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La Plague Parisians, their heads tilted back, their chins pointed upwards, are bumping into one another on the street. Seagulls have descended upon us. Politeness is put on standby, and all pardons are lost in a racket of pinballing eyes. Despondent gasps of “Do vi-en teals?” softly ricochet. “Say perry plague” a man with a white mustache mutters in French. “Yes, it's some plague!” I eagerly agree, smiling as another French woman turns to me, resignedly nodding her head towards the Seine : “Ah wee, say perry plague.” And when I get to the Seine, I see the plague itself — a twenty-foot-wide spread of putrid sand imported along the river, a month-long attraction with a 10-euro entrance fee. The words “ Paris Plage !” dance across a blue banner in a curly white font reminiscent of 80s French textbooks — the ones with the scrawled ink cartoons of striped bathers. “ 21 juillet à 21 août .” The beach is three days old and already infested with seagulls and sweat. I see the textbook page now: a foamy ocean with a sandy beach. Beside it is written not “Plague,” but “ Plage.” Oh, right, I say to myself. Plage, beach . God, why am I here? I've been in Paris for a month studying French and I still can't speak a word — the seven or so words I do know, I'm too self-conscious to say. I pray for invisibility daily. Initially, I dared to browse cheap clothing stores, until even that proved paralyzing. (The saleswoman loomed towards me, brandishing a tape measure between her manicured fingers and heading for my chest. No! I protested, fumbling backwards into a couple of poised French girls self-assuredly sifting through sweaters. But the saleswoman persisted towards me. Waiving my hands, shaking my head, I mutely mouthed, No, no! I'm just looking! in English and bolted out the door . ) In most other situations, I've managed with the finger. Mosquito anti-itch crème, mosquito repelling spray, and mosquito repelling soap are all sold in street vending machines. I have mastered one phrase, which I exercise nightly as I lie in bed, alone in my room: “ Je pRRond, Je pRHRond, Je pRHond.” I mutter, trying to successfully hawk up an “r.” “Je pRRRond.” I take. “ Je prends — [point]” usually ( thankfully ) can buy me a Nutella crepe from a street vendor. The one phrase I've assimilated from eavesdropping is en faite — what I proudly deduced to mean, “in fact.” What a solid expression , I thought to myself upon discovery. They never teach you the useful expressions back in the States! Good thing I'm here! When I shared my latest finding with my roommate, he laughed and said, “It's just a filler, means nothing. En fête, en fête . They say it all the time. Rolls right off the tongue.” As I cross Pont Des Arts to Ile de la Cité , a voice pulses in my head, ahead of my step , Why the hell am I here? What am I doing? Pinballing, Hell. Doing Why? Here what? Hell. Suddenly it occurs to me that it's my first time wandering around alone. In Notre Dame, I deposit twelve cents, three centimes and a T token for a prayer candle with the suggested price of three euros. The candles remind me of Mexican votives I had tried emulating for a printmaking project in the spring. I want them . Straining to contrive a justification, I need them . It's… for school! I swear. As I deposit the collection of coins — hefty if not exactly substantive — I hear a man's voice urgently behind me, “ No, Lenny, you got to pay for those before you light ‘em—” “Daad, you don't understand— ” They pause and look on as I stuff one into my turquoise purse. “No, dad, see,” the boy raucously whispers, “They're souvenirs . It says, ‘Pay what you want. Offering up to you .'” The father turns to his son, “This is a church , Lenny. A place of worship and honesty and truth. We're good people, from a good family. In God's house we pay what God asks.” I stuff two more in my bag and hope they aren't looking. Walking out of the church, a hoary man stumbles up to me from the swarm of the seagull-sky-gazers. “ Mademoiselle, s'il vous plait, aidez-moi,” he whimpers, tottering from side to side . “Qu'est-ce que vous faites? Je suis aveugle, aveugle. Aidez-moi. Aveugle, aveugle, aveugle .” While he — surprisingly — isn't looking up for the seagulls, he isn't looking at me either. “Je ne parle pas français. Je suis desolée, désolée” I say theatrically furrowing my brow, hoping my expression will convey the message I know my French can't. “Are you an American?” he asks, seamlessly segueing into English. “Put a penny here,” he says prodding me with his hat. “Help me out, mademoiselle . I'm a blind man.” “Oh my,” I say nervously, dropping a couple coins in his hat. But he doesn't leave. “You seem lost. A lost little American lady,” he says. “Where would you like to go, my American mademoiselle ?” “St. Sulpice” I say as if in question, my voice cracking on the “p.” He points his square finger in the direction behind me. With a sincere nod of thanks, I turn to follow