I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, page 6
Right now it seems an unlikely place for such a minor transaction as the pass sanitaire conversion, but faith in the obscurity of French bureaucracy propels me on. Also, I see a long line snaking down Avenue Gabriel. Ah yes, this seems more like it. I spot a young guard watching me. He gives me a charming grin and a wave. How I have missed flirting. The simple act of charming your way through an interaction. Of having potential in the eyes of another. I try my luck. “Pass sanitaire?” I call. He frowns sympathetically. I call it again. He shrugs and points me toward the line. I’m tempted to stay here and see whether this brief interaction might lead to something more—would he be a watermelon, or a cherry?—but the line looks long. And I get the sense the clock is ticking.
I navigate a fortress of barricades to no avail. A quick confused conversation with the guards managing the tent in front of the embassy, under the beseeching eyes of that long line, and it’s quickly clear no one here has any idea what I’m talking about. What is clear is that everyone in line is (a) French and (b) waiting hopefully for a visa to the US. This all makes sense, of course. This is the American embassy. I am the thing that doesn’t make sense.
“Of course they can’t give it to you,” messages Nina. “It’s a ridiculous thing to tell people.”
Her indignation has the effect of making me feel less foolish. At least I didn’t stand in that line all day.
Another location has popped up on the Facebook groups that Nina is monitoring for me from her apartment in the 11th as she files her stories for the day. She has a regular gig covering television for a Canadian publication that is somehow still in business. She takes a screengrab of the Facebook post and sends it to me. According to the latest word-of-mouth update, they are doing conversions at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital. I google map it and see its location across the street from Notre-Dame. Can that be right? “Yep,” says Nina.
It’s 12:30 p.m. I’m tempted to go home and sleep—I’m already tired out from the riding and walking, and more drinks with everyone have been scheduled for 18h00. Still, I can’t shake the sense that I’m on some sort of treasure hunt. That it’s very likely the thing I am searching for will cease to exist tomorrow. The experience of having things disappear overnight has become normalized enough that I know it’s entirely possible I may wake up tomorrow to a city that is barricaded against me. That every plan I’ve made, from friends to cheese to nudity, hinges on my figuring this out immédiatement. It’s this that propels me on.
I’m halfway to the Louvre when I look up and force myself to stop and take it all in. I am in the Tuileries! Not alone, but surely with fewer people than have been here in, how long? Before, empty cities seemed to be a phenomenon created by apocalypse movies, or weather. The long rows of flowers, exploding into bloom. The faint floral scent. The sense I am in a painting. I keep walking, trying not to let my mind wander.
I know my way to Notre-Dame without mapping. Through the arch. Along the Seine. Over to the island. The cathedral is still under scaffolding from the fire that toppled the steeple. It looks like it’s under a shroud.
During my first lonely month in Paris, in the summer of 2016 shortly after I’d sold my first book, I would leave the apartment at night, the same one I’m in now, and walk the narrow streets. Deep in the terror of a first draft, I would come upon the cathedral from the side, the tourist shops shuttered for the evening, and then stand in the square and try to get a perfectly symmetrical photo of the façade, using my proximity to the monument as evidence to myself that I was capable of finishing a book I wasn’t entirely sure I understood how to write.
* * *
• • •
My current sense of capability diminishes as I circle Notre-Dame. The barricades around the cathedral complicate matters, as does what appears to be a tent, though no one is in it. My phone tells me I’m standing in front of the Hôtel Dieu, but none of the doors seem to lead anywhere useful. Is this an actual hospital? Or was it once a hospital and is now something else, like the Hôtel des Invalides, where I once saw an opera? History has perverted the meaning of language here. These are short streets surrounding the cathedral; I don’t even know if they have names. This is the old pre-Haussmann Paris, one that survived the bulldozing, envisioned and executed to eradicate the health issues that plagued the poor neighborhoods. Now the streets are lined with little shops selling racks of trinkets. It’s the trinkets right now that feel like an advertisement of the past more than the buildings.
Across from the hospital is a large stone arch that in past years I’ve seen people lined up at, overseen by severe-looking guards. I think it might be a courthouse. There is no one there now, but maybe that is where I am supposed to be? If I continue on this way I will just end up back on Rivoli not far from where I had my first quiche, and if I go in the opposite direction, I will cross the bridge to the Left Bank and be in sight of Shakespeare and Company. I am technically in tourist central. Having a government office here is like if the American consulate were located in Times Square. Which I suppose is a possibility; Paris is either less segregated when it comes to tourists than New York, or more overrun everywhere, depending how you look at it.
I navigate my way along the tents, thinking I may spot someone official looking. And it’s here that I come upon modern glass sliding doors that I’ve never noticed before, but which have the prescriptive appearance of a place connected to health.
