Paris on a Plate

by Stephen Downes

  Up the steepest and most dangerous staircase in France is a second floor of more crannies, nooks and books. Turn a corner, and you’ll discover a low velveted divan on which lounges a surly student stroking a purring tortoiseshell. The second-floor books are not for sale, but you may use them for private research. From my overhearing, it seems that most of the customers are young and French. The only person making any real noise is the manager, an American in his early twenties wearing a chocolate corduroy jacket and a wispy goatie. He is being petulant — in English — for anyone who cares to listen. In particular, he is objecting to a cookbook that gives weights in pounds and ounces. ‘What sort of a cookbook is this?’ he exclaims, throwing it down. He is also performing, it seems to me, for an attractive, large Asian girl who has come in seeking work.

  I buy The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a Penguin paperback, for 11 euros, just for the fun of it, and he stamps its title page with ‘Sylvia Beach Whitman Foundation’ under ‘Shakespeare & Company’. Also, ‘Kilometer Zero Paris’, whatever that might mean. He takes off on a new tack. ‘What’s the French for porpoise?’ he screams to nobody in particular. The Asian girl looks nonplussed. Three or four browsers are uninterested. I head for the exit and, with the door half-open, turn to him and suggest that the word is ‘dauphin’.

  ‘No,’ he snaps at me. ‘That’s a dolphin. I want porpoise! Porpoise! What’s the French for porpoise?’

  I leave, suspecting that Ulysses would fail to get published these days.

  day eight

  Owing to a bureaucratic oversight, as most fuck-ups are called these days, I’m having to change apartments this morning. As the crow flies, my next abode is only about a kilometre away. But I’m not walking it with a backpack, daypack, computer and paraphernalia. Actually it’s a toss-up. Let’s say I would walk a little over a kilometre to reach the new place. Not a huge hike at all. If I take the Métro, I’ll have to descend and then climb a series of stairs and escalators when I change at Barbès Rochechouart for the overhead line heading west towards Pigalle. But in a relatively flat city, heading north from the rue des Petites Ecuries means climbing steadily uphill once I get into the rue de Rochechouart. So it’s a toss-up. I clean up the studio, remember my camembert in the fridge — it has been maturing nicely, I can feel — and give Monsieur Montebello’s room a final longing glance. And I take the Métro.

  They know I’m coming, I tell myself, and it’s ten o’clock, when every concierge in Paris is sorting keys, sweeping corridors, or bringing in the bins. I’ll just pick up my key to the new place, let myself in and relax a little before lunch at the Eiffel Tower.

  The ascent from line four to line two at Barbès is easier than I expected and I even have a seat for part of the four-station journey. I get out at Anvers, walk back down the boulevard and take a left into the narrow rue Seveste. It rises gently to the grassy square Willette, just beneath Sacré-Coeur. The massive oak door to number sixteen, a building of several stories, is only a score or so metres from the park and a merry-go-round. The funicular railway that takes you up the hill to Sacré-Coeur is a little further on.

  Madame Galena, who owns the apartment, has sent me the digicodes for the outside and inside doors and I struggle through them. A short dark corridor leads to a small interior courtyard paved in concrete. It’s about the size of a very large prison cell, and I feel condemned almost immediately. Opposite the corridor are windows hung with lace curtains, obviously the concierge’s apartment. No lights are on and nobody is about. I peer through the windows. A table with family photographs is barely visible in the gloom. I am to deal directly with Madame Fernandez, Madame Galena has told me. I knock for the third time. No answer. Nobody. Not a soul comes or goes. And it’s very cold, only slightly warmer here than in the street.

  Parisian concierges are almost never away from their posts. And there’d be a Monsieur Fernandez, too, and he is also absent. They can’t be away for long, I tell myself. An elderly gent in a cloth cap emerges from one of two winding staircases that empty into the courtyard. Does he know where Madame Fernandez might be? Isn’t she here, he says with surprise. She’s always here, he adds. Perhaps she’s just slipped out to the shops. He offers to try to find her or her husband in the quartier. He’ll send one of them back to let me in.

