Chapter 29

C’est Pas Possible!

COMING UP TO THE END of my fourth year in France, it was time, I decided, to take stock. I resolved to try something novel for the occasion and hence opted for a night in with a home-cooked meal. Outside the street was slicked black from a recent burst of ice-cold rain. Autumn had taken hold of the city. People wrapped in heavy coats rushed down the rue outside my window, huddled against the chill and running to escape the rain. I cracked open a bottle of Talisker whiskey, cranked up the heat, lit a few candles, and sat in my orange-walled womb, reflecting on how much I had penetrated the city in the last four years and exactly how far my assimilation as an honorary Parisian had progressed.

I was still known as le kangarou to my neighbors and most of the store and café owners in the street. It was clear I was never going to be a fully integrated Frenchie, but I had nonetheless done a reasonable job getting my head around many of the country’s unique cultural quirks. Even so, there were many mysteries about the French that I would never fathom. So time-honored, so steeped in history, and so much a part of the cultural fabric of the nation were they, I could never hope to make sense of them.

Why, for instance, did many old Parisian apartments have the shower cubicle in the kitchen? Was it a plumbing issue, requiring that all water pipes in an apartment pass through the same room? Was it a peculiarly French time-saving device, allowing people to incorporate the washing of dirty dishes with their daily ablutions? And when and where did it become a good idea to encourage the wide distribution of electric toilets? During the last four years I had had occasion to use an electric toilet more times than I cared to remember. And while they might have been great for conserving water, there was always something unnerving about squatting over what is essentially an industrial-sized blender.

And why was Johnny Hallyday, a 1950s teen idol, still the most popular recording artist in France? Come to think of it, what was with the French predilection for all things 1950s? Especially rock-and-roll dancing? Why was it that no matter what music was playing, be it swing, a waltz, jazz, heavy metal, or techno, the French would always find a way to dance Le Roc to it? Was the jive taught to them at school along with their times tables? Were they honestly so blinkered as to believe that the rest of the world was also still jitterbugging and twisting, fifty years after the music’s birth? Elvis was dead, so why was this nation still stuck in a collective dance time warp?

These French conundrums consumed me as I sipped thoughtfully on my tumbler of Talisker. No matter how long I stayed, I concluded, I was destined never to properly work them out. But my stay in la belle France hadn’t been a complete waste of time. With some contentment I sat back and reflected on the marrow I had sucked out of life since arriving in Paris. And with no small amount of pride I enumerated the cultural idiosyncrasies that I had managed to unravel.

One revelation, which had come admittedly later in my Paris existence than was strictly desirable, was the discovery of the “Two Nos Before a Yes” principle. This is the unwritten law underpinning the entire service industry in France. A rule unknown to tourists and recently arrived expats, it states that for every request you make of a sales assistant, bank clerk, Métro ticket-seller, or bureaucrat—anyone, that is, who you might mistakenly think exists to provide you with a service—you will receive two negative responses before you get an affirmative one. It’s a rule that can be applied no matter what the scenario. Need to change a train ticket? Steel yourself for two emphatic denials before you see any cooperation. Want to seek an extension on payment of your tax bill? Prepare to weather a double barrage of emphatic nons before a oui, d’accord miraculously appears. Want to convince a French woman to sleep with you? Pay no attention whatsoever to the first two rejections, safe in the knowledge that acquiescence is but one more attempt away. True, in the process of learning to dance this elaborate social tango, your average newcomer to France loses a lot of time and money. But it was a rite of passage, I now understood, and once you were in the club, a whole world of possibilities eventually opened up to you. Yes, I thought as I watched a gaggle of boys tramp down the street in clothing patently unsuitable for the plunging temperatures, grasping the Two Nos Before a Yes principle had made my life in Paris remarkably easier.

