Paris to the Moon (36 page)

***

At the meeting there was a general feeling that we needed to placate Quelin. We had a cross section of waiters and clients there that afternoon: Claude and Guy from the staff, and a left-wing journalist who I thought was looking at me darkly, having spotted not Tom Paine but a smoothie from the CIA.

Lorenzo led off with his usual quiet authority. He was in his usual costume: a soft black turtleneck and flannel slacks, with a scarf thrown, Little Prince style, around his throat. He has a round face, with an absolutely beautiful, warm smile. He has two registers at his command: a low, troubled one that he uses when he is reviewing the agenda and another, higher, and more plaintive one that he uses when he is exhorting us publicly, for instance when we occupy the restaurant. He outlined the problems. The waiters felt abused and uncertain because the standards in the kitchen were declining and Bucher was still letting the new manager take a chunk of their service money. "How were they declining?" someone asked. The fish was no good; the sole was being parboiled before it was grilled; someone else thought a supplier was coming in from the Flo Group with ordinary beef. "Well, I had a steak there the other night," someone began . . . but we all shushed him. The food, good or bad, was not really the
point,
we all said. The point was the spirit of the Balzar. If we did not act quickly and more decisively, the brasserie, and the
garcons
' security, would be lost. The guys had decided to stage a one-day wildcat strike, and it was important for us to support them—perhaps by occupying the Balzar the same day, perhaps on the night before. In any case, the crisis of the battle was approaching, and we could not be lazy or indecisive in our actions.

Claude spoke next. He was angry and at the same time, and for the first time, a little pleading. The
garcons
were planning to walk out on Thursday, he explained, and he hoped that we, the members of the association, would come out to support them. We would have Bucher foxed coming and going.

I could sense a reluctance to do this on the part even of our elite radical circle; this would be going beyond the politesse of our arrangement with Bucher, moving toward open warfare.
"Attention!"
someone said, a real interjection in French. "This could put us in a dangerous position." I feared too that Claude's ideas about the power of the association were greater than the power of the association deserved. I noticed that he liked to say the term
the association,
and he always referred to Lorenzo as "M. le President."

I was becoming a little dubious, especially so because Lorenzo, for some reason, I thought, kept looking at me for ideas. I said, at last, that the only threat that had any meaning to Bucher was the threat of more bad publicity; that in effect, a boycott of his other restaurants would scare him more than anything else we could do. But I was also pretty sure that Bucher would never sell, and I feared that if the
garcons
walked out, he'd just replace them. Perhaps, I hinted, I gulped—I sensed the left-wing journalist looking at me with increasing disgust—we needed to start moving toward an exit strategy (I couldn't think of the French, so I said,
scenario de sortie,
which was more or less right). Did we have an exit strategy, aside from victory? What if Bucher held fast and didn't move? Could we get the
garcons
out in decent shape and not just blow up the Balzar, so to speak?

I was rewarded with steady, opaque looks. Having arrived at the logic of war, one of us—the American—was trying to wriggle out of it at the first sign of opposition. (I remembered what an American diplomat negotiating with the quai d'Orsay had once said to me: "It is hard enough to get them to start, and once they start, you can't get them to stop.")

Then Lorenzo and Mme. de Lavigne together raised another, stranger, and more tempting vision. What if we were to buy the Balzar? What if Bucher could be convinced that the cost to him in bad publicity and harassment was just too great, didn't make sense for his chain, and that, finally, in a moment of facesaving capitulation (but why would this be facesaving for him? I let it pass) he could sell to a group of
actionnaires—
i.e.,
us.

Lorenzo had a nice rhetorical formula for this transaction: "M. Bucher wants to join the association, but the association would like to join the Flo Group." Mme. de Lavigne had been in the restaurant business; it would not be hard to do. We could each own a little piece of the Balzar, the
gargons
too, and, run as a cooperative, a kind of writers and waiters cooperative, we could make it
rentable.

