7 THE CRITICAL MOMENT
7
T HE C RITICAL M OMENT
“And for dessert? An orange or an apple?”
There were few choices when it came to the fruit at Chez Richard. Laurence, the waitress with the long apron and melancholic eyes, already knew the answer. Roger opted for the orange by default. It annoyed him how, after eating it, his fingers would smell like citrus all evening, no matter how many times he washed his hands in the miserable bathroom of that neighborhood restaurant. When he put his index finger on the shutter of his camera to take a photo in the evenings, he was reminded of what he’d eaten at lunchtime. In spite of it all, he still preferred the orange to the apple. He’d grown tired of apples. He’d picked so many of them, carried so many boxes of them, and seen his parents grow so weary whenever a September storm ruined the golden apple-picking season that he no longer wanted anything to do with apples. Or his father.
Roger discovered that the best way to beat the cold in Paris was to walk. Every afternoon, a new exhibit. The city had so many of them that, instead of wandering aimlessly after lunch, he could choose an art gallery, a museum, or a photography exhibit. Every day, he ventured to a new one. That Tuesday, when the teasing sun and stubborn cold forced him to wear a scarf, gloves, and a wool hat, Roger went down to Beaubourg to see the recent acquisitions of Georges Pompidou. It presented just like that, with that ugly title. The “Recent Acquisitions.” They comprised photographs the modern art center had purchased between 2003 and 2008. Roger enjoyed going back to the industrial-style building, which had a red-bellied glass serpent slithering up its eccentric facade.
The Pompidou Center had seemed like the epitome of modernity to Roger when he’d visited with his parents twenty years earlier so they could try out their new car, the only time the Narbona-Bazin family had gone to Paris. His parents were fascinated by the blue tubular machine. Marcel and Roger, on the other hand, were more entertained by the diverse fauna on the esplanade in front of the museum. During that summer of 1988, they saw specimens they’d never encountered before: bare-chested punks with colorful mohawks; Argentine jugglers wearing clown noses who held up ten chairs stacked on top of each other; human statues dressed as Charlot who were able to keep still without moving an eyelash for two whole hours; and all kinds of street musicians whose music overlapped, turning the square into a festive cacophony that the brothers from Fontclara, a hamlet with just fifty inhabitants and one Romanesque church, could never have imagined. They didn’t have all that, even in Girona. Or Barcelona, which they visited from time to time.
Twenty years later, Roger had no one to talk to about all the oddities of life that passed before his eyes on that unchanged concrete plaza. But now peddlers dominated the square, selling sunglasses spread across blankets laid on the floor. They were certainly counterfeit designer brands, though the street vendors insisted they were real. Large groups of street vendors dressed in their traditional Pakistani garb could be seen selling small, plastic flying toys that would shoot into the air like rockets and drop down randomly onto the heads of tourists. Sometimes, if you looked lost, a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses would stop you and explain the virtues of their sect; although, in their fundamentalism, they didn’t call it that. They called it “Christian confession.” The jugglers with the chairs weren’t there anymore. They’d all likely retired due to old age or lower back pain, or because they’d saved up enough to scrape by. There was still a punk or two left, but they’d since ditched the mohawk.
He paid the entrance fee to the photography exhibit and passed quickly through the bustle and into the silence of the museum. The escalator carried him to three enormous, dark halls that welcomed him with faintly lit images. He liked that there was a little bit of everything: Alina Szapocznikow’s photo sculptures; Frank Breuer’s warehouse logo, which had a distinct whiteness and aesthetic; and the old photo-booth strips of Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy that dated back to the Wall Street crash of 1929. The Pompidou Center had purchased them recently. There was also a black-and-white photograph that caught his attention. It was a Cartier-Bresson taken in Tokyo at the burial of the kabuki actor Danjūrō. The photographer had captured the critical moment of mourning for five women, two of whom smothered their sobs into their white handkerchiefs. A masterpiece. He lingered in front of the image for a while, motionless, observant. The excursion was worth it if only for that image. The emotion of the protagonists was contagious. It gave Roger goose bumps, but it was also the kind of photo he would never take—because he didn’t know enough and because, since his father’s death and the ensuing aftermath, he hated photojournalism. He should have rushed back into working for a newspaper and riding his motorcycle back and forth, documenting tragedy. But why would he want to preserve the tragedy of others when there was so much beauty to be photographed? How morbid.
