“Let me summarize once again. You step beyond the usual moral constraints, indeed, beyond the point of return, if you are to be believed. But, this is Paris, Robinson. Nothing in your experience convinces me that it lies outside the realm of human experience. Look, Robinson, rue St Honoré is just across from us. That is the street where the ox-cart would carry victims up to the Concorde for the guillotine. Imagine, six thousand heads cut off in a year. So, a man runs into a French woman with a death wish, well, there’s really nothing exceptional about it, is there?”
He looked over the bridge into the Seine.
“For something to be outside the norms, it must only be comprehensible in relation to itself, and not in relation to anything else.”
“You see that bench over there, Tranh? One day, Sheba and I were having a little sit down. It was a beautiful day, and for me, I thought there was only Paris, me and her. Nobody else existed. There was an old man sitting at the neighbouring bench, minding his own business, feeding the doves. Sheba was wearing a long skirt, with a slit up to the thighs. She allowed her leg to slip out and began tracing out circles into the ground. She caught his attention, and then just flashed him one of her looks. But, he turned out to be paresthetic. What followed, Tranh, was not a pretty sight.”
“If I understand correctly, you struck some sort of faustian bargain with her?”
“That’s right.”
“There is something you haven’t told me. Fine, you are not ready. But, you seem driven by some need to penetrate to the inner enclaves of the world of vice, as if it will provide you with some answers. You are not just transgressing a code of ethics, or the ten commandments. You see the cunt as some form of oracle.”
“That’s right! I’ve always thought that Cunt, per se, is something that has nothing to do with the woman.
It’s an independent parasite that lives off the the host body. And, Paris, Tranh, it’s like a big Cunt. It’s why I never feel like I’m walking down St-Denis. I’m slithering down the fallopian tubes of Paris. From one Venus fly trap to another. A honey-dripping lure, drawing me towards her again, to the lair, to her nest, the Queen Bee. She used it like a supra-spiritual vacuum cleaner to suck out any rational thought I had ever had. As if her labia talked to me, whispered to me the same secret over and over again. You know what, Tranh? This may sound insane, but I’m convinced that cunts communicate with each other. They may even come from another planet!” “But, Robinson, you have understood absolutely nothing! This woman, can’t you see, she doesn’t even exist! She is a reflection of your own mind. That is what is driving you crazy. There is nothing wrong with what you did. You fell in love with this woman. That is all.” “You know what, Tranh? You’re the one who doesn’t get it. Sheba is part of the background. My relationship is with her cunt. If I could sever her cunt from the rest of her body, it’d be a perfect relationship.”
He drank down the remainder of his wine. Poured out two more glasses.
“Alors, ça, c’est fort.”
“I haven’t finished yet.”
“What is different about this Sheba?”
I sucked on my cigarette.
“I’ve played out marks, and I’ve been played as a mark. But, this was like a progression. Planned in advance. First, I fucked her. Then, for a while, we were fucking each other. Then, it moved onto her turf. She fucked my mind. Like she moved right inside my brain.”
“She wouldn’t have moved in without an invitation.”
“Probably not,” I conceded, “ but, that’s beside the point. I have a feeling I’m going to run into her again.
This story isn’t over.”
“It’s her Frenchness.” “True. French girls still give head.”
“If you are to engage with the French, you must understand the French. The key to them is to realize that their esthetic of beauty and their revolutionary nature is directly linked to their taste for cruelty.”
Tranh was drunk, but had honed the talent of remaining articulate long after the Médoc had dismantelled his cerebellum into its constituent parts, which gave his speech a tangential flavour of automatism.
“Tell me, Robinson. When you last visited Père Lachaise cemetery, did you notice the engraved message at the entrance? It says: La mort est un sommeil éternel. The man who ordered the engraving was named Fouché. The most dangerous man who ever lived. A vicious, coldblooded atheist. The man who orchestrated Robespierre’s downfall. I have examined paintings of this man in the Louvre. His most pronounced features are his hooded eyelids. This man moved with consummate ease from the secretive cells of the extremist left to the far right, where he eventually became the chief of police in postrevolutionary France. The new millenium, Robinson, will be the era when the Fouchés of the world regain their place in the corridors of power.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point? My point is we are lucky men to idly speak of these things in the early morning.”