It sounded like just about the best idea I had ever heard. Like many Americans of my generation, I am a fanatic restaurant imaginer: I think that someday I will open a restaurant called La Chanson, to serve French-American cooking: roast chicken with caramelized carrots and broccoli puree and pecan pie for dessert; then there is my favorite idea for a restaurant called Les Fauves, which would serve only game—taglietelle with wild boar, pheasant stuffed with chestnuts—or else to open—and this I was sure would make a fortune—a place to get real Montreal bagels, better than any other kind, boiled and then baked, sweet and chewy whereas New York bagels are bready and tasteless. . . .

So this was the hand that we would play, or try to play at least. We would have another sit-in at the Balzar, the night before the meeting, and we would threaten Bucher with still more
mediatisation.
The next day, independently, the personnel would stage their wildcat strike, and the two actions together would, somehow, sufficiently intimidate a whipsawed Bucher and he would crumble and sell us back the Balzar.

I can only say that at the time it did not seem like a completely crazy scenario. What we could not understand, I suppose, was why Bucher would want to buy the Balzar only in order to destroy it, why, after it had been clearly shown to him that he could not understand the institution, grasp its traditions, perpetuate its values, he would still want to hold on to it. For the money? It was too small for his chain; he had said as much himself. He could make more money in a single sitting at one of his Right Bank atmosphere factories—the vast art deco Boeuf sur le Toit, or the belle epoque Julien—than he could in a week at Balzar. It wasn't as if we had anything against him personally; if he wanted to come and eat at the Balzar, we'd welcome him, anytime. But why own it only in order to ruin it? Where was the logic in that?

I suppose we couldn't realize, or could realize but couldn't accept, that the logic of business is not a logic in that sense. It's not only a narrow consideration of profits and losses, but a larger logic of, well, appetite. To buy something is to assert oneself, and to sell it, for whatever reason, is to collaborate in one's own diminishment. We were asking him to regurgitate in public, and even if we offered him the feather with which to tickle his own throat, he wouldn't want to do it. A man in his position couldn't afford to regurgitate, not in public, because then he would look ridiculous.

Anyway, we all clasped hands and swore to be at the Balzar on October 7 to reoccupy the place. Everybody had bought some food to the meeting—I recall that Claude had brought a particularly beautiful and fragrant Cantal, a wonderful cheese—and we soon broke for some wine. I buttonholed Guy after the meeting and asked him what we could really do, what the guys, the
garcons, really
wanted. Did they really want us to try to buy the place? He said, We want it to stay the same. To continue doing what we've always done. And to serve good food—the food isn't good enough. The food should be excellent.

This was curious, I thought. We radicals had decided that it was a red herring, so to speak, to make too much of an issue of the quality of the cooking—that wasn't the point, we insisted grandly—yet the
garcons
made much of it, made more of it than anything else. Some fundamental part of their metierhood is offended by the knowledge that the cuisine is being degraded. There is a real decent impulse on their part to put down a
plat
on the table with real enthusiasm: You'll enjoy this.

As I thought it over on my way home, it occurred to me that this is after all the deepest altruistic impulse that we have, food sharing being the most fundamental gesture of selflessness. I thought I was at last beginning to see the deeper motives, the real human basis of their indignation, beyond the few pennies here and there that they were losing. In the old regime they had been the tribal chieftains, the ones doing the sharing, and this more than compensated for their otherwise servile-seeming role. If they served good food, then they were practicing, if only by proxy, the primal role of the provider; if they served bad food, then they were just waiters in a restaurant. Beneath the "French" aspect of the Balzar wars—the mistrust of change that is not merely, or not merely foolishly and emptily, "nostalgic"—there was a deeper impulse, almost an instinctive one. Of course they wanted to protect their share of the service, and they wanted to keep their old working conditions. But they also were terrified of a loss of status, of being publicly shamed. To be a server at all is to dance on the edge of shame all the time.
"Sale metier,"
Bemelmans's waiters famously mutter to themselves as they go in and out of the kitchen, "filthy profession," and it is easy to understand why. Bucher was reducing them to food bearers, rather than food sharers, and it made them feel as if they were being eaten alive.

***

October came, and we occupied the Balzar again. The second
reunion
had a different feeling from the first, both gayer and angrier and more hysterical. At the first meeting the near absurdity of what we were doing had given everything an edge of comedy.
Can we really be doing this? Well, -yes, we are. We are!
At the second
reunion
things seemed tougher, rockier. There were far more of us, for one thing, and not everyone could find a seat. People were waiting outside, thronged outside, trying to come in. The Balzar wars had been
mediatise
as something amusing—
a fronde parisienne,
one of the papers had called it, a Parisian civil war. Those of us on the inside knew that the real action would take place the following day, when the
gargons
walked out, and we felt both anxious not to tip their hand and eager to let them know that we were with them.

Lorenzo was sublime. At the appointed hour he rose again from his seat, "We are here tonight not to make demands, not to protest, but to inquire," he began. "We are here to inquire of M. Bucher if, though he owns the name Balzar, if anyone can purchase its spirit. Is that spirit truly for sale? Can it be bought and sold? Or can it only be protected? We are not here to criticize the cuisine or to give M. Bucher lessons in the management of his affairs. We claim no expertise in that." Lorenzo gave a just so slightly sardonic inflection to these last words, implying that this was an expertise that one would hardly want. "But we do claim to understand the spirit of this place, the thousand tiny interchanges between the
personnel
and the place that have made it something more than a place where one exchanges money for food, and from which one would go elsewhere if more food could be had for less money. We are here to inquire about the nature of
possession,
about what it means to possess something and about who truly possesses a place: the man who owns the chairs and tables or the people who sit at those tables or those who have devoted their working lives to those tables. We want to ask: To whom belongs the Balzar? Does it belong to those who own it or to those who love it? Above all, we are here to inquire if any of us can feel at home in this place if the
personnel
of the Balzar do not feel at home in it. For they are the carriers of the spirit of this place. I say to the
personnel:
We are with you, right to the end." The room exploded in applause.

People began to rise and make seconding speeches themselves. Many of them, I am bound to report, had a slight edge of anti-Americanism, although no American was involved in this struggle, one way or another. (Apart from me, I mean, and I was there strictly as an honorary Parisian, or Quisling.)

For instance, a man rose from one of the banquettes at the end and cried, "You must let Bucher know that this is not a small war!" Applause. "Not a little brushfire that can be put out." More applause. "Let them know that this will not be the Gulf War!" Wild applause. "It will be Vietnam!" Madly enthused applause.

But after the meeting I went over to talk to this Danton, and he turned out to be a French-American businessman who lives in San Francisco. He gave me his card. Finally, and one by one, the waiters came out to bow, and we rose to our feet to applaud them. They looked genuinely touched, and we swore that we would not let them be betrayed.

The next day at lunch the waiters walked out. I went over to the rue des Ecoles to see what was going on and found all of them on the street, in mufti, carrying placards. Their union had put out a table, and there was a petition that you could sign to show your support for the Balzaristes. The
garcons
looked happy, and Jacques, a friend of Lorenzo's, was there with a video camera, documenting the event.

Our next meeting, in late November, was the strange one. Bucher had invited a little group of us to have breakfast with him once again, and on the eve of that meeting, we decided to have a serious meeting—an
assemblee generale
of Les Amis du Balzar. We held it, now, as serious meetings should be held, not at the Balzar or in Mme. de Lavigne's apartment, but in the classroom in a film school in the Twelfth Arrondissement, at nine o'clock at night. There was a pretty good turnout, considering, but now the alacrity and lightness had been lost, and the meeting had the air of, well, of a meeting. We all sat on school chairs, uncomfortably, and Claude, looking surprisingly uncomfortable too, droned on about the position of the waiter's grievance in front of the labor court.