Europe @ 2.4 km/h (31 page)

This afternoon, on my way up to Boulevard Diderot, I am greeted by a kindly-looking man with Coke-bottle glasses on the bridge of his nose and a red-wine glass at the end of it. Drinking alfresco, he invites me to sample a
pichet
of
grappa
. Meet Nunzio, an Italian 30 years resident in Paris and owner of the
trattoria
in front of which I find him. This is a fortunate meeting for me, how fortunate I cannot yet know …

After a couple of hours’ rest I venture across the boulevard to explore the quarter I am in, the 12th
arrondissement
. It is one of the poorer areas of what many — even an American I met on the train to Berlin — call ‘the greatest city in the world’. The bistro and café culture is just as I knew it would be, intoxicating, even if you only order a demitasse of coffee.

But you are also struck by the raggedness and shabbiness on every corner. Poverty long ago lost its capacity to shock me, or so I thought until today. There is something woebegone, utterly bereft of self-respect, about the poor of Paris, perhaps because they are a highly conspicuous and wretched minority amid fashionably attired passers-by. It is the contrast that shocks, and seeing it today rebuts any belief in the incremental progress of humanity after re-reading George Orwell, on the first page of
Down and Out in Paris and
London
, as he describes their predecessors of 1933 thus, ‘The Paris slums are a gathering place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into the solitary, half-mad grooves of life and give up trying to be normal and decent’.

Their presence is as much part of the 12th
arrondissement
, where they hang around the market and beg, as the culture of café and the world’s finest bread. Near the Place d’Aligre this Sunday morning a 200-deep queue of well-heeled Parisians wait patiently in the drizzle outside a bakery whose fresh, crisp aromas bewitch my nostrils almost intolerably. The baguettes that emerge, lovingly cradled in silver foil, from this
boulangerie
are veritable works of art. I expect you’ll want to know whether the poor get any bread? They do; and not just crumbs but, the more enterprising ones, half-loaves. This is just as well. They cannot afford circuses.

On the footpath of Boulevard Diderot this afternoon a middle-aged woman with an oversize coat and a plastic bag brimful of daily necessaries yowls at my chair, ‘T’ai ri-aaaargh!
T’ai ri-aaaargh
!’ I have no idea what, if anything, the words mean. Clearly she spends her timeless days in Orwell’s ‘half-mad grooves of life’. I pity her — from a safe distance.

904-912 km

This Monday morning I begin searching in earnest for a place to rest. The Lux is adamant I cannot prolong my stay. The Hotel Garden (‘
Complet’
). Auberge International des Jeunes (‘
Complet
’).
Half a dozen other lodgings, whose names I don’t even bother to note down, ‘
Complet, complet, complet, complet, complet, complet
’.

As afternoon grades into evening, my early confidence sags. Apart from the availability question, some hotels are giving a French impression of their own, that customers in wheelchairs are an alien life form, and even if they had vacant rooms (and they’re not saying there are) it’s unthinkable they would consider letting them to the likes of me.

About eight in the evening, near the Place Léon Blum, I come to the fifteenth hotel of my search, the Royal Voltaire. And here Georges, the young creative manager, sees his policy of never turning away a potential guest sorely tested. Like many others I have found, his hotel has a lift but my chair will not fit in it. Georges asks me to follow him, but I cannot. He has to push me up the 40-degree angle to the first-floor car park before I can reach an equally bare anteroom, really a puny loft. I’m welcome to sleep in either place. Choice already! With an admirable sense of propriety, he is too embarrassed to charge me anything. This would be like having my own squat. For a while it seems as though the toileting arrangements might be based on the same principle, but a quick look is reassuring. Georges drags a mattress onto a quartet of beer crates and I try transferring my body from the chair to this improvised surface, but it is too unstable to take my weight. I tell him I’ll take it, without the crates, if nothing better turns up. As no one else is remotely likely to want to sleep in a loft next to the garage, he agrees I can come back as late as I like to claim it, and informs his receptionist of the deal.

At 11.30 pm I phone to say that, after covering 16 km today under my own steam, I have found a place: the Hotel Acacia, a kilometre away, at an irreducible €44. My chair scrapes against the metal sides of the lift and I can barely get the chair into it, let alone out of it. In the morning the receptionist tells me that the
patron
wants me out, he is afraid the lift will be irreparably damaged. I acknowledge his concern and get back in the hunt.

912-932 km

Today, Tuesday, my search plumbs its lowest point. As might be expected when you have nowhere to stay, haven’t had a bath or a shower for two days, and are eating on the run, minor irritations assume greater importance than they ever ought.

In the morning, the No. 56 bus from Place Voltaire to Place de la République starts to move off after the driver has seen me waiting to board. The bus has a ‘disabled’ sign
and
a ramp that simply needs unlatching. Ignoring me, the driver tells a passenger, who tells me, ‘He says he hasn’t got a pallet’. The technology doesn’t require one, or didn’t he know that? I tell him off for false advertising before we go our separate ways.

At lunchtime — which I had convinced myself would be a hypothetical concept today — I greeted Nunzio outside his
trattoria
and he insisted I draw myself up to the table and wait. After five minutes he brought out a plate of steaming hot spaghetti. With a flagon of
grappa
. When I’d finished this, he followed up with
entrecôte
and chips. And more
grappa
. And then refused to take a sou, or even a eurocent, in payment.