Dawn was breaking. The rear façade of Notre Dame etched a silhouette against a charcoal sky. We stood mute, watching a streak of blue on the horizon disappear into a mass of cloud. Then, back to the rain. The night shift girls would be checking into the Byzantin for coffee before returning home to sleep through the daylight hours. Tranh pointed back towards the Brasserie de l ’ île. A woman stepping onto the bridge, her head down, enveloped in a scarf, and a transparent plastic cape over a blouse, mini-skirt, four-inch pumps.
“Look, it is Alena,” he said, as if he’d conjured her up himself.
Tranh waved in her direction. Her head was tilted downwards unnaturally. She drifted momentarily towards a passing car, staggering uncertainly. She aboutfaced, her heels bent inwards as she regained her equilibrium. She continued in our direction, then stopped again, kicked her heels off, placed them side by side on the trottoir. She looked up, caught sight of us. She stared blankly, then lost her footing, propped herself against the balustrade.
“Something is wrong.”
Tranh moved towards her, quickening his stride, then breaking into a run.
“Alena!”
Alena had climbed onto the balustrade, and was now balancing precariously, her eyes riveted on the river.
Tranh advanced until within two metres of her, slowing to a walk. She took one step towards Tranh, her arms extended out wards. Like a child, performing a hopscotch. Tranh opened his arms.
“Just keep your eyes on me, Alena ... easy ...”
She was close, an arm’s length away.
“Non. C’est trop dur.”
She about-faced, exposing a Christian Dior backpack.
“You’re having a bad day. Come down, we can talk about it.”
We were interrupted by a shout, and the appearance of a man coming from the direction of the Left Bank, running onto the bridge.
“Stop! Espèce de salope!” It was Yannick, the doorman. He was choking from the effort of running. The rain pouring down in a steady torrent. I looked back at Alena. Mascara running in rivulets down her cheeks. She leaned forward. Shivering, her bare feet sliding along the chalky surface of the balustrade. Her gaze locked onto mine. She smiled. Recognizing me for the first time.
“Quel con. Goodbye, Franck.”
She looked down for a moment, then jumped. The current immediately caught her, flushing her towards the tip of the square St-Louis. For a moment she looked sky ward in surprise, floundered, disappeared, then reappeared, her arms slapping absurdly against the current. I gripped Tranh’s right arm.
“Forget it, Tranh. It’s too late.”
Alena caught by the undercurrent, was engulfed by a thick, swirling brown eddy. When she reappeared this time, she was face down, and the brown rush of flood waters smashed her roughly against the rock edges of square St-Louis. Yannick standing at the edge.
“Putain, putain, why did you go and do that? Oh,
putain de merde, je vais me flinguer. Fucking hell, it’s all over.”
He fell to the ground, pounded his
fist onto the roadside, weeping uncontrollably.
“Come, Robinson. Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do here. The police will be asking questions, and those questions will lead to more questions.”
We walked towards the Place du Châtelet. The first buses of the morning arrived. Tranh climbed onto the 27, heading towards St-Lazare station.
“Just go home, Robinson. Just one of those things.”
I bid him goodbye, then moved back towards the river again. Two white Renaults had arrived on the bridge. A plainclothes frisking Yannick. His accomplice looking in my direction. I turned left, paid no attention. Walked along the quai des Célestins, then stopped. I lit a cigarette, stared at the river for a while, not thinking much, other than the usual default reflection: what’s the difference Franck, they’re all phantoms, you’re the only real one, they can’t help what they do, and whatever mutant deity created them is far sicker than anybody walking the planet. So, forget about it. There didn’t seem any way out of things, other than dying.
