Les Chroniques de Bruce

The title is a little misleading, for in fact Bruce already speaks English. If I sometimes reproduce here in his low-fidelity anglophonics the things he says to me, it is not (usually) to give the reader a cheap laugh at a Frenchman’s expense but rather to capture Bruce’s anecdotes and advice in all their Zen-like purity. That being said, I am convinced that the English Bruce knows is all the English Bruce wants to know.

Through the Brucean dialect, a world of elegant simplicity comes to life. Practically everything is made, be it dinner, a meeting with a friend, a trip abroad, or a bit of friendly “musculation.” Whatever cannot be made is highly likely instead to be taken. Coffee, pronounced with the intonation of the French café, can be both made and taken. Often in the afternoon following lunch.

Moreover, Bruce’s English knows few tenses. Away with the workaday drudgery of the present perfect progressive or the damnably difficult future anterior: past, present, and future merge into vivid simultaneity, as if the collision of French and English had by means of some linguistic miracle produced an accidental grammar of Japanese austerity whose immediacy is modified solely by ancillary signs like yesterday and tomorrow.

My favorite part of Bruce’s personal patois, however, is the way in which all of our relationships, our love affairs, practically any event that transpires over a period of time, even the descent of man and the sum of his experiences on this planet, his wars and exploits and discoveries, are boiled down to a single basic and all-encompassing term: “the story.”

— Yesterday, I think about my story with Natasha, Bruce tells me. Tomorrow I call her to ask why she does not say if she has the ticket I buy her. Yes, tonight I make some sport… Tomorrow morning, the car. Fix the car… Then I call. Or is it better, sending an email? Because it is expensive, the call….

…and so on.

When the topic of the transmigration of souls arises, people typically express the hope that that they not be reincarnated as a(n) insert member of lower family/genus/species.

Me, I prefer a glass half full. Thus I like to assume, not without a little pride, that in my former life I was one damned exceptional insect.

1) Olive oil
2) Honey
3) Olive oil and honey

— Bruce, I say, I’m not sure any of those are going to do much good.

Bruce has his hand deep inside his sweatpants. Gratte gratte. Bruce has gone commando today I see. Gratte. Gratte gratte gratte gratte. He grimaces painfully, and does a little dance in a circle as he scratches.

— I can not get rid of it, he says in English. I try everything.

Gratte gratte. Pulling his hand out of his pants, Bruce sniffs his fingers and makes a face like he’s just taken a deep whiff of bad Roquefort.

— Why not just go to the pharmacy and buy some cream? I ask.

— Bof, scoffs Bruce. Les pharmacies, i sont des voleurs! Des voleurs !*

Alas, he’s not wrong.

* “Pfft, the pharmacies are thieves. They’re thieves!”

Two trips sufficed to move all of my worldly possessions into Bruce’s apartment. One for the large suitcase I brought with me, and a second for my pillow and the new duvet I bought to replace Bruce’s catastrophe of hearts and roses. My belongings having been unceremoniously chucked into my new bedroom, Bruce and I shared our first dinner together.

I’ve mentioned previously my appreciation for the range chez Bruce. The downside of Bruce’s—er, our—kitchen is that everything in it looks as if it’s made an aller-retour to Hell. Everyone knows it’s the signature of the célibataire to buy the cheapest kitchen items available and, if possible, keep them for eternity. Here the John Hancock of bachelordom has been scribbled from cupboard to drying rack in worn-out five-euro culinary paraphernalia. The skillets have all been diligently deteflonized. I’m not up to snuff in metallurgy, but I think one might actually be made of tin; it wobbles madly on the range when it heats up. In a past life, the misshapen saucepan was surely an army helmet during the war. The utensils (one cannot justly call them “silverware”) are all interestingly warped, all the plates are in fact bowls, and all the cups are plastic (with the exception of Nutella and Maille Moutarde jars reincarnated as glassware). Inadequate tools for the true culinary artist, but with such amateur tackle we cook.

That is to say, “we” cook… Somehow, I’ve fallen into the role of head chef. Meanwhile, Bruce is in charge of checking the score of the football match and responding to any and all chat messages from the Czech Republic. But I can’t complain; my patron, he has graciously supplied the materials—courgettes, poivreau, pommes de terre, oignons, and lardon—that I will cut up and bake in the oven. And I have complete artistic freedom in my new atelier.

— Should I add some thyme or herbes de Provence? I shout into the adjacent living room.

