Back in Paris

The need to fall back into routine seized me last night and its hold continued on me today. Normally, routine is stultifying: the usual activities falling in the usual order numb any excitement. But today, getting back to routine was not at all—I felt I had to reorient myself to Paris.

While I was gone, small things have changed. In the RER station, they took down a relic electronic board and replaced it with a sign that was more aesthetically pleasing and harmonious with the rest of the metro system. Nevertheless, that was jarring was I tried to reintegrate myself into Parisian life.

What didn’t help matters was that having been apart from French for five days, it decided to take leave to places distant and exotic, without leaving notice, so that when I tried to call upon it, I found the place where it should have been empty and deserted, with only the most trifling remains to aid me: I could summon only the simplest phrases and the lowest clichés, and my recall of French pronunciation gathered only a confused mishmash. Those remnants carried me throughout the bulk of the day, until reinforcements from the rest of my French skill charged and saved me.

It was at the laundromat that those reinforcements saved me. My usual day is every other Sunday, and yesterday was the appointed Sunday, but when I arrived home yesterday, I was tired from the journey—isn’t it strange that travelers become tired, when all they have done is sit around for hours at a time?—and far too lazy to do the laundry. So the task fell to today.

Normally, the laundromat need not be a place where a lot of skill in French is necessary. There’s a fair amount of chit-chat amongst some of the French, but tourists and other French segregate themselves with books or other media. I was personally planning the latter approach, not just because my French skill struck me as particularly inadequate today (I vacillate on my self-assessment of my French skill in normal circumstances—my inability to correctly pronounce ‘r’ in French class had me feeling like a five year old could express more concepts more fluently than me.), but also because I wasn’t in that chitchat kind of a mood. I’m not one of those people who can simply instantly engage random people in chitchat (and finds it entertaining—although the people who can tend to also find it entertaining), especially when said chitchat would be extended over the period of more than an hour, so I was quite comfortable with my decision. Furthermore, I was prepared to avoid chitchat—I had, for the first time ever, enough small change. So my decision was made.

Unfortunately, events have a way of outranking our own decisions—we are mere corporals at best in the influence of our own lives, and events will always be the generals. In this case, after I put my money in the machine once, and having had it work, I placed it in the second time and pressed the button. Then I sat down. Usually the washer takes some time to start, so I was unsurprised when the second machine didn’t start immediately. But after a while, it was clear that it hadn’t, and I had an issue.

I started by wondering aloud—“That’s kind of weird. It hasn’t started yet.” There was only one other woman, a middle-aged one, in the laundromat. She stopped folding her heavy quilt and said. “Oh, that is strange. Let me get the owner.” So she turned and knocked on the thin tall door in the corner of the laundromat, and the proprietor, an Asian woman, emerged slowly.

I explained my situation, and she retreated briefly into the alcove, and reemerged with two two-euro coins. She tried the machine herself, and it worked. The resulting interaction was somewhere between interrogation and investigation.

She quizzed me on the procedure, and I responded and said what I had done. I said that I was almost sure that I had followed it to the letter, including the correct buttons, etc., etc. She then asked the woman whether I had paid both times—the woman backed me up, without a second thought. This truly puzzled her. She then tried the other machines. Those didn’t work. She asked me again about the procedure; I said what I had said again. By this point, some other people had filed in; they giggled. Whether it was my stubborn repetition of the same words with the same rhythms and the same emphases or the proprietor’s constant repetition of the same question that caused them to laugh, I don’t know. I would assume it was me, that there was a miscommunication, but at the same time I don’t know where I would’ve gone wrong. But it worked out.

After around fifteen minutes, an older woman with brown dyed hair, a ski jacket, large red frames and a business ensemble came in. She started calling to something behind her. It was her dog. She addressed it with “tu,” and treated it both as a baby and her muse: “Follow me” was often a prelude to “Oh, I need to get change,” etc.