his finger. God, I've been studying French for so long. Really, why am I here? It's a farce. I'm not sure I can justify the expenditure. Worse is that it's not even mine to justify . I'm just another undergraduate tick, nestled between Le Jardin du Luxemberg and the Sorbonne . Safely taking a fake class for my fake major in a city with a fake beach. Safely beached and bathing. The seagull overhead agrees, and takes a dump on my leg, sealing my suspicions. A woman wearing a red blazer and red cowboy boots draws up her shoulders like a puppet on a string and tilts her head piously to the right in reluctant acceptance of the absurd. “ C'est Paris Plage,” she sighs. It is unclear whether she's referring to the shit or my ensuing insanity. When I walk into my apartment, my roommate is reading at the kitchen table. “Hey!” I shout. “Guess what aveugle means!” “Blind” he says without looking up from his policier. Blind. Sightseers seeing only in cropped frames — 4X6 proportions; Parisians seeing the sky but looking for the ocean; a student blind to blindness; and a blind man not seeing a damn thing, but at least pointing in the right direction. The next day I resolve to actually study my surroundings — to actually look at Paris and Paris Plage!, in particular. Arriving at the Seine, I see that the letters on the Paris Plage! sign are not white at all. Instead the words are composed of various-colored felt letters outlined in coarse, yarn stitching of a complementary color . The letters have been arranged in a manufactured muddle against a plot of sand and photographed into permanence. There aren't seagulls, only the normal pigeons. (God knows what took a dump on me the other day. That, of course, did happen — whether that day or another, I can't remember; although I was undoubtedly with a friend who does.) Seagulls were something someone else had mentioned to me at a party — an image I had subconsciously appropriated. The man who approached me after I stole candles (I, regretfully, did take three; although Lenny and his father were not there to comment) was not blind — at least, he didn't say so. A friend at a party had been talking about blind twenty-year-olds “running rampant” on his block in the 7e. Later that night, someone else explained to me that his block situated France's greatest Academy for the Blind, but by then, it was too late. I had already encoded to memory the idea of Paris brimming with blind. The blind man, then, was just a personal phantasm, a grotesque in my post-party nightmare. And the bobbling French at the beginning of this essay — they sound farcical because they are. While Paris Plage! is just the 20' wide ribbon of sweaty sand I initially described, to my surprise I see, running adjacent, a promenade pinballing with people, a promenade separating the sanded sunbathers from the actual river, a river itself blockaded by a fence. Crowds lie, paying not to see, but to be seen. When I return from my “studies,” I go up to my room, a loft about as close to the surreal as one can imagine, a loft with plexi-glass floors and an antique pupitre. I walk towards the pupitre (I'm not being pompous, believe me I don't have the French for it; there really just is no other word for this relic of a desk-chair contraption). There sit the three votives. Good thing you took three , I say to myself. One would have been incomplete, but three makes a solid shrine . Looks good , I think and then actually — perhaps, affectedly — look at them for the first time. The Virgin is encircled — noosed — in a strand of Comic Sans font which brands her to “ Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris .” The Parisian Virgin's dress is slightly more subdued than that of the star of the Mexican votive, than the Parisian's Guadalupan counterpart. Instead of being robed in red, Miss Notre Dame is sheathed in pale pink. But the resigned head tilt is universal. The Parisian Virgin's is the same as the Guadalupan Virgin's is the same as the woman in the red blazer's (a woman who's reality is, admittedly, uncertain). I strike a match. “ah” I say as I light the first wick, “vueh” I say as I light the second, “gluh” I say drawing away from the third. My initial end. The end I first foresaw for the piece. But like the seagulls and the blind man, it is false — manufactured and contrived, and worst of all, oozing preciousness. In actuality, I sit down, and finally, ecstatically, ready to do something — to start this essay — I look at the candles, just as described above. I think about how appropriate it would be to light them, but I don't. Instead, seized by the conviction that all coins tumble with the same twang in a tin box, I start stammering in a boisterous crescendo all the French words I know. “Paris Plage! Français! Ecrivez! Maintenant! Voila! C'est pour la langue française et la Paris Plage!” “What?” my roommate says. And even though he has a clear view, he doesn't look up. Search
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