The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City (14 page)

LES BOUSCULEURS

Since everyone always asks, I should let you all know that I know how long I’m going to live in Paris. I trashed the other half of my round-trip ticket years ago, and as long as I have the fortitude to suffer through the annual humiliation known as my “visa hearing,” I’m staying put for as long as I can.

But if you really want to know, there is something that often makes me think of leaving. It’s something that prevents me from doing all the wonderful things that I want to do in Paris, and some days I pine away alone in my apartment, afraid to go out because of it. If I do need
to go out, I quickly do what I need to get done, then rush straight home.

What is it that makes me often wish I hadn’t tossed the unused half of my round-trip ticket? It’s
les bousculeurs.

Paris is a city of
bousculeurs
, a word few people recognize and a French term I assumed I’d made up (which I have a tendency to do) until I located the verb in my
dictionnaire français.
There it was; right there between
boursoufler
—the verb “to bloat”—and
bouse
— “cow manure.” And it’s about as enjoyable to experience as both of them.

Bousculer: Pousser brusquement en tous sens.

To push abruptly in all directions.

At first I thought it was just something specific to the French. I’d moved to a foreign country and, naturally, the streets and sidewalks had a different rhythm and flow from what I was used to. Paris is far more compact than most American cities and space is at a premium, so naturally there’s bound to be a bit of bumping into each other. Or so I thought. Then I visited Lyon, the second-largest city in France. Going from one place to another was a breeze, and not one person rammed right into me as if I weren’t there.

So when people say to me, “It must be so fun to live in Paris! What do you do all day?” I don’t think “Avoid people” is quite the answer they’re expecting. But it’s true. You know those knuckleheads who step off the escalator before you, then just stand there looking around, oblivious to anyone else who might need to pass? Imagine living in a city with two million people like that, thinking only of themselves, and you get the drift of what I’m up against here.

A short walk to the
boulangerie
turns into an annoying game of people-pinball, where I’m dodging folks right and left as they come at me. Who’s going to move first? If I dodge to the right to avoid them, they’ll veer in the same direction I do. If I veer to the left, suddenly that’s where they want to be, too. I sometimes play around with their minds, feigning I’m going in one direction, then at the last second, cutting across to another. But they always outfox me, and I invariably find myself swerving out of
their way at the last minute. It’s exhausting, as well as humiliating. I actually had a couple laugh at my misfortune just after they cut me off on a crosswalk, landing me in the gutter.

Sometimes if someone’s coming at me, I’ll take refuge behind one of those immovable traffic barriers, which Parisians have nicknamed
bittes
(pricks). Other times I’ll back myself up against a stone wall and stand there, just to see what they’ll do. Believe it or not, Parisians will still take it upon themselves to walk right up to me and expect me to move. It’s like a show of power. I’m sure if I fainted on the sidewalk, they’d stop in front of where I fell, wait, then expect me to get out of their way when I came to.

If there is a positive side to this, it’s that it helps to answer another question I’m frequently asked. “How do you eat all those chocolates and pastries and stay so thin?” That’s easily explained: I walk twice as far as necessary, putting in twice the mileage as I should, steering myself around everyone else.

Parisians have one glaring flaw: they’re selfish. If you’re scrambling for a pencil and paper to write me a hostile letter, don’t bother. It’s a quote from Romain, who was born and raised in Paris. “Parisians are
horrible
,” he says. “They only care about themselves and no one else. They’re
très, très impolis.
” And that’s coming from the most Parisian person I know. A journalist friend, Julie Getzlaff, interviewed Parisians about what they disliked most about their city, and almost everyone said, “le comportement des gens”—the behavior of people. Even Parisians describe themselves as
“désagréables”
and
“impolis.”

I quickly got over the idea that it was my fault and that it was I who wasn’t moving correctly. I’d spent twenty years working in very cramped restaurant kitchens maneuvering among lots of people, all of us rushing around dodging scalding-hot pans and holding sharp objects. But did I crash into people?
Pas du tout.

There was something I wasn’t understanding here. Fed up with being on the losing end of too many urban jousting matches, I tried to come up with a few possible explanations for their behavior.

1. Paris has few straight lines, so you can’t expect Parisians to walk straight. They haven’t been trained properly.
   

   True.
   Although I scraped by at the bottom of my class in high school geometry, I do remember the Euclidian definition of parallel lines, which means they never intersect. Too bad Euclid never had to walk in Paris. Or maybe he did, but got fed up and split before he came up with that theory.
   

