Hungry Woman in Paris (6 page)

“Sí, sí. ¿De dónde es usted?” She asked me where I was from because I certainly wasn’t Colombian like her. I told her I was
Mexican and that I was Rosemary’s friend, staying in her
chambre de bonne
. She explained to me that she was Colombian, from a town just south of Medellín. I gave her the short version of how my family
had migrated from a town north of Mexico City to Los Angeles. She explained to me that she was in Paris with her two daughters
and had been in France for six years
sans papiers
. I asked her why she’d come to France instead of the United States like most Latin American immigrants. She explained that
many years ago Spain did not require a visa from people from Colombia. They came in via Spain and, once in the European Union,
they were able to take the train and make their way into France. Why not stay in Spain, where they speak Spanish and life
will be a little easier? I asked her. She explained that she had relatives in France already and France is a richer country
than Spain.

“There are a lot of Colombians in Paris,” she informed me. She was so tempted to move to Levallois, where most of them resided,
but she did not want to lose her
chambre de bonne
and her part-time job on the third floor, with an American couple with two children. She asked me about Rosemary and I told
her about her mother and her trip to Los Angeles. I had not heard anything from Rosemary in over a month. I didn’t want to
call and bother her at a time like this, but I was hoping she would call me soon.

“Bueno pues.
Je m’appelle Marina, et vous?
” she said in Spanish and French. I looked at her funny and she quickly understood that I didn’t speak French. She sympathized
and said that after six years she could only speak it a little, but could understand it a lot.

“You have to speak French here, or no work,” she said in Spanish. We said our good-byes and she added that if I needed anything
to knock on her door, Apartment D. I wondered who my other sixth-floor neighbors were. Since I didn’t speak French I would
have to play face and gestures with them, but they didn’t need to know me. I didn’t even know how to introduce myself. Would
I be able to gesture “Hi, I’m from the U.S., but I hate the U.S. right now, so I’m here and I don’t know what I am doing with
my life or why I don’t want to get married. Nice to meet you”? I went into my room and shut the door.

The next day I had to go get groceries and a copy of Hemingway’s
A Moveable Feast
. Just because I was depressed and suicidal didn’t mean I shouldn’t catch up on my reading. I got on the metro and got off
at Concorde and crossed the street. A French police officer was walking back and forth in front of a police barricade; I looked
over and saw the American consulate. I walked on the rue de Rivoli past souvenir shops and countless tourists looking for
or leaving the Louvre and continued down the archways to the English bookstore. As soon as I walked in, I heard American English
being spoken, but soon the beautiful sounds of my language were interrupted by an Englishman searching for Voltaire. He was
directed to the French classics and headed down that aisle. I know the British invented the English language, but living in
America, I’d forgotten that we didn’t; we’re the ones with the accent; we’re the ones that talk funny; we’re the outsiders.
I realized that my unconscious mind had just assumed we Americans invented everything—everything except the Eiffel Tower.
I hadn’t realized how Americentric I was until I’d left the States.

I walked down the aisles and got to the
H
’s. All of Hemingway’s books were there in paperback, including numerous copies of
A Moveable Feast
. I wasn’t original, going to Paris and pretending I was Hemingway… So what that I was a journalist… I wasn’t an
alcoholic… yet. I had read
A Moveable Feast
back in high school, when I was taking French. Of course I could have taken Spanish to get an easy A, like so many Mexican
students, but I’d actually thought that I was going to go to France and would use the French I learned. Why had it taken me
more than ten years to finally get here? I’d been busy trying to save the world; but the Mother Teresa in me needed “a holiday,”
as the British say.

I walked closer to the cashier and saw a bookshelf filled with nothing but memoirs of Americans living in Paris. There is
a tradition of Americans living in Paris and doing all the things they couldn’t do in their own country. African-American
men came to Paris at the turn of the century because here they didn’t experience the discrimination they were subject to at
home. They could play their music and have sex with Frenchwomen without being imprisoned or lynched. Countless female writers
came to Paris because they could rent an apartment on their own without a husband’s signature. Imagine what life was like
back then, when you needed a husband to exist in society, I told myself. So what can I do here that I can’t do in my own country?

