Hungry Woman in Paris

by Josefina López

  CHAPTER 4

  Bonjour, Carte de Séjour

  After two months of living in Paris, I looked out the window and saw snow falling. It was beautiful at first to see snow on the streets of Paris, but then it dawned on me that it really was winter. This was not a California winter, but a real winter requiring scarves and coats and even boots. I walked down Victor Hugo Boulevard past all the shops and was tempted to buy something, but I had promised Rosemary I would never shop on Victor Hugo Boulevard unless it was at the little boutiques that had preowned designer clothes and purses, some located on the rue de la Pompe. She said most of those clothes were worth it because they were worn maybe once, and the designer purses were practically new. Rosemary explained that a lot of those purses belonged to mistresses or call girls who got them as gifts, bought with the same business credit card used to pay for hotels and business expenses. The women in those situations sold them to the boutiques to get fast cash. “Aside from the bad karma, they’re good deals.”

  I got on the metro and took it wherever it took me. When I started seeing African people in traditional African clothes getting on, I assumed I was getting closer to the part of town where immigrants lived. I decided to get off and explore. It was probably cheaper there. Wherever there are immigrants, you know there are bargains just around the corner. I got off on Clichy and walked around the boulevard north of Pigalle, which was packed with inexpensive coats and knockoffs of every type. I bought a black coat. Normally I’d go for a red one, but the truth of it was that I just wanted to hide out. I wanted to be small and invisible if possible. I made my way to another metro stop and an African man wearing traditional Kenyan clothes handed me his business card. He’d looked at my face and figured I needed help. He had been a witch doctor in Kenya and was practicing in Paris. His card said, “Come to me if your husband has left you. I will make him come back to you like a dog.” I imagined that scenario. I thought, Yes, but what if he does come back like a dog and ends up drooling on himself and shitting all over your carpet? Maybe if I could ask him to play dead and hide under the sofa until I needed him to mow the lawn that could be a good thing. A large African woman pushed me aside with her fat arms and I snapped back to reality. I was in front of the metro entrance and had to shit or get off the pot because there were people behind me waiting to stick their metro ticket into the ticket machine. I stepped aside and wondered where the hell I should go next. I remembered I still had not been to the top of the Eiffel Tower and thought it was as good as any day to do it… Maybe on such a miserable day there would be no line.

  There is always a line, unless it is closed, I soon discovered, and waited for half an hour to take the elevator up to the very top. On my way up I saw the Jules Verne restaurant and told myself I would eat there before I left Paris. Who would I eat with? I had no friends in Paris. What if Rosemary never returned? I got off with the rest of the tourists and looked down. It was a long way to fall. There was no way anyone could jump off; it was suicide-proof. I took photos with my digital camera and wanted to ask a Japanese tourist to take my picture.

  “Canela? Canela!” someone yelled out from behind me. I turned around and saw a woman I couldn’t recognize at first.

  “It’s me, Margaret. I did the journalism summer workshop back in Los Angeles with you.” I smiled, pretending to remember, until her younger face came into focus.

  “Yes, now I remember your face… What are you doing here? Are you visiting Paris?”

  “No, I live here. I’ve been living here for the past year,” Margaret announced.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I just finished cooking school. I got my diploma in cuisine and pastries just last week from Le Coq Rouge.” She announced this proudly, as if awaiting some kind of applause.

  “I thought you wanted to be a journalist,” I reminded her.

  “I did,” she answered, sounding a little annoyed, “but I was tired of the bullshit with the editors. I couldn’t write the stories I wanted to write, so I said, ‘Fuck that.’” I quickly recalled all the fights with my editors over stories too controversial to publish, like my piece on the Latina immigrant mothers in the barrio whose sons were the first to die in Iraq. I remembered my interview with the Guatemalan immigrant mother about the loss of her son José Antonio Gutierrez, the very first soldier to die there. He’d signed up to go to war so he could get a green card.

  “You lost your objectivity,” my editor had said, claiming that was the reason he had prevented my story from being printed.

  “What do you mean?” I’d replied, trying not to lose my temper.

  “The fact that you’re an immigrant completely paints this article in an unbalanced manner,” he’d informed me.

  “You don’t think I can be objective,” I’d asked carefully, “because I’m an immigrant?”

  “Yes. It’s clear that you can’t. You’re too emotionally involved. You should be a columnist, but I can’t have you doing this. I’m taking you off the story.” He’d said it matter-of-factly, not even looking at me.

  “You do that and I quit,” I’d threatened.

  A woman in a wedding dress walked past me now, on a photo shoot, and I was brought back to reality. Margaret had been talking all along and I caught the last of her sentence.

  “. . . so I decided to take a year off and come live my dream,” she confided with a smile of satisfaction.

  “That’s really wonderful that you had the courage to just go for it,” I offered, trying to make up for my previous annoying comment.

  “I figured, you only live once. I always wanted to live in Paris, and I met a wonderful man in cooking school who proposed to me. We’re going back to the States to start a restaurant together.”

  “You actually met him in cooking school?” I pictured them frying up eggs together like idiots in love.