  I wait. Soon it’s eleven and I’m getting cold. A woman in her thirties comes down the second staircase. Madame Fernandez does cleaning at the pharmacy nearby, she says. Perhaps she’s there. I leave my gear, go back outside and look up and down the street. Several shops sell bolts of coloured fabrics, but I can’t see a pharmacy. I return to the courtyard and ring the agency. Oh, Monsieur Downes, what bad luck. But you should have made an appointment to tell the concierge when you were arriving. She knew I was arriving, I say to Wolfgang, who has handled my bookings. He sounds German and insists on speaking English. ‘Did I have to give an hour?’ I say, a little tetchily. He will get on the phone immediately, he says, and ring me back.

  Ten more minutes pass before my phone rings. The owner’s daughter is coming in from the suburbs to let me in, he says. ‘Where is she now?’ I ask. In the suburbs coming in to Paris — not far, is all he can offer. Doesn’t he have keys? No, he says. Now, I have a fair idea of what coming in from Parisian suburbs can mean. A two-hour wait? Ninety minutes if I’m lucky? Nothing else can be done, because Madame Galena herself is in Italy, says Wolfgang. ‘Oh!’ I say.

  Twenty minutes pass and I ring the agency again. Look, I say, I have work to do and can’t wait for either the concierge or the owner’s daughter. Can he please hurry them up? Wolfgang says he’ll see what he can do. A quarter-hour passes and I get another call. A woman’s voice shrieks through a cacophony of traffic and bursts of laughter. Her voice is breaking up, too, as if a fixed line somewhere linking us — I know there can’t be one — is being repeatedly run over by farting Vespas. I return to the street to listen better. I understand very little. It sounds as if the caller is Madame Galena’s daughter. She’s ringing from Rome, where she is with her mother. Someone called Michaela, anyway, will let me in. She is coming. I ask when. Perhaps in ten minutes. I thank her for the call.

  Wolfgang rings again to apologise, but there is nothing he can do. I tell him I’m leaving my stuff in the courtyard. Madame Fernandez should take it into her apartment for safekeeping when she gets back. Wolfie says he is only the agent. He can’t do anything. He must trust owners and concierges to organise such things as the handing over of keys.

  I bury the computer in the backpack, take my scant valuables with me and pile the rest of my things outside the concierge’s door. On a sheet of A4, I scribble that these are the belongings of Monsieur Downes, who is renting the apartment of Madame Galena. I’ll be back before four. Telephone me to tell me how I can get the keys, or leave them in my backpack. Thanks. The Eiffel Tower cannot wait.

  Even on this brutally cold morning I’m expecting queues. But I’ve arrived before lunchtime and shouldn’t have to wait long. In fact, there appear to be no lines of tourists at any of the four piliers ’ the bases or feet of the tower. I know enough about Paris’s premier tourist site not to eat at Le Jules Verne, the tower’s one-Michelin-starred restaurant. It’s simply the cost. But I go over to the south pilier anyway, to read the menu.

  It’s encased in elegant and substantial glass bordered in gold. ‘Jules Verne’ is chased in block capitals across the top. The list is in English and among the ‘Fishes’ is a ‘Thick line-fished john dory lightly grilled, duck liver emulsion, pressed potatoes and mushrooms in terrine’ for a mere 56 euros. ‘Hare from French hunting’, as the list puts it, comes in ‘two styles, royal style upper part, roasted saddle, potatoes Anna’. Cost? Fifty euros. No, I head directly opposite, crossing the asphalt beneath the tower to the north pilier, where ordinary people get in the lifts for the summit and two stops in between. As luck would have it, I’m first in the queue.

  My good fortune is ephemeral. It’s not my day, obviously. The young wom
an behind the bank-thick pane of the ticket office waves her hands at me. I can barely understand her. The cluster of tiny holes drilled through the glass between us extrudes our conversation, etiolates it, distorts meaning. The holes are low, too, and I have to bend to make myself heard. Her computer that prints the tickets is broken, she shrugs. I will just have to wait. The wind whips up and others arrive, wrapping themselves as well as they can. At a glance, we might be at the gates of a Siberian gulag.

  The queue lengthens. Soon there are forty to fifty people behind me. How long can you wait in France? Piece-of-string time. In the ticket office, personnel lounge around and laugh. It must be warm in there, too, because they’re lightly dressed. They smoke. They bellow. Those of us in the queue watch a silent movie. A ‘tech’ arrives. Must be a ‘tech’, I reason, because he’s wearing a beige pullover and trousers instead of jeans. He dives under the counter, fiddles, and looks at computer screens despairingly, darting from one to another. When an employee comes close to the glass, I shout through the holes, ‘Can’t you sell tickets by hand?’