I ended up buying a book on how to live and thrive in Paris, along with the Hemingway book. I had considered getting a book
by F. Scott Fitzgerald just to keep my Hemingway book company, but I had to start thinking about money. I had saved up to
help out Armando with the down payment on a house. He said I should hold on to my money because he could afford the down payment
by himself. I didn’t feel right having him pay for everything. He was such a nice guy… Now, don’t ask me why I called
off the wedding… My mother has her theories, but none of them come close. I can tell you what I think, but I really can’t
say I know. It’s just a feeling. Kind of a journalist’s instinct I have when I’m interviewing someone and something in my
gut tells me it’s not the truth. Truth is a feeling swimming in my solar plexus, brushing up against my arms, caressing me
under my cheeks.

I stepped outside the bookstore and I was back in Paris again; now it was raining. A rainy day in Paris is beautiful, like
a postcard, when someone is there sharing an umbrella with you. But when you feel like the only person in the world who doesn’t
speak French and doesn’t have an umbrella, it feels like a giant dog peeing on you. I walked over to a café and tried ordering
in French. The waiter interrupted me as I was butchering his language and guessed exactly what I wanted. At least I didn’t
ask for a Coke, I thought. I went to great lengths not to be the “Ugly American”; it was exhausting trying to be a decent
person in a city where people were not so pretty to you. Rosemary had defended the French, being an unapologetic Francophile.
“It’s not that they are rude, it’s just that Paris is the city with the most tourists, and Parisians get tired of them,” she’d
said. “Also, all those tourists go home and tell their friends and then the stereotype gets perpetuated. I remember people
being rude to me in Los Angeles,” she’d added as evidence.

I looked around me and knew that if I ever wanted to graduate from being a tourist I would have to learn French. I’ve already
told you why I didn’t learn French and how I am cursed, but there was no way around it. I hated when people criticized my
parents for not knowing and speaking English. I would tell them that my parents worked manual-labor jobs and came home exhausted
to their ten children and the idea of going to night school to learn English was too much for them. After my mother was done
with her day she would turn into a zombie and watch telenovelas and escape into lands where women like her got the fairy tale
and not the ten kids. I, however, had to learn French. But what would be the best way? A lot of these language schools were
so expensive, and they don’t give you a
carte de séjour
. I can only stay here for another three weeks before I have to go, I reminded myself.

In the middle of the night I got a phone call from Rosemary. She had been in the U.S. for almost two months, but I’d only
heard from her once. I’d wanted to call her, but figured she was probably overwhelmed, so I’d waited patiently.

“I’m not coming back,” Rosemary confessed, waking me up out of whatever dream of serenity I was having. She explained how
her mother had died and she was so devastated. At the funeral she ran into an ex-boyfriend—not the one who’d brought her to
France, but a high school sweetheart, who won her over by being at her mother’s funeral. She cried for two weeks and he stood
by her side and was devoted to her at her most vulnerable moments. Rosemary realized that she still loved him, and they had
gotten engaged.

“You’ll return to the U.S. in December for my wedding, won’t you?” she asked me.

“Yes, of course,” I told her. “I’ll be there, I promise.” What else could I say? Someday I would have to go back and face
my mother and my family, as well as the fact that I would be thirty and unmarried. I hated all those stupid Hollywood stories
about women turning twenty-nine and immediately their life was on a timer that eventually would ring, setting off the biological
clock that would cause them to explode if they didn’t turn it off by dropping an egg and producing a fetus. “God, what a terrible
trick you played on modern women,” I said out loud, staring up at the ceiling. I hated those stories, what clichés, how typical,
how Hollywood… how painful. You don’t know how it hurts to be soooo single when you’re Mexican-American and your five
sisters are already married with kids and everyone in your family wonders what the hell happened to you that you can’t get
your life together.

