his pyjamas.
Madame Da Costa opened the net-curtained glass door of her loge and let out a faint whiff of cod. She was dressed in a long-sleeved black t-shirt and black leggings, and her hair was sticking out from her head in dark, unbrushed waves. She looked a bit like a chicken - all chest and crest. When she saw me, she immediately leapt back inside.
I was definitely a pariah in these parts, it seemed.
But no, she re-emerged, flustered, her hair held in place with a headband, and apologized for not distributing the post yet. She thrust a fistful of letters at me, the top one of which was addressed to a Herr Doktor Helmut Ringelnetz.
"Non, non," I said. "I me
an, oui, thank you for the letters, but I come for a different reason. My-"
Dammit, how did you say my lock has been changed without my consent?
"My door does not want my key," I tried. I held up the key and mimed someone suddenly finding that it is, to all intents and purposes, no longer a key.
"Ah, oui!" Cogs were whirring in her mind, events clicking into place. "Two men come this morning, they make a lot of bof, boom, crack!" Now she was the one miming. "I go up, they are breaking the door. I ask who they are, they say, you shut mouth, we just change lock then we go. And they do it and go. Poof! They were not for you?"
"No."
"No, you don't make noise. Not like the others." She looked up at me with her approving smile. It felt good to have a protector, even such a miniature, spherical one as Madame Da Costa.
"Were they from the HLM department?"
"No. One man was normal, private lock man. The other was big -" she puffed out her barrel chest, clenched her biceps, "very chic. Like ..." She looked for the right word. "Like bodyguard." She nodded to herself. "Like bodyguard for the lock man. Bizarre." She frowned.
"Très bizarre," I agreed and told her about the phone call I'd just received.
Ten minutes later I had an old sweatshirt in Portuguese national football colours (green, red and sweat stain) wrapped around my hands. My eyes were closed, and I was praying that when I opened them again, my fingers would not have been turned into raspberry coulis.
This was because I knew that Monsieur Da Costa was swinging a sledgehammer at me, aiming for the huge chisel that I was holding against the new lock.
One deafening, bone-juddering thump later, the door swung gently open and we were inside snooping about.
Everything was just as I'd left it. Kitchen with three days' washing up, my bedroom decorated with a patchwork of discarded socks and underwear, Élodie's room locked in case I got lonely and started snuffling around in her lingerie drawer.
A Year in the Merde Page 22