  ‘Non, Monsieur,’ she replies.

  I’ve got time, at least, to decide where I’m going to eat. It will be in the tower’s bistro, Altitude 95, on the first level. And how good will it be? I’ve also got the time to make a bet with myself. The Elior group is a French-listed company with annual revenue of 2.3 billion euros. It has 45,000 employees and 10,600 restaurants and food outlets in Europe and South America. It’s the third biggest company in the European food-service market and the biggest provider of food at museums and exhibitions in France. Eliance Restaurants is a branch of the firm. It manages the food outlets at the tower as well as those at the Louvre, the Versailles palace and the Musée d’Orsay. How good can eating be when it’s provided by a company so gigantic? Does size matter? I place ten euros to win thirty that it will satisfy me.

  Someone in the queue strikes me. Not actually, but I find I’m drawn to a young woman with crinkly straw-blonde hair cascading to her elbows. She looks as if she’s leapt out of a 1960s European celluloid romance — A Man and a Woman, say. But there’s no man that I can see. A waisted long black woollen overcoat hugs her slim frame. She turns up an astrakhan collar about her ears and dances lightly in the glacial temperature. She is booted to the knees in black suede. We exchange glances and she smiles. I’m not leaving the front of the queue. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be averse to her joining me. She doesn’t.

  As icicles begin to droop from our noses and the children’s crying intensifies, the great ticket computers of the Eiffel Tower boot up. The staff behind the glass go back to their labours — reluctantly, if I’m any judge of body language. We’ve waited thirty-five minutes. For 4.10 euros I buy admission to the first level. (It’s 11 euros to the summit.) Nobody buys tickets just to the first or second levels, but the top of the tower is in cloud most of the time today and visibility is terrible even at ground level. (And, yes, I’m mean, as I’ve mentioned, and have been to the summit before.)

  The lift is big enough to take scores of people. It fills quickly. One of the last small spaces is near me in the back corner. The girl in the black overcoat with the astrakhan collar sidles across, a microscopic grin on her lips. I take a stab:

  ‘First time in Paris?’

  ‘Yes,’ she squeaks. Her voice is ludicrous. I try to hide my surprise. It’s like the Métro’s brakes between Invalides and La Tour Maubourg. It’s so eccentric, I wonder if she’s putting it on. Perhaps she has an awful disease. She’s from Phoenix, Arizona, she says.

  ‘And you?’

  I fill her in. As the doors close, she tells me she’s a critical-care nurse, and I say the usual stuff — nothing brilliant, unfortunately, but then I never shine in these situations. Just, like, wow, you must see appalling things. Heck. Gee! I don’t know how you do it. She nods away politely, saying in a resigned, sad way that she’s gotten used to the traumas. How long is she here, I ask. A week.

  The lift scythes upwards through the tower’s drab steel skeleton and level one arrives in no time. I’m the only one getting off, and I push through the others. ‘Might see you on the way down,’ I suggest pathetically, as the doors close. She smiles and waves.

  Altitude 95 is a huge brasserie designed in retro-tech, Dr Who style. Beyond its walls of glass is the muscular superstructure of the tower itself. Inside, the colour scheme is battleship grey, the heads of large rivets border table tops, and convex mirrors bend all the harsh angles. Service trolleys are made from a burnished alloy that could plate a DC3 fuselage, and tub chairs have riveted steel backs. But it must have been done some time ago, because constant use has made everything seem just a little chipped and tired.

  Very few lunchers are in, and I’m taken to bench seating well away from a table of six who smoke. Smoking in restaurants will soon be banned in France, says the maitre d’. He can’t wait. The French have no respect for non-smokers, he adds.

  Altitude 95’s dishes cost less than half the price of those at the Jules Verne. Four entrées precede five main courses and seven desserts. You can eat skate wing with capers and lemon or seafood risotto with olive ‘petals’ for 22 euros, coq au vin for 23 euros and steak tartare with chips and salad for the same price. Desserts cost 8.80 euros.

  What interest me most, however, are two menus: three courses ‘of the day’ for 27.70 euros; or two courses for 21.50 euros. If they’re good, the latter option is pretty much a bargain — bearing in mind that you’re eating in possibly the world’s most famous structure and, on a clear day, you can see all the way to where my belongings are probably getting pinched in the shadow of Sacré-Coeur. The cheaper menu offers six oysters or a ‘parmentier’ soup with bacon batons, fishcake with whipped butter or beef bourguignon, and camembert or floating island (whipped egg-white on a crème anglaise).

  Dishes are a little slow coming out, but they’re delightful. Nothing flash, just good honest traditional tucker. Half-a-dozen oysters are freshly opened, juicy, still attached to their half-shells and as good as can be got. They’re big, steadied on ice, and arrive with half a lemon, slices of an excellent sourdough bread, a pot of fine unsalted butter and a shallotand-red-wine-vinegar sauce. This vinegar-shallot concoction is always served with oysters in France. It’s pure acid, a stupid and thoughtless accompaniment. Beef burgundy — a hearty red-wine stew — is classically tasty and comes with acceptable green and white gnocchi topped with a salsa (blended herbs and oil); cubes of red capsicum, dwarf tomatoes and mushrooms accompany.

  From where I sit, I can see quite a bit of the tower’s level-one promenade. Perhaps half-a-dozen people stroll about, none of them, unfortunately, the critical-care nurse with the squeaky delivery and astrakhan collar. But my stuff might at this instant be making its way into the back of a beat-up Citroën van. I’m a little anxious, and I really shouldn’t dally.

  A globe glows dimly in the concierge’s apartment. A smiling, short, dark woman of strong build and Iberian presence comes to the door. She is so sorry, she repeats a thousand times after I introduce myself. (My gear has been brought inside safely.) She introduces her husband, a neat, trim gentilhomme in a polo shirt and V-neck pullover. They rarely leave the building but had a family emergency today. But, more importantly, she says, they didn’t know I was coming. One of them would have stayed behind to greet me and hand over the keys. Nothing surer, she says. She is so sorry. I explain that I’d exchanged emails with the agency and the owner and I thought everyone was up to speed. She wasn’t told, says Madame Fernandez.

  In two trips I take my stuff up the spiral staircase, which curls tighter than a corkscrew. Its oak treads are a timber timpani in the stairwell, and I can imagine the music several people rushing up and down at once would make. There’s a black-painted metal banister for free hands. The apartment is on the fourth floor, says Madame Fernandez, and I’ll get used to the climb. (There is no lift.) Actually, it’s very good for you, she offers. I know, I say, gasping.

  Madame Gale
na’s two-piece (as this type of accommodation is called) is spectacularly comfortable. It has a separate bedroom, small dining and sitting rooms joined by an arch, a good-sized bathroom, galley kitchen and corridor. It resonates with charm. It’s a very Parisian apartment, but it’s also a home. Someone cares about it. White walls seem freshly painted and are hung with muted prints and small abstract canvases. A sprinter making his way through a midnight sky the colour of van Gogh’s starry night takes up one wall. Goya has influenced its creation. Rush mats cover most of the broad, grey-painted floorboards and ruched drapes in mid-grey organza hang in the tall windows. Like many thousands of Parisian apartments in old buildings, it has been renovated and modernised for warmth, charm and practicality. I’m not sure that the fireplace works, and I’m not game to light up. But its surround is in worked black marble. A mirror above it has a dazzling lime-green frame. Bookshelves are filled with serious reading across many fields, including philosophy and left-wing European politics. There’s not a coffee-table tome in sight, and the small television set is there possibly only because the agency asked Madame Galena to install it. Its rabbit-ear aerial is pretty useless.

  At around five o’clock the phone in the apartment rings. It’s Madame Galena herself, calling from Italy. She is so apologetic. And between pardons, she delivers stinging serves about the agency. She didn’t know I was arriving today, she avers. But, I say, I received an email in excellent English saying that all was well. And I replied to it. Ah, she says, that can’t be right. Her English is very poor, she says. Perhaps they wrote the email for her, she offers. All is well, I say, and no harm has been done. I’m happy and the apartment is wonderful, I tell her. And she hangs up after wishing me the very best possible stay in Paris.