Almost French (16 page)

But I love having time to research and write. Feature
writing is incredibly varied. One day you’re sitting in the palatial Hôtel Crillon interviewing Jeremy Irons about his latest film, the next you’re on an RER train to a bleak Paris suburb to interview angry French–Algerian youth. And although it’s a battle to find publications willing to pay travel expenses, some magazines do send me abroad. There is nothing glamorous about these trips. Commissioning editors always lament how they’d give me more money for expenses—of course they would!—if it weren’t for their miserly editorial budgets. Invariably I end up in a modest hotel in a seedy part of town. But it wouldn’t occur to me to complain; I’m grateful for every break.

These trips away exemplify the best thing about the job of a journalist. For short, intense periods you’re welcomed into worlds that are completely different from your own. Ordinary people tell you their extraordinary stories. And although they will quickly forget you, you don’t forget them. Their lives—touching, heartbreaking and sometimes uplifting—somehow stay with you. The handsome twenty-something boys in downtown Sarajevo—one Serb, one Croat, the other Muslim—best friends since childhood whose stirring story was simply the fact they’d remained best friends throughout the war. The Sicilian widow dressed in peasant black who broke the Omerta code of silence when she stood up in a courtroom filled with menacing Mafiosi and pointed to the men who murdered her husband. The tiny woman in Belfast who, two decades after her son was murdered during the Troubles, still says a prayer and lights a candle for him every night.

Once the office furniture is assembled and my clippings are all filed, I settle down to work. With no trips planned in the immediate future, for the next few months I enjoy
writing in the peace of my new office. That is, until
la rentrée
in early September, the official start of the new school year, when all of a sudden a stir-crazy cacophony rips through my office window, tearing like a comet through my concentration.

Incredibly, we’d bought our apartment without knowing that a school wraps around the base of the building. Our visits had fallen on weekends or after hours when all was still and quiet. By the time we moved in, classes had already broken up for the long summer break. Not surprisingly, the real estate agent didn’t mention the school when we’d enquired about our neighbours. Directly below us, it isn’t visible without leaning precariously out the windows.

But oh how we hear it, I now discover. The playground is asphalt and ridiculously small because in France education is about filling heads with facts, not having fun (even if this is a
maternelle primaire
, which means the pupils range in age from three to eleven). Several times each day, one hundred under-exercised kids catapult out of class to run around something the size of a tennis court, squealing and screaming. The noise problem comes to a head soon after they start back. One morning, rushing to meet a deadline for a story on the far-right National Front party, I can’t think for the whining wail of a little girl.

‘Give me the ball! Give me! GIVE MEEE!’ Her bawling is maddening—like a siren that can’t be switched off. Then, after about five minutes, suddenly quiet. The ball crisis is over. Relieved, I turn back to my computer screen. Her next cry makes me jump, blasting through my window with all the operatic force her little lungs can muster: ‘
MAMAN
,
MAAMAN!
’

I stick my head out the window.

‘JUST GIVE HER THE BLOODY BALL! NOW SHUT UP THE LOT OF YOU!’

There is an astonished silence from below. Immensely satisfied, I imagine one hundred bewildered little heads swivelling to spot the screaming madwoman. But they can’t see me any more than I can see them. Only later does it occur to me that I never would have done this in Australia; that this rather forceful approach to the problem is actually quite French. In our
quartier
, I’ve seen mothers lambasting toddlers for dirtying their clean clothes; adults—perfect strangers—roaring abuse at each other because someone’s scooter is blocking someone else’s doorway.

The silence from below doesn’t last—within seconds the playground erupts in an excited babble of retaliatory
SHUT-UPS
which escalate until a teacher is finally forced to leave his lunch to establish some order. In time, though, I get used to this juvenile clamour and even grow fond of it. My work schedule adapts to the school day. I learn to avoid doing phone interviews during playtime. When the classes pour outside for lunch it’s a sign for me to take a break too. Every now and then from my lofty, unseeing vantage point I adjudicate disputes. Like me, I sense the children quite enjoy our exchanges.