It seemed all around me my girlfriends had betrayed me. It felt like this was going to be yet another big personal deadline
I would miss. All my girlfriends had met the societal demand of thirty, when supposedly you stop being a girl and you get
engaged and finally become a woman by getting married. I remembered all the ideals Luna, Rosemary, and Margaret had had about
what a woman’s life should be: not just “a room of one’s own” but a life of one’s own. But then twenty-nine came and the ideals
were thrown out the window, along with the dirty-girl purse with the multiple fiesta-colored condoms and the prewritten “Dear
One-night Stand” letters.

Rosemary asked me to ship her belongings to her parents’ address and told me I could keep the
chambre de bonne
for as long as I wanted by paying her rent. I told her I was glad for her that she’d found love at such a difficult time.

“You deserve all the wonderful things in life to happen to you,” I said and began crying.

“Are you crying?” she asked me.

“Yes, I’m just so happy for you,” I replied, covering up the fact that I was reminded once again of how wrong Armando and
I were for each other. The kind of joy that came out of her was so inspiring that I knew I’d never felt that kind of delight
talking about being engaged with Armando.

Rosemary wished me luck in Paris and gave me a couple of phone numbers of American girlfriends and a French friend or two
who were actually open to making new friends. According to Rosemary, the typical French person won’t let you be her friend
until after ten years of knowing you.

“If they didn’t meet you in elementary school, they are not interested in getting to know you now,” Rosemary had once informed
me, explaining why French people were more genuine than Americans. “You see, in the U.S., everybody calls you a friend and
smiles at you like they have known you forever, but when you really need them they act like they don’t know you. But the French
don’t ever smile or call you a friend unless they mean it.” I considered this and realized that, although I loved authenticity
and people being direct with me, in these circumstances when I felt so vulnerable and fragile and completely alone, I would
prefer people who smiled at me and didn’t like me than people who didn’t like me and therefore didn’t smile. Yeah, okay, call
me a hypocrite. Or an American.

I contemplated the phone numbers long after Rosemary had hung up, and stared at the peeling paint on the ceiling. After a
few minutes of following the cracks in the ceiling I looked down and noticed a poster of Anaïs Nin. It had a quote about how
your life expands depending on your courage. I stared at this Frenchwoman who’d had an extraordinary life and wondered, If
I were Anaïs Nin, what would I do?
I would go have sex with a stranger
was the answer I got back. Okay, if I were Hemingway, what would I do?
I’d kick the shit out of somebody, wrestle a bear, or shoot myself.
So if I were me, I asked myself as a joke, what would I do?
Go to cooking school
was the answer that came back at me, and I had to laugh. I laughed so hard I cried. I cried because I missed my mother. Cooking
always reminded me of my mother. Actually, lard reminded me of my mother, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. She was
my first source of food, so my brain automatically referenced her even though I had specifically instructed it to bury all
thoughts of her in the back of the closet holding all the painful memories, the ones that only come out when you’re really
drunk and you’ve puked everything up and all that is left inside you are the vile, bitter memories.

I had considered calling my mother, but emotionally I was not ready to answer any of her questions. The first thing she would
ask me was “Where are you and what are you doing?” I would respond, “I’m in Paris… having an existential crisis.” That
would be my honest answer, but she’d probably reply, “In Paris doing what pendejada?”
Pendejada
means idiotic or moronic or whatever colorful insult mothers can think up that they assume would help their daughters understand
what idiots they are. Women of my mother’s generation were not allowed to have an existential crisis; you had to be rich and
childless to afford to have one. She would not be sympathetic, although she could appreciate the fact that she and my father
worked so hard to afford me the opportunity to have an existential crisis. If she were not so embarrassed about my breakup
with Armando and my nasty fight with my Tía Bonifacia at the wake, I could see her bragging about my existential crisis in
Paris to her comadres at the local beauty salon.