It was one of those pit and pendulum thoughts which made me nauseous. Wasn’t really my style, but I vomited on the ground. Then, I started crying. It was early morning, and I was drunk, and alone. And, in a way, I was enjoying myself. It felt good to be maudlin, shedding tears over a woman who sucked cock for a living. Or at least did until then. I knew that, if I saw my ex-wife jump out of a thirty storey building, it wouldn’t make page 17 in my brain. And somehow that struck me as more evidence that I was where I wanted to be. It made sense to cry over a whore smashing her head on the banks of the Seine. I spotted a cab coming down the quai, and flagged it down.
“Take me to Pigalle. Boulevard Clichy.”
After drifting up and down boulevard Clichy for a while, I noticed the cab driver examining me through his rear view mirror. His nose had been broken a few times. A thick, waxen sheet of black hair draped to a set of shoulders tailor-made for a yoke. His hands oversized, bloated paws which gripped the steering wheel with a contained ferocity.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“Turn North.”
“We just came from the North.” I pulled a few notes from my billfold. He lifted up two fingers of his right hand, retrieved the notes, then glanced back again.
“You know this area?” “Yes. I know it.”
“You looking for someone?” “I haven’t decided yet.”
The Moulin Rouge, a slew of strip clubs and porn palaces, fronted by impresario types trying to lure wandering johns into their haunts, all reassured me that nothing fundamental had changed. We crawled up and down the boulevard a couple more times. I directed him through some of the smaller streets. Rue des Martyrs, rue Houdon, rue des Abbesses. Then a sweep wide towards Père Lachaise cemetery.
“Turn down Sebastopol towards St-Denis.”
“People know me up here in Pigalle. I am an exwrestler. Champion de catch. Could have been champion of France, if it hadn’t been for a fight one night. Cost me four years in la bagne.”
St-Denis had its familiar ramshackle look. A pestilent oasis, ridden with human maggots, but an oasis all the same for those of us who seek such places to relieve us of other malaises ill understood by the healthy of spirit. The driver interrupted my thoughts again.
“My wrestling days are finished. I was bouncer for a while at the Folies Pigalle. It was all right. But, there’s nothing a group of transexuals like better than a fistfight, and whenever the fights broke out, one of them always wanted to take a poke at the biggest man. My last night there, a coked-up tranny in a spandex dress shot me from behind. In the nuque.”
He pushed his right forefinger inside the track of the scar along his nape. “Nobody could get me down on the mat, then some fifty kilo drug addict takes me out. Tant pis. Then I ran into money problems with the milieu. Had to stage my own death. Simplify. Now, I drive, and when I don’t drive, I play my cello at home.”
He glanced into his rear-view mirror, exposing an ugly grimace.
“You think it ’s funny, a big ox like me playing the cello?”
“What’s funny about it?” “You on the run?”
“Stick to your driving.”
He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head.
“You’re the client.”
The real-life outline of the buildings enveloped with an undulant silhouette. Excessive fatigue, or the lousy weather. Or time to see an optometrist.
“Listen, you wouldn’t be interested in some cunt, would you? I can bring you to a place with some first class girls. It will cost you a bit, but they’re clean, you know.”
“Is Club le paradis still open?”
He shook his head, but seemed to cheer up after I passed him one of the notes from my wallet.
“This is Paris, my friend. We don’t find your paradis, we’ll find you something else.”
Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
“You ever want some protection, my friend, you call Victor on this cell phone. You might need it. Things happen to people in this city. Things they never dreamed possible. Some of them are good things. Some of them are not so good.”
“Fuck it, let me off here.”
I had spotted a café at rue des petits carreaux, opening up for textile workers arriving for the day shift. I entered, ordered a coffee, smoked a half dozen cigarettes. Then, decided to call up Ducastin-Chanel. Take her out to lunch. It made sense. A lot of insane propositions make sense at the tail-end of an all-nighter.
