I walked down to Invalides. Soon the vast lawn I crossed would be floodlit, and the lights on the Eiffel Tower, further down the Seine, were coming on. I crossed the Pont des Invalides to the Right Bank. Most of the pedestrians were coming the other way, coming home from the city. They looked tired, it looked like the end of their day. I was leaving my work and my day had only just begun.
Sometimes I imagine Paris from above: my view swoops down and skims its rooftops, and the city looks to be carved from a mass of grey stone. I am a dark dot moving along the narrow streets after the Madeleine, lines etched in its ancient face, and the river I leave behind is its mouth, turned down at the corners, or up, depending on which way you face. Looking back, it was up.
I reached the tenth. Cinema neons and palatial fast food restaurants marked the length of the boulevards. I headed over them to smaller streets. It was dark now and the bars were getting crowded, warmly lit like brandy. I zigzagged my way across and up, discovering back lanes I’d never seen before, squalid and lively, losing myself in the old passages, finding myself on rue St Denis.
I looked at my reflection in a shop window I passed. This jacket fitted me perfectly; I couldn’t imagine Claudine wearing it. She’d think she was dreaming when she went back downstairs and found it wasn’t there. I thought about the photo of my family I’d left behind, and the tears soaked up by the white pile, and other parts of me that would remain with the Durebex. Things they wouldn’t notice till later, if ever.
Perhaps they’d know it was me and try and trace this jacket, but they didn’t have my new address, or my phone number. Perhaps, like Laurent and so many others, they’d look at the photo and think Caroline was me. I saw faxes come shrieking out of her machine just when she’d set up an office back in Sydney. No sooner repatriated then expatriated.
My left glove kept falling off, nudged by the rim of the cast. I was in a hurry to have it painted – the white plaster was staining my clothes, and Chantale had said she’d finish it with a sealer. I tried out different movements to locate the pain in there – levering the fingers one by one, twisting the wrist, so tightly bound it was more a psychological than physical twisting, straining the muscles down my arm through to my hand – but the break seemed to have disappeared inside the plaster, deep inside the bone, to somewhere unreachable. I was left with a feeling of shame and pleasure, as though I’d succeeded in fooling someone. Decoration seemed appropriate.
Two women came out of a building in front of me. An older and a younger. The similarity in their gait and their four high cheekbones gave them away as mother and daughter. They passed me, arguing.
I felt like one of these buildings. You could see the outline of the original design, now warped, and the balconies had been redone; soot darkened the grooves between each stone. Out of sight a lift had probably been installed, and on street level the shopfront was new.
To me these buildings were like members of a family. They just kept being renewed over the old foundations, they couldn’t help but change and they couldn’t change what they were built on. Each event, each inhabitant left a mark.
I was late, it was cold, and my knee still hadn’t healed. I stopped at a crêpe stand for a ham and cheese crêpe, then I walked up to Barbès-Rochechouart. The métro was running after all. Why was everybody so sure there would be a strike?
I put the last piece of crêpe in my mouth and through the hot plume of my breath I watched a métro pull out. One by one the blue-lit carriages emerged from the station above.
Salut Barbès.