  “Yeah, isn’t that romantic? I was totally not looking for love and we just happened to be in the same cooking group, directly across from each other, and something about the way he cut his onions got me.” We laughed. I was curious about what she had to do to stay in France for a year to attend cooking school.

  “If you pay for the whole course, the school will get you a carte de séjour for a year.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A carte de séjour,” she said, overpronouncing it. “A card to stay—like a visa.” Margaret gave me her cell phone number and told me to call her if I needed anything, but added that she was leaving in a week. I wished her well and wondered why I had run into her, of all people. I guess the Eiffel Tower is the center of the world; you’re bound to run into someone from your past.

  Back at my building, I was about to step into the elevator when an older woman in a designer suit with large pearls around her neck said something in French. She was well kept and impeccably dressed. These Frenchwomen don’t know how to get fat and age properly. Since I did not respond, she asked me in English where I was going. I explained to her that I was going to the sixth floor.

  “You must take ze other elevator,” she explained. “Ziz elevator is for za people who live here, not za servants.” I was about to explain that I wasn’t a servant and that my situation was different, but I assumed she didn’t speak enough English to understand and didn’t care to know my situation. I went behind the main elevator and took the dirty servants’ elevator. Rosemary had explained to me that because she had been there awhile, the residents didn’t mind her taking the regular elevator, but since I looked like an Arab to this woman I’d immediately been rendered a servant. Everyone in Paris thought I was an Arab. Even the Arab taxi drivers would speak to me in Arabic and were shocked to discover I was Mexican. I didn’t bother telling them I was Mexican-American because that tends to confuse people in Paris; even Americans got confused.

  Earlier that morning, I had stared at the calendar and counted the days I had left before I’d be considered undocumented once again, in another country. Growing up, I was what people called
an “illegal alien.” I didn’t know I was undocumented, because my parents had told me not to tell anyone I had no papers; I’d just assumed they meant toilet paper or something innocent like that. Then, when I was a teenager and needed to think about college, I discovered I didn’t have the right papers to apply. Although I was undocumented and could be deported at any time, I thought it impossible because my parents were both legal residents. It was due to a technicality that I was without papers. Eventually my father applied for citizenship, and my siblings and I were able to obtain residency right in time to qualify for financial aid and attend college.

  When I got out of the servants’ elevator, a woman was already there, waiting for it. Our eyes met and she feigned a smile. She said, “Bonjour” with a Spanish-accented pronunciation.

  “Habla español?” I asked her. She stopped and smiled with a real light behind her eyes.

  “Sí, sí. ¿De dónde es usted?” She asked me where I was from because I certainly wasn’t Colombian like her. I told her I was Mexican and that I was Rosemary’s friend, staying in her chambre de bonne. She explained to me that she was Colombian, from a town just south of Medellín. I gave her the short version of how my family had migrated from a town north of Mexico City to Los Angeles. She explained to me that she was in Paris with her two daughters and had been in France for six years sans papiers. I asked her why she’d come to France instead of the United States like most Latin American immigrants. She explained that many years ago Spain did not require a visa from people from Colombia. They came in via Spain and, once in the European Union, they were able to take the train and make their way into France. Why not stay in Spain, where they speak Spanish and life will be a little easier? I asked her. She explained that she had relatives in France already and France is a richer country than Spain.

  “There are a lot of Colombians in Paris,” she informed me. She was so tempted to move to Levallois, where most of them resided, but she did not want to lose her chambre de bonne and her part-time job on the third floor, with an American couple with two children. She asked me about Rosemary and I told her about her mother and her trip to Los Angeles. I had not heard anything from Rosemary in over a month. I didn’t want to call and bother her at a time like this, but I was hoping she would call me soon.

  “Bueno pues. Je m’appelle Marina, et vous?” she said in Spanish and French. I looked at her funny and she quickly understood that I didn’t speak French. She sympathized and said that after six years she could only speak it a little, but could understand it a lot.

  “You have to speak French here, or no work,” she said in Spanish. We said our good-byes and she added that if I needed anything to knock on her door, Apartment D. I wondered who my other sixth-floor neighbors were. Since I didn’t speak French I would have to play face and gestures with them, but they didn’t need to know me. I didn’t even know how to introduce myself. Would I be able to gesture “Hi, I’m from the U.S., but I hate the U.S. right now, so I’m here and I don’t know what I am doing with my life or why I don’t want to get married. Nice to meet you”? I went into my room and shut the door.

  The next day I had to go get groceries and a copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Just because I was depressed and suicidal didn’t mean I shouldn’t catch up on my reading. I got on the metro and got off at Concorde and crossed the street. A French police officer was walking back and forth in front of a police barricade; I looked over and saw the American consulate. I walked on the rue de Rivoli past souvenir shops and countless tourists looking for or leaving the Louvre and continued down the archways to the English bookstore. As soon as I walked in, I heard American English being spoken, but soon the beautiful sounds of my language were interrupted by an Englishman searching for Voltaire. He was directed to the French classics and headed down that aisle. I know the British invented the English language, but living in America, I’d forgotten that we didn’t; we’re the ones with the accent; we’re the ones that talk funny; we’re the outsiders. I realized that my unconscious mind had just assumed we Americans invented everything—everything except the Eiffel Tower. I hadn’t realized how Americentric I was until I’d left the States.