The security guard nods when I pass, and the woman behind the desk points me in the direction of a door. “To get my pass sanitaire,” I say in English. “Yes,” she tells me. I clock the absence of any confusion on her face and it gives me a thrill. “Through that door and to your right,” she says, pointing. It seems too simple. I walk through the lobby as directed, and through the next door. There is a little white room on the right with four people inside, a young man and a woman and an older couple holding papers. The young man looks up at me. “Can I convert my American vaccination to a pass sanitaire?” I ask, again in English. He nods, pleasantly, yes. Wonderful! “Wait outside and we will call you in,” he says. I step back into the doorway frame. “No,” he says, and points back to the lobby, à gauche. I walk back and look to the left. Along the window ledge, there is a line of people sitting. All eyes are casually resting on me, the way pets will sit by a window and keep an eye on what passes by. I smile. “Is this the line?” I ask in English. Nods. I’ve never been so happy to see a line. There is just enough space for me to sit down at the end next to an older woman who is by herself.
Older woman. In my own head I am still young. I do not yet feel the diminishment of my so-called powers in the way I have been warned will happen. Far from invisible, I do not feel even remotely faded. I wonder sometimes if this is because I live by myself and do not have the experience of living alongside people whom I have loved enough to commit my life to, have birthed, have raised through the years of total dependence, who have defined my place in the world, and who suddenly, or slowly and then quickly, need me less. See me less. I have only myself to see me. I once wrote a short story in my twenties about a girl (me, obviously) whose only understanding of herself was her reflection in the windows of stores she walked past. My writing teacher was not as impressed as I wanted her to be. But I often think back to that observation. I am often defined to myself by my impression of my own reflection. Never more so than in the past fourteen months. Do the people next to me now consider me an older woman? Did the young, impatient man at the pharmacie? Am I mistaking the disinterest that I’m warned comes with age for Frenchness? Most of my interactions with young women since turning forty leave me with the impression that I am their coveted research subject, and they are taking notes; far from discarded, they seem to be holding on to me tightly. But we’ve all been out of circulation for a while now. Perhaps I’ve reemerged into the world middle-aged, not just numbers-wise but spiritually, publicly. Maybe I’m in my era of invisibility and just don’t know it. It is admittedly difficult to feel a loss of power when one is sitting two hundred feet from Notre-Dame Cathedral having hurled oneself across an ocean with no guarantee of a smooth return. But I consider the possibility.
I have time to contemplate all this as I watch people arrive and retrace my steps: in the door, to the desk, questions repeated, almost always in English, fingers pointed, across the lobby, into the small room, and eventually back out again to the waiting line of casually resting eyes. Each time someone new takes on the task of affirming that, yes, this is the line. There is a brief moment between the new addition disappearing into the hallway and reappearing, when everyone tenses up. Has this interloper been served while we all wait out here? No one stops them on their way in though, including me; we only direct them to the end of the line when they reemerge.
I message Nina and Sandra. “Hôtel Dieu FTW. In line!” This will get passed on and added to the word-of-mouth chain on Facebook.
Nina responds with three emoji thumbs-ups. Sandra says, “Bonne chance.”
I try to gauge how quickly the line is moving. Each person is inside for an average of fifteen minutes. At this rate I will be here for three hours, which seems like not the worst bargain, though my phone battery is already half dead and idiotically I have not brought a book. Near the front of the line there is a family of Americans, blonde and white and exactly what the world believes Americans to be. Paris may feel empty, but I am hardly the only American to make this trip. Not surprising, I suppose, when at least half the country decided Covid was over a year ago.
I learned long ago to say New York City when people ask me where I’m from; it’s proven the fastest route to garnering whatever shred of respect a traveler might expect—more even than whatever goodwill I can expect from my Canadian passport—and the only place the Parisians will concede is on their level. New York exists as an idea to almost everyone, everywhere. An appealing idea. An exciting one. Including to me sometimes, despite having nearly twenty-five years of actual lived time there. Whether or not that idea has any truth to it, enough people believe it that it becomes its own powerful, universally understood language. And my mother tongue.
I only last ten minutes before striking up a conversation with the older woman next to me. I have become a person who strikes up conversations. With the people at the checkout in Fairway. With the women who work at the post office. More than at any other time, I remind myself of my mother when I do this. So much of my childhood was spent in a state of indignation and mortification over my mother chatting with strangers. Making pleasantries with the checkout person. The teacher. Slowing down our return to the family room television set. It’s only in the past few months, as I find myself holding conversations about weather, and shopping, and my niece and nephews to whom this package is addressed, that I understand all this small talk as a symptom of loneliness and am able to recognize the shape of my mother’s isolation.
I discover the older woman beside me is from Eastern Europe and is trying to convert her husband’s vaccination card into a pass sanitaire. Her husband is from Morocco, and he is supposed to arrive tomorrow. He needs this conversion in order to stay, is what I am able to glean between the fractured English and our masks. She’s concerned she won’t be able to do this for him.
I can feel her desperation and anxiety. I can’t tell whether the anxiety is about him or the people in the office. I feel like I’ve spent the entire year witnessing women acting on behalf of the men in their lives, being stretched further and further, pulled beyond their limits. Is that what’s happening here? Or is this paperwork anxiety? I have no way of knowing.
She is an anomaly in this group, which is otherwise clearly made up of tourists.
The line snakes along.