— C’est toi le boss, says Bruce, miniature soccer balls flashing across his eyes.

By the time the meal is ready, the match is over. On the couch, Bruce has tucked his legs up under a blue blanket bearing the image of a snow tiger. He has downshifted into a science-fiction action movie.

— I want to show you a film, he says. It’s the best: Les Chronicles de Riddick. You know it?

— I think so, I say, vaguely recalling a trailer with flashes of a milky-eyed Vin Diesel descending from the darkness to kill his enemies. Sure, why not? I say. We can watch it… Dinner’s ready, so you can—

— J’t’laisse servir, he says.

As I dole out into two bowls our légumes au four, I notice a small stack of mail on the corner of the coffee table. The topmost envelope is addressed to a “Mme Renault.”

— The former tenant? I ask, pointing at it with the charred wooden spoon.

— The old lady, says Bruce. My friend’s grandma. Two years and the mail still comes.

— Oh, so ever since she moved…

— No, no, she died, says Bruce.

— Ah, right, I say, you said your friend inherited the place and—

— But I told you about the fire, no?

— Yes, you did, I say. But wait… What about the fire?

— That’s it.

— That’s… what’s it?

— She died, says Bruce.

— In the fire?

— Yes.

— In the fire.

— Yes, in the fire. He takes a big bite and washes it down with a slug of Côtes de Bourg. Unrecognizable, he adds, shaking his head in regret.

I look at him questioningly as I sink into the spot next to him on the couch.

— That’s what my friend tells me, he explains. Burnt to a crisp.

— That’s horrible, I say. What caused it?

— Bad wiring… He notices my anxious glances toward the prises around the room. Don’t worry, my friend, I did all the rewiring myself.

Somehow I am not consoled.

— Anyway, he continues, they say the fire probably wasn’t what killed her. He takes another big bite and through his mouthful adds, More likely she died of fright—you know, from a heart attack—well before the fire gutted the place.

— Jesus, I say. Where… Where’d it happen? I ask.

— Well, it was the middle of the night, he says, cleaning up the last of his first helping with a hunk of bread. So she would have been asleep at the time…

— So, in the bedroom then, I say.

— Of course.

— My bedroom?

— Naturally, he says.

— Naturally, I say.

— I really didn’t tell you? Bruce asks. Then: Come on, he says, have some, eh? and he passes me the casserole.

* * *

That first night in my new room, despite being so exhausted I crawled into bed directly after the movie ended, I barely sleep wink. Not only is it beginning to dawn on me that I’ve moved to a foreign country with no definitive plan for making it work… Not only am I dreading the possibility of having to bare, the next night, another film as unspeakably awful as Les Chroniques de Riddick… While keeping an eye on the two electrical receptacles that flank the bed, I am also imagining vividly the smoldering cremated remains of a French octogenarian…

The worst part, though, is lying in bed staring at that buttermilky blotch on Bruce’s frilly rose-and-heart-covered bedspread—imagining with horror any number of things that might have caused “the tell-tale stain”—too beat, or just too lazy, to bother getting up to change it.

L’être ou le néant, voilà le problème. Monter, descendre, aller, venir, tant fait l’homme qu’à la fin il disparaît. Un taxi l’emmène, un métro l’emporte, la tour n’y prend garde, ni le Panthéon. Paris n’est qu’un songe, Gabriel n’est qu’un rêve (charmant), Zazie le songe d’un rêve (ou d’un chauchemar) et toute cette histoire le songe d’un songe, le rêve d’un rêve, à peine plus qu’un délire tapé à la machine par un romancier idiot (oh ! pardon). Là-bas, plus loin – un peu plus loin – que la place de la République, les tombes s’entassent de Parisiens qui furent, qui montèrent et descendirent des escaliers, allèrent et vinrent dans les rues et qui tant firent qu’à la fin ils disparurent. Un forceps les amena, un corbillard les remporte et la tour se rouille et le Panthéon se fendille plus vite que les os des morts trop présents ne se dissolvent dans l’humus de la ville tout imprégné de soucis. Mais moi je suis vivant et là s’arrête mon savoir car du taximane enfui dans son bahut locataire ou de ma nièce suspendue à trois cents mètres dans l’atmosphère ou de mon épouse la douce Marceline demeurée au foyer, je ne sais en ce moment précis et ici-même je ne sais que ceci, alexandrinairement : les voilà presque morts puisqu’ils sont des absents.

