The fire regulations at Le Ciel de Paris are exactly as they were before September 11: exit in a calm and orderly fashion via the stairs. And if the stairs are damaged, full of smoke, white hot, like an oven? Well, um, wait calmly to be burned, asphyxiated, or crushed to death. Okay, fine, thanks. The way up to the roof is still sealed off to stop smart kids coming and partying at night. It happened: a couple of years back, a gang of squatters organized a picnic on the roof of the tower. Since then, the movements of every young alcoholic are carefully monitored.
“In any case,” said a member of the security staff, “if a 747 flew into the Tour Montparnasse, it would be sliced in two straightaway so the question of evacuation wouldn’t arise.”
Well, that’s reassuring. To get my mind off the subject I think about a serious semantic problem which has occured to me: what verb should one use for parking a plane in a building? Not “to land,” since there is no longer any question of reaching land (the same problem arises with the French atterrir, which presupposes the presence of terre beneath the wheels). I propose “to skyscrape.” Example: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We are now approaching our destination and will soon be skyscraping in Paris. Please stow your tray tables, return your seats to the upright position and fasten your seat belts. We hope you’ve enjoyed your flight with Air France and regret that we will not have the pleasure of seeing you on our airlines, or indeed anywhere else, again.”
That said, you can visit the roof during the day. Unlike the roof of the North Tower of the World Trade Center (inaccessible), the roof of the Tour Montparnasse is open to the public for a fee of €8. You can take the elevator to the fifty-sixth floor with a handful of Japanese tourists dressed in black and a mustachioed security guard wearing a navy blue blazer with gold buttons. (When I was a kid, I was dressed like that: itchy flannel trousers and a sailor’s blazer, and I probably looked just as furious.) On the fifty-sixth floor, you visit a little exhibition about Paris, and already you can enjoy the panoramic views. My gaze plummets through the picture windows to Montparnasse cemetery looking for Baudelaire’s grave, a white pebble in a garden of stone. On the left, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the distant childhood I try to prolong by remaining stock-still, as if staying in the same place geographically might somehow stop time. I’m not young anymore, simply geostationary. A dismal cafeteria (the Café Belvédère) serves goblets of hot liquid to tired provincials. To get to the roof, you have to brave a stairway that smells of bleach (memories of swimming pools, rowdy lessons, toweling swimming trunks, and smelly feet). Out of breath, I climb the last steps, my efforts rewarded by stenciled numbers on the wall indicating the altitude (“201 meters, 204 meters, 207 meters”). A metal gate opens onto the sky. Wind whistles through the bars. From here, you can see planes take off from Orly. In the middle of the concrete roof, a white circle has been painted for helicopters to skyscrape. If I wanted to, I could throw things into the void onto passersby. I might be arrested for vandalism or attempted murder or malicious wounding occasioning involuntary manslaughter, or dangerous schizophrenia or inexplicable hysteria or frenzied panic. Pink mist, far off, over the Sacré-Coeur. A billboard attempts a pun: LA VUE PARISIENNE. This is mine: my name is Frédéric Belvédère. I go downstairs to Le Ciel de Paris. A similar restaurant exists in Berlin at the summit of the Fernschturm on Alexanderplatz, and that one spins round like a record. In the seventies, the modern world desperately wanted to dine in a skyscraper, lunch in the stratosphere, eating at altitude was chic—I don’t know why. On the floor with the “panoramic exhibition,” a screening room shows old aerial pictures of Paris to a depressing flute soundtrack. The tape wows and flutters. People in anoraks walk around looking bored. Lovers force themselves to kiss full on the mouth despite their breath. A child yawns; I imitate him; perhaps he is me.
And then, instinctively, for no particular reason I turn to look at Denfert-Rochereau and that’s when I see a human ribbon made up of thousands of individuals, a river of hair piled up round the square. The largest antiwar demonstration for fifty years; it is February 15, 2003. Yesterday, the U.S. took on France in the U.N. Security Council. The President of the United States, like his father, wants to go to war on Iraq; the President of France does not agree. Anti-Americans slug it out with Francophobes. Televised insults are hurled liberally on both sides of the Atlantic. At the foot of my tower, the mammoth protest march stretches from the Place Denfert to the Bastille—200,000 people marching in the cold along the Boulevard Saint-Michel, beneath the freezing sky of the Boulevard Saint-Germain…On the same day, the same number of marchers are saying the same thing on the streets of New York. I take the elevator down to join them. Am I a coward, an appeaser, an anti-Semite, a cheese-eating surrender monkey, as the American newspapers say? Turning back toward the smoked-glass monolith from which rays of sunlight ricochet, I decide to rename the Tour Montparnasse. In contrast to the Twin Towers, I shall name it the Lonely Tower. This curved rectangle, the shape of a cracked almond at each end, that ridiculous, forlorn beacon surges from between the couscous restaurants and the merguez vendors. Along the Rue du Départ, I meet lots of North Africans in front of a wall which has been painted by Walt Disney Pictures acclaiming The Jungle Book 2. Baloo the bear is dancing with Mowgli across ten meters of façade among the stale fat of shish kebabs. The protesters brandish STOP THE WAR banners. The Disney movie takes place in the Indian jungle colonized by the British. But there is a moral to the book that is absent from the cartoon: “Now in the jungle there’s something more than the law of the jungle.” Come back, Kipling, they’ve all gone mad!