To my left is another white American couple. I can tell they’re from the northern Midwest simply by their reticence. They are friendly, but not quick to conversation. Talking to Americans is a tricky business these days; the safe ground of casual conversation has become increasingly narrow and requires some sniffing around as though two alpha dogs are meeting and deciding on whether to fight. The shared experience of citizenship that might have once buoyed one through a casual conversation is gone and been replaced by knives. At home the absence of a mask is usually a clear sign of one’s affiliations, like some sort of gang patch or tattoo, but here everyone must wear one still. It would probably be easier to stay silent, but I’m too curious to know how they found their way here; were they also told that the American embassy was doing these conversions? Yes, they were. They also got this address from Facebook. They are here for a week. The conversation dies. I watch more people come in and repeat the steps. There is no more room on the ledge.
The older woman to my right continues to shuffle through her papers with an increasingly nervous energy I recognize from time spent in immigration rooms, time spent standing in line to get my green card renewed. I see the familiar demeanor of a person needing to be recognized in order to literally exist in this space.
It worries me I have not brought my green card with me on this odyssey. It’s back at the flat. It rarely leaves the house unless absolutely necessary. By law I am supposed to carry it everywhere in America; I never do. Better to risk the fine that comes with not having it on me than go through the expensive, monthslong rigmarole of replacing it. This is a rule I implemented for myself after I was once mugged—less a mugging than a purse snatching to be more accurate—by a kid on a bike in broad daylight on the Eastern Parkway promenade in Brooklyn. It all happened so quickly that I stood stunned as I watched him ride off with my bag (and my green card).
When I filed a police report later that afternoon, the officers kept asking me about valuables, how much money was on me. Did they take my computer? I didn’t care. I only wanted them to know I was now without my green card. Its absence had returned me to a person with questionable status, faded me out of the picture. “You’re lucky,” the officer said (here my memory can’t commit to one version—he either said I was lucky or that I was smart). “A lot of folks up in Harlem and the Bronx get violently injured putting up a fight for theirs when they’re robbed.” He said it like they were foolish not to just let it go, in the way one talks about cash or jewelry. Possessions not being as important as your life. But what is the life of a nonperson in the eyes of the law? What is one willing to risk for the right to move freely? Or to remain safely in a place? Not that I was overly fearful of either of these things. There was, on any given day, a less than zero chance anyone in New York was going to ask me, a white woman with American-sounding English, to prove I had the right to be in New York.
When I returned to Homeland Security a few months later to be refingerprinted for my replacement card, one of the officials taking my papers briefly got aggressive with me. “What happened to your green card?” he asked in an accusing tone, hovering over me where I sat, as if I had casually thrown it in the garbage. Without giving it a thought, I snapped back. “I got mugged!” Then I turned my back on him. He came around and apologized and asked me if I was okay. It was then I realized, no amount of paper can replace the deep confidence that comes from a lifetime of being given the benefit of the doubt.
I wonder if I should leave to retrieve my green card from the flat. But that seems foolish. This place may be shut by the time I return. The line closed. This may not even exist as an option tomorrow. I will take my chances, I decide. I have a Canadian passport and a New York City vaccination card that, even though it looks as though it might have been issued sometime in the late seventies, is still official. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single place in which one or the other doesn’t work in one’s favor.
The loud blonde American family up front finally goes in. We all watch them and I can feel the group’s mental calculation over whether their togetherness will slow the line or speed it up. This fresh anxiety is mitigated by the fact we all get to move down the ledge by a few feet. Even this brief sensation of movement is encouraging. More people sit down. The American father emerges only a few minutes later and turns to the line. “They want to know the date you got your last shot and which arm,” he tells us without being asked. One never fully realizes how friendly Americans are until one is outside the country. The woman beside me starts texting furiously into her phone. Then she picks it up and begins talking furiously in French. It’s a short conversation, and when she hangs up she shrugs and mumbles to herself.
Shortly the rest of the family appears. That was fast. A ripple of energy. We all move up. This is going quickly now. The woman beside me is ushered in, not more than five minutes has passed since the Americans have left. “Good luck,” I say. She nods and scurries in. But she comes out just as quickly. The look on her face tells me everything. “He must be here,” she says to my inquiring glance, and shrugs. It’s the shrug of a person accustomed to obstacles and paperwork. “Bonne chance.” She waves and is out the door.
In I go.
I already have my passport and vaccination card out, sensitive to the waiting eyes outside along the window ledge.
“I’m Canadian,” I say immediately.
I elaborate quickly: “But I was vaccinated in New York City, because I live there. I have my New York driver’s license if that helps.” I figure it’s better for everyone if I just lay it all out.
I brace.
A few summers ago, Aarti and Nina were trying to plan a holiday and struggling to find an island they wanted to go to, one Aarti could also travel to without needing to apply for a visa. “You need a visa to travel there?” I recall asking with the obliviousness that can come from never having to consider whether I’m free to go somewhere. Of never having my citizenship be thought of in any way but as a story the world was happy to hear, whether or not that legitimacy was earned.