More worrying are the thumping
THWACKS!
which send tremors through our building several times a day. The neighbours’ dog breaks into alarmed barking; the fourth floor babies wake and wail. The first time it happens I scamper down the stairwell, half-expecting to discover a semitrailer has crashed through our front entrance. But the cause of the quaking is rather more mundane. Fabric. Mammoth rolls of ordinary material are being delivered to the clothing sweat shops which occupy the first three levels of our building.
Reaching their destination, the workmen let the lead-weight cylinders topple and crash to the floor.

We live on the perimeter of two overlapping
quartiers
. Immediately to the south is the Montorgueil neighbourhood—quite a respectable, hip Paris address. But a few paces north is the heart of the city’s rag trade district known as the Sentier. A maze of skinny streets, overcrowded workshops, poky passages and fire-hazard buildings, the area has been the launch pad for some major French labels such as Kookai and Naf Naf. Mostly, the businesses are owned by Sephardic Jews from North Africa. The secret of the Sentier’s success is hard work and fast production—between them the several thousand workshops can handle huge orders and short deadlines, churning out beaded T-shirts or fringed pants in their hundreds. Sure, it’s not Dior or Chanel but the clothes are fashionable and cheap.

Despite its central location, you won’t find the Sentier listed in many guide books. When mentioned, it is usually to say that This is Not the Sort of Area Where Most People Would Like to Live. Although we weren’t deterred by this widely held opinion, it is somewhat justified. The delivery trucks are responsible for some of the worst traffic jams in Paris. They block the narrow streets, nonchalantly loading or unloading while outraged drivers toot and shout abuse. Pedestrians have to dodge racing porters wheeling trolleys piled with fabric and rolling rails of clothing. Residents can forget about owning a car—you’ve got more chance of being kidnapped by an alien aircraft than finding a space big enough for a mini. Rather than risk the hassles and daily parking fines, we decide to leave Frédéric’s car on a boulevard at Levallois while we work out whether or not to sell it.

The sewing machines in our building purr seven days a
week and in summer, with the windows wide open, we can hear them racing up seams and frantically spearing zippers. Frequently, leaving our building means fighting through five hundred cropped denim jackets or sliding down stairs sparkling with sequins, already falling off before the clothes even make it into the shops. Although there is wide opposition to the Sentier—from taxi drivers and city planners to environmental groups and residents—so far campaigns to move the district out of Paris have failed.

Over-the-top, in-your-face, a law unto itself, that’s the Sentier for you. Illegal immigrants are paid by the garment to work outrageously long hours in workshops which breach the gamut of health and safety regulations. Swindling is carried out on a mythic scale. One audacious racket involved ripping off scores of financial institutions to the tune of about $150 million, through an elaborate network of money laundering and cheque kiting. After investigators swooped on the area, one hundred businesses were found to be directly involved. Before the case could be tried in 2001, a special eight-hundred square metre court room had to be built in the Palais de Justice to hold all the accused.

For a long time, merely mentioning the Sentier would likely elicit anti-Semitic remarks. Even the established Ashkenazim in the nearby Marais disdained the district, considering their North African brethren ostentatious and impious. But then
La Vérité Si Je Mens
hit French cinemas, proving such a success that it prompted an equally popular sequel. A satirical film set in the Sentier, it comically captured the stereotypes, camped them up, and made the whole country laugh and love them. We saw it at the Rex cinema, a Paris institution five minutes from home, and were surrounded by Sephardic youth who looked a lot like the characters on the
screen. They roared at the young men in glossy convertibles cruising the narrow streets, talking on mobile phones above dance music booming from customised car stereos. The girls permanently dressed for clubbing in platform shoes and tight tops that show off cleavages. The flashy Deauville hotels. They revelled in the light-hearted characterisations, embraced the jokes, proud to own them.

Truthfully, I could do without the fabric scraps which litter our entrance. I go wild at the delivery men who stub out their cigarettes on our wooden stairs. If we don’t go up in flames first, one day the reckless deliveries of fabric rolls are going to bring down the building.

And yet …

Somehow the Sentier has an appeal reminiscent of another era.
Le vieux Paris.
In the past, the entire capital was a clutter of commerce and residences which rose above narrow, canyon-like streets. Then in the mid–nineteenth century, Napoléon III appointed Georges Haussmann to carry out some urban planning. Much needed amenities were installed—sewers, water supplies, gas mains. But the new boulevards, however necessary, destroyed everything in their wake. The poor were moved out and the city’s ancient heart was made to look more orderly.