To be or not to be, that is the question. Getting on, getting off, going, coming, mankind does so much of it that in the end he disappears. A taxi brings him, the metro takes him away, the Eiffel Tower doesn’t have a care nor does the Pantheon. Paris is nothing but a daydream, Gabriel nothing but a (charming) dream, Zazie the daydream of a dream, and this whole story the daydream of a daydream, hardly more than a delirious tale banged out by an idiot novelist on his typewriter (oh, sorry!). Over there, a bit farther—a little bit farther—past place de la République, the graves are piling up with Parisians who once were, who climbed up and down the stairs, went to and fro in the streets, and who did so much that in the end they disappeared. A pair of forceps brought them, a hearse takes them away again, and the Eiffel Tower rusts and the Pantheon crumbles faster than the bones of the all-too-present dead can dissolve in the humus of a city permeated with worries. But I am alive, and that’s all I know, for when it comes to the taxi driver skipping off in his cab or my niece hovering a thousand feet in the air or my sweet wife Marceline staying at home, all I know at this precise moment, right here, all I know is that, dactylically, they’re practically dead because they’re not here.

—Raymond Queneau, Zazie dans le métro

Between meeting Bruce and agreeing to live with him, I had spent a week looking at a number of apartments around town.

The first place I saw would have been ideal: a room in a large haussmannien apartment with three twenty-four-year-old French girls. Unfortunately, during the interview, which was conducted entirely en français, my less-than-perfect lingual talents apparently gave them the impression that I was either financially insolvent or a potential pervert, or both.

The second place I looked at had a lovely view of the Gare du Nord. For those of you who have never seen the Gare du Nord, this is called “irony.” It was inhabited by two smokers who, though in their thirties, had decided to decorate the place in an adolescent theme: posters and papers pinned to the walls, ashtrays blossoming with butts, and a recycling bin that had not been emptied of Kronenbourg bottles since the mid-1990s. It also had the intriguing feature of requiring one to pass through the shower to arrive at the toilet.

The third place was with four Spanish girls. This apartment was not in the 4e arrondissement so much as it was on the outskirts of heaven. (I have a thing for Spanish girls.) The room being offered, tucked under the eaves of an Escheresque building that I expect should fall over into the Seine any day now, was the size of a small cupboard. I could only stand upright in the center of the room, and the bed looked as if it was on loan from a kennel. Naturally, I would have taken it in an instant, but the Spanish girls never called me back. I tried to use the fact that the shower was reportedly stopped up as a means to console myself. The last place I had looked at, a large but windowless room in the 10e, was perfectly fine except for the stopped-up German in the second bedroom.

With regard to Bruce’s apartment, the deciding factor for me was the kitchen. Given that a meal at a Paris restaurant can easily run 20€ (that’s 26 bucks to you, Uncle Sam), eating in is imperative if you don’t want to end up living in a tent along the canal. In all the other places I saw, there was at best a hotplate. Cabinet space was a rarity, and you were lucky to find a toaster or microwave or, for that matter, a fridge larger than the one you kept beer in at college.

Bruce’s apartment, on the other hand, has a four-top range with a large oven underneath. It’s electric, sure, but we can’t ask for miracles… There’s even a bit of counter between the range and the large refrigerator/freezer. All of this allows Bruce and me to cook together almost daily. And dining with Bruce has proven to be one of the most interesting aspects of living in Paris, for reasons I will doubtless recount at a later date.

I hesitate. I honestly don’t know what I think. I do know, however, that Juning is coming back to take my room on rue Tolbiac and that I’m shit out of luck if I don’t have a new place by then. And I know that having a French roommate will be a big advantage for practicing the language and for meeting people here. And then there’s Bruce, who’s gazing at me with the most innocent look of eager anticipation I’ve ever seen on the face of an oversize thirty-three-year-old man.

— Okay, I say finally, yeah. Yeah, I can do this. This’ll work.

— Super! Bruce exclaims.

He grins and gives me a playful slug on the shoulder.

— It’s gonna be so cool to have an American roommate! he says enthusiastically, as though he were an eight-year-old and I his new pet turtle.

— Yeah, it’ll be cool, I agree.

— Ah, wait! There’s something I forgot to tell you.

There is a stipulation to taking the room: the last two weeks of March, his girlfriend is coming from the Czech Republic to stay with him in Paris. Bruce offers to knock 100€ off the rent that month if I’m willing to play the Spartan monk for fifteen days. Despite having a dreadful sinking feeling that the romantic bedspread will be making a comeback, I agree to a fortnight of room swapping.

