Men in Doorways by William McNamara

I only had one appointment and it wasn’t until the afternoon. Leaving the flat in the early morning I walked deliberately away from the Place de la Republique, the sore focus of the night before. I joined some men drinking coffee in a doorway. The bars and cafes have been closed in France since November, but some survive as takeaways and a rogue subset of the populace gather at the tables restauranteurs have used to block the entrances and treat them like a bar. I stood among a group of such men – it’s always men – who were shooting the shit with the patron of the bar-come-takeaway and embraced each other freely. Their masks hung from their chins like the jeans below the arses of the skateboarders I had been so jealous of the night before. Observing curfew, trapped in our Airbnb where the TV wouldn’t work and there was no corkscrew. Surely a home without a bottle opener is illegal in France. I’d hung out the window watching skaters with bags of beers head towards the nearby Place de la Republique and I’d longed to be going with them. The nuisance clatter of their skateboards nearby was like the chatter of the birds around the vineyard in the south where we’ve worked throughout the second lockdown. No combination of reapplied cables would conjure an image on the television and the two Thai delivery menus I was being asked to compare looked identical. I’d left the flat as soon as I woke up and before 8am I already felt the evening’s curfew looming. Bunched together with the men and their little paper cups of coffee in the doorway I wasn’t being particularly careful. Contracting the virus seemed like a cheap way to make sense of a purgatorial year. I liked the idea of a fortnight in bed, no responsibilities and something meaningful happening to me. A passive kind of significance.

I’d been looking forward to this day walking around Paris for a long time. After six months in the countryside – a forced Provençal stasis, a golden prison – I felt like a diver coming up for air before resubmerging. I left the men drinking coffee in their doorway and came across a triangle of public space in Le Marais where we had stood the evening before. I’d insisted on stopping in the triangle and drinking a warmish beer I’d bought in the supermarket. It was 17:59. One minute to curfew. A group of locals were sprawled more confidently along another side of the triangle with great-looking takeaway pints. In Paris, everyone always has one-up on me. By 18:04, I could tell my girlfriend was terrified of our curfew defiance, while I was finding a pathetic vitality in my woefully petty demonstration. The local group with their delicious looking pints didn’t seem to care either way. Yvette looked like she was on death row. Some people are so square you begin to doubt any mention of their legendary art school parties, I thought smugly as I drank the then-warm beer. A bin lorry arrived and scared the shit out of me, for I mistook it momentarily for a riot van. I tried to laugh it off but began to wonder what kind of responsibility they have, as arms of the government, to report illegal, post-curfew loitering. We were back in the Airbnb by 18:15.

I pointed myself towards the river on a street called Rue de Temple. In an unknown city I have the habit of establishing a medium length walk and repeating it. I’ll walk a circuit several times with minor diversions. I’m trying to force a sense of familiarity. I walked several times up and down the Rue de Temple and the parallel Rue des Archives that day, I interacted with nobody and learned nothing. From a half-remembered glance at a map I knew I would be near the Centre Pompidou and I kept an eye out for it, it is my only memory of a childhood trip to Paris and I am a specialist in meaningless returns. Seeing something again after a long time is a good way to fake a depth of meaning and impose a kind of structure on your life. As with anything, abstinence only heightens the sweetness of capitulation and it was a long time since I’d seen the Pompidou, a building I wasn’t particularly interested in and cared about only because it had already featured in my life. I was preparing to be overwhelmed by a glimpse of the famous inside-out gallery, the big bundle of pipes. I gasped a couple of times passing elaborate construction sites in my peripheral vision, mistaking the unfinished buildings for the gallery’s well-known interior-exterior.

The Rue Du Temple gave way to some wide open spaces fenced by imposing buildings that all seemed so senseless without crowds. Paris with only the Parisians was miserable. The real joie de vivre comes from the artless tourists, usually American or English, who in their unthinking ignorance, their blind will to be entertained, are capable of the heroic over-enthusiasm big, historic cities deserve. All around me there were only bored looking, well-heeled types hurrying to and from work. It was as if you could only catch the virus if you stood still. It’s said that if you stop on the pavement in big cities, you’re either lost or crazy. In 2021’s Paris I felt exposed, the only one gawping at the large, impressive buildings and I began to hurry too, though I had nowhere to go, nor any idea of where to go. Without the previously omnipresent tour groups and visiting families gathered around the universally agreed upon points of interest I remained largely ignorant of what anything was. With no cafes or bars to hide inside, no terraces to languish on, perpetual motion was the only way to belong to Pandemic Paris, it was that or join the men in the doorways. Belonging is the bizarre, contradictory urge of the masochistic, wannabe-cosmopolitan tourist, traveller or visitor. We look forward to seeing a place hoping to exchange money and time for an experience of something new, only to carry on like we’ve seen it all before.

