French Resistance

French Resistance
Micah R. Bochart
November 2007

Le gen d’arme, arms crossed behind his back, tells us with impeccable decorum that we owe ninety euro each for our so-called moving violation, plus another twenty-two for the defunct headlights freeloading their way along the front of our bicycles. Sam’s composure quickly deteriorates, followed by her French. I’ve lost my translator, and, with her, the irrationally cozy feeling that I’m somehow being taken care of, protected against all possible evils in this large and chaotic city that prides itself on the shunning of my native tongue.
Lucky enough, the Frog speaks English, so I talk back. I walk the tightrope between firmness and shameless brown-nosery, telling him we can’t possibly pay the fine, telling him it’s our first offense and he can be absolutely certain that there won’t be a second one, trying all the while to keep my voice steady, to bury the panic that threatens to explode every time I think of what one-hundred-and-twelve euro sums could do to our futures.
Ninety seconds ago, we were millionaires. We pedaled the streets of Paris so fiercely that the Maquis itself would have faltered before us. Back and forth across the Seine, in and out of traffic, from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the walls of the Louvre. Every street and alley our legs could swallow, a montage of berets and public toilets sweeping by on either side of us. Problem is, an empty crosswalk on an empty street with traffic lights so inconspicuous that any God-fearing American would be Godly to spot them is apparently sacred ground to a badge with an ego. Now we’re here, paying for our transgression, for running a crosswalk at ten miles per hour in a pair of squeaky bicycles on an alley without people. Notre Dam looks on from two blocks down the street, and we’re so distracted by the moment that it seems stripped of all its historical enormity, just another witness to this exercise of petty justice.
“I can’t afford to pay,” I tell the cop. “We’re students. This will bankrupt us,” and I’m hoping he won’t end up thinking what so many other foreigners think – that we’re rich and cushioned and lavished simply by virtue of being American.
Strangely enough, it took this cop almost two minutes to correctly peg our nationality, assuming, at first, that we were English. Somehow, I’m feeling like it’s a good thing that our Americanness isn’t screaming out of every pore, but one thing’s for sure: the fact that we’re foreigners isn’t winning us any sympathy points, not from a man who seems like he’ll only be won over by the fine but complicated art of sweet-talking.
I try for simplicity, for the shortest distance between two points.
“We’ll never do it again,” I tell him, but his posture never falters, and neither does his smile.
“That’s what they all say,” he replies, “and as soon as they’re around the corner, they do it again. Ninety euros each. Plus twenty-two for the headlights.”
I’m not exactly sure what causes him to relent, or if you can even say he relented. Chances are, he’d never intended to force the money out of us, though he’d certainly have taken it if we’d coughed it up prematurely. In any case – after begging for amnesty for the fifth or sixth time in a row – we don’t get the response we’ve grown to memorize. There’s no knee-jerk refrain of the money we owe, just a flamboyant gesture down the street in the direction we were traveling.
“Go ahead,” he says, and adds, as only a Frenchman could, “It brings me great pleasure to see you follow the law.”
Relief is tremendous. So is my gratitude, but both are short-lived. By the time we’re on the other side of the Seine – walking our bikes this time, like the Maquis shot us in the kneecaps – all I can feel is frustration that a day such as this could be punctuated with a scolding.
It makes a good story, of course. “American in Paris tangles with cop and sweet talks his way out of bankruptcy,” but I, for one, was happy with the story as it stood.
“American in Paris bicycles the city from one end to the other.”
“American in Paris sips wine by the Seine and praises the power of words.”
“American in Paris watches long-term lover cruise on her bicycle, master of the streets, if not the laws that govern them.”
Lucky enough, “long-term lover” is a writer herself, so between the two of us, we should be able find a headline that suits us.
“Long-term lover” lives near the base of Montemartre in a room of her own, five floors up from the bustling tumult of one of the city’s international districts. It’s a massive modern-art building, structured around the unlikely theme of a naval ship. Though not precisely of a piece with the cozy three-story villas of the expat mythos, the pad gets by, and Sam makes up the difference. She’s managed to clutter her room with books and papers and pens and other instruments of creation, and done it so profoundly that I’ve taken to calling her my Anais, my writer in stylish exile. With this kind of bastion at her back, all she needs is a pen in her hand and no experience is safe. Any event, no matter how trivial or humiliating, can be exploded into adventure, into a study on alienation, on collision of cultures, on how one responds to crises and comes out feeling richer and more delightfully idiosyncratic with each little twitch of the watch.
In any case, we keep on walking, put a river between ourselves and Monsieur Law Enforcement, go trekking off somewhere to watch the new Jesse James movie with Brad Pitt and marvel at the French subtitles. It isn’t until the end of next day that we can really laugh at the event, and by then we’re two thirds of the way down the Eiffel Tower, halfway between the mobs of sightseers on levels one and two, pausing on the empty stairway to admire the mass of metal surrounding us.
It’s a chilly night, chilly and tastefully humid. A wind blows gently from the north, the same kind of wind that almost blew away our ninety euros each (plus twenty-two for the headlights) and there’s a faint layer of mist hovering over the tops of the buildings. From what I’ve seen, that mist could easily be cigarette smoke, because everyone smokes here. Seriously everyone. Old men hang in front of bookstores and blanket their faces in puffs of gray. Fair-skinned women sit with their legs crossed in the cafés and restaurants, monologuing the merits of art and moviemaking, cigarettes fingered elegantly, adjoining lungs unfazed. Algerians smoke against the streetlights and the intricately sculptured walls of the opera house. A man in a helmet and sunglasses sits on his motorcycle, cigarette burning away in his mouth, like a frame out of a Godardt movie, waiting for the light to change. How they make it to fifty I’ll never know, but we’re above it all now, high enough to discourage the smoke from following us.
I’m standing here watching the flickering lights of the city, wishing I’d made it to the grave of Jim Morrison, that in consonance with all the other attractions a short-term visitor to Paris inevitably misses, but find that this moment, as period mark, is beautiful enough as it. Sam stands behind me, at the place where the pillars of the tower just start to spread out: the attempts of a pragmatic architect to beat the odds and build something the wind couldn’t blow over, attempts that would later be criticized as being unnecessarily artistic before critics of next generation label it as an ugly but inseparable part of the Parisian skyline, and perhaps of Parisians themselves.
When I think of the cop again, it’s with an air of pity, because I know Sam and I are thinking of all the wild ways we can violate him with our pens. We’ll take his smile, his stance, his flamboyant gestures. Everything that makes him distinct is about to become our property, discharged upon the paper and rendered wild and defenseless, to the judgments of whatever readers decide to make him their own.
She steps closer, chuckles. I cradle her cheek in my hand, and we stand there together, surrounded by open air and the cold embrace of metal, and the wind, without ceremony, fails to knock us down.