With everything settled, we sit down on the couch. I look around the room, trying to make it click that this is actually where I will be living for a while. Bruce looks around as well, as though he too is seeing it for the first time and hasn’t yet quite gotten used to it. Then he says to me, in English:

— It is strange, you know. Ever since I divorce, I feel myself always divorcing everything.

Without knowing what he means, I know exactly what he means. I nod, but he stares at me, expecting more of a response.

— Well, I add, I guess you could say I just divorced my country.

— Yes, my friend, says Bruce. Yes, but now we have each other.

— At least it’s sure to be a better marriage than our last, eh?

We laugh. Then a silence falls between us. Not an uncomfortable one, no, but merely the silence of two men in their thirties resigning themselves to yet another unforeseen and unwanted, but all the same acceptable, new arrangement.

Bruce pops open a couple of 25cl beers and turns on the large television that is the pièce de résistance of the living room, and we watch Italy kick the shit out of France.

Four days later, I move in.

— Renovations? I ask.

Last year, he explains, a fire gutted the apartment. Indeed, if you lean out the living room window, you can still find scorch marks on the sill. The owner, who inherited the property from his grandmother and who was loath to give it up, let it to Bruce on the cheap in exchange for the repairs.

As Bruce tells me how the apartment was his pet project during the toughest months immediately following his divorce, I take a closer look around the living room. I should add that, even though there’s nothing on the walls and there are no bookshelves to be found here, the furniture and decorations Bruce does have are of a respectably high quality. His long leather couch is top-notch, and the matching entertainment system and coffee table (which doubles as the dining table) are tasteful. Also, Bruce went to the trouble of finding some admirably masculine drapes to hang in the salon.

In the corner of the room is Bruce’s personal oasis sportif: an adjustable workout bench equipped with piles of free weights, a jump rope and a towel hanging from the highest crossbar. Here is where we find the sole book in evidence. Lying open on the bench is Jean Cianti’s classic Le Grand Livre du Culturisme : Cours Complet de Body Building (Catherine de Coataudon-Kerdu, trans.). Offering a regiment of “exercises and techniques in muscular development, posture training, and nutritional advice,” this illustrated guide promises its reader the opportunity to become as buff as Junior European Champion Alessandro Ardenti, the Schwarzeneggeresque fellow pictured mid-flex on its cover. I pick it up and flip through the pages. Selected passages are marked with asterisks or underlined in ballpoint. Bruce smiles a little sheepishly as he takes it from me and slips it to the TV cabinet, muttering something about using it to faire du sport and something else about musculation.

— So this is the room, he says, leading me past the bench.

The bedroom is more than adequate for my needs. In fact, it’s twice the size of the room I left behind in San Francisco. In the corner stands an armoire large enough to store five times the amount of clothes I brought with me in my single suitcase. Unlike many rooms I’ve seen thus far, I can imagine this one being livable.

As I look around, however, I’m suddenly struck by the bedspread. Struck is not the word—embarrassed. I am embarrassed by the bedspread. Here is this big French guy showing me the room he’s renting, and his bedspread, God, his bedspread is dotted with little red hearts and roses on a field of pink. That’s not the bad part. In the center, there seems to be a large stain the color of a smoker’s teeth and of highly dubious origin. Naturally, I pretend that there’s nothing out of the ordinary here, and I remind myself that should I take the room I can always burn the sheets and duvet cover before sleeping in it.

— So how come you’re renting out the big room and not the other smaller one? I ask.

Bruce has already shown me his bedroom. If you blink, you might miss it as you cross through to get to the salle de bains. It is… monastic? spartan? Did they have monks in Sparta? If so, they slept in Bruce’s room.

— This bed, Bruce says absently, that slight sneer returning to his face. I bought it for my wife. She never shut up about it. My back hurts, my back hurts, we need a new bed… So finally I bought it for her. We used it three months before we got divorced. It’s a wonderful bed, very comfortable, very very expensive—over a thousand euros, to use it for just three months! But I just can’t sleep in it now.

Figuring it’s best to drop the matter, I walk back to the living room, take a quick peek again at the kitchen.

— So what do you think? he asks.

To be continued…

The following Friday, I went to see Bruce’s apartment at 20h (that’s eight o’clock to you and me). After close to half an hour of wandering up and down the rue du Faubourg St-Denis in search of the Passage Brady, I had to call Bruce and ask for him to meet me on the corner.