I crossed the Seine heading vaguely and unintentionally for the Latin Quarter. I’d been hearing about it in books like A Moveable Feast since I was 17. I accidentally came across Shakespeare & Co. and felt the lack of a certain kind of excitable, interrailing, Parimanic, Moleskiner pilgrim I assume would have been there pre-Virus. It was tombsilent. In the window was a little shrine to Lawrence Ferlinghetti who had recently died. Dozens of copies of Howl fanned around his portrait. Beyond the famous bookshop, a sad little place without the rucksack’d caricatures I cynically imagine seek it out, the Latin Quarter was a Palmyra of shuttered Irish pubs and curiously scentless kebab shops. I don’t know what I’d expected, the lifecycle of bohemian neighbourhoods in western cities is well documented. The liminal spaces that attract a certain type of nonconventional person can’t stay interesting or affordable for long. Whatever had been happening here was over almost a century ago, any interest I might have had in the place is from the antique reports of the rich interlopers who ruined it. My information about Paris was way out of date. 

I’d seen enough. Back on the Rue de Temple most of those I passed wore elegant perfume, a surprising fact of the metropolis I’d forgotten. In the south the landscape is richly scented but rarely the people. I stopped to watch a video of Vincent Cassel wrestling his beautiful girlfriend that was playing in the window of a shop. I cut across onto the parallel Rue des Archives, passed the Museum of the Hunt and text my girlfriend some nonsense about how disappointing it was to find it closed, how pertinent it would be to our accidental country life, safe in the knowledge a visit was impossible. She was just getting up and replied only “hey you.” As I walked up the Rue des Archives I was still thinking about that video of Vincent Cassel. Contrary to the unusual, modern paradox of film stars looking fitter, healthier and stronger as they age, Cassel looked relatably exhausted. I didn’t recognise a handful of shuttered gay bars as such immediately, their flags instead made me think about applauding a critically underfunded health service, a strange result of the British government’s cynical reappropriation of the Pride movement’s rainbow symbol last summer. As I walked down the Rue des Archives I reflected on recycled iconography and how the Nazis lifted the swastika from elsewhere, too. Probably I was overreacting.

Crossing the Boulevard Voltaire, I felt the pull of the Place de la Republique on my left but managed to stay away. I entered a neighbourhood that was in the earlylish throes of whatever had happened to the Latin Quarter a century before. Among the newer and more fashionable outlets there remained the longstanding cornershops and grocers vital to the city’s immigrants, shops where a nostalgic Turk might find a Turkish brand of tinned tomatoes or in another, a wistful Ghanian might buy their favourite Ghanian beer. Far from home, these everyday items we take for granted take on a greater significance. They are not just tomatoes, beer, sardines or tahini but some essence of home jarred, bottled and canned. British people only start to care about Marmite or Heinz when they’ve been away for too long. The larder goods of childhood seen again far from home lend a life the kind of structure or meaning I was hoping to find if I ever managed to stumble upon the Pompidou. Possibly, to the metropolis’s disparate and displaced, the incurably homesick, those dusty shops are more vital than foreign embassies. 

My gentle, background cynicism of the area’s regeneration didn’t keep me from going into a natural wine place – a kind of off-license with the self-importance of a missionary – where the young clerk’s incongruous Ford Maddox Ford moustache hung over his obligatory cotton mask. He grunted “bonjour”. The masks are great for a poor French speaker like me, everyone is as hard to understand as I am now. The delay before they realise I don’t belong is noticeable and generous. I walked slowly around the small shop twice, as I would have done in a record store when I was younger and more easily capable of caring about things. I lingered by the small selection of wine from other countries. If the goods in the corner shops I’d passed could provide someone with a taste of home, I was hoping the contents of these bottles would give me a taste of elsewhere. Looking at bottles from Portugal, Germany, Greece, The Czech Republic, Austria, I was kidding myself that there was something poignant about wine from foreign lands now all the borders are closed and travel is impossible. The wines all cost about as much as Ryanair or EasyJet flights to those countries used to. Now the ubiquitous low-cost travel of my 20s is impossible, I am romantically inclined to kid myself medium-cost wine contains some essence of the lands we can’t reach, a report on how the static year was for them. 