The dog, a tiny terrier, became a prop for the entire room. One guy, a Spaniard as it turned out, who had several tics and spasms, alternated between petting it and trying to “steal” it. I myself mostly ignored it as it climbed up my leg and entreated me for some favor. It made several circuits of the room with quickly cycling legs which resembled, in rapidity, a hummingbird’s wings. It would pause oftentimes at the door to stare at the pedestrians outside, at which point the woman would tell it not to leave. The dog was very prompt about obeying those orders. Then, after having abandoned its watch at the door, it would gape, hypnotized at the revolving washing machines. Eventually, it proved to be underfoot too much, and it was given a place of honor next to me on the bench, sitting like a sultan on its owner’s ski jacket. But because the door was open and let in a draft, it began to shiver, its tiny skull shaking most of all, almost becoming a living bobblehead. But the woman remained unconcerned as to its plight, and it soon became warmer, apparently, as it stopped shaking.

As for the woman, her huge thick glasses—they were the size of French saucers (which are quite small, as coffee is served in shot form)—rendered her unable to see her change, and she asked me for help with counting what she had. She didn’t have enough; I loaned her some. She was very apologetic about the imposition, as if forty centimes would bankrupt me. I said it wasn’t grave at all; she accepted that and then stepped out and brought back dog food for her dog (one presumes) and change for me. Then her drying finished and my washing finished, and we proceeded onto our next task.

At that same time, the Spaniard came back and found that his drying was done. This unfortunately crowded us all into the same area, and one person loading jeans, another person folding sheets and a third delicately removing his shirts does not make for a spacious situation.

At that point the woman left with her dog sitting on the top of her laundry in her rolling plaid duffel-bag that all the French use for both laundry and groceries. I saw it as it left peek over the edge of the bag at the hypnotic dryers, even larger than the washer. Then it disappeared from view.

This left the Spaniard—this is when I finally found out that he was Spanish. I forget how the conversation began, but it quickly turned to the United States. The Spaniard dreamed of becoming an actor in Los Angeles, both because of the job and the climate, which he thought was Mediterranean. But this was more than an idle dream—he inquired into my knowledge of green card rules, and the amount of work available, and Spanish skills. He revealed that he did not know English, but he “could learn.” Then he made a comment that he thought Spanish was displacing English in a lot of areas, to which I said was somewhat overstated. He seemed surprised when I said that “In LA, it seems like everybody’s either an actor or a screenplay writer or something.” He agreed that it was a very difficult life (I had been emphasizing this), and then moved into general discussions of the U.S.

Immigration came up. “Is there racism against Italians and Irish?”

“No, not now. In the past, yes.”

“Against Mexicans?”

“Yes, a lot.”

Then somehow—my memory fails me—he brought up cultural stereotypes. “You know, the Irish are hard workers. Me, I’m a Latin, and the Italians are too; the Latins don’t work so hard. So I don’t know how that would work out in the US.”

I answered that the stereotype—I emphasized the word strongly—was not that Italians didn’t work hard, but that they were all junior mafiosos and the like. At least, so far as I’m aware.

His dreams shifted to New York City. “Are there people who speak Spanish there? Fewer than, say, Texas, right?”

“Yes, but there are a lot of Dominicans and other immigrants—there’s still a lot of Spanish.”

“Well, there is a lot of crime.”

This was dangerous territory for me. Not so much because it was a weird part of the conversation—it’s a common belief—but because explaining the idea of an average rate is too abstract for my vocabulary of running, jumping, walking, visiting and liking. But I gave a crack at it, and he seemed satisfied if surprised.

Then, before I left, came an odd comment whose exact antecedent I can’t remember (it was something about crime): “The Chinese—they’re very hard working. And tranquil. Right?”

“That’s the stereotype, yeah.”

The difficult thing about the conversation was not just the concepts expressed or the stereotypes dredged up, but the pity I had for him. He was afflicted by a tic that returned unbidden several times throughout the conversation. It started with several blinks rapidly, as if he was trying to remove something from his eyes, which continued throughout. The left part of his face would bob downwards and towards his shoulder. He stuttered a bit. I had noticed this habit earlier, but now that I knew he wanted to become an actor in LA, the image of his tic runs on repeat in my mind, and it is the first thing I can think of. He seemed sincere, and the naiveté displayed with his tic summed up his lack of specific knowledge about America.

The conversation we had, I felt guilty about. I communicated like an American—the word “stereotype” is a pejorative word, maybe one of the most in our language. We use it that way because we Americans want to judge the individual and not the group, because we love the individual. Perhaps the word does not have the same force in French. Or maybe I did not communicate my ideas vividly or with enough force. Because I feel like now, in retrospect, that I let him down by not disabusing him of his ideas. Perhaps the reinforcements never came after all.