Almost French (30 page)

‘In that case, Madame, you might as well have bought a vulgar mongrel.’

I don’t say another word. Maddie is shampooed, plucked, shaved, and powdered white. Her face fur is trimmed, gelled and teased. The whole process takes almost three hours and costs me F550—roughly $150. An extra F50 charge has been added, explains Christine, for the time spent untangling her
knots. I pay up meekly, apologetically. I forget I’m supposed to tip.

In future, Maddie will come four or five times a year, turning up in tandem with Lou-Lou for their detested double booking. Livid to have been duped into coming yet again, the pair of them slide reluctantly through the door like samples of seventies shag carpets, prompting reprimands from the staff about the merits of brushing. Premium-priced
toilettage
isn’t my only indulgence either. Thanks to a tip from the fishmonger, I start buying dried pigs ears—yes, the real revolting things—because in France they’re sold in every pet store and dogs adore them. Maddie’s instinct is to bury them and we find them half-chewed and glutinous under cushions and pillows on beds and sofas—anywhere she’s strictly not allowed. Even crazier, one bleak autumn Saturday twelve months from now, Maddie and Lou-Lou will actually be blessed at the American Cathedral in Paris. Along with a Noah’s Ark of creatures including a circus panther, a chimpanzee, a bald eagle, a couple of guinea pigs and about eighty cats and dogs. Down the aisles the animals go, two by two, until Lou-Lou and Maddie reach the altar where—to their immense displeasure—they will be splashed with water by beaming ministers.

Yes, I guess Paris has changed me.

Leaving the Marie Poirier parlour after this first appointment, I take a while to adjust to Maddie’s New Look. Christine, it’s glaringly obvious now, took absolutely no notice of my request for a more unkempt style. Maddie’s transformation is radical: she is almost unrecognisable. For starters, the chrysanthemum face cut is actually more of a dandelion puff—an airy cloud of fur that looks like it might blow away at the slightest breeze. Her shocking new whiteness makes
you squint—it’s like looking at fresh snow in sunlight. Instead of feeling heavy and greasy, her fur is soft and silky and smells like the perfume section of a department store. As a parting gift, a red silk scarf with Marie Poirier printed neatly across the corner is wrapped around her neck. On the metro home, I keep staring at her, smelling her, unsure whether the result is grotesque or glamorous. Should I feel embarrassed or proud? Eventually I decide she looks pretty. For one brief moment, one of us at least, looks Parisian.

The apartment had appeared empty when I returned with shopping bags spilling leeks and celery but muffled voices and stomping overhead led me upstairs to the mezzanine. Standing on the beam, I poked my head through the open skylight.

Frédéric and a huge man I have never met, whose centre of gravity is surely not right for heights, are sitting on the edge of our sloping roof, perilously close to a six-storey fall into the school playground. Iron rooftops roll all around them. The stranger is holding a skein of string, whose end point (anchored by a teaspoon) is dangling in the void beside our building.

‘What are you doing?’

Although he seems to be observing, not actually doing anything, Frédéric gives me a busy, manly look. ‘We’re measuring where the window will go.’

For months we’d been talking about creating a new window in our apartment and through friends had found an apparently reliable builder who makes a living out of these sorts of jobs. The man holding the string between enormous sausage fingers must be Mio from Montenegro. My heart sinks. I’d expected tools and technical precision, not this string-and-spoon method of ascertaining something as crucial as where we will smash a hole in our stone wall.

‘Er, don’t you think that might be a bit approximate.’

Mio’s eyeballs roll in exaggerated impatience. Clearly I don’t have a clue. ‘
Ah les femmes
,’ he sighs, his powerful shoulders sagging under the weight of my female stupidity. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, he says to Frédéric, or words to that effect. And although they only met this morning they chuckle like old mates, the weighted string suspended in the abyss as though the roof edge is a riverbank and the pair of them are fishing. I retreat, leaving the business of measuring to the men folk, not sure who is more dangerous—Frédéric with his history of dodgy DIY jobs or the swaggering, sexist builder.

If there was one thing we didn’t like about our apartment, it was the fact that an entire length of its rectangular form is devoid of windows. All the openings are in the roof or on the northern façade, which looks onto the other wing of our building and a couple of domed roofs on Rue Réaumur. We have plenty of light but no view. Our blind wall becomes a source of frustration, a solid, sealed barrier between us and Beyond. It inspires curiosity. Climbing onto our roof (I am content to stick only my head out the skylight), we discover the wall without windows looks on to the Gothic silhouette of St-Eustache church, rising above the rooftops. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could see this from our lounge?

We dreamed and deliberated for a long time before finally deciding to go ahead with the window. You see, it’s totally illegal. We haven’t sought permission. In Paris, alterations to building exteriors require official approval, understandably. Trouble is, the process of getting permission is a long paper-trail involving numerous bureaucratic departments, public architects, every member of the building’s
copropriété
or body corporate and any neighbours who might be able to
glimpse the alteration by tiptoeing on their toilet seats. Usually it arrives at a dead end. Invariably someone objects—if not the authorities then a jealous neighbour who can’t bear the thought that you might have something—a rooftop terrace or room with a view—that he or she doesn’t.

Our illegal window provides an illuminating insight into the way things get done in France, revealing just how simple life can be, how limitless the possibilities, when you ignore the tangle of red tape altogether. Taken to an extreme, this rampant rule bending and breaking accounts for the breathtaking corruption scandals involving politicians, banks and big business in this country. But on a far smaller (and I like to kid myself, responsible) scale it can be rather efficient. It allows for a certain suppleness.
On va s’arranger
, someone will say, meaning they’re willing to strike a deal. It might not strictly speaking be one hundred percent legal but—and this is what counts—an agreement will be reached that keeps all parties happy.