2. Because they think, “We’re a Latin culture.”
   

   False.
   Parisians use this line to justify all sorts of bad behavior, from cutting in front of me in line, to short-changing people, to public urination. I don’t know what being a “Latin culture” has to do with anything, but thank goodness I don’t live in the Latin Quarter: I’d be hungry, poor, and stepping over a lot of dubious puddles.
   

3. Parisians are too busy thinking about important, interesting things, and can’t be bothered to think about where they’re going.
   

   True and false.
   Finance Minister Christine Lagarde suggested that French people should “stop thinking so much,” presumably in an effort to stimulate them into action. (Or maybe she had the same fellow paint her apartment that I did.) Fortunately, I don’t think many Parisians got that memo, since I didn’t notice any changes around town after she made her pronouncement.
   

If people are thinking too much around here, it clearly isn’t about where they’re going.

The first bit of the
bousculeur
puzzle fell into place for me when I was racing out of my apartment building one morning, emerging from the big wooden doors and out onto the busy sidewalk. In my haste, I crashed into a woman, who stepped back and apologized—to me! “Oh,
désolée, monsieur.”
“That’s odd,” I thought. No, not because a Parisian actually accepted
blame for something that was obviously her fault. But because
I’d
run into
her
, yet she apologized to me. Maybe I needed to learn to go with a different flow.

I recalled the panic of my first driving lessons in Paris. Somewhere out there is a list of traumas; losing a partner, getting divorced, being fired, and moving are right up there in the Top 10. For some reason, driving in Paris isn’t on that list. I don’t know why.

Romain, my driving instructor, sat in the passenger seat wearing dark sunglasses, impassively, with a cigarette dangling from his mustached lips.

I, on the other side of the emergency brake, was a mess—a jangle of nerves, white-knuckling the steering wheel and sitting ramrod straight with my face glued up against the windshield. In Paris, if you’re stopped at a red light and don’t floor it a nanosecond after the light changes to green, an explosion of horns will erupt behind you. So the moment I stepped on the gas, I found myself immersed in my first-ever Parisian
rond-point
, the traffic circle that wraps around the very busy place de la Bastille. Sheer mayhem ensued. Cars came at me from all sides, honking and swerving toward me from every which way, floating in and out of my path with no semblance of order.

I held my place while we all played a game of stop-and-go. The rules seemed to be for each player to drive at the highest rate of speed possible, get within a millimeter of another car, then slam on the brakes and stop short at the absolutely last possible moment, then lean on the horn. By the time I emerged from the other side, I understood why everyone here smokes. I needed a cigarette too.

Behind the wheel anything goes in Paris. Unlike in America, people don’t really seem to mind if you do stupid or unpredictable things while driving, things that would be punishable by road rage in America. You can do whatever you want while driving here, as long as you’re not drinking coffee, which is unheard of, or talking on your cell phone, which is a heavily ticketable offense.
“Très, très dangereux
,” Romain warns me. But he doesn’t seem to think there’s a problem with taking his eyes off the road
for thirty seconds to fumble through his jacket pocket in the back seat for his lighter while the car goes sailing across three lanes of traffic—and I silently say a prayer, thanking God for French health insurance.

So I’m learning a new way of thinking around here. It’s not about doing what’s right to keep the flow of traffic moving, it’s about doing what’s right for
you.
I’ve attempted to explain “Don’t block the box” laws (which make it a violation to block an intersection after the light changes) to Parisians, who look at me like I’m insane. “How else are you going to get in front of others if you don’t cut them off?” I can hear them thinking.

You also can’t think in linear terms (which applies to more than just walking around). Paris isn’t structured as a grid, like most other major cities, so it takes a bit more savvy to get around in linear fashion. Back in the 1850s, Baron Haussmann tried to change the way Parisians moved by reorganizing the city into grand boulevards, which cut though Paris in straight paths. But if you talk to Parisians a hundred and fifty years later, they’re still really miffed about it. They just refuse to be herded into straight lines.

Defeated, I gave up. There’s no way I’m going to change two million people. They’d won and I had no recourse but to simply become one of them, since I didn’t want to be responsible for adding “sidewalk rage” to the French lexicon.