Bruce came down and led me back to the tiny alley that I must have passed eight or nine times without realizing it. Lost amid the dozens of nearly identical Indian restaurants, épiceries, and coiffeurs that line the passage is the front door to Bruce’s building. He punched in a code, and we passed through a dark hallway to the stairwell. We climbed up to the quatrième étage gauche (that’s the fifth floor on the left to us English-speaking folks—I suddenly understood how Bruce got those tree trunk thighs). Finally, we reached a door that was thumping and throbbing from within. From his pocket Bruce produced a most medieval looking contraption and used it to unlock a series of deadbolts. With a wave of his hand, he invited me in.

A cursory look around chez Bruce provides ample evidence that the apartment is occupied by un célibataire (for those of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion, that means a bachelor). When I enter, the television is on and Bruce has turned up so it can be heard over the heavy bass of “Fous ta cagoule” (number one on the French hip-hop charts for months running), which is blaring from his computer where a game of Mortal Kombat is paused.

— Well, this is it, says Bruce.

— Yes, I see.

He turns off the music and the television, and begins to give me the grand tour. The place isn’t huge, so another couple of waves of his hand is all it takes.

— Voilà le salon…

The off-white walls are bone bare, and there’s but one small, shaggy rug beneath the coffee table. Along with the enormous television and Bruce’s computer, there’s a couch, a coffee table (where I notice a twelve-pack of miniature beers is sitting), and his workout equipment. Throughout the apartment, the runners have been glued into place, and in the corners they’ve come loose. Naked bulbs dangle from open light fixtures.

— … la cuisine...

The counter space and cabinets are decent, but the shelf screwed to the wall looks unstable. It bows beneath the weigh of a large container of Trans-X creatine powder, a bucket of Cytogen Whey Pro (“The Must-Have Protein Formula”), and… a vase of flowers? The sink is choked with piled pots and pans, plates and plastic cups.

— … et la chiotte…

The shower stall, pink inside with mildew, has been pulled a good foot from the wall, exposing pipes and tubes. Behind the door, the water heater drip-drip-drips into a pail to keep time with the sink, and the toilet seat is noticeably smaller than it should be. The room smells vaguely like a basement… Come to think of it, the whole place has a mildly cementy aroma.

— I did all the renovations myself, Bruce announces with a twinge of pride.

To be continued…

How did Bruce know that I desperately needed a place? Maybe it was that unmistakable shelter-hungry look in my eyes, the tense, keen glare of the apartment-hunter espying potential quarry.

I needed to find a place and fast. To begin with, there was no chance for me to stay more than a month on rue Tolbiac. The landlady’s sister was due back soon from Beijing and so I would soon have to leave, which was fine by me. The room was gorgeous and the Asian neighborhood on the south side of Paris, with its Tang Frères grocery stores and innumerable Chinese and Vietnamese restos, was right up my alley, but the place was impossibly far from the métro. None of the other apartments I had seen since my arrival filled the bill.

— Oh, so you have a room in your place you wanna rent out? I say casually, to mask my desperation.

— Well, he says, I still have expenses to pay from my marriage. Well, I mean, from my divorce. (Beat.) I’m divorced.

— Me, too, I say. Twice.

— Ah, then we are brothers in misery, eh? he says. Worst mistake of my life, that salope!

I didn’t expected such a sneer of hatred from so gentle-seeming a hulk of a man. But just as suddenly his angry expression fades, and with a gesture he tosses away the thought of her. The conversation switches back to English.

— Yes, yes. I rent the room to save some money. I think you will like it. You come and see, eh?

— Yes, definitely, I say. Jesus, yeah, I need to come see it.

— So come Friday. There is a football match. If you want, we drink some beers and watch it.

— Sounds perfect.

— Alors mon ami, I got to leave now. Tomorrow, I want to make a little sport, then maybe I play football the afternoon. My car won’t start too. I have to take it to a friend to see what is the problem. So yes, a little football then I see about the car.

— Uh, great… Okay, I say, not quite sure why he is telling me all of this. Well, yeah. Give me your number and we’ll meet up next weekend.

We enact the ancient ritual of cell phone number exchange and end up chatting for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Then, saluting me with a smile and a nod, Bruce turns and disappears amid the crowd of unfamiliar faces. A few minutes later, having finished my wine, I tuck a couple of beers in my coat and head for the métro.