A couple of friends revealed how well the system can work over dinner one night. They had just finished stunning renovations in the 5th
arrondissement
, converting an entire top floor of poky
chambres de bonnes
(maids’ rooms) into one big, airy loft. It was a huge job which dragged on for about a year and involved various teams of workmen—in other words not the sort of job that could be carried out secretly; the other apartment owners in the building had to be alerted. The problem was, at the outset several of them opposed their plans. But our friend, savvy in such matters, saw through their woolly objections. His neighbours weren’t really against the work—they probably couldn’t have cared less. What they wanted (without actually saying so) was something
in return for their approval
. One was planning daring renovations of
her own, as it turned out, and wanted our friend’s support at the next
copropriété
meeting. Another, a pensioner who lived directly beneath, settled for a small wad of cash—to compensate for the noise inconvenience. ‘
Et voilà
,’ our friend concluded, as though discreetly handing out envelopes of money is as everyday as getting a suit dry-cleaned. ‘Everybody’s happy.’

Although the French seem to make sense of their system, for a foreigner the approach to rules and regulations in this country is difficult to grasp. Some are applied to the absolute letter while others are openly flouted as if everyone—including the law enforcers—agree that it was a silly idea in the first place. Perhaps it’s because in so many ways, the French have surrendered their lives to the state, blindly conforming to the rigid order imposed on them because that is the price they pay for cradle-to-grave perks and protection.
L’Etat
employs more than one quarter of the country’s workforce. Cumbersome and omnipresent it interferes with almost every aspect of its citizens’ daily lives.

So the French are forced to express their legendary individualism, their recklessness, in a thousand small ways: refusing to pick up their dogs’ droppings even though law requires it; hurtling motorbikes onto pavements to avoid three seconds of red light. Paying everyone from house cleaners to plumbers
au noir
is standard practice because it has the delightful double advantage of saving money and cheating the government out of income tax and the ‘social contributions’ required of any employers. The thrill of disobedience is part of the Gallic baggage.
Il faut oser
, our renovator friend told us. You’ve got to dare.

Two architects—friends of friends—dropped by to outline the possibilities for the planned window. Wearing ill-fitting
jackets, loosely knotted ties and bad haircuts, they resembled ageing hippy-intellectuals who have made an effort to look businesslike.
Soixante-huitards
, for sure, Frédéric says afterwards, meaning they probably threw a few cobblestones in 1968. An ordinary window is not very
amusant
, said one. It’s a question of imagination expanded the other, outlining some more adventurous options. ‘We could do a rotating glass door, a sort of viewing pad … or even better, a terrace built like a drawbridge, something big enough for a small table and a couple of chairs. We’ve just installed one in the 11th
arrondissement
… very practical with those surveillance planes flying overhead, so when the inspectors come knocking on your door,
toc
!’ He slapped both hands together, making a triumphant shutting sound. ‘The drawbridge is pulled up, they see nothing!’

I laughed at the madness of the scheme, its ingenuity, the fact that architects who occasionally work for the government should take such delight in outwitting the authorities. Of course, we don’t want anything so extravagant, we just want a window, I said, looking at Frédéric, my law-abiding lawyer. Little lights of anarchy glinted in his eyes. ‘That sounds very practical,’ he nodded, thoughtfully, and I knew he was already imagining dropping the drawbridge each morning for breakfast on our sunny terrace with a view over Paris.

When Mio and Frédéric descend from the roof, we all chat for a while over coffees. Just as concierges are invariably Portuguese and most bistros in the capital are owned by people from Auvergne or Aveyron, a good number of the city’s masons and builders hail from one of the countries that used to make up Yugoslavia. A towering two metres with an assertive belly straining his shirts, Mio studied philosophy
after school and somehow ended up as a builder in Paris. His conversation is an unstoppable meandering of proverbs, quotations and ruminations on life and poetry. He sighs often, great bottomless breaths of Balkan gravity that slowly inflate then shrink his enormous frame, usually in contemplation of a problem that he alone can solve.

Given the window is technically possible (in other words, the building won’t fall down when we bash a hole in the wall), and it won’t bother anyone (none of our neighbours will even be able to see it) the main problem is the placement. It is imperative we get the position right—and not just for aesthetic reasons. Rising halfway up the other side of our blind wall, stopping at the end of our lounge, is a convent. Developers have been dying to get their hands on it for years because of its prime location. Imagine a rectangle sliced in two by a diagonal line. The rectangle is our wall, the diagonal line the sloping path of the convent’s roof. The problem is simple: our window has to be
above
the convent’s roof line, otherwise we will bash a hole straight into a nun’s room. Based on the findings of the string-and-spoon experiment—whose purpose was to measure the distance between the two roofs—the outline of a window is sketched in chalk on our wall. It is a modest size—110cm by 70cm—and later we will wish we had been more daring. Frédéric is excited, Mio full of bravado; he’ll start with a small hole, a reconnaissance, and if the first attempt comes out in the convent, he’ll just patch it up and aim higher. Nervously, I picture our wall riddled with misfires.

The business of drilling through the stone is bone-jarring work. The wall is much thicker than we’d expected. By mid-afternoon, Mio has tunnelled a narrow aperture fifty centimetres into the stone and still hasn’t reached the other side.
Powder clouds soar to the ceiling, showering dust down on the plastic sheeting we thankfully spread over our furniture. Sweating and exhausted, Mio is starting to look worried and I realise that for all his blustering, this is a tricky job and he wasn’t entirely joking about the risk of burrowing into the convent. Every burst of drilling brings me running out of my office, hoping for a glimmer of light. But each time the hole remains dark, like looking through a telescope with a lens cover, and I become increasingly anxious that we’ve miscalculated, that our illegal tunnel is going to land us in trouble.