The Sentier somehow escaped the clean up—and has resisted subsequent efforts. Among the gilded monuments of inner Paris, it has the audacity to be real. The district is strictly utilitarian: too consumed with the business of making clothes to care about appearances. Compared to the corporate blandness of many other city centres, the chaos of the skinny streets seems almost quaint. I like the Sentier’s crowded cafés with their formica tables of sweaty barrow boys and serene Hasidim. The dishevelled little shops which
sell nothing but zippers or skeins of gaudy flowers or
faux
astrakhan dyed olive or orange. It may be grubby, noisy and polluted but the quarter is also alive and oddly invigorating.

Eager to know more about the different
quartiers
in our area, I start reading books on central Paris and discover it has a fascinating, unique history. At the southern end of Rue Montorgueil is Les Halles, which aprons around the massive St-Eustache church. Despite the proximity of the two quarters, these days they are entirely different. Devoid of charm, Les Halles is the sort of place you avoid at night—beneath a park that attracts drunks and dealers is a cavernous underground shopping mall full of teen shops and takeaways. But the neighbourhood wasn’t always so soulless, I learn.

For eight hundred years, Les Halles was home to a sprawling food market, teaming with racing barrow boys and tough men with towering baskets of fruit and vegetables bending their backs. Well into the twentieth century, the market exuded a medieval conviviality. At dawn, hundreds of horse-drawn carts and delivery trucks would roll in from across France, disgorging cattle, squealing pigs, geese, ducks and chickens. Stall owners piled their cabbages and cauliflowers into pyramids that were so tall they rose halfway up the buildings behind them. Locals joked the smell of seafood and tripe had permeated the cobble stones. Bowls of winey onion soup warmed callused winter hands. Deals were sealed over
pichets
of rough red in bistros and bars with names that sound straight out of old French films—Le Chien qui Fume, Le Pied de Cochon, L’Escargot. The Smoking Dog, The Pig’s Foot, The Snail. Piano accordions pumped out popular songs on street corners. At night, the old zinc counters propped up everyone from prostitutes to poets. The ‘belly
of Paris’ is how the nineteenth-century French writer Emile Zola described it.

Les Halles also had a seamy side: a thriving black market and an exploding rat population, not to mention the red light district which bubbled around its edges night and day for the wellbeing of the market men. On summer afternoons, the stench of rotting vegetables made passers-by gag. As the number of delivery trucks increased, the traffic tangles became untenable. Post-war Paris was anxious to be seen as progressive and modern and De Gaulle considered this unruly congestion unbecoming for the heart of the capital. In 1969, the first food pavilion was pulled down and the market was gradually moved south of Paris.

It was one of the biggest, most controversial demolition jobs ever undertaken in France and it quickly acquired mythical proportions. According to local lore, when the meat hall was dismantled, a black tide of vermin poured into nearby homes. For the market folk the relocation brought an end to the only life they’d ever known. Many plunged into depressions, refusing to move their stalls to Rungis—the modern replacement where produce is sold in air-conditioned steel hangars. Les Halles had been the city’s heartbeat. Every Parisian old enough to remember it speaks wistfully of the colour and the characters, the coarse jokes and naughty repartee which rang through cobbled lanes late into the night. To many people, its closure signalled the loss of Paris’ glorious gritty soul.

But a spirited splinter of the old market has survived. Rue Montorgueil was the oyster nub of the Les Halles market and it drew people from all walks of life. Monet painted the street, we learn. Balzac used to eat oysters at the café Au Rocher de Cancale. Although the
quartier’
s inhabitants were
once resolutely working class, increasingly they’re likely to be photographers, writers, professionals with young kids and gay couples with dogs. Fortunately, the recent arrivals haven’t extinguished all the populist charm. The odours may be less pungent, the fruit and vegetable stands less grand, the prostitutes confined to Rue St-Denis. And there’s only one oyster vendor left, a fellow who has been selling on the street for more than two decades, apparently. But in spite of these changes, the area has retained a sense of identity.