  I walked down the aisles and got to the H’s. All of Hemingway’s books were there in paperback, including numerous copies of A Moveable Feast. I wasn’t original, going to Paris and pretending I was Hemingway… So what that I was a journalist… I wasn’t an alcoholic… yet. I had read A Moveable Feast back in high school, when I was taking French. Of course I could have taken Spanish to get an easy A, like so many Mexican students, but I’d actually thought that I was going to go to France and would use the French I learned. Why had it taken me more than ten years to finally get here? I’d been busy trying to save the world; but the Mother Teresa in me needed “a holiday,” as the British say.

  I walked closer to the cashier and saw a bookshelf filled with nothing but memoirs of Americans living in Paris. There is a tradition of Americans living in Paris and doing all the things they couldn’t do in their own country. African-American men came to Paris at the turn of the century because here they didn’t experience the discrimination they were subject to at home. They could play their music and have sex with Frenchwomen without being imprisoned or lynched. Countless female writers came to Paris because they could rent an apartment on their own without a husband’s signature. Imagine what life was like back then, when you needed a husband to exist in society, I told myself. So what can I do here that I can’t do in my own country?

  I ended up buying a book on how to live and thrive in Paris, along with the Hemingway book. I had considered getting a book by F. Scott Fitzgerald just to keep my Hemingway book company, but I had to start thinking about money. I had saved up to help out Armando with the down payment on a house. He said I should hold on to my money because he could afford the down payment by himself. I didn’t feel right having him pay for everything. He was such a nice guy… Now, don’t ask me why I called off the wedding… My mother has her theories, but none of them come close. I can tell you what I think, but I really can’t say I know. It’s just a feeling. Kind of a journalist’s instinct I have when I’m interviewing someone and something in my gut tells me it’s not the truth. Truth is a feeling swimming in my solar plexus, brushing up against my arms, caressing me under my cheeks.

  I stepped outside the bookstore and I was back in Paris again; now it was raining. A rainy day in Paris is beautiful, like a postcard, when someone is there sharing an umbrella with you. But when you feel like the only person in the world who doesn’t speak French and doesn’t have an umbrella, it feels like a giant dog peeing on you. I walked over to a café and tried ordering in French. The waiter interrupted me as I was butchering his language and guessed exactly what I wanted. At least I didn’t ask for a Coke, I thought. I went to great lengths not to be the “Ugly American”; it was exhausting trying to be a decent person in a city where people were not so pretty to you. Rosemary had defended the French, being an unapologetic Francophile. “It’s not that they are rude, it’s just that Paris is the city with the most tourists, and Parisians get tired of them,” she’d said. “Also, all those tourists go home and tell their friends and then the stereotype gets perpetuated. I remember people being rude to me in Los Angeles,” she’d added as evidence.

  I looked around me and knew that if I ever wanted to graduate from being a tourist I would have to learn French. I’ve already told you why I didn’t learn French and how I am cursed, but there was no way around it. I hated when people criticized my parents for not knowing and speaking English. I would tell them that my parents worked manual-labor jobs and came home exhausted to their ten children and the idea of going to night school to learn English was too much for them. After my mother was done with her day she would turn into a zombie and watch telenovelas and escape into lands where women like her got the fairy tale and not the ten kids. I, however, had to learn French. But what would be the best way? A lot of these language schools were so expensi
ve, and they don’t give you a carte de séjour. I can only stay here for another three weeks before I have to go, I reminded myself.

  In the middle of the night I got a phone call from Rosemary. She had been in the U.S. for almost two months, but I’d only heard from her once. I’d wanted to call her, but figured she was probably overwhelmed, so I’d waited patiently.

  “I’m not coming back,” Rosemary confessed, waking me up out of whatever dream of serenity I was having. She explained how her mother had died and she was so devastated. At the funeral she ran into an ex-boyfriend—not the one who’d brought her to France, but a high school sweetheart, who won her over by being at her mother’s funeral. She cried for two weeks and he stood by her side and was devoted to her at her most vulnerable moments. Rosemary realized that she still loved him, and they had gotten engaged.

  “You’ll return to the U.S. in December for my wedding, won’t you?” she asked me.

  “Yes, of course,” I told her. “I’ll be there, I promise.” What else could I say? Someday I would have to go back and face my mother and my family, as well as the fact that I would be thirty and unmarried. I hated all those stupid Hollywood stories about women turning twenty-nine and immediately their life was on a timer that eventually would ring, setting off the biological clock that would cause them to explode if they didn’t turn it off by dropping an egg and producing a fetus. “God, what a terrible trick you played on modern women,” I said out loud, staring up at the ceiling. I hated those stories, what clichés, how typical, how Hollywood… how painful. You don’t know how it hurts to be soooo single when you’re Mexican-American and your five sisters are already married with kids and everyone in your family wonders what the hell happened to you that you can’t get your life together.