Not far from the friendly hotel whose manager would have let me sleep next to the car park rather than see me on the street, its antithesis — which I shall abbreviate to Hotel B.S. — shows a more malign face of Paris. Owned by an upper-class Moroccan family, the hotel is dominated by the adult daughter of the clan, ironically named Mercy, aggressively shrill and possessed of a flair for the melodramatic. It’s obvious enough early on that the B.S. is that rare creature, a hotel with a lift I can use and a price not too far above my budget. But Mercy insists all its rooms are
complet,
before registering other new arrivals and handing them room keys.

Around 8 pm the evening shift staff of the Novotel, near the Gare de Lyon, grant me permission to ‘use the facilities’. For the next few hours I see the
sans-abris
, the homeless of Paris, with the eye of pity and an unaccustomed awareness of how close the cosy mansions of this city are to its rainswept gutters.

When I return to the B.S. around midnight, my quest still unfulfilled, Majid the nightwatchman describes the ruling family as ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ and assures me they have plenty of empty rooms.

It’s raining hard and closing in on 2 am when I decide that, as Orwell has already written the definitive book about living on the streets of Paris, the Novotel foyer is the only hand I hold in this game of marked cards. By and by, the night owls finish their and head up to their rooms. By positioning myself behind a pillar that blocks the line of sight to reception, I hope to survive until dawn. Towards half past three, just as I’m dozing off, the night duty manager, Branko, gives me a rude awakening.

‘You must go. Go now,’ he commands. Answerable to higher authority, he insists he cannot accept my continued presence. In a very French moment he says, ‘You do not respect my position’.

‘
Au contraire
,’ I tell him, ‘you do not respect my position.’

‘And what is that?’

‘That I have no position.’

Picture Branko unamused.

After some time, he relents. OK, I may stay until 7 am, not a minute later. Oh, and I’m welcome to watch the overhead TV. Branko doesn’t seem to notice but at this late hour the screen is blank. Between seven and eight o’clock it rains again and I avoid a soaking only by sheltering with the dispirited souls in the bowels of the Gare de Lyon.

932-944 km

By Wednesday afternoon I have looked at 21 hotels and other establishments without success and am back at the B.S. Earlier in the week I acted on a suggestion by well-meaning Parisians that I should contact my embassy (though certain that finding abodes for Aussie backpackers would rank fairly low in an Australian diplomat’s job description).

I was in the foyer, trying to detect a hint of mercy in Mercy, when a phone call from the embassy came through for me. It was an attaché with the exciting revelation that he had tracked down a hotel in the 11th
arrondissement
— one of the few to have escaped my attentions — and, wonder of wonders, a room in this establishment could be mine for just €99 (A$165)! Clearly, it was years since the diplomat had been backpacking but, thanking him for his efforts, I promised to present myself at the Belle Epoque and see if a large tariff reduction was out of the question. The manager gave me the room for €55, the most expensive night of the journey but a bargain by Paris standards. He probably assumed that the call from the embassy meant I was some sort of VIP (Very Insistent Paraplegic). Only Wednesday and Friday were possible. I must continue the search on Thursday.

Coming out of the lift, which I had entered facing forwards, I fell backwards, never thinking that the lift would stop 25 cm above floor level. Luckily, my chair and backpack cushioned the fall but now I was lying in a darkened corridor and no one could hear my calls for help. This is a bad week, I recall thinking. What to do? Using the chair as a battering ram I opened the heavy door and crawled out to the fire escape, hauled myself up a couple of steps and swung myself back into the chair. We don’t call ourselves
Homo
sapiens
for nothing.

949-953 km

Recalculating how much I saved by being on the streets for part of a night and in the Novotel foyer for the rest, I can now see my way clear to paying €68 for a night at the B.S. But once more I’ve underestimated Mercy’s mercilessness. Cornered by her previous refusal to drop the price, she now turns vengeful with a frenzy, accusing me of milking my paraplegia for all it’s worth. This I fiercely resent, as I’ve asked for no special treatment. Immediately she flares up. I must quit the premises at once or she will call the police.

On seeing me stay put, Mercy starts wailing like a banshee, ‘Get out! Get out of the hotel, you are a barbarian!’ (‘
Vous êtes barbare!
’) When the police arrive, they patiently listen to both sides but, as this is private property, advise me to leave. Adding today’s quota of visits to twelve more hotels and even short-term apartments, I have notched up 33 attempts to find lodgings over half the area of Paris. ‘Is there anything else I should do?’ I ask.

The gendarmes urge me to follow them back to the station. And thus begins a most amazingly patient ringaround (don’t they have crimes to solve? I wonder, but keep the thought to myself) which after five hours culminates in success. It is almost 10 pm when I arrive at the Hotel Cosmos, in the Rue Servan not far from the Acacia, just in time to obtain the last room in the house.

It has taken nearly a week and I’ve hardly begun to see the things I came to Paris to experience. Then again, the consolation is, I have seen an awful lot of Paris, more than most visitors ever will. Tomorrow I return to the Belle Epoque, and for the last six nights of my time in Paris I will sleep at the d’Artagnan hostel out east in the 20th
arrondissement
. My search is ended. Finished. Over.
Complet
.

955-959 km

Back at the Belle Epoque, a Frenchwoman from the country asks a dumbstruck receptionist for a timetable showing
bateaux mouches
departures to the Place de la Bastille. This is the equivalent of a blow-in to Sydney asking when the next ferry leaves for Bathurst. He has no answer for this one.