I’d heard about clandestine drinking sessions masquerading as tastings in the wine cavistes during the pandemic, but instead of offering to open anything the young Ford Maddox Ford recited comprehensive tasting notes and complex soil descriptions for any wine I pointedly asked about. I gave up, bought some cheaper stuff and left it in the Airbnb. I walked down the Rue de Temple again. It never occurred to me to wonder about the eponymous temple. Again I was distracted by the video of Vincent Cassell, the fatigue, his tauntingly healthy looking partner. As I was trying to decide who was the more vampiric – the healthy young girl or the fading, older man — I realised the shop was on the corner of a little street that pointed right at the Centre Pompidou. I found it was reassuringly filthy and visibly aged, as we both were since our last meeting in my infancy. We both had something of the Vincent Cassell about us, the Pompidou and I. I was unmoved, I felt no revelation, the sight of something unseen outside of memory didn’t stir me. The cheap trick hadn’t worked. Another meaningless return. Two men were performing outside the disembowelled gallery. One danced in loose, exaggerated, loopy movements around the other who was seated and rapping into a megaphone about a March 12th deadline. Instinctively I reached for my phone to film a sample but realised everyone in the small crowd was already recording the two men. A small sign suggested a hashtag for sharing any content. #DeadlineMars12. 

The small crowd — too small, really, another site or moment where tourists were missed and could have really created a sense of occasion — calmly filmed the act on their phones, so contacts or followers might better experience the moment they were absenting themselves from by concentrating on filming. I thought about this exchange of absences as the two men performed and the smallish crowd recorded. If an event is only experienced through the small screen on either end, does it matter if you were there or not? Especially as almost everything is recorded in some way and therefore reduced to a sameness, a similar value. Exchange of absences. The habit of self surveillance has created an homogeny of experience. Technology is experiencing the world on our behalf, I noted with the notes app on my smartphone. I feel like such an old man when I try and articulate any sentiment about the technology I benefit from, abuse compulsively and barely understand.

Standing there deliberately not filming the men I felt like a threat. I was the lone person looking directly at them, not through a lens, and it felt confrontational, I felt unshielded. The senile progress of my luddite reflections was disturbed when a desperate looking man ran past full pelt. A furious man followed at a dragging pace, he could have been the father of the young man he was chasing. The second man was shouting “STOP THIEF THIEF STOP THE THIEF THIEF STOP” and gradually a few people unfroze from the crowd and joined the chase, perhaps sympathetic to the potential loss of the gadgets they were using to parse the world. A chain of half a dozen people ran around a nearby bookstore and vanished around a corner. Like me, most were satisfied someone else was doing something and we needn’t get involved. We could go about our business undisturbed. Before the performance ended, with no idea if the thief was caught, I wandered over to the bin marked Anglais outside the book shop. I needn’t’ve bothered, it was the usual bibliographic detritus of the wanderlusting and self-seeking visitors that used to loaf around Paris: Lonely Planet guides and Paul Cohelo. 

I followed a sign for Les Halles. It was another clue from old books, wherein incredible nights always seem to end with one last drink in the surrounds of the old market and passing out in a barrow of cabbages. My information was woefully out of date. An example of that pan European nonspecific city centre urban regeneration that makes everything look like an under loved space ship, Les Halles was surrounded by the usual suspects: a flagship Levis, a multistorey’d Five Guys and the like. Welcome to anywhere. There was a trace of chaos on the other side and I traced the perimeter of the stupid building to a crowded park. In my ignorance of Paris I only later learned I had been above the Louvre. More people than I’d so far seen in one place were crowded in the pale sunlight, office workers lunched on heavily grafitti’d stone benches, multiple rap battles were taking place. I couldn’t see anywhere to sit that wasn’t in the immediate vicinity of a group until I noticed a fenced off section in the centre of the park. I was surprised to feel some Covid-related anxiety, I didn’t want to get close to anybody. Some attendant was blowing a timid whistle at the tough guys who climbed into the fenced area and spread themselves out. I bought a lunch beer and climbed in too, delighted with the twin opportunities to establish myself as one of the tough guys but also remain safely distanced from any risk of infection. 

I crossed the river back into the underwhelming Latin Quarter. In San Francisco Books the old clerk was narrating everything he did. A young man at the till sat behind a thick covicautious sneeze guard ignoring his decrepit colleague and working on a Macbook. I didn’t want to get too close to the old clerk, who was packing boxes for delivery at the start of the fiction aisle, which was narrow but crammed with books, so I began my perusal of the shelves at M, socially distanced from the old clerk and what I imagined to be his fragile, paperish lungs. I compared the M’s in front of me with the M’s on the reading list I keep in the notes app on my phone. Mann, Murnane, Musil. Potential contemporaries of the clerk. “All of these just came in from London, now they’re heading for Montreal!” he said in his toothsome American accent about the books he was packing into a cardboard box. He faced away from me and from behind appeared only an amount of wrinkles held together by a mask, an oxford collar and a scrap of grey hair. He turned and reached for a book near where I stood and though his scoozaymwah sounded like the speech of someone just arrived in France, I suspected he had been in Paris for years. They’re all over the world, these anglophones who emigrated and never integrated, calling themselves expat because they’ve decided they’re a cut above the immigrants at home. We met eyes, briefly, and above the mask that held him together his were like the last two boiled sweets in the glovebox packet of a car nobody has driven for years. 