He took the metro back home. With the heat at full blast on the public transit, he took off his wool cap and, had there been any room to, would’ve taken off his jacket. The trains were so packed during rush hour between the les Halles and Abbesses stations that he could barely lift an arm to grab on to the stainless steel bar when they stopped short. Roger wore his backpack in front to help guard his camera and lenses throughout the journey, including when it came time to traverse the infernal passages on the eternal walk to the transfer lines. When he was back in a train car, he placed his hand on top of his bag to protect it from being swiped. He didn’t break contact with it for even a moment. In one way or another, he had to ensure it was still on him. He’d been warned that pickpockets made a fortune on Line 12 because of the gawking tourists. Once back on the street, he could breathe freely again. After fifteen days in Paris, the eighteenth arrondissement had already become home.
Bundled up, he made his way back up Montmartre using a shortcut he’d already learned. He made sure that the path from the metro exit to the house cut through streets that only locals, and few at that, ever walked. Sometimes he counted more cats than people. Even more so when the sun was beginning to set.
Out of nowhere, someone shouted: “Hey, photographer!”
It took Roger a minute to realize who the woman smoking under a streetlamp was. From the corner of his eye, he thought she might be a prostitute. The cabarets alongside the boulevard were full of them. When it got dark, two prostitutes would appear on every corner, as if they’d divided up the territory. But he hadn’t yet seen any venturing up the steep neighborhood of Montmartre. It was a simple matter of supply and demand. It was harder to find a passerby to offer your services to on the solitary streets. It definitely wasn’t possible up on the hill. Even less so when the cold made it inconceivable to stand and wait for a client willing to pay fifty euros for a blow job in the doorway.
“Come on, take a picture of me,” the woman insisted.
Roger began walking toward her until he recognized her.
“Oh man. It’s you. Did you finish your shift?”
“The lunch shift, yeah. I go back in an hour to start dinner.”
“Richard exploits you,” he blurted out. “And I think you start dinner early here in France.”
“Are you Spanish?”
“Well, from Barcelona. Well, actually, from Girona ... From near Girona. Well, from—”
She interrupted. “You speak French well.”
“Because of my mother. She’s from here, obviously. Well, not from Paris, from Bes—”
She cut him off again. “It seemed strange to me ... with how hard it is for you Spaniards to pick up the accent.” She didn’t care where he or his mother were from. Wearing a jacket that covered her from ears to ankles, she leaned against a stone wall. “How do you want me to pose?”
“For?”
“For the fucking picture. Are you going to take it or not? You’re a photographer, what with that thing hanging from your neck all day. You’re definitely not a tourist with that big machine.”
“Photographer ...”
“I knew it since the first day you came to the restaurant.”
“I am a photographer, or aspiring photographer, or—I don’t really know what I am. But ...” He pleaded for forgiveness with his eyes. “I won’t take a picture of you.”
“Excuse me?”
He cleared his throat so he could repeat it a little louder.
“I won’t take your picture. Sorry.”
“But ... why not? It’s only for me. Take it and send it to me. And that’s it, man.”
“I’m sorry.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, clearly hurt. “Am I not pretty enough to be a model?”
Roger moved closer to her. Once she was two steps away, he looked at her attentively. She appeared older and more vulnerable without the white apron. She seemed to be a worn, disillusioned woman. At around forty, Roger guessed, she had an altogether unfriendly air. If not cold, then sad.
“It has nothing to do with you as the model. You’re ... perfect. I’m really sorry, but I’m not going to take your picture.”
“Are you an idiot? What’s wrong with you?”
“ Désolé. They’re personal issues.”
It dawned on the waitress that should the amateur photographer who refused to take her picture ever set foot in Chez Richard again, she would spit in his soup on the way from the kitchen to the table. It wouldn’t be the first or second time she’d left a present for some deserving asshole. But the youngest of the Narbona-Bazin family, son of a farmer and a woman from Besancon, didn’t want to seem like something he wasn’t: an asshole.
“I’m Roger.” He extended his hand.
“You’re expecting me to kiss your ring now?” She slapped his hand away from her.
“It’s cold as hell here. My apartment is just there ... If you have an hour to spare ...”
“Sure. Let’s go up and fuck. Who do you think you are?”
“I wasn’t going to say that. We can go up. I’ll make you a café au lait and explain why I don’t take photos of people anymore.”
“Look, I don’t have the time, and I’m not desperate enough to listen to you pretend to be an interesting artist. Suck my dick, man.”
She threw the cigarette butt on the ground and stepped on it. When Roger glimpsed her worn-out boots in full detail, with their discolored leather and uneven soles from endless walking, he could have taken out his Canon and searched for the correct shadowing to take a nice picture.
“My name is Laurence,” she said, with her hands in her pockets.
He took it as a sign of a truce.
“I know. I hear Richard shouting at you all day. Am I allowed to come back to the restaurant then?”
“Will your wife leave you?”
“No, I don’t have a wife.”
“Then come whenever you want.” Laurence got close to his ear. “Want to know something? I’m dying to serve you soup.”