Life and nothing but!

We have been in Paris a month now. Hard to believe!. Slowly we have embedded ourselves into the soft texture of the quartier. The blond lady at the news stand, walking back from the neighboring café, coffee cup in hand (a cup on a saucer, not a mug), greets me with a smile and a “Bonjour, Monsieur”. She assumes her post, framed by colorful magazine covers, shelves cluttered with newspapers and publications in several languages (French, English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, German). To step into her booth, she has to swing the front, articulated in the center, like a revolving door. She places her coffee cup carefully on the front shelf, steps up, sits down on a stool, adjusts her skirt and swings the front back around herself. It reminded me of a sequence in the first “Alien” film, the Ridley Scott one, when Sigourney Weaver, having detected the alien in the escape pod, carefully dons a space-suit, her armor, to face her altered surroundings. So this average French lady dons the information structure of the world, the interface of the world and the city. Then she stirs her coffee, sips it, takes my coins, hands me my paper. We are not strangers any more, we engage in this almost daily ritual, we share a structure.

Here begins my differentiation. Although you cannot be said to have “gone native” until you have familiarized yourself to the coins you handle, until you can tell whether the change that you have just received is correct by just glancing at them, and not turning them to read their denomination, this mutual recognition constitutes the shaping of a space in the daily fabric of the city for me to occupy.

We are beginning to adopt habits and actions that, although in some way mirroring our usual actions at home, are specific to the place, to the environment. We go to the market at Richard Lenoir on Thursdays and Sundays, we have settled on the boulangerie that offers the most tasteful baguette, I have found the two cafés in the neighborhood that will brew a cup of expresso for one euro flat. The bus numbers at the shelters have fleshed out to evoke destinations, schedules and streetscapes. Linda tells me that every day she instinctively finds a new route to walk to her classes, mazing and wending through the narrow streets with the unfamiliar names.

When we venture daily out of the quartier, I feel a bit adventurous, but I also distance myself from the throngs who people the guidebook sites; I am not a tourist anymore, I elevate myself to a different dimension. In the streets filled with fast-food places offering shawarma, falafel, hamburgers and fries, I quicken my pace and try to look alien to that civilization. If I want an ice-cream, it has to be Berthillon, I look askance at the heaps of prepared subs on the Place Saint Michel, and to the T-shirt vending pushcarts with their loads of aluminum Eiffel towers, adopting the practiced snobbery of the initiated. Linda reported excitedly that she had been stopped in the street by someone needing directions! And she was able to comply. The strike of the blade on her shoulder!

Yet I do not feel the quotidian as tiresome or faded. There is still the sensation of rebirth, of excitement, of newness. This familiarity is exciting in itself, the feeling of being able to master a new environment, of experiential enlargement. The little walk that I undertake most days, to get the newspaper, to buy a croissant, to walk along Saint-Antoine’s sidewalk, looking into the cafés and shop windows, the fromager with hundreds of cheeses, the chocolatier and his confections, the several wine-shops, past the restaurants, reading the slates where the daily menus are displayed, every day a similar trajectory, but always something new. I relish being able to feel the season changing; although it is still warm, and sunny most days, the trees near Saint-Paul are beginning to turn, and in the evenings a little chill presages a killing frost in the making. But most of all the changing displays of fruit in the stalls, every day a different offering, the mushrooms, first girolles, now cèpes, the first chestnuts and walnuts. Huge blackberries have joined the trays of raspberries, and two weeks ago the purple figs appeared, at seven Euros a kg.; they are now taking over every display, prices tumbling daily.

The menus in the restaurants have also evolved with the season, they are shorter on salads and the boeuf bourguignon and blanquettes de veau, food for the colder weather, have appeared on their slates. On some of the cooler days, the merchants do not push out the refrigerated ice-cream chests any more.

As I am sitting here now, in the apartment, windows open, I relish the city sounds pouring in the open window. The steps, the conversations of the passers-by, the rumble of the scooters, the children’s muted din in the schoolyards around us, the bells in the churches pealing the passage of time. Life all around me.