What Happened, 4

Le Basilique de Sacre Coeur (from earthinpictures.com)

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 4 ~ Sacre Coeur

There really is no hope of capturing Paris in words, though I will make some tiny, sorry attempts. The subject is too big, at least for me. Better to stay small. I will not be obligated or responsible for you somehow seeing the Paris of those years. This is a failure I concede up front. Go yourself. Look up pictures. Read Hemingway, whomever. I declare I am not responsible for Paris, although I am responsible for leaving some things behind there. That will be my tale, my story of Paris. That is all it will be. Better, I say, to stay small.

I saw before me a demitasse of chocolat chaud, a tiny spoon delivered by a Tunisian waiter at a Montmarte cafe along with our gleaming white porcelain cups and saucers. Back home, where gulping food and drink, then gulping more, was my norm, this French serving seemed an impossibly tiny amount of hot chocolate for such a freezing night. Abdullah and I had arrived in the City of Light on Christmas Eve,  1986. We paced ourselves through our cups. With each teensy spoonful, the spoon’s metal tang came first, then the hit of syrupy, steaming chocolate went down like what chocolate must have first tasted like to a Mayan lord or whomever first served the cacao bean, warm and wet. We were ecstatic to be free young men in Paris for several days and nights, hot cups in cold hands, so our judgment was perhaps severely clouded. But I remember, twenty years later, how that chocolate tasted.

Our hands and faces were frigid from a walk up out of the Marcadet des Pouissoineers Metro stop to this café blocks away in Montmarte.  On our way along boulevards, up serpentine side streets, we passed bakeries, bookstores, groceries, candy shops, perfume stores. All the minutiae of French commerce, the slivers of shops you bounced among to compile your needs for the day and night. We strolled past an open butcher shop. On a hook above the window outside the shop hung head-down the body of an antlered deer. A sprig of mistletoe decorated its mouth

We each poured the last drops into our mouths. Left a few centimes behind, exited the café. The moment had come. Would this work? We rounded the corner to a seven-story building hunkered at a three-way intersection. The building commanded the corner. It looked as if it had been there since Napoleon, maybe well before. The way in was through two massive wooden doors, twice as high as  Abdullah or me. So, let’s see. (more…)