a transmission from paris

Hello,

This is a long one. Strap in.

…

There is a man who squats at the Rue du Bac station on the Aubervilliers side of the line 12 platform. When I go home from school in the evening, sometimes I catch him there. Depending on the hour, he is either sleeping under a yellowing duvet, or he is praying due east. As far as I have seen, his pale prayer mat is always underneath him for both activities.

…

Bubar bears almost no signage except for a few laminated menus on the window. Inside there are walls of wine and CDs, stacks of hats and books. There are only three “tables” to speak of. The one in the windowed corner is reserved for people who purchase by the bottle. One is a large barrel with a chessboard on top. The last is a small barrel, only fit for a few wine glasses and the crowd of chairs that unstack around it. Along the bar top are toy cars of all sizes, naked dolls made to face each other in a mimicry of sex, and more wine bottles with little knitted hats.

Jean-Lou is the barman. His uniform consists of a hat from the stacks, vests, and shorts – always shorts, regardless of the weather. He has invited me to join his friends and regulars at the farmer’s market on Sundays for wine and oysters. Some weeks, I see him more than my professors. He owns the wine bar and has for the last thirty or so years. I’ll ask for a glass of whatever red he already has open for the night, and he’ll bring out some sort of food for us to snack on. He makes off-color jokes about the women who walk in and worse jokes about the men that he knows, and he does, in fact, know most of the people who walk in.

The bar is closing in the next week or so, and I’ve somehow joined the procession of people mourning it.

…

Since February, I’ve had styes three different times. I’ve become far too well-versed in the variation of styes possible to humans, and thanks to WebMD, I am also well-versed in the worst case scenarios for each one. I still have a recalcitrant lump on my right eyelid. According to Google, it is harmless and should go away in the next month or so. If it doesn’t, then apparently surgery is recommended.

…

There is a cafe on the corner of the street where I live. In the fashion of many Parisian cafes, they have all-day service, catering drinks and food to the time of day (i.e. in the morning, there is coffee and breakfast; in the evening, there is dinner and cocktails). This one distinguishes itself by having a green motif. I perhaps go there too often to the point that some of the servers seem to recognize me.

One day, I went there in the morning for breakfast and to complete some schoolwork. I saw these construction workers stop at the counter with their neon orange vests. They chatted with the staff, calling each of them by name. It must’ve been 11am or maybe even closer to noon at that point, but both men ordered whiskey neat and an espresso on the side. I can only assume they were ending their shift somewhere, completing those silent night assignments that help keep the rest of the city running. Although if it was the middle of their workday, it would explain why construction in Paris seems to take a year minimum to finish.

…

The days have been getting warmer. I think when I talk about how much I love to see a blue-sky over Paris, it isn’t really about the weather. In reality, I am chasing a sense-memory — sunglasses on a cafe terrace, a book or pretending to write, the smell of cigarettes and beer. I’m looking for the rush of being 20 and in Paris for the first time, or being 22 and in love for the first time, or maybe I’m just chasing the dream of being Anthony Bourdain.

…

Last week, I spent 8 hours in the library, failing a skills test for a job interview, catching up on overdue internship tasks, and scrambling to finish the executive summary for my final graduation assessment. On my cigarette breaks, I would go and watch the Young Palestinians event. They set up at the base of the courtyard, shielded from the rain by the awning in front of the cafeteria. They aren’t an official student association, but even so, two weeks ago they drew the rancor of half the conservatives in Paris to protest in front of our university buildings. The whole fiasco even ended up in international media outlets. People told their stories and performed music in the gray, and the periodic cheering broke through the fugue state of my cramming.

…

That first summer, Dr. Anderson took us to the Abbey Bookshop because the line at Shakespeare and Company was too long that day. I buy almost all of my English language books from them. This year, I went after spending half of Sunday wine-drunk and eating oysters at the farmer’s market. After buying my books, I poured myself coffee from their carafe outside and went to sit on some church steps nearby. As the wine-haze faded, I watched some boys play soccer across cobblestone in the ebbing light, and I thought about the last time I was there. I was sweating and reading Anne Carson and getting back together with my ex-girlfriend.

…

I was at Bubar again last week, and a man told me that he wanted to share as much as he could before he died, so I listened to him.

Alain was wearing a hat and a button-up flannel with long gray hair and a beer belly. He looked like a cowboy from a time when cows no longer exist, and the tradition is passed down by word alone. This is his transmission.

He talked about mathematics at first and how easy it is for him. Mathematics is just another way to see the world after all. As a young boy, he could even understand Descartes’ philosophical explanations on the subject. He’s a genius as was his mother and his grandfather. But they were all too different for this world, for their village. They were too fast. His mother was ‘like a schizophrenic,’ his grandfather something similar. When his grandfather died, he left a fiefdom of spare parts. A mechanic in a small village, smart beyond his reality, he would collect anarchic parts, and he always understood how all of it could work together.

Alain is old now with a son that is good at mathematics but thankfully not a genius and slow enough for this world to refrain from crushing him as it did the rest of the lineage. The son is seventeen. The father is in his sixties and has had many women before, during, and after the mother — but that is neither here nor there.

When Alain was sixteen, he could construct symphonies and concertos in the manner of Mozart in his mind, but his father wouldn’t support him. All his life, Alain has gone fast, faster than the others — too fast, too fast, too fast. He told me that back then, all of his friends told him that he should buy a motorcycle, but he refrained. He knew that if he ever got one, then he would’ve crashed and died.

I only met him that one night, and halfway through his monologue, I saw him cry.

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
This is the last book that I’ve finished, which given the intentions of this newsletter, seems fitting to share. I took a one-year moratorium from reading any more Murakami, and coming back to it, this one felt like being 17 and reading him for the first time. This is the story of a lonely young man and his one and only true friend in the world when she disappears from it. The young woman is in love with an older woman and can only think through writing. Her character, in particular, has struck me in a certain way.

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie