The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (28 page)

“Allow me to tell you that I am not competent in that which
interests you,” he wrote in French. “I do not see what I could bring to you by meeting you.”

I got the message. I was on my own.

I sent Phil my letter to the pope in French and Spanish. Marilena translated it into Italian. Now what? “We’re at a crossroads,” Phil said. “The pope gets so much mail that the tiny office that deals with it is swamped.”

Phil had written a story for Reuters disclosing that the office receives about 6,000 letters a week, more than 300,000 a year. Monsignor Giuliano Gallorini, head of the office that handles letters to the pope, leads a team of one nun and two laywomen, who work in one small room. They sort the letters by language. Monsignor Gallorini told Vatican Television that most of the letters are about “difficulties,” mostly illness but also economic distress. “They ask for prayers,” he said.

More urgent and personal letters go to the pope’s two private priest secretaries. “These are the ones that are a little more delicate, that have to do with questions of conscience,” Gallorini said.

My letter fit neither of the categories.

I apologized to Phil for involving him.

“No, no, there’s no reason why Francis won’t say he’ll come to your street one day,” he said. “Your letter is so cute, so innocent, so sincere.”

So naïve?

Phil plunged me into a convoluted world of Vatican politics and protocol that I hadn’t dealt with in thirty years. He ran through possible scenarios.

First, the slam dunk: Phil would give my letter to the pope himself the next time he was in the “pool”—that is, when he was
one of the few journalists chosen to cover a papal event, who then “pools” the information to the rest of the press corps. That, we decided, would be too brazen.

Second, the Swiss Guard: Phil would give the letter to the commandant of the Pontifical Swiss Guard, which protects the Vatican.

“You mean just go up to the Vatican front gate and hand it to one of the guards on duty outside?” I asked.

“Not any Swiss Guard,” said Phil. “The commandant. I could ask him for guidance.”

That, we agreed, was too uncertain.

Third, the payback: “There is a Jesuit who owes me a favor,” he said.

Sounded good to me.

So Phil took the letter to Father Spadaro, the Jesuit priest who had interviewed the pope for
La Civiltà Cattolica
. Father Spadaro was amused. He smiled and read parts of the letter aloud. He told Phil he had once visited the Martyrium off the rue des Martyrs. He said he saw the pope regularly and that he’d be happy to help. He hand-delivered my letter to the pope’s office in Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse where he has taken up residence.

I prepared for a phone call from the Vatican. I rigged up a speaker system on the dining room table. I readied a recording device to preserve the conversation and capture every one of the pope’s words. I wrote a script in Italian.

“What’s with the speakers and wires?” Andy asked me a few days later.

I told him I was waiting for Pope Francis to call.

“You’re joking, right?” he said.

So far, Pope Francis hasn’t called. He hasn’t written.

But I refuse to give up.

Like Ignatius Loyola, Francis exhorts us to find God in all things. “I look forward to the surprise of every day,” he once wrote.

Me, too.

LE KALE AMÉRICAIN EST ARRIVÉ!

. . .

And here and there gleamed the glistening ruddy brown of a hamper of onions, the blood-red crimson of a heap of tomatoes, the quiet yellow of a display of squash and the somber violet of the aubergine; while numerous fat black radishes still left patches of gloom amidst the quivering brilliance of the general awakening.

—É
MILE
Z
OLA
,
The Belly of Paris

I
LEFT TOWN ONE AUGUST, AND WHEN I RETURNED IN
September, Ali Belkessa and Fahmi Hamrouni, the greengrocers between the hardware and cheese stores at the bottom of the street, had disappeared.

Andy detected the first sign of something amiss.

“There’s a new team at Ali’s shop,” he told me.

“They must still be on vacation,” I said.

When I went shopping for fruit and vegetables, I asked about Ali and Fahmi.

“They’re gone,” said the man in charge.

He told me his name was Kamel Ben Salem. He said he and
his father-in-law Abdelhamid Ben Dhaou bought the shop from Ali in June and spent the month of August renovating. They had been open for four days.

“Where did they go?” I asked.

“To the Seventeenth, I think,” he said, meaning an arrondissement to the northwest.

I wanted the address; Kamel said he didn’t have it.

How could this be? Ali belonged on the rue des Martyrs. A big man with a big belly, he knew me by my first name and kissed me on both cheeks whenever I stopped by. When he became a father, the street knew and rejoiced.

Ali’s shop cascaded gloriously onto the street most Sunday mornings, when the rue des Martyrs was closed to traffic. He set up tables with bargains of the week and loudly hawked his goods, the only merchant to do so. Some people delighted in his effusive spirit; others heard his shouts about three cartons of strawberries for the price of two and thought he belonged in an Algerian souk, not a gentrifying neighborhood of Paris. Ali had been born in Algeria, while most of the street’s greengrocers came from the Tunisian island of Djerba, some from the same extended family. To them, Ali was an outsider.

I’m a reporter. How had I not known that Ali and Fahmi were leaving?

Ali had promised to take me to buy produce at the vast Rungis wholesale market; Fahmi had once featured in a broadcast I did for NBC’s
Today Show
, about an official campaign to coax Parisians to be nicer to tourists. He was filmed telling me about carrots. Just about every time I saw him, I joked that in America, he was a star! I thought we had a relationship.

So why didn’t they tell me?

I crossed the street to the café at No. 8, where Ali and Fahmi had alternated taking their breaks every morning. Mahmoud Allili, the owner, is also from Algeria; he and Ali had been close. Mahmoud shrugged. “Everybody knew they were leaving.”

“But we should have had a party for them!” I said. “We should have taken photos.”

He shrugged again. Such sentimentality had nothing to do with business.

I went next door and asked Valérie Levin, the baker’s wife, if she had heard. “Sure,” she replied. “We knew they were moving. But you don’t talk much about these things.”

I walked to the more upscale fruit and vegetable shop up the street then owned by Ezzidine Ben Abdollah. Even though Ali had been competition, the two men had liked and respected each other. “He got a great offer,” said Ezzidine. “I assumed you knew.”

He said Ali had gone to work as a wholesale buyer at Rungis for his uncle, who owned several greengrocery shops in Paris. “You make more money doing that than what we do here on the rue des Martyrs,” he explained.

Like Ezzidine, the new owner was from Djerba, but Ezzidine told me that he missed Ali. “He knew everyone’s name,” he said. “He came by just to talk—about produce, about business, about our families.”

I stopped last at the cheese shop next to Ali’s. Annick Chataigner said she had known in the spring that Ali had plans to sell. “I tried to persuade him to stay. I told him he belonged here. I told him I felt I was losing a son!”

And that was that. Everyone had known. Except me. I thought about why and came up with two reasons. First, France
is a country of secrets. Keeping them, and deciding when to trade in them, is more than a game; it’s a national survival strategy. Ugly truths might disturb the surface calm. What harm comes from disguising them if it preserves a pleasant outer world?

Second, the rue des Martyrs is a village, with insiders and outsiders. The insiders, in this case, were the merchants. Next came the people who lived on the street. Then came everyone else. As a newcomer and a foreigner, I was everyone else.

I was reminded of something my paternal Sicilian grandfather, Tom Sciolino, taught me as a child. He cursed the
stranieri,
the “foreigners.” In reality, the
stranieri
were the outsiders, the ones who could not be trusted. My grandfather saw the world as concentric circles with himself as the center, then the family, then people who had emigrated from his hometown, then Sicilians, then other Italians, then everyone else. Anyone in authority was to be avoided. The rules of the rue des Martyrs are not quite as stark. But there is some truth in the
stranieri
theory.

Gradually, I got over Ali and Fahmi’s leaving and decided to give the new guys a chance. Kamel boasted that he had added shelves to stock more merchandise. He had installed bright fluorescent lighting and two Formica-topped tables for the scales and cash boxes. He raved about his produce.

“My father-in-law has been in the business for forty years,” said Kamel. “We have the best sources at Rungis.”

“What is really good today?” I asked.

“Mirabelles!” he said, pointing to a box piled high with deep-yellow plums.

“Mirabelles! They are terrible this summer.”

Kamel handed me one. “Taste it,” he commanded. “It’s
top
.”

Top
? Oh my! English was invading the rue des Martyrs.

I popped the small plum whole into my mouth. The skin was firm but not tough. The flesh was soft, the liquid sweet. Kamel was right. The mirabelle was
top
.

“I’ll take a kilo,” I said.

The next test: arugula. Ali and Fahmi had never had good arugula. Theirs was packaged in plastic and belonged in a supermarket, not a greengrocery. Kamel lifted a translucent sheet from a box to reveal crisp baby arugula. His look said, “I told you.”

I saw him from a new perspective. And then I thought I recognized him. Of course. He had been the greengrocer on the upper rue des Martyrs. For eight years. He belonged. Abdelhamid told me that his father and Fahmi’s grandfather were brothers. He had known Fahmi since he was born.

Day after day, Abdelhamid and Kamel charmed me. Every morning before dawn, Abdelhamid drove to Rungis to choose the produce himself. He showed an artistic side as he arranged peaches in pyramids and mixed tomatoes of many colors and sizes in one bin. He lined the bins with lime-green paper to bring out the natural colors of the produce. He introduced new items, like sweet corn. Corn! The French feed it to animals. The only place I had ever found sweet corn in the neighborhood was at the Picard supermarket, husked, wrapped in plastic, and frozen. Kamel and Abdelhamid use paper bags, not plastic ones like the supermarket does, to keep leafy vegetables from being crushed. The bags are not like the plain ones found in America. These are made in France of recycled paper—biodegradable, resistant to humidity, and decorated with an illustration of a cart overflowing with colorful fruits and vegetables.

We bonded. When I needed a centerpiece one Thanksgiving, Abdelhamid and Kamel offered m
e a twenty-pound gourd. It
resembled a squat tan pumpkin with voluptuous curves. It cost twenty-eight euros.

“But I only need it for one night,” I said.

Kamel had an elegant solution: he lent it to me. Not only that, he carried it to my apartment and put it at the center of the table. I returned it the next day.

One day I walked in vowing to buy only a head of lettuce, two avocados, and four apples. Nothing more. As I left, I spotted a box of fresh artichoke bottoms. Kamel had painstakingly cut away the outer leaves, leaving only the smallest ones to keep the flesh from turning brown. The flesh should not be exposed until just before cooking.

“I’ll give you a great price!” he said.

“I don’t need artichoke bottoms!”

“Ten euros!”

“That’s too expensive!”

He picked up a whole artichoke the size of a grapefruit and threw it on the scale.

“One artichoke is six euros!” he said. “I’m giving you such a deal. And all the work I did comes free.”