I sat in the stairwell for two hours waiting for Ducastin-Chanel to prepare herself for our little date. The taxi took another long hour, while she shivered at curbside rue de Mulhouse and I finished another half pack of cigarettes. It was the first time I had seen her with teeth in her mouth. On her chamois skin, she had stroked a long ivory shadow with her rheumatic claw from lids to brow bone, applied dark brown shadow in creases, then lined her upper eyelids from inner to outer corners with black kohl pencil, curving the line upward at the outer corners. This was capped off with two coats of black mascara on the outer periphery of the upper lashes.
Didier, our flat-nosed Aveyron waiter, dropped a couple of kirs. Paid her a compliment on her crinolined evening dress and white opera gloves. Ducastin-Chanel responded that they were a replica of Gina Lollobrigida’s costume in ‘La Morte Ha Fatto L'uovo.’ “Or was it: ‘Death laid an egg’?”
She berated Didier upon learning he had used Muscadet instead of Bourgogne Aligoté in the Kir.
“Give a lady a cigarette, Franck.”
I passed her a Marlboro. She cradled the cylindrical shape in her fingers like a trophy.
“You don’t believe it, do you, Franck?”
“Believe what?”
“That these chapped old lips ... you know, Franck.”
“No. You’ve got something. I could see you giving a man pleasure.”
“Not just pleasure, Franck. I could deliver pain. And pain could be lucrative.” Didier dropped a bottle of Grand Vin Château Tayac, a Cru Bourgeois 1993. Ducastin-Chanel stared at the glass. She pushed her knuckly hands around the stem of the glass, lifted it to her lips, which hung like rotted bark. For a moment, she was impervious to me, staring through the glass with that glaucoma glare favoured by the geriatric. She was like anyone old. When they get you at close quarters, they won’t give you what you need unless you listen to the rest. And the rest never matters. “ W hat about the gamine? You said you’d tell me where I could find her.”
“When you get older, people no longer respect you.
I don’t blame them. I was a balance for a while. Passed on information to the Brigade Judiciaire on Pierre Lescot.
But the younger ones didn’t respect me. I don’t blame them.”
She smiled coquettishly, looked at her empty glass.
“Can’t a girl have some fun, Franck?”
I waved Didier over. She had something, although it had become a little bit sthpeshial with the passing years.
“They were good days. You s
ee, Franck ... it’s Franck,
isn’t it?”
“Yeah ... what about la gamine?”
Her teeth clamped shut at fair velocity. That skinny claw of hers suddenly gripped onto my left wrist, and her look became ferocious, confessional, as if she’d waited since that night at the Bobigny forty-seven years ago to release the secret within her.
“Listen to me, Franck, we gave people a destiny. The bordellos in those days were beautiful places. The johns circulated freely through the rooms. There was entertainment. Dancing, bal-musette, smok ing rooms. Of course, we had to deal with the police, but this is France, Franck. Things can be discussed. I need some money, Franck ...” She glanced down at her crotch.
“It’s all over now. I don’t blame them. Why should I blame them? Franck, you know something ... you look terrible.”
The boudin and mashed potatoes arrived ...
II
One of the reasons you keep running into the same actors in the global café scene is that these places are basically high-end franchise operations for the lost souls of the world. W hether it ’s Harry’s Bar, the Café Carlyle in New York or Le Fouquet’s on the Champs Elysées, which I was about to enter, you can program these people as easily as the consumers at McDonalds or your local Burger King. Just substitute Chablis Laroche for the root beer and souris d ’agneau confite au romarin for the big whoppers and you have the ticket.
I always walk into a café periscope up, do a quick survey to see if there is any loose poontang, as the hillbillies call it, and park myself within a table or maximum two of the prey for the evening. As the thermal sensors moved to the right side, who do I see, but Sheba herself sitting at a table with a Paki wearing too many rings, looking bored, dabbling idly at the remains of a Baba au Rhum, while sipping a vodka martini. She wore a fur coat that looked pretty fresh off the rack. Her eyes bugged out when she saw me, no doubt at the promise of an escape route from her current beau but, credit where it’s due, the enthusiasm was there.
“Franck!”
Waving me to a table on the other side of Le Fouquet’s, at a safe distance from her escort.
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