If only I had had a similar level of success penetrating that great cornerstone of the French system—the c’est pas possible, c’est toujours comme ça conundrum. Spend a reasonable amount of time in the country, and you cannot help but come to the conclusion that everything in France starts from the default position of impossible. “C’est pas possible!” is a refrain you hear from the boulangerie to the presidency. It’s the knee-jerk response to any and every question. The c’est pas possible assertion is neatly complemented by the c’est toujours comme ça explanation. The first states the absolute impossibility of something coming to pass; the second buttresses the initial statement with an explanation against which there is no rational argument. What you are asking of me is not possible because it has always been like that.

It’s an impenetrable circle of negativism, a perfectly self-contained circular argument that frustrates French people, expats, and tourists alike on a daily basis. And don’t bother pointing out the illogicality of it all. Your argument will be met only with a Gallic shrug, a prototypical pursing of the lips, and the sharp exhalation of air. Together these two seemingly innocent expressions encapsulate all that is infuriating about the French. A reluctance to change. A complete aversion to the notion of customer service. And a smugness that asserts that la méthode française is the only way ever to do anything.

Take, for example, ordering a steak in a Paris restaurant. French chefs are justifiably proud of the extremely high quality of their country’s cuisine. Chances are they know better than 90 percent of their clientele exactly how to cook a steak to make it taste best. But if a customer has a penchant for rump burnt to a crisp, then surely they can expect to receive their steak appropriately well done.

“Do you suppose the chef could cook this steak really well?” a customer might reasonably ask of his waiter. “I mean really well—black on the outside, no blood on the inside.

“Non monsieur,” comes the inevitable reply. “C’est pas possible.”

“Um, why not?”

“Parce que c’est toujours comme ça.” Argue your way around that one.

The tide in the Talisker bottle was fast retreating. While outside a light rain had started to fall, inside, the list of timeless French imponderables was growing.

The Two Nos Before a Yes principle and the Pas possible—toujours comme ça conundrum were certainly annoying, I thought to myself, but neither of them held a candle to the great French normalement phenomenon. Translated literally, normalement means “normally” or “usually.” Coming from the mouth of a French person, especially one whose job it supposedly is to provide you with a customer service, it has the power to make your blood bubble with rage. The word is employed to give a level of vagueness to proceedings, a noncommittal answer to a specific question. Rather frustratingly, I most often encountered the word used by people in the transportation industry.

“I wonder if you could tell me if there is a train this afternoon for Marseille?” you might ask a ticket vendor.

“Normalement” would come the reply.

“Do you mean normally yes, or normally no?”

“I mean normally there is a train this afternoon to Marseille. Whether the one scheduled to run this afternoon actually does, well, I couldn’t tell you.”

Setting aside the fact that the vendor was technically correct, his statement was unhelpful in that manner that French people have perfected over centuries—and was therefore infuriating. After all, it wasn’t as if you were asking for a cast-iron guarantee. In the event the train did not run because of unforeseeable circumstances—an act of God, say, or a derailment—you were hardly likely to hunt down the ticket vendor and beat him to a pulp. And yet he refused to give a definitive answer, for to do so would be to assume responsibility and possibly invite blame should his pronouncement not come to pass. Better to shirk responsibility with a noncommittal response. That way, nothing would ever be his fault.

Yes, there were things that I had no hope of ever understanding, cultural chasms that would never be breached. But after four years, all things considered, I figured I was doing okay. I had a great network of friends, a cushy, well-paid job, an overactive social life, and a six-month-a-year travel itinerary that was as full as it was interesting. On the personal-life front, things were starting to look up too. I had just met a lovely Australian showgirl to whom, over a period of some months, I was starting to become closer. Shay’s nocturnal work schedule, which sat at complete odds to my nine-to-five responsibilities, meant that we only seemed to enjoy semiregular phone contact and the occasional crossing of paths at dinners and parties thrown by mutual friends. But even so, there was definite love-interest potential there. What’s more, Paris had just started to feel very much like home. Un kangarou I might well have been, but one with a stripy shirt, a curled mustache, and a beret.

With the whiskey warming my belly, I switched on my laptop to check my e-mails before turning in for the night. A message from the human resources manager at work caught my attention.

Please come and see me first thing in the morning, it read. There is a very serious problem with your residency status. According to our records you have been working and living in France illegally for the past four years. This situation cannot continue.