A boy in drag came into the shop and went directly into the back where the cheaper paperbacks were shelved. “I need a really sturdy box!” the old clerk was saying to his colleague, to himself, to me, to the boy in drag, to all of Paris, to god knows who, “I’m gonna need a three-kiloer!” As he moved to find his sturdy three-kiloer I escaped into the back where the boy in drag was looking at a wealth of tier-two Graham Greene. The little annex was lined completely with orange spines, huge stocks of forgotten authors like John O’Hara and Julien McLaren Ross. From this false sanctuary I could still hear the old clerk, he was having an exchange with someone out in the street too distant to hear, or perhaps with nobody, “An EU taxi? — you want me to book you an EU Taxi? — Why there’s no such thing, — EU taxes, you need to help paying EU taxes, like goods taxes or — I never really thought about it — oh you do want a taxi, well we’re in the EU, so I guess they’re all EU taxis!”

I moved on, aware my appointment was during near with the curfew close behind. On the Boulevard St Germain, another address from formative reading experiences that meant nothing to me in reality, I queued for a public toilet behind two English speaking women. The Canadian was delighted to explain to the Brit the self cleaning mechanism of the toilet. In a city without galleries or museums the culturally curious improvise their entertainments. A girl joined the queue behind me and withdrew a Polish novel from a Polish deli tote bag. After a long morning disappointed among the underwhelmed Parisians I’d stumbled upon the international part of town. It didn’t last. After marvelling at the toilet fold itself into the wall to be disinfected as the floor was automatically hosed, I was back among the French and I could feel the curfew only a few hours away. The Pole, the Canadian and the Brit had disappeared. I began to pace desperately. I crossed and recrossed the Seine looking for who knows what, aware the route I was walking was the equivalent of hoping a loop of Waterloo Bridge, the Strand, Embankment Bridge and the South Bank might reveal some unseen element of London. Of course not. Young people in expensive clothes lined the wide bank of the river in the anaemic sunlight and betrayed the proximity of the Sorbonne.

The appointment was with a London restauranteur who now lives in Paris. The others were late and he and I sat at a table in the window of a closed restaurant. I wondered what kind of jealousy this might generate in anyone walking past, as the bars, cafes and restaurants had been closed in France for four months. The restauranteur wore an orange hat that matched the rich sienna of his wool shirt and a well-made mask in the same textured green cloth as his jacket. He wore the mask on his chin like the Parisians he professed to be contemptuous of. A lockdown diet and fastidious water cleanses lent him a preternatural sheen. As he spoke about the wine tastings he leads online for top level subscribers to his bottle club, I realised the carefully matched clothes and yogi-like emaciation were tactics of the new world he already inhabits, that of the front camera, Zoomland. With his name in huge letters above the door of two Hackney restaurants, he already had cult-like tendencies, now he was appearing guru-like in his followers homes telling them what to drink. No wonder he was struggling with Paris, where he was just another wealthy foreigner, a WFH Dad Macbook-Air-ing away on some London concern. 

Afterwards I had less than an hour before the curfew. I was only a few streets away from the Place De La Republique, the point I had been obsessed with throughout the night before, convinced it was the epicentre of illicit revelry. I found it was a glorified roundabout. The din of traffic that circles the square is enormous, it’s like standing in the middle of some monstrous velodrome. Skateboarders were skateboarding, drunks were drinking, the overlap between the two was generous: drunks were skateboarding and skateboarders were drinking. I don’t skateboard, I hardly speak French and even if I was fluent, in it’s unlikely instance any conversation between me and the skaters would be like Wittgenstein’s example of the lion. Even if we spoke the same language we wouldn’t understand one another. We haven’t the requisite shared experience to communicate. I wondered what I had expected. Almost exactly what I saw and it held no place or charm for me. What in front of me was off-putting or distasteful, had previously been impossibly compelling and romantic, because it wasn’t allowed, because it was where I wasn’t. 

William McNamara is a semi-retired barman, occasional apprentice winemaker and hobby diarist. He lives